Tuesday, December 29, 2020

Will the Sitting Vice President Please Stand Up?

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Vice President Mike Pence has often pledged loyalty to the Constitution, and on January 6 he should stand up for it and the unborn. Under the Twelfth Amendment Pence, in his role as President of the Senate, is responsible for deciding the integrity and validity of the Electoral College votes for president.

“The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted,” commands the Twelfth Amendment. Under this provision of the Constitution, the congressmen and senators are to be assembled as mere witnesses, with no power to intervene or participate in the process of counting the votes.

Pence should notice that in roughly a half-dozen states there are rival certificates which cancel themselves out, and Pence should decline to certify those states’ votes similar to how multiple state Electoral votes were disqualified in the 1860s and 1870s. Pence’s role should not be limited by the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which law Professor Edward B. Foley wrote in 2010 “is inadequate, unwieldy, and arguably unconstitutional.”

On Sunday, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) filed a federal lawsuit to confirm the unconstitutionality of the Electoral Count Act, which cannot alter the Twelfth Amendment. This Act, which has never been upheld in court, attempts to dilute the authority of the Senate President by restricting debate and authorizing votes on certification by Congress.

Hanging in the balance today are millions of the unborn, as Biden stated that he would appoint the pro-abortion Xavier Becerra as his Secretary of Health & Human Services (HHS). Biden himself is unfit to serve a full four years, so Becerra's radical fellow Californian Kamala Harris could become president without being elected to that office.

Pence has ample basis for declining to accept and open Electoral votes from contested states. The signatures on millions of mailed-in ballots were never verified and were improperly counted for Biden, including 2.6 million such ballots in Pennsylvania alone.

No bank would refuse to verify signatures on contested checks. The selection of the next president is just as important, and the potential fraud on millions of ballots renders the reported results unworthy of certification.

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows traveled last week to Georgia to observe a review of a sample of signatures there. But he was denied access merely to observe, as many poll watchers were improperly blocked on Election Day and afterwards.

Democrats remain confident that they have pulled off a heist which continues for the upcoming special election in Georgia on January 5. Yesterday an Obama-appointed federal judge blocked a cleaning of the election rolls of improper voters prior to that election of new senators.

Georgia officials have sent warning letters to thousands of people who have improperly obtained mail-in ballots despite not residing in Georgia. The letters are destined for the trash can, as Republicans almost never really prosecute anyone for election fraud, particularly out-of-staters.

In Wisconsin, tens of thousands of votes should be disqualified due to fraudulent representations of confinement. A quarter-million people in Wisconsin were registered under a claim of indefinite confinement, not all of which were valid.

Lame duck Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) was reelected in 2016 on the coattails of Donald Trump, who garnered more votes than Toomey there. Toomey announced at age only 58 that he will leave the Senate for undisclosed, probably lucrative opportunities rather than fight to hold his GOP seat, while continuing to be ungrateful to Trump.

Like a bank president who looks the other way while his bank processes unverified signatures on checks, some Republican senators deny awareness of election fraud. But under the Twelfth Amendment, such weak-kneed senators do not certify the votes.

Senate President Pence alone has the constitutional authority to recognize Electoral College votes. Pence should decline to recognize the Biden votes from the states tainted by fraud and having rival slates.

Pence could seek a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court on the issue of his authority on January 6. Better yet, Pence should act in accordance with the Twelfth Amendment by declining to accept tainted certificates, and then enjoy watching Democrats scamper to the Supreme Court to seek intervention.

Pence could also do what Democrats insisted was necessary before voting in the impeachment trial earlier this year: call witnesses and hear evidence. If essential before voting on a removal of a president, then likewise before certifying a fraudulent presidential election.

No one would be disenfranchised by Senate President Pence if he declines to recognize tainted certificates from states lacking election integrity. This election would then go into the House of Representatives, where each state would have one vote on behalf of its residents in choosing the next president.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Tuesday, December 22, 2020

Counting Every Fraudulent Vote

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The mantra “count every vote” has been twisted to “count every fraudulent vote,” and that is how the presidential election is being stolen from President Trump. Politicians pompously lecture the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump about how important it is to count every vote, but what the politicians are actually doing is allowing every fraudulent vote.

Whenever a single fraudulent vote is allowed, it negates a law-abiding vote. Counting every legitimate vote requires carefully excluding every potentially improper vote.

Voting by mail necessitates an authentic signature to reduce the possibility that the ballot was cast in an improper way. Yet multiple swing states have not allowed independent verification of the signatures on the millions of mail-in ballots cast in those states.

In Georgia, after weeks of complaints by those who voted properly in the November election, the Secretary of State has finally agreed to permit a random sample of signatures to be reviewed by a liberal university, while proclaiming that such a review could not possibly change the result. A real audit would not be limited like that.

An absurdly low number of only about 2,000 absentee ballots out of more than 1.3 million were rejected in Georgia last month for signature deficiencies, which is barely one-tenth of 1%. Amid rampant ballot harvesting, a more realistic number of invalid signatures would have been far greater.

The reported margin of difference between Biden and Trump in Georgia was less than 12,000 votes, which is less than 1% of the mail-in ballots counted and included without proper signature verification. A full signature audit, which there is still time to do, would likely discover that more than 1% of the mail-in ballots lack verified signatures, thereby potentially changing the result.

Ballot harvesting is the bundling of ballots in the names of many voters, and sending them in. But ballot harvesters can have difficulties duplicating the signature of every voter, and Georgia admits that invalid signatures occur yet failed to exclude as many ballots as it should have. Election officials in many states were intimidated by the “count every vote” slogan. Instead they should be trained that counting a single fraudulent vote has the effect of disenfranchising a lawful voter, thereby tainting the election.

Since it is a matter of public record who votes, the signatures on all those ballots should be scanned and posted on the internet alongside the signatures on file for public scrutiny, just as monitors at in-person polling booths are allowed to double-check signatures. Within days of such a posting the fraud would be easily spotted by the public, along with how often it occurred.

That is, of course, exactly what Biden supporters do not want to happen. They want to brush all this under the rug, and move on to steal future elections starting with the next one in Georgia, on January 5th.

One excuse liberals give for blocking a full, independent signature audit of the mail-in ballots is that it is no longer possible to match a specific signature with a specific ballot and thereby disqualify the ballot. But statisticians can easily solve that problem by comparing the percentages of mail-in votes that went for each candidate.

A full signature audit in Georgia, for example, could easily result in the disqualification of more than 30,000 ballots. The remedy would be to consider the margin by which Biden won among mail-in ballots from the same regions, and disqualify the votes for Biden based on that percentage.

Alternatively, the election result for the entire state could be tossed out. Electoral College votes need not be accepted by Congress from every state, and Congress should count the votes only from those states that have election integrity.

Members of the new 117th Congress should put the contested states on notice now that if they refuse to allow a full signature audit of their mail-in ballots, then their Electoral College votes will not be counted on January 6th. That is the day when the House and Senate will determine the validity of votes cast by the Electoral College on December 14.

While the Supreme Court recently held that a state lacks legal standing to challenge a defective voting procedure used by another state, Congress has the responsibility not to accept Electoral College votes from a state which included fraudulent votes. Senators need to object to allowing states to include fraudulent votes with invalid signatures on mail-in ballots.

When students cheat on an exam, as occurred this year at West Point, the remedy includes disqualifying the entire exam, not merely a portion of it where the cheating can be proven. The counting of improperly signed mail-in ballots occurred in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and other key states, and on January 6th Congress should disqualify all of their Electoral College votes.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Tuesday, December 15, 2020

Vaccination Is Not the Answer to Covid

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The first Covid vaccine is rolling across the nation, but many Americans are not buying the hype. Despite months of nonstop publicity in the media, only about half of those polled say they will get the shot when it becomes available.

Fifty percent is not nearly enough, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has already accepted an appointment as Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser. Fauci didn’t say if he and Joe Biden intend to vaccinate millions of other Americans against their will.

According to Dr. Fauci, 75 to 80 percent of Americans must be vaccinated over the next nine months, in order to have any chance of getting back to normal by Christmas of next year. If vaccinations fall short of that goal, Fauci says a return to normal life would likely be postponed years into the future, if ever.

And don’t think that if you agree to get the shot right away, you will have permission to throw away your mask, head back to the gym, dine in restaurants, hang out in bars, or visit family over the holidays. These familiar activities will not be allowed until we reach so-called herd immunity, after virtually everyone has been vaccinated, and then only if it is effective.

The biggest cheerleader for mass vaccination, billionaire Bill Gates, candidly admits that basic American freedoms will not return anytime soon. “Bars and restaurants in most of the country will be closed as we go into this wave, and I think sadly that’s appropriate,” he said, adding that “big public gatherings will still be restricted” throughout 2021.

Warming to his favorite subject, Gates pontificated that “certainly mask-wearing has essentially no downsides.” Maybe there are no “downsides” for someone who sits all day at a computer, wrestling with the buggy software that Gates made billions of dollars monopolizing, but masks have plenty of “downsides” for millions of ordinary Americans.

Vaccination will not end the mask-wearing, and promoters of masking insist it protects against catching the virus. England already has Covid vaccination and yet its deputy medical officer predicts that the British may still need to wear masks for years into the future, which should reinforce doubts about the value of vaccination.

