Roe Reversal Is the Decision of the Century

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

“I never like to take credit for anything,” Donald Trump told a hostile reporter last month. “God made the decision,” he added recently about the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Let’s give credit where it is due: Trump went 3-for-3 on his Supreme Court nominees on the pro-life issue, and Republican Never-Trumpers were wrong to oppose him. In less than six years Trump achieved the overturning of Roe that stymied Republicans for a half-century, a feat no other Republican president attained.

All three of Trump’s High Court nominees were needed for this 5-4 margin of victory in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, to reverse Roe entirely. Justices Alito and Thomas deserve special gratitude for courageously leading their 3 new colleagues against the scourge of Roe that has long been the raison d'etre and sacred cow of the Left.

Many others, too numerous to list, deserve thanks for this spectacular triumph. Included in that list should be all who supported Trump in 2016 and all who support him now against retaliation by the Left.

Without Roe, liberals have no authority anymore for their campaigns that promote abortion. Without Roe, Democrat politicians no longer have a basis for continuing to loot taxpayers to fund abortion, which many Americans oppose.

Democrat politicians threaten political consequences over this decision, but none is likely now as may have occurred 30 years ago. Today Democrat politicians are heavily dependent on demographic groups that do not support abortion, and will not be more likely to vote for a candidate who advocates for it.

The media portrays a new War Among the States over this issue, but if so then it is a war that the pro-abortion states will lose by their declining population. Already red states gained many new congressional seats and electoral college votes in the latest census due to migration, and with pro-life laws going into effect their population growth will continue to outpace the blue states.

As the majority on the Court pointed out in its splendid decision, states were long allowed to prohibit abortion for most of our country’s history, including when the 14th Amendment was adopted. Most states did outlaw abortion, and the recent Court decision allows a return to pro-life laws that existed before Roe.

The Constitution contains nothing that supports abortion, the Court properly held. The Roe v. Wade decision was severely flawed in numerous ways that the Court picked apart.

Without a solid historical basis for legal abortion in the United States dating back at least to the 1800s, there were never any valid grounds for finding a constitutional right to it. At the time of Roe v. Wade, the national consensus was against abortion rather than in favor of it, so that could not justify creating a new constitutional right to it either.

Several states are already benefiting from a boost in carrying pregnancies to term and childbirth by prohibiting abortion. While the abortion industry has started filing lawsuits in state courts to block pro-life laws, states such as Alabama have constitutional provisions prohibiting any creation of a right to abortion.

“Trigger laws” in nearly a dozen states automatically restore bans on abortion in anticipation of the Supreme Court overruling Roe v. Wade. There is a slight delay in some of those states to await official certification of the Supreme Court ruling before unborn children are saved by this automatic ban.

This reversal of Roe creates an historic opportunity for conservatives to attract more young voters, who are increasingly pro-life. This is perhaps the only issue where young people are more conservative than their parents, and fan favorites such as Justin Bieber and Tim Tebow are outspokenly pro-life.

The only real argument by supporters of Roe v. Wade is to abide by how the Court had previously ruled, a doctrine known as “stare decisis,” but the conservative justices shredded that as inapplicable to a decision as unjustified as Roe was. Moreover, Phyllis Schlafly kept the Equal Rights Amendment out of the Constitution, so that could not help abortion although liberals filed last-ditch arguments to invoke the never-ratified amendment.

The Court correctly shut the door on the argument that abortion must be allowed in order for women to enjoy the equal protection of the laws. If a new Equal Rights Amendment attempts to create a right to abortion, then under this ruling it would have to do so explicitly, which would never pass.

The three Justices appointed by Trump referred to the “unborn” child more than a dozen times, while the Justices appointed by Clinton and Obama did not use that term even once in their long-winded dissent. The future belongs to the unborn, as the Court majority recognized and held in reversing Roe, and America will benefit from contributions by those not aborted.

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 PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

End Vaccine Mandates for Summer Travel

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Last Friday was the busiest travel day of the year so far, but hundreds of thousands of airline passengers were stranded by flight cancellations. Including last Thursday, more than 35,000 flights in the United States were canceled or delayed over the holiday weekend.

Nearly a third of all flights last Thursday and Friday were late in arriving. At least those travelers ultimately reached their destination, except where delays caused passengers to miss a connecting flight and then be stuck overnight in an unfamiliar city.

Hundreds of passengers were grounded at the Atlanta airport for more than 24 hours. One mother with an 11-month-old daughter was stranded without infant formula, which had gone with their checked bag to Omaha.

The delays and cancellations continued into Monday, when more than 3,000 flights bound for or departing in the U.S. were delayed, while another 370 flights were canceled by 5 p.m. ET. Thanks to public tracking by the website FlightAware, the government cannot hide this travesty.

Media stories fail to report on the underlying reason. The primary cause is not weather or similar routine disruptions, but ripple effects caused by vaccine mandates demanded by the Biden Administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress.

Like many Americans, pilots, flight attendants, and air traffic controllers are saying “no” to vaccine mandates by not showing up for work, leaving travelers deserted at airports. Neither Biden nor any Democrat has been willing to admit, four months from perhaps the biggest election of our lifetime, that their vaccine mandates were a mistake.

“A variety of factors continue to impact our operations, including challenges with air traffic control, weather, and unscheduled absences in some work groups,” was the official explanation by Delta, which canceled the most flights this past weekend. Other airlines have had numerous cancellations at other times this year.

“Unscheduled absences in some work groups” is a euphemism for disruptions caused by vaccine mandates. Public opposition to Biden’s vaccine mandates is hurting his approval rating and harming Democrats’ chances of holding onto control of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections.

Last year the pilots’ unions warned that vaccine mandates against them would result in travel chaos for many Americans, and it has. Yet airline executives failed to stand up against the Biden Administration’s demand for universal vaccination, perhaps because the executives are heavily dependent on direct subsidies from the federal government totaling more than $50 billion last year for pandemic relief.

With their credibility at stake, the public health authorities continue to insist on mandatory vaccination for the military, for federal workers, for some schoolchildren, and for pilots and other airline employees. These mandates persist despite how the fully vaccinated, boosted, and masked-up Dr. Anthony Fauci recently caught Covid anyway.

Past and future presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg threatened even more tyranny from his position as the Secretary of Transportation, which oversees the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). He says he can order the airlines to hire more workers, as if he knew how to find and train the highly skilled and dedicated people who safely operate America’s air travel network.

Buttigieg himself saw his flight from Washington, D.C., to New York City canceled this past weekend, and he drove the mere 225 miles instead. That option is not available to most travelers who are unexpectedly stranded by a canceled flight, and the astronomical cost of gasoline discourages driving anyway.

The airline travel chaos “is happening to a lot of people, and that is exactly why we are paying close attention here to what can be done and how to make sure that the airlines are delivering,” Buttigieg pompously declared. But he fails to get at the root of the problem, and instead treats this as an opportunity to expand government control of an industry that was working just fine when President Trump left office.

More regulation to try to solve a problem caused by overregulation makes no sense, and would lead to more subsidies by taxpayers of big corporations. Having the federal government dictate how many employees private airlines should have would be a wrong turn on the runway.

Meanwhile the Biden Administration pushes harder to impose Covