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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.