Assertions that the coronavirus vaccines are 90% or 95% effective are misleading. The term effectiveness is used by some to mean merely reducing the severity of the illness, rather than providing complete immunity.

Questions have been raised about the sufficiency of the testing data, and whether serious adverse effects such as Bell’s palsy were misleadingly portrayed as being non-serious. Millions of Americans have allergies, and severe allergic reactions occurred among early recipients of the Pfizer vaccine in England.

The Pfizer vaccine is the first to use mRNA technology, which prompts a recipient’s own biological cells to generate a protein in order to spark an immune response. Long-term effects of this new technology remain untested and unknown, as are its possible effects on reproduction.

Meanwhile, the tyranny of lockdown continues unabated, as reflected by the $15,497.76 per day fines being imposed on the Atilis Gym in Bellmawr, New Jersey. Not one case of Covid has been linked to the fit patrons of that gym, whose co-owner Ian Smith marched with other Trump supporters in Washington, D.C. last Saturday.

Those of us who failed to defend the gym are next on the chopping block, as mandatory vaccination looms on the horizon. A bill in New York’s Democrat-controlled legislature would force the public to receive the Covid vaccine, and vaccination may be required of millions as a condition of keeping their jobs.

Meanwhile, reports in peer-reviewed medical journals of safer, less-expensive approaches to Covid continue without sufficient publicity. Last month a mostly unnoticed article in the American Journal of Clinical Pathology described how vitamin D deficiency is correlated with a nearly four times greater risk of death from Covid.

There are numerous reported benefits of vitamin D, which President Trump himself took to quickly overcome Covid in October. Yet little is said by public health authorities or the media about how taking vitamin D may sharply reduce the risk of severe illness from Covid.

Operation Warp Speed was not just for a vaccine; it was intended “to accelerate the development, manufacturing, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics.” Yet hardly any effort is being made to develop and distribute treatment by therapeutic medications, in order to keep Covid victims out of hospitals and off ventilators.

Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) courageously held a hearing last week on early treatment options, with compelling testimony by physicians who have actually treated Covid patients successfully, and kept them out of the hospital. Early treatment does not fit the liberal game-plan to deprive us of our liberty by making mask-wearing and lockdowns the “new normal.”

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Tuesday, December 8, 2020

Deadlines Must Yield to Investigate the Fraud

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Liberals should not be allowed to run out the clock to prevent a thorough investigation of the election fraud. When the weak Attorney General Bill Barr said he has not seen enough evidence of election fraud, the translation is that he has not yet thoroughly investigated it.

Robert Mueller spent more than $30 million and nearly two years investigating frivolous accusations about the 2016 election, so it is silly to expect sophisticated fraud in this election to be proven in 35 days. Yet partisan deniers of wrongdoing try to misuse deadlines found nowhere in the Constitution to certify an unconstitutional election.

There is only one deadline in the Constitution for filling the office of president: January 20, every four years. Plenty of time remains to consider the mounting evidence of how this election was stolen, and for key state legislatures to choose an untainted set of Electoral College members.

The Constitution does not require a vote of the Electoral College on December 14. Between 1888 and 1932 – a span of 12 presidential elections – the members of the Electoral College cast their votes on the second Monday in January.

Ratification of the 20th Amendment advanced the Inauguration from March 4 until January 20, but until then it is appropriate to ferret out election fraud to make sure the right person is sworn into office. Indeed, Biden and Democrats should welcome the investigations as enthusiastically as they pushed the Mueller one.

The timetable set by federal statutes has already been violated by Democrats. Federal law dictates that “The electors of President and Vice President shall be appointed, in each State, on the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November, in every fourth year.”

If that law had been complied with, Trump clearly won the election because more than enough votes were cast on November 3 to give Trump a solid majority of the Electoral College. Trump’s opponents want to ignore that federal statute in order to include hundreds of thousands of improper mailed-in ballots.

In Michigan, less than one-half of one percent of the 3.3 million absentee or mail-in ballots received were rejected, which is an implausibly high rate of success for millions of people performing a tricky and unfamiliar task. A study by ABC News of the 2016 and 2018 elections showed that an average of 1.2% of those ballots were disallowed.

Mail-in ballots have been counted in implausibly high percentages of even 100% for Biden. By reducing the rejection rate to nearly zero, Biden received an unfair boost in the close states, tipping the result in Georgia.

Yet Georgia still refuses to do a signature audit of the mail-in ballots, even after its weak Republican Governor Brian Kemp said that such an audit should be done. Kemp claims he lacks the authority to order this basic review of election integrity.

“Your people are refusing to do what you ask. What are they hiding?” Trump tweeted in response. He held a massive rally in Georgia on Saturday at which he observed, “We just need somebody with courage to do what they have to do.”

Governor Kemp admits that he has the authority to call a special session of the legislature, which could immediately select an untainted slate of electors. Yet he refuses to do that, too, and legislators fail to convene on their own as they could under the U.S. Constitution.

The effect is to rob Americans of an honest presidential election. This week Texas courageously sued Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin for essentially stealing this presidential election.

Unlike the other pending lawsuits, Texas sued directly in the Supreme Court as authorized by the Constitution when one state sues another. This prevents the High Court from ducking the issues.

“A dark cloud hangs over the 2020 Presidential election,” Texas points out in its filing. This dark cloud results from Democrats’ own actions, as they improperly changed election rules in swing states without approval of the state legislatures, as required.

Pollster Patrick Basham confirms what most Republican voters know: it is statistically unlikely that Trump would have lost a fair vote count. “Donald Trump did very well, even better than four years earlier, with the white working class,” Basham points out.

“He held his own with women and suburban voters against all or most of the polling expectations, did very well with Catholics, improved his vote among Jewish voters.” Basham added that Trump “had the best minority performance for a Republican since Richard Nixon in 1960, doing so well with African-Americans, and importantly with Hispanics.”

The Supreme Court itself has held, in Burson v. Freeman (1992), that election fraud is “successful precisely because” it is “difficult to detect.” Americans are entitled to an honest election result and any delay that may be necessary to fully uncover the fraud.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Tuesday, December 1, 2020

Rampant Election Fraud Continues

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

“Voting in Georgia when you are not a resident of Georgia is a felony,” blustered the ineffective Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Monday, as he denounced well-publicized efforts to enlist temporary residents to vote in the January 5 election for two seats in the U.S. Senate. “Third-party groups have a responsibility to not encourage illegal voting.”

But he and other Republican state officials have the responsibility not to use a voting system that allows fraud in the first place. Occasionally urging people to behave, and not to exploit a system rife with vulnerabilities, does not prevent fraud when the political stakes are so high.

Of the 4.9 million ballots counted in Georgia in the recent presidential election, some 3.9 million were cast by the Friday before election day, and many of those ballots were mailed in without verifiable proof of their legality. Yet Joe Biden insists he won the Peach State by just 12,670 votes, or only three-tenths of 1% of ballots cast.

President Trump properly said he is “ashamed” of ever having endorsed Georgia’s do-nothing governor, Brian Kemp, who continues to fail to protect election integrity there while control of the U.S. Senate hangs in the balance with the upcoming runoff election.

As of last Friday, a whopping 900,000 Georgians had reportedly requested mail-in ballots, many of which will probably be filled in or returned by Democrat operatives paid to boost the numbers for Democrat candidates, as they did for Biden. Unlike in-person voting, there is no meaningful way to protect against fraud in filling out and returning mail-in ballots.

Raffensperger announced that the New Georgia Project had “sent voter registration applications to New York City,” which is a potential violation of Georgia law. He declared that NGP, recently headed by Democrat U.S. Senate candidate Rev. Raphael Warnock and before that by Democrat gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, is under investigation as are three other groups.

Such investigations should have been done long before now, of course. And since election fraud by Democrats is rarely prosecuted, no one is holding his breath that any real prosecutions will ever happen.

Way back in 2014, the office of the Georgia Secretary of State, which was then headed by now-Governor Kemp, had investigated the same group, yet delayed three years before referring that case to law enforcement. Charges were never brought, which is typical when the accused are liberals.

Other Georgia groups now being investigated include one which allegedly mailed “absentee ballot applications to people at addresses where they have not lived since 1994,” another which purportedly registered a dead Alabaman to cast a ballot in Georgia, and a third which urged college students to change residency to vote.

Elections should not rely on begging people not to cheat. Kemp, Raffensperger, and the GOP-controlled Georgia legislature should be installing safeguards to ensure that fraudulent ballots are caught and rejected before they are counted.

Georgia law requires voter ID for casting a ballot in person, and yet permits mailing in ballots by anyone and everyone. There is no justification for permitting massive stuffing of the ballot box by unverified voters.

In Pennsylvania, Commonwealth Court Judge Patricia McCullough suspended mailed-in ballots as a violation of that state’s constitution, in a case brought by newly reelected U.S. Representative Mike Kelly of Erie. Judge McCullough properly questioned the 2.6 million mailed-in ballots which erased the landslide victory earned by President Trump on Election Day, when he won among in-person voters by nearly 700,000 votes.

The Democrat-controlled Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which had already allowed mail-in ballots to trickle in for days after Election Day in violation of state law, quickly reversed the good ruling by the lower court. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court did not express any doubt that the mail-in voting violated its constitution, but permitted it anyway by saying plaintiffs should have sued earlier.

The Pennsylvania Senate held a hearing last week about election fraud but then failed to take action as authorized by Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution to pick electors for the Electoral College. Republicans improved their majority in the Pennsylvania legislature this election, but Democrats insist Biden won the state based on an implausible imbalance in mailed-in ballots.

Neither mailed-in ballots nor electronic voting machines can be properly audited to ensure the same level of integrity associated with traditional in-person voting. To restore confidence in the process, states should return to traditional paper ballots, marked in person by each voter on Election Day.

While the Leftist ground game steals elections, Republican campaigns continue to be dominated by ineffective, highly paid consultants who enrich themselves with commissions for placing television ads. The result could make the January 5th Senate runoff election in Georgia a pathetic television rerun of the recently stolen presidential election.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Saturday, November 28, 2020

Freedom to attend church is upheld

Liberal UChicago law professor Brian Leiter disapproves of Amy Coney Barrett siding with the majority in a religious freedom case, and writes:
Governor Cuomo should declare the Court mistaken, and ignore the ruling. After all, if Justice Ginsburg had not died, this case would have come out the other way, as everyone knows. Her appointment in Samarra should not change constitutional law, a proposition even conservatives who profess commitment to the rule of law might agree upon.
I agree that her appointment should not change constitutional law, and people should have the right to attend church just as they have for centuries.

I guess Leiter is assuming that because Ginsburg never attended church, she might not recognize the rights of others. He could be right about that.

I am surprised to see Leiter reject judicial supremacy in this way. Yes, there are times when a governor should ignore a supreme court ruling. I just don't think he picked a good example.

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

Leftists March through Georgia

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

As our nation waits for Georgia to complete its second recount of ballots cast in the 2020 presidential election, it’s worth reviewing what previously happened in the same state where General William Tecumseh Sherman destructively marched to the sea after the 1864 presidential election.

In the 2018 race for governor of Georgia, the Republican candidate, then secretary of state Brian Kemp, defeated Democrat Stacey Abrams by about 50,000 votes, or 1.4 percent of the 3.9 million votes cast. But Abrams did not concede on election night, or the next day, or the day after that.

Instead, Stacey Abrams pursued every possible avenue to overturn governor-elect Brian Kemp’s apparent victory. Her campaign examined absentee and provisional ballots in search of additional votes, and even filed a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Georgia’s election procedures.

After that election Stacey Abrams called a news conference in which she announced: “to be clear, this is not a speech of concession. ... As a woman of conscience and faith, I cannot concede.”

Her non-concession was supported by other Democrats such as Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who said, “I think that Stacey Abrams’s election is being stolen from her, using what I think are insidious measures to disenfranchise certain groups of people.”

Five months later, in April 2019, Senator Elizabeth Warren insisted that “massive voter suppression prevented Stacey Abrams from becoming the rightful governor of Georgia.” Later, in August, Stacey told an audience, “I will say something that seems to anger people when I say it: We won. We won that election.”

Liberal publications and cable networks indulged Stacey’s claim that she really won the election, or would have won if the vote had been fair. She was not censored by Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube for spreading disinformation, and her posts were not slapped with a label warning that her claims were disputed.

The 2018 election in Georgia is worth revisiting because of the new approach that Stacey Abrams brought to politics. Her efforts sought to outnumber traditional Georgia voters with a new, more progressive electorate.

Her New Georgia Project, which she co-founded in 2014, targeted the “New American Majority – people of color, those 18 to 29 years of age, and unmarried women.” The group, which raised over $10 million from undisclosed donors, claims it registered 500,000 new voters from groups more likely to vote for progressive candidates.

Stacey’s strategy was revealed by a New York Times columnist named Michelle Goldberg, whose column entitled “We can replace them” caused a stir just before the 2018 election. Goldberg’s column depicted Georgia as a state in which “an embittered white conservative minority clings to power, terrified at being swamped by a new multiracial polyglot majority.”

Immediately after she lost, Stacey Abrams and her campaign manager started a new group to continue the fight against “voter suppression.” The new group, Fair Fight (with Fair Fight Action and Fair Fight PAC), filed a lawsuit against the secretary of state, claiming defects in Georgia’s voting machines.

Georgia’s new secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, then capitulated by replacing all the old voting equipment with new machines from Dominion Voting System at a cost of $100 million. Dominion voting machines are suspected of using Venezuelan software that enabled system administrators to switch thousands of ballots from Trump to Biden.

If Joe Biden ends up winning Georgia’s 16 electoral votes for president, he will owe a large debt to Stacey Abrams for inducing hapless Republican state leaders to purchase and install insecure voting machines, and otherwise rolling over for the Left.

But Stacey is not done. She has now focused her well-honed efforts toward replacing Georgia’s two Republican U.S. Senators with radical leftist challengers. Both contests will be decided in a runoff election to be held on January 5.

If Stacey succeeds in this political hat trick while Georgia Republican officials sit idly by, then the Senate in addition to the White House could fall into the hands of the radical Left. The GOP-majority Georgia legislature should exercise its responsibilities under the Constitution, Article II, section 1, to choose Electors based on the in-person voting, but instead they have cowered in fear of Stacey.

The Georgia legislature should also restore integrity to elections there by limiting mail-in voting to those who solicited ballots and have verified signatures on them. Better yet, the Georgia legislature should eliminate most mail-in voting altogether to stop the travesty of ballot harvesting, by which ballots are cast in the names of people who did not genuinely vote by secret ballot.

Stacey will be the leading candidate for the next vacancy on the Supreme Court if Joe Biden is sworn into office, and he promised to name a black female to the high court. How does Justice Abrams sound?

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Tuesday, November 17, 2020

Biden’s ‘Dark Winter’ Coming Early

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The recent switch away from Daylight Savings Time marks the annual end of “summer time” for most Americans, and this year we turned back our clocks two days before the presidential election. For many this heralds the onset of so-called Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD.

This social affliction could be far worse this year as Democrats impose tyrannical control to essentially lock people in their homes. These new shutdowns interfere with Americans mingling with family and friends during the upcoming holidays.

The “dark winter” that Joe Biden promised in the final presidential debate will become a reality if he becomes president. Fortunately, the election is still being legitimately contested in six states.

“We’re about to go into a dark winter,” Biden declared in that October 22 debate, referring to the upcoming coronavirus lockdown. “A dark winter,” he repeated for emphasis.

His phrase shocked President Trump, who responded that “We’re opening up our country. We have no choice. We can’t lock ourselves up in a basement like Joe does.”

More recently Biden interrupted his phony “bring us together” message by telling a carefully screened audience in Wilmington, Delaware that “We’re going into a very dark winter. Things are going to get much tougher.”

Biden took softball questions from the friendly journalists who had been invited to attend what was advertised as a major policy speech. One reporter wanted to know about the Biden family’s plans for Thanksgiving.

“I strongly urge that if, in fact, we’re going to have Thanksgiving with anyone, that we limit it to a maximum — they suggest 5 people; a maximum of 10 people, socially distanced and wearing masks. ... There should be no group of more than 10 people inside the home.”

With Biden setting a dictatorial tone, Democrat politicians across the country promptly fell into line. The Associated Press reported a few hours later that “Governors ratchet up restrictions ahead of Thanksgiving” — Democrat governors, that is, along with Democrat mayors and county executives.

“I must again pull back the reins,” the AP quoted New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, who declared that indoor gatherings would be limited to 10 people, down from 25. The Democrat governors of California, New Mexico and Washington State issued similar restrictions, as did the Democrat mayor of Chicago and county executive of St. Louis County, Missouri.

Family separation, anyone? These unreasonable new orders to separate American families during our holidays are coming from the same Democrat Party which has spent the last four years falsely accusing President Trump of separating families of illegal immigrants who showed up at our southwestern border demanding asylum to which they are not entitled.

The “family separation” charge against the Trump administration was mostly a fraud. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) identified 432 fake families in a 5-month period last year, where children had no relationship to the adults who smuggled them across the border.

California Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom updated the so-called guidance he issued in October, to nationwide ridicule. He prohibited gatherings from including more than three households, including the host and all guests, and these traditional get-togethers may not last more than two hours.

Face coverings must be worn by everyone at all times, the rules insist, except that “people may remove their face coverings briefly to eat or drink, as long as they stay at least 6 feet away from everyone outside their own household, and put their face covering back on as soon as they are done with the activity.”

Newsom’s original guidance specified that all Thanksgiving dinners be held outdoors throughout California. His updated rule flatly prohibits indoor gatherings in the more populous Purple Tier counties, and strongly discourages them in the more rural Red, Orange, and Yellow tiers of the Golden State.

The rules go on to say that “singing, chanting, shouting, and physical exertion” are strongly discouraged, but what Thanksgiving is complete without one or more of those activities? The playing of musical instruments is allowed, but only if the musicians are from one of the three households, and wind instruments are strongly discouraged.

Newsom ignored his own guidance when he recently attended a gathering of more than three households at the luxurious French Laundry restaurant in Napa, California, where meals cost around $350 per person. The dinner was hosted by one of the state’s most powerful lobbyists who, among his many clients, led the 2016 initiative that legalized recreational marijuana there.

Thanksgiving is not the only gathering for which liberal Democrat governors feel entitled to exempt themselves from the same rules they impose on the rest of us. It was recently disclosed that Gavin Newsom’s own four children aged 4 to 11 have resumed in-person education at their private school in Sacramento, while public schools throughout the state remain closed.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Tuesday, November 10, 2020

Don’t Concede to Fake Votes

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

President Trump should reject the liberal clamor to concede an election that was evidently stolen by hundreds of thousands of fake ballots in seven battleground states. Ballots from voters who never requested them, along with ballots not completely filled out and personally returned with signatures that were both witnessed and verified, have turned this election into an unverifiable farce.

The United States Code (Title 3, Section 1) requires that the “electors of President and Vice President shall be appointed, in each State, on the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November.” That means only one day for every state to conduct a nationwide election, not many weeks of collecting ballots by political partisans.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris should disavow the many improper ballots tallied for them long after Election Day. Biden and Harris should concede the illegality of ballot harvesting, whereby paid operatives stuff the ballot box with thousands of ballots in the names of people who never earnestly voted with the necessary protections of an in-person secret ballot.

Many lawsuits are pending, even as new instances of voter fraud are still being uncovered. In Michigan, a software “glitch” flipped many votes improperly to Biden, and in other states poll watchers were improperly denied access to monitor the counting.

Never before in American history have the media rushed to declare a president-elect while the votes were still being counted, unless the opposing candidate had conceded defeat. In past elections, the media would only say that a candidate was “projected” to win, not that he actually won.

In 2000, for example, the media did not declare Bush the president-elect while the votes in Florida were still being disputed and recounted. Not until December 13, some 37 days after the election, did CNN report that “Texas Gov. George W. Bush donned the mantle of president-elect following Vice President Al Gore’s concession.”

It was only fitting that Biden and Harris covered their faces with masks as they claimed victory based merely on projections by their supporters in the media. Even some foreign leaders have greater respect for our Constitution than Biden supporters do, and have properly declined to congratulate him.

The Constitution provides that each state’s presidential electors shall be appointed “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the election rules were flagrantly disobeyed in key states including Pennsylvania, their state legislatures must reclaim their authority to appoint electors for the upcoming meeting of the Electoral College.

Contrary to the media drumbeat, the president-elect is the person who receives a majority of the Electoral College, or 270 out of 538 electoral votes. But the electors will not cast their votes until December 14, and we won’t even know who they are until each state completes the process of counting, recounting, canvassing, and certifying the election results in that state.

In addition, there are serious disputes about many ballots that have already been counted. In Pennsylvania, for example, hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots were allegedly counted by Democrats outside the view of Republican poll watchers, in violation of the law.

President Trump is absolutely right not to concede, and he should not concede so long as votes are being counted and there remain legitimate questions about the integrity of the process. More than 71 million Americans voted for Trump last week – an astounding total which far exceeds that of any other president in history.

When the Communists stole the world championship from the United States Olympic men’s basketball team in 1972, the American team refused to concede defeat by accepting the silver medal instead of the gold. Forty years later, the American team captain even included a provision in his will that prohibits his heirs from ever accepting that silver medal, which remains unclaimed to this day at IOC headquarters in Switzerland. That was not poor sportsmanship. It was a courageous and principled rejection of what was wrong, by withstanding pressure to go along to get along.

Trump’s detractors still fear him, and want him to concede now so that they can use his concession to discredit his presidency and undermine everything he might say or do in the future. They want Trump to legitimize this corrupt election process, so they can do more of it.

Trump should not concede to the calculated corruption by those who pulled every trick imaginable to stuff the ballot box and change the outcome of the in-person voting. The hundreds of thousands of mailed-in ballots that supposedly went 80-100% for Biden were no better than fake news.

The Biden-Harris campaign, with consummate arrogance, is trying to begin the so-called transition before this election has even been determined. As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters today, “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.”

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Saturday, November 7, 2020

How indeed did we get here?

Vivian Gornick writes in the NY Review of Books:
The morning after Donald Trump’s election, everyone who had not voted for him probably woke up thinking, “How did we get here?” Nearly four years later, even when we ask it rhetorically, we are still marveling over the question, for which no satisfying answer has ever been found. How indeed did we get here?
She blames Phyllis Schlafly and her followers.
Pretty soon many of us began to realize that the gulf between the women’s movement and Schlafly’s followers not only wasn’t going to narrow, it was going to grow steadily wider; ...

Still, it was not until Donald Trump became president that I could even imagine American democracy self-destructing. Now it seems a distinct possibility.

She says that she is depressed about the influence of conservatives.

Tuesday, November 3, 2020

He Has Fight in Him

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Alexander Hamilton identified “energy in the executive” as a key benefit of the newly created office of President of the United States, and even his detractors admit that Donald Trump has satisfied that requirement. The contrast with his low-energy Democratic opponent could not be more stark.

In the 28 days since he was hospitalized for COVID-19, President Trump headlined more than 50 rallies attended by close to a million cheering supporters. During the same time period, Sleepy Joe Biden was seen by fewer than 2,000 people at a handful of poorly attended events.

No one can deny that Trump energetically competed for every last vote, while Biden hoped to coast to the White House with the help of his flacks in the mainstream media. Biden’s lackluster campaign insulted the voters by failing to heed Phyllis Schlafly’s wisdom that “from County Coroner to U.S. President, there is no substitute for a candidate putting out his hand to the voters and saying, ‘I ask you to vote for me.’”

Trump has certainly done that, more than any presidential candidate since Harry Truman. Trump continued to fulfill his presidential duties while holding 14 massive rallies in the final 3 days throughout 7 key states. He recently appointed and obtained confirmation of his third justice to the U.S. Supreme Court, placing Amy Coney Barrett on the High Court despite naysayers insisting there wasn’t enough time. “A president is elected for four years. … I’m not elected for three years,” Trump retorted.

In 2016 Hillary Clinton featured entertainers at her rallies to boost attendance, but young people would then leave after the celebrity left rather than listen to what Hillary had to say. At Biden’s final campaign event in Pittsburgh, he brought onstage the popular singer known as Lady Gaga.

But then the revelation: Lady Gaga was part of “Artists Against Fracking,” a celebrity project that urged New York Governor Cuomo to ban fracking in New York, which he did. The Trump campaign was quick to criticize Biden for campaigning with a celebrity who once opposed the industry that now supports about 600,000 Pennsylvania families.

A long list of other celebrities promised to leave the United States if Trump were elected in 2016, but none of them actually left. Biden could have campaigned with any of them, but wisely has not fully embraced liberal Hollywood the way that prior Democrats have.

On Election Day Trump was up early again, appearing on television and visiting his campaign headquarters in Virginia to thank workers and speak to the media. He pointed out how the media was never going to allow him to persuade them, and Trump cracked a joke about so-called fact-checking.

No other politician has stood up against the media as Trump has, which forever changes the political landscape. Even Ronald Reagan deferred to the media and rarely called them out for their mistreatment of fellow Republicans.

Trump denounced Democrat-appointed judges, too, which prior presidents have rarely been willing to do. Trump appropriately lambasted the Deep State, a term that is here to stay to describe the entrenched shadow government in D.C.

The massive crowds that gathered for Trump in 40-degree weather and challenging logistics gave a voice to the grassroots which both political parties have too long ignored. “Fi-re Fau-ci” was a recent spontaneous chant in Michigan that was music to the ears of Trump and millions of Americans.

The crowd was referring to Dr. Anthony Fauci, who enjoys one of the highest-paid jobs in government as he pontificates about coronavirus. Rather than supporting the President and his goal to get America back working again, Fauci has taken inconsistent positions while repeatedly undermining Trump.

Fauci promoted remdesivir as a treatment for COVID-19 despite how it requires hospitalization and intravenous administration. Recently a massive study conducted by the Fauci-allied World Health Organization concluded that remdesivir, which costs thousands per patient in addition to the immense costs of a hospital stay, is ineffective.

Trump fights to save our country from the radical Leftist agenda. Republican congressional candidate Sean Parnell in Pennsylvania recently had his home spray-painted with Communist red as an illustration of the pitched-fork battle that we are in to preserve our prosperity and freedoms.

Phyllis liked the saying that “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen!” That famous quote by President Harry Truman refers to how officials who cannot withstand the pressure of politics should get out of the way.

No president in American history has been put through as much “heat” and unfair pressure as Donald Trump. He has not only survived the pressure and enabled America to thrive, but he has also set a high new standard for all good politicians to aspire.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Friday, October 30, 2020

Another strange Mrs. America review

The TV series Mrs. America has brought some strange commentary, such as this review:
Fundamentalist Christianity in America is, by default, misogynist, cisheteronormative, and white supremacist, and its rise as a political force in the United States began in the 1970s, with Phyllis Schlafly as one of its most famous faces.
No, Phyllis Schlafly was a Catholic, and not a Fundamentalist Christian.
I had absolutely no desire whatsoever to see this person humanized or excused or forgiven. These fears were quickly put to rest. This is no sympathetic portrait, ...

There’s a scene in the first episode in which she goes to his office to get his signature on *checks notes* a credit-card application. By law, she cannot apply for a credit card without the permission of her husband.

No, there was no such law. The scene is fiction.

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

Low Energy Joe's Dark Winter

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

It would be a dark winter for our country as Joe Biden predicts if “low energy” Joe were to be elected president next week, and not just because of his lack of personal vitality. His supporters’ war on our energy industry would throw our economy into a downward tailspin.

Having a president who hides in his basement, and whose mind has declined to the point that he referred to his opponent as “George,” would be bad enough. Our economy would languish under Biden’s demented leadership, and our foreign enemies would exploit the vacuum in the White House.

It is even worse than that. Biden and his California running mate, Kamala Harris, want to cut off affordable energy for all Americans, and force us to live with frequent energy interruptions and rationing as California already has today.

Californians living under the control of Democrats already suffer from frequent power blackouts. In August and again this week, crippling blackouts rattled the state which has intentionally decreased its own access to traditional energy.

Biden and Harris are beholden to the radical California environmentalists who are enemies of traditional energy: coal, oil, and natural gas. They want to regulate away the heart of our economy on which millions of jobs and our productivity depend.

This assault on traditional energy is led by coastal California, which enjoys revenue from smartphones and internet censorship, against the “Rust Belt” manufacturing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan. As President Trump points out at his rallies, manufacturing needs traditional energy to fuel the factories, as does our overall economy.

Liberals pretend that their opposition to traditional energy is based on what they call the “existential crisis” of climate change, but that is a lie because they also oppose nuclear power, which does not contribute to global warming. The Biden-Harris ticket is really at war with efficient energy.

Their hidden agenda slipped into the open at the final presidential debate, when President Trump asked Biden a question that none of the liberal moderators would ask. “Would you close down the oil industry?” Biden responded, “I would transition from the oil industry. Yes.”

A gasp by viewers was immediately felt. The Biden-supporting moderator, Kristen Welker of NBC, also seemed dismayed.

“Why would you do that?” she asked Biden. He responded that he would impose net zero emissions in energy production by 2025, which would shut down the entire industry because its carbon emissions are impossible to eliminate or entirely offset.

Flashbacks resulted for older voters to the long, tortuous gas lines of the 1970s amid an energy shortage then. No one wants a return of that crisis.

The moderator tried to pivot away, but this was a bombshell of a revelation by Biden that should cost him millions of votes. As Trump immediately said, “Will you remember that Texas, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Ohio?”

On Monday, Trump held three rallies in Pennsylvania and coal-miners turned out to see him in Martinsburg. Pennsylvania is one of the largest coal producers in the country, and Democrats have already lost neighboring West Virginia over this issue.

But Pennsylvania also has Philadelphia, which is governed by a Democrat political machine. More race riots erupted there on Monday night, giving Americans yet another warning of the failure of law-and-order that would occur under a Biden-Harris administration.

Manufacturing and energy production in Pennsylvania have long propped up the liberals in Philadelphia with subsidies and handouts. The economic backbone of the state in coal-mining, fracking, and manufacturing would suffer enormously if low-energy Joe is elected.

As President, Biden could bankrupt the energy industry by strangling it with regulations through the Environmental Protection Agency and other arms of the administrative state. West Virginia voters have “woken” up to that, and Pennsylvania voters should, too.

The radical environmentalists who control Biden are determined to end fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, which produces oil and natural gas from deposits that were not affordably accessible by traditional drilling. This technology has brought jobs and prosperity to rural communities across the Keystone State.

Neighboring New York bans fracking statewide and there is a stark disparity in prosperity along the Pennsylvania-New York border. On the Pennsylvania side the towns are refurbished with wealth produced by fracking, while on the New York side there is decline and despair.

No environmental harm has ever been found to result from fracking. In contrast, windmills supported by Biden and Harris cause devastation to birds, and the clanking noise of the turbines has caused headaches and worse to those unfortunate enough to live nearby.

President Trump has said that reducing regulations is as important as reducing taxes, and from his first moments in office he has cut the regulatory impediments to our economy. Every regulation is a tax, and Biden would regulate traditional energy to death.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Tuesday, October 13, 2020

Honey, It’s Time to Vote for Trump

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Liberals count on “suburban women” to carry Biden to a victory denied to Hillary Clinton four years ago. The theory is that many of the suburban women who voted for Trump last time have changed their minds and are pulling the lever against him this time.

That false prediction is a stepchild of the gender gap theory of politics which was all the rage in the media in the 1980s as they tried, unsuccessfully, to oust Ronald Reagan from the White House. Reagan was supported by men even more than by women, and supposedly that gap in support was going to be his downfall.

It was not. Reagan rode to a landslide reelection victory of historic proportions in 1984, carrying even the liberal backyards of Massachusetts, New York, and California. The experts crawled back under their rocks after the crash of their predictions about the impact of a gender gap.

Polling married couples about what color home they would like to buy would result in many differences in opinion between husband and wife. But, as with voting, when it comes time to buy a home they agree and make the decision with one voice.

Polls tighten, as they did in 2016 around this time, because married couples decide not to cancel out each other’s vote. This is not because of new information, or because millions of people are independently changing their minds, or because of how the candidates performed at a presidential debate. This is because married couples begin deciding in earnest about the election and what it means for the future of their children and grandchildren. This is because families seriously reflect on the freedom and prosperity they have enjoyed until now, and start really deciding which candidate will continue that for their next generation.

Married couples typically vote for the same candidate in elections, and it would be silly for them to go to the trouble of voting just to cancel each other out. The strong support for Trump by men has the effect of pulling married women to his side despite all the media bias.

Studies show that women, as a group, are more influenced by the media and thus have been pulled away from supporting Trump by the slanted reporting against him. That has artificially depressed Trump’s approval rating throughout his presidency, particularly among women.

But when it finally comes time to vote, serious conversations begin between husband and wife. It becomes more like their joint decisions to buy a home, raise a child, and plan for the long-term future. A response to a pollster is a decision that people make willy-nilly in reply to a surprise phone call. It can embody an unhappiness at that time, or an opportunity merely to complain.

Earlier this month CNN gloated that, in its polling, women supported Biden over Trump by a 34-point margin. An average of many such polls showed a 25-point gender gap.

But those polling responses are not family decisions, as actual votes by married couples are. When married women actually cast their votes, they take into consideration how their husband is voting more than what CNN says.

Suburban women are unlikely to vote against their own husbands, and hence to predict an election outcome it is essential to focus on how suburban men will vote. They went big for Reagan in 1984, and then so did their wives.

A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll announced that although suburban women support Biden by 62% to 34%, suburban men support Trump by a landslide margin of 54% to 43%.

Suburban men and women are predominantly married, or else they would be living in cities. The tightening of the race occurs when the married couples realize that by voting for the same person they have an impact of 2 votes, but voting opposite each other is a waste of their time.

Feminists may hope that the suburban wives persuade their husbands how to vote, but that is not what happened in 2016 or prior elections. Instead, often husbands are more persuasive than the media in influencing their wives for whom to vote, leaving only the unmarried women with a gender gap voting against the Republican.

Trump nearly prevailed with married women in 2016, and there are more married women than the unmarried women who opposed him then and now. Today some explain Trump’s better polling among married women as being due to the issue of safety against crime, but that issue would matter as much to unmarried women.

Instead, it is the institution of marriage that enables Trump and other Republicans to continue winning despite the array of media and big money against them. Married men see through the liberal bias, and easily persuade their families to vote for Trump, too.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Trump Could Stun Experts with a Repeat of 1948

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Harry Truman pulled out a sweeping victory in the presidential election of 1948 that stunned the experts and the press, which even ran a famous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline on election night. History may be repeating itself now.

Behind in the polls, Truman campaigned to large crowds at train stops as he traveled the country. Today Trump does likewise at airports.

“Give ’em hell, Harry” was the campaign slogan for Truman in 1948 that began when a supporter shouted it at one of his rallies. Truman responded extemporaneously, “I just tell the truth about them, and they think it’s hell.”

Trump shares the same first four letters as Truman, and Election Day this year is very early in November as it was in 1948. Both mocked their political rivals with nicknames, as Truman called the distinguished Senator Fulbright, “Senator Half-bright.”

America, unlike England, loves the scrappy underdog who does not give up. That was Harry Truman in 1948, and President Trump today.

Trump has always been at his best when he is striking back against the elite, the media, and even some in his own Republican Party. It was no different at this time in 2016, when Trump had to overcome a tidal wave of criticism from nearly all sides in order to prevail.

Truman liked to fire people, as Trump has appropriately done. Truman, like Trump, also had a healthy disdain for the Swamp.

Meanwhile, for months Joe Biden has been channeling Thomas Dewey, Truman’s heavily favored opponent. Both Dewey and now Biden campaigned little, and instead relied on polls and experts who said they were a shoo-in to win the election.

Truman, like Trump, had pollsters telling him his approval ratings were too low to win. Some in his own party were even dismayed that Truman ran for reelection.

Truman, like Trump, appealed most to those without a college education. Truman, like Trump, had to fight a Congress that was controlled by the opposite party.

Truman wrangled against the media much as Trump does. When a Washington Post music critic wrote a harsh review of an unimpressive recital by Truman’s only child Margaret, Truman responded furiously by threatening him in writing.

“Some day I hope to meet you,” Truman wrote to the journalist Paul Hume. “When that happens, you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!”

The media was aghast at this and other crass behavior by Truman, but it did not hurt him with voters out in the Midwest. Trump's tenacious standing up against the media is also endearing him to voters.

When the 1948 election night returns began to roll in from the Eastern states, Dewey won states that experts thought sewed up the victory for him. He prevailed in places which he had lost four years earlier against FDR.

But then the Midwest stunned the experts by breaking Truman’s way, just as the Midwest could put Trump over the top in this election. Trump’s repudiation of the elite resonates in middle America, as it did for Truman.

The turnout in 1948 was low, just as it might be this year in light of how the television audience for the first presidential debate was down by more than 10% from 2016. An anemic overall turnout would probably help Trump, as it would be a more informed electorate rather than low information voters.

Worse than Dewey’s failure to campaign much in 1948, Biden is refusing even to answer basic questions about what he would do as president. Biden repeatedly dodges questions, as he did at the debate, about whether he will unfairly pack the Supreme Court with additional new justices.

Biden declined to debate Trump in person this week, which did not work for Jimmy Carter in 1980. First Carter did not show up for a debate with Ronald Reagan, and only later as polling broke against him did Carter agree to debate in what was by then too little, too late for him.

Voters, particularly in the Midwest, did not feel they knew what the easterner Dewey really stood for, or did not like what they did know about him. Many voters feel the same way about Biden.

Few are willing to show up for a Biden campaign event, in contrast with how thousands show up for Trump rallies despite how he has had COVID-19. On Sunday a massive crowd of thousands of cars paraded in support of Trump in Miami, in anticipation of his visit to Florida Monday night.

Signs, some in Spanish, declared their enthusiastic support for Trump and called for freedom in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. “Say NO to socialismo/communismo,” one sign exclaimed, grateful that Trump took a strong stance at the first debate against Biden’s socialist policies.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Tuesday, October 6, 2020

Failure to Protect the President

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Last Friday, Americans received a sobering reminder of how important it is to protect our president. The news that he was admitted to a hospital for the Wuhan coronavirus rattled our entire country, including the stock market.

Only a month before Election Day, liberals initially thought Trump’s illness would be advantageous to them, and many of them cheered his misfortune. They want Americans to vote Trump out of office next month, and they were thrilled that he briefly left the White House even earlier.

But quickly Democrats were dismayed to see how important the health of the president is to nearly every American. Average people, including even those who had voted against him last time, waited anxiously for updates about how our president was doing.

Unrelenting critics of Trump in the media suddenly felt compelled to report sympathetically on the status of his recovery, and how long he would remain in the hospital. Joe Biden, who had just called Trump vile names during the nationally televised debate a few days earlier, had no choice but to tweet out a message of support for Trump against this disease.

Trump’s foray out of the hospital for a little joy ride on Sunday afternoon even sparked intense national coverage by the press. His uneventful circling of the hospital was more important to Americans than who was winning the NFL football games being played in empty or near-empty stadiums.

There is an American tradition of rallying around our flag, and around our president against illness or attack. In this case both appear to be happening, as the illness apparently results from a virus spread by our greatest potential enemy, Communist China.

Though downplayed in the media, suspicion grows that COVID-19 was produced in a lab in Wuhan, which makes it a weapon of mass destruction different from past pandemics. Li-Meng Yan, a Chinese virologist who was a researcher at the Hong Kong School of Public Health, has explained why she believes the virus was made in a military laboratory by combining two bat coronaviruses.

If you have not heard of Dr. Yan, then it is probably because Twitter has censored her, too. As reported by Newsweek, Twitter suspended her account in mid-September without public explanation, despite her nearly 60,000 followers.

The communist Chinese have recently arrested her mother as retaliation. But Joe Biden and Democrats are silent about this human rights abuse and remain unwilling to hold China accountable for causing so much harm.

The Deep State is allied with Democrats and has failed to protect our president against this Chinese viral invasion. Apparently tanks and planes are easier to repel than a virus, particularly if genetically designed to cause harm.

All of Fauci’s horses and all of Fauci’s men have been useless in protecting Trump and our country. The reliance on testing obviously failed to keep the virus out of the White House.

Rapid-response testing delivers a false sense of confidence because it cannot detect the potential spread of the virus by travelers recently exposed to it elsewhere.

Participants in the White House nomination ceremony for Amy Coney Barrett were tested as urged by Fauci acolytes, but that test could not screen out those in recent contact with the virus on an airplane or in a car. Roughly a dozen attendees at that event have since contracted COVID-19, including the president himself.

But the president did not test positive until six days later, so perhaps he and others did not contract the virus at the mostly outdoor event after all. The CDC sought to perform contact tracing on all the attendees in order to conduct surveillance of all their activities, but President Trump wisely blocked that Big Brother monitoring.

Many who attended that event are political activists or conservative senators whose daily movements should not be subjected to the prying eyes of the Deep State. Endless mischief would result from intrusive inquiries into whom certain conservatives met with in celebrating the nomination of Judge Barrett or helping on her confirmation.

Attempts to blame President Trump for the spread of the coronavirus at the White House suffered an additional setback when top officials at the Pentagon went into quarantine after the Coast Guard vice commandant tested positive. Notice that the media do not blame the top brass there.

Meanwhile, the leftist approach of forcing schoolchildren to wear masks all day is worse than the drills of the 1950s, when children practiced hiding under their desks in the event of a nuclear attack. At least those drills were merely fleeting inconveniences, while the masking of schoolchildren has unlimited disruptive duration.

Americans cheered when President Trump, perhaps acting against medical advice, exited the hospital on Monday evening. Imagine how much more they will cheer if he wins reelection in November.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Judges on a Rampage Against Trump

The Phyllis Schlafly Report By John and Andy Schlafly

While the nation’s attention is transfixed on the impending confirmation of a new Justice of the Supreme Court, lower court judges have been ruling almost daily against good policies of the Trump Administration and the states that voted for him in 2016. Democrat-appointed judges have issued sweeping injunctions on the census, the post office, the presidential election, state ballot requirements, asylum, the border wall, and even TikTok.

Imagine a football game where the rules about what constitutes a first down were changed during the contest. How silly and unfair it would be if in the second half a rule change were imposed to require only 5 yards rather than 10 to attain a first down.

Yet a flood of recent decisions by Obama-appointed judges are trying to change rules for the presidential election that is ongoing. Shockingly, more than 300 such lawsuits have been filed this year in 44 states, according to the COVID-Related Election Litigation Tracker.

Obama judges have arrogantly acted to suspend or override state laws that protect the security of ballots and prohibit accepting ballots after Election Day. A chaotic landscape of court decisions and emergency appeals have undermined an election process that has worked well for 232 years.

In Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina, Obama-appointed judges have ordered election officials to accept and count ballots that arrive after the deadline established by state law. The Wisconsin ruling was temporarily put on hold by the Seventh Circuit, but the South Carolina ruling was upheld by the Democrat-controlled Fourth Circuit.

These rulings fly in the face of Purcell doctrine, which requires courts to refrain from disturbing the established procedures so close to an election. Judicial supremacy, by which judges pretend to be supreme over the other branches of government, is a pandemic now.

Federal courts have even interfered with the beneficial deal that President Trump brokered for the transfer of the popular TikTok app from the Chinese Communists to new American owners. The Administration correctly viewed Chinese control of TikTok as a threat to our national security, yet a transaction which would have created a $5 billion windfall for the American people has been disrupted by the federal judiciary.

Joe Biden promised to appoint a black female to the Supreme Court, and Stacey Abrams, the failed candidate for governor of Georgia, seems to be his leading choice. A Yale Law School graduate whose sister is an Obama-appointed federal judge, Abrams recently headed the $10 million New Georgia Project that brought the Georgia lawsuit asking an Obama judge to overturn state laws that protect ballot security.

In South Carolina, Obama Judge J. Michelle Childs issued a 71-page opinion overturning several state laws, including the requirement of a witness signature for absentee ballots. The witness requirement was specifically relied on by Republican state legislators when they agreed to extend absentee ballots to all voters this year. In Louisiana, Obama Judge Shelly Dick arbitrarily extended the deadlines for both early voting and mail-in voting. In Georgia, Obama Judge Eleanor Ross ordered election officials to accept and count mail-in ballots received three days after the election, despite a state law which requires all ballots to be received by Election Day. In Arizona, Obama Judge Douglas Rayes ordered election officials to allow voters five days to cure a missing signature or other defect on their mail-in ballots, despite state law which requires all ballots to be completed by Election Day. In Wisconsin, Obama Judge William M. Conley ordered election officials to accept mail-in ballots received six days after the election, despite its state law forbidding that.

In Washington State, Obama Judge Stanley Bastian ordered the Postal Service to make multiple changes in its procedures, ostensibly to promote massive use of mail-in voting. Among other instructions, Judge Bastian wants post offices to treat election-related mail as first-class mail even if first-class postage wasn’t paid. There are still plenty of Clinton judges engaging in activism, too. Texas had a reasonable plan to allow seniors at risk of Covid to use absentee ballots without excuse, but Clinton-appointed Judge Fred Biery absurdly ruled that it violated the 26th amendment to not allow the same accommodation to 18-year-old voters; the Fifth Circuit reversed him. Politics abhors a vacuum, and Democrat-appointed judges are wasting no time filling up the judicial pipeline with activist rulings while Republicans focus on future Justice Amy Coney Barrett. All over the country, Obama-appointed district court judges are issuing rulings they hope will outlast Trump and be upheld by a future Justice Stacey Abrams. The last presidential election hinged on the issue of the courts, as most voters wanted President Trump to fill the vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. The same issue persists now at the district court level, as this recent tsunami of Leftist injunctions demonstrates.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Saturday, September 26, 2020

Barrett and the Triumph of Phyllis Schlafly

New York magazine reports:
Barrett is the beneficiary of decades of right-wing activism, much of it carried out by women who not only rejected feminism but sought actively to bring it down low. In her religious conviction and her status as an accomplished but anti-feminist woman, the judge recalls Phyllis Schlafly, who died four years ago this month. Barrett was still a toddler when Schlafly and her militant housewives vanquished the Equal Rights Amendment. But to the left, Barrett is a familiar specter: a traitor to her sex.

We are all living in Schlafly country now. Barrett’s nomination is only the latest evidence. The border separating mainstream conservative politics from the fringe was never all that robust, but in 2020, it is invisible. Schlafly’s far-right, anti-feminist ideology has taken over the Republican Party. ...

Liberals haven’t always grasped that lesson. That unfortunate reality was dramatized in Mrs. America, FX’s recent series about Schlafly’s rise to relevance. ...

Schlafly never quite made it out of the kitchen, either. She died on the outskirts of power, and never held office. Her organization, Eagle Forum, is dwarfed by Christian right groups with more money and better connections. But we’re still living with her ideas. Schlafly endorsed Trump just before her death, ...

Schlafly, famously, was no housewife, and Barrett is even more of a career woman. Conservative women with professional lives often invite accusations of hypocrisy: The label dogged Schlafly from the 1970s until the end of her life. But liberals don’t help themselves or any of their causes by taking the right-wing’s bait. Something deeper and more threatening than hypocrisy is at work. Schlafly was a pioneer for women. She uncovered the great loophole. For her successors in the Christian right, there is now one acceptable way to take a piece of male authority for themselves, and it runs through professional anti-feminism. The Schlafly track is about power, not ideological purity. Barrett may become its greatest success — a culture warrior almost without equal.

It is funny how this liberal magazine can say that Phyllis "was no housewife" right after saying that she "never quite made it out of the kitchen".

The article is correct that Barrett is a beneficiary of the movement that Phyllis led.

Tuesday, September 22, 2020

Unpacking the Court

The Phyllis Schlafly Report By John and Andy Schlafly

Even before the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg created an opening for President Trump to place a third Justice on the nine-member Supreme Court, Democrats were planning to take control of the courts next year. Their dreams include “packing” the Supreme Court with a one-time infusion of six additional justices, as Franklin Roosevelt tried to do in 1937.

FDR’s court-packing plan failed when the president was rebuked by his own Democrat-controlled Congress. He was never able to push things through Congress after that, and struggled even to obtain public support for World War II until Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

Kamala Harris is still smarting that she was unable to stop Brett Kavanaugh from joining the Court last year. Along with fellow Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Harris tried to derail the nomination with an unproven, absurd accusation of misconduct from 35 years earlier when the future judge was still in high school.

All Democrat-appointed justices on the Supreme Court have voted in lockstep in recent years, always in favor of entrenched liberal interest groups. They always hear petitions from Planned Parenthood and its allies, while turning down 99% of the petitions for review by other parties.

With the media on their side, the four Democrat-appointed Justices were able to forge a majority on several key issues by peeling off a Republican justice to join them, be it John Roberts or Neil Gorsuch. But that game will be over with confirmation of another Trump nominee to the Court.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died one day after Constitution Day, the 233rd anniversary of the day when Washington, Madison, and Hamilton completed their long summer of hammering out the structure of our government. Today that same Constitution is an obstacle to Biden-Harris as they seek to turn our Nation into a one-party state like California, which elected Kamala Harris as its senator.

Even before Ginsburg passed away, Democrats were clamoring for unconstitutional goals such as statehood for Washington, D.C., abolishing the Electoral College, and adding the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution 40 years after the deadline for its ratification expired. The Harris Administration, as Kamala referred to it in light of Biden’s declining mental capacity, needs a majority on the Supreme Court to achieve those goals.

D.C. Statehood, which Nancy Pelosi has already rammed through the House and could get through the Senate if Democrats win a majority there in November, violates at least two provisions in the Constitution. Rep. Tom Massie (R-KY) called this legislation “farcical” because it is so clearly unconstitutional, and this bad idea should be dead-on-arrival in the courts.

President Trump’s third nomination to the Supreme Court, which no first-term president has achieved in a half-century, will protect our Constitution and break the liberal influence over it. This achieves a long overdue result of unpacking the Court and freeing it from those who want to rewrite our laws, rather than applying the Constitution as they should.

Now with only three justices voting together for liberal causes and without the sympathetic pull toward the late Justice Ginsburg, the dynamic suddenly changes to a Court that will interpret the law like an impartial umpire, as it should. It becomes a new ballgame of calling balls and strikes, as Phyllis Schlafly wrote in 2004 in her seminal book The Supremacists.

Democrats are openly frustrated that their political base is not as energized by the importance of the Supreme Court as the conservative base is. Dating back to the notorious rulings of the Warren Court in the 1950s and 1960s, grassroots conservatives have long been aware of how much damage an activist court does, and how important it is to elect a president who appoints good judges.

Trump has accomplished more in his first term than prior Republican presidents achieved in two terms on this all-important issue. As others dithered about whether to fill the sudden vacancy left by RGB passing away, Trump acted boldly and decisively in declaring that he would fill it immediately.

With that masterstroke, it feels like 2016 again, as Trump steps on the accelerator while the media tries to catch up with him. Trump wiped away the tiresome negative publicity about COVID-19, rioting, and California wildfires, and took charge in a breathtaking way.

The contrast between him and “Basement” Biden becomes clearer. Biden’s prior statements in favor of filling a vacancy in a presidential year and his refusal to identify whom he would name to the Supreme Court exposes him as the inept, bumbling two-facer that he is.

Biden himself has criticized the suggestion of packing the court which his Leftist supporters rush to now. It is time to unpack the High Court and end the control that the Left has had over it, and President Trump is keeping America great by doing so.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Tuesday, September 15, 2020

Trump Judge Nixes ‘New Normal’

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

A Trump-appointed judge has finally stood up against the senseless continuing shutdowns by Democrat governors. Federal judges had been going along with totalitarianism at the state level until Monday, when federal judge William Stickman declared that a Democrat governor has acted irrationally.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s never-ending shutdown blocks outdoor rallies by the Trump campaign in the state which may decide the outcome of the presidential election, and has prohibited attendance at other gatherings, too. Prior attempts to restore freedom, including a lawsuit appealed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and efforts by the Republican-controlled legislature, had failed.

But those on the side of freedom did not give up, and they finally achieved a legal breakthrough in federal court in Western Pennsylvania, where 8 out of 10 active judges were appointed by Trump. There the University of Pittsburgh is playing football, while Penn State’s Nittany Lions have been sidelined by the Big 10 conference.

Judge Stickman observed that the shutdown order by Gov. Wolf was supposedly necessary to “flatten the curve” and protect hospital capacity against an overflow of patients. No such overflow ever happened and yet the unjustified shutdown continues.

Plaintiffs challenged Gov. Wolf’s restrictions as violations of the First Amendment freedom of assembly, and both the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the 14th Amendment. Judge Stickman held in their favor on all of the above in a brilliant 66-page decision which disavows the overly deferential approach taken by other Republican-appointed judges.

“The fact is that the lockdowns imposed across the United States in early 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic are unprecedented in the history of our Commonwealth and our Country. They have never been used in response to any other disease in our history,” Judge Stickman held.

Indeed, Judge Stickman traced the origin of the shutdowns, not merely the virus, to China itself, which he pointed out does not protect individual liberties as we do in the United States. The lockdown approach spread like a domino effect from Wuhan, and “were unheard of by the people of this nation until just this year,” he pointed out.

Gatherings of more than 25 persons indoors and more than 250 persons outside have been prohibited for months in Pennsylvania. This has impeded the ability of President Trump to hold his massive rallies in this all-important state of 20 Electoral College votes.

“Congratulations Pennsylvania,” tweeted President Trump in response to the news that Judge Stickman had struck down its Democrat governor’s restrictions. The Pennsylvania Governor has vowed a swift appeal to the Third Circuit, but he will be greeted by more Trump-appointed judges there.

Short-term restrictions amid an emergency may be entitled to some deference, Judge Stickman wrote, but “that deference cannot go on forever. It is no longer March. It is now September and the record makes clear that Defendants have no anticipated end-date to their emergency interventions.”

He rejected the governor’s invocation of the anachronistic 7-2 decision of Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905), which is often cited by supporters of mandatory vaccination because it allowed Massachusetts to compel the vaccination of a minister against smallpox. As the judge pointed out, that decision predated the vast expansion of individual rights in the 20th century.

In 1905 the government could infringe on many individual rights, such as freedom of speech, and later denied the right to own gold, which would be unthinkable today. And the Supreme Court carefully limited its decision in Jacobson by saying that government overreach on vaccination should still be checked by the courts.

Judge Stickman rejected the overly deferential standard of the 115-year-old Jacobson decision. He pointed out that “the ongoing and indefinite nature of” of Democrat Gov. Wolf’s actions “weigh strongly against application of a more deferential level of review.”

He found persuasive a recent opinion by Supreme Court Justice Alito, joined by Justice Thomas and Trump-appointed Justice Kavanaugh, when they objected to the Court’s refusal to grant an application for relief to a church in Nevada. “We have a duty to defend the Constitution, and even a public health emergency does not absolve us of that responsibility,” Justice Alito wrote.

Judge Stickman criticized the Democrats’ “one-size fits all approach,” whereby the “vast diversity of the Commonwealth” of Pennsylvania is treated identically by the shutdown. Pennsylvania “has dense urban areas, commuter communities servicing the New York metropolitan area, small towns and vast expanses of rural communities,” over which the “virus’s prevalence varies greatly.”

Democrats’ shutdown orders have created “a topsy-turvy world where Plaintiffs are more restricted in areas traditionally protected by the First Amendment than in areas which usually receive far less, if any, protection.” Penn State football and the entire Nation should applaud this decision against shutdowns that infringe on our fundamental rights.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Tuesday, September 8, 2020

Biden-Harris Would Loot the Midwest

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

While California’s raging wildfires have sent smoke billowing as far away as Kansas, the Biden-Harris ticket would extend its political power to the Midwest, too. California politicians have been looting middle America and the placement of Kamala Harris as the shadow president would pick midwesterners’ pockets even further.

California already controls the House of Representatives through Nancy Pelosi as its Speaker. The San Francisco-based Pelosi effectively holds the purse strings for our entire Nation and can shut down the government until she gets what she wants.

On the other side of the Capitol, both California Senators sit on the powerful Judiciary Committee, where they brutally harangued Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh prior to his confirmation in 2018. Dianne Feinstein is the oldest sitting U.S. Senator and one of its most influential members.

Electing the Biden-Harris ticket would accomplish a trifecta by placing a liberal California politician in the White House, too. Given Joe Biden’s declining capacity, it would effectively put the fringe Leftists who run the San Francisco-based Big Tech industry in charge of the entire nation.

Ouch to the Midwest if this happens. Already California politicians have been transferring wealth and jobs away from the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. The shutdowns during the coronavirus pandemic boosted Big Tech by forcing people to rely more on the internet, while hurting auto manufacturers who had to close their factories and suffer declines in sales.

Radical environmentalists would extend their reach if Democrats win in November, and they have already been forcing the transfer of billions from the heartland to California. Biased global warming regulations, which penalize some pollution in favor of others, have caused Detroit automakers to pay billions to the electric car maker Tesla as regulatory credits.

California is home to the wealthiest corporations in the world, including Apple, Google, Facebook, and now Tesla, whose stock market value is higher than all the other automakers combined. Michigan’s auto industry should not be compelled to transfer billions of dollars to Tesla based on misguided regulations about climate change.

The batteries required for electric cars cause as much pollution as traditional cars do, but with different toxins. Batteries require rare metals which are mined in ways detrimental to the environment, and both the manufacturing and disposal of batteries pollute our scarce water supplies more than traditional cars do.

West Virginia voters have gotten the message about how radical environmentalists cost them jobs, and Trump carried that formerly Democrat state by a whopping 42% in 2016. Ohio voters, too, have awakened to the harm caused by the liberal elite to their economy, and Trump carried it by 8% last time.

Next door, Pennsylvania faces many of the same energy issues as West Virginia and Ohio. A Chamber of Commerce study estimates that 609,000 jobs in Pennsylvania depend on fracking, and that it would increase the cost of living there by $4,654 annually if fracking were prohibited, as Kamala Harris promised last year.

Joe Biden, or “Hiden” as Trump calls him for hiding out for months in his home during the coronavirus pandemic, was born and raised in Pennsylvania and enjoys a few percentage-points advantage based on that. But the economic harm to be caused by stopping Pennsylvania’s burgeoning energy industry could become a 10-point issue on Election Day.

Another way Californians tax the Midwest is through litigation, where liberals forum-shop to file in federal court in San Francisco in order to obtain a Democrat-appointed judge. That is what plaintiffs’ attorneys have done in looting the 120-year-old midwestern company Monsanto, now owned by Bayer.

The lawsuits over Roundup, Monsanto’s effective weed killer used widely by farmers and homeowners, are taking more than $12 billion from workers and shareholders located predominantly outside the jurisdiction of California’s courts. That money enriches liberal attorneys, and some of it goes into politics to defeat Republican candidates for office.

When Kamala Harris was California’s Attorney General, she aggressively harassed out-of-state companies to force them to make enormous payments for having made the mistake of selling products in the liberal state. In 2016, she shook down Volkswagen for a shocking sum of $14.7 billion. She then allocated $2.7 billion of that to “a trust fund for environmental mitigation projects,” which finances environmentalist groups to look for the next target to shake down.

Many of those targets are midwestern companies that provide much-needed manufacturing jobs in the heartland. President Trump has added more than 300,000 manufacturing jobs to our economy after Obama-Biden caused hundreds of thousands of such jobs to be lost, which Biden defiantly said would never come back.

On Monday, the S&P 500 Index declined to include the California company Tesla, which sent its stock spiraling downward. California environmentalists, through Biden-Harris, are likewise not worthy of controlling the White House.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Thursday, September 3, 2020

Importing Third World Medical School Graduates

Scientific American op-ed
Every year, more than 4,000 foreign graduates of international medical schools come to the United States for a residency program. They rarely return home to serve the countries that raised and educated them. Meanwhile, more than 2,000 graduates from U.S. medical schools each year are blocked from becoming doctors because there are not enough residency programs for them to enter, and they cannot practice medicine without this training experience. A further 2,000 American graduates of international medical schools are also denied the opportunity to practice medicine in the U.S. for the same reason. As COVID-19 has inevitably spread to developing countries, this policy will come to be seen for what it is: robbing developing countries of their desperately needed medical professionals. This must stop, even though American medical care benefits from being able to take the best doctors for ourselves.
Note how this is only presented as an argument for America to change American policy to benefit other countries. A better reason is that America should be taking care of its own citizen. If an American citizen completes medical school and wants to become a licensed physician, he should be shut out by a scheme to import foreigners to take his place.

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

Mail-In Voting: Return to Sender

The Phyllis Schlafly Report By John and Andy Schlafly Unlike school, the election or reelection of the president cannot be delayed, because its timetable is written into the Constitution. It’s too late now to change the procedures by which our ballots will be cast and counted, and “return to sender” should apply to the proposal to elect our president by mail.

Electing the president involves tens of thousands of officials in 50 states and over 4,000 counties, not to mention the massive volunteer army of citizens who staff over 100,000 polling places. Adherence to proper procedure is a vital safeguard as we select a single person to exercise what the Constitution calls “the executive power” of the United States.

With so much riding on the outcome, we must resist the pressure by Democrats to use COVID-19 as a pretext to change the process at the last minute. Despite the pandemic, sports leagues have not changed the rules by which hits, runs, errors, touchdowns, extra points, goals, and other game-winning events are measured and tabulated.

Even Democrat-leaning columnists are beginning to recognize that it is just not feasible for the widespread use of mail-in ballots in this election, as some have called for. Partly it is a question of scale: our election system was not built for 100 million ballots to be sent out to eligible voters and then mailed back and tabulated in the short time available.

Nor is there any way for millions of mail-in ballots to be counted fairly and accurately enough for Americans to accept the candidate who declares victory in such an untested process. No system ever works perfectly the first time it is used, but the winner will be entitled to the keys to the White House, the nuclear “football,” and the appointment of judges for the next four years.

Over 200 lawsuits have already been filed, mostly by Democrats, in a well-funded effort to change various aspects of the process by which the upcoming election will be conducted. Here are a few examples, but there are many more in the pipeline that could affect the outcome.

In Texas, the Democrat county clerk of massive Harris County (Houston) announced plans to mail absentee ballot applications to all 2.2 million registered voters. The Republican state attorney general filed suit to stop that plan because state law limits absentee ballots to persons with health disabilities or other good reasons for not casting a ballot in person at a polling place.

In Iowa, two Democrat county clerks were sending ballot applications in which critical voter information was “prepopulated.” In other words, the registered voter’s personal information (including voter ID number) was already filled in, ostensibly for the voter’s convenience.

Judges in the two counties, Linn (population 200,000) and Woodbury (population 100,000), issued separate rulings last week putting a stop to that practice, which could have allowed someone other than the voter to submit a prepopulated ballot application. Both judges ordered their county clerks to issue new absentee ballot applications with blanks to be fully completed by the voter as state law requires.

In both counties, the clerks had repeated the Democrats’ mantra that precautions are unnecessary because voter fraud is virtually non-existent, but as Judge Patrick Tott of Woodbury County pointed out, “it is also the type of fraud that is almost impossible to detect.”

“From a practical perspective,” Judge Tott continued, “once fraud has occurred it will already likely be too late. Sending out absentee ballot requests with all the information that a person that intends to commit fraud would need certainly does not limit the likelihood of fraud taking place, but would likely help to facilitate it.”

Linn County Judge Ian Thornhill separately observed: “It is implausible to conclude that near total completion of an absentee ballot application by the auditor is authorized under Iowa law where the legislature has specifically forbidden government officials from partially completing the same document.”

As the two Iowa decisions illustrate, legitimate absentee ballots require a high degree of time and attention by both the voter and the county clerk (or auditor, as the county official is called in Iowa). Most counties are unprepared to cope with a surge in absentee ballots, and most voters are likewise unprepared to cope with the amount of paperwork required to vote absentee.

Mail-in voting is too complicated for too many voters. There are too many ways in which a careless voter can spoil his ballot, causing it to be rejected by election officials, with no time to fix or cure the mistake.

Many voters would run out of time to complete the process of requesting and casting an absentee or mail-in ballot. According to a recent survey by the New York Times, 35 states do not allow enough time to request, receive, and return a mail-in ballot.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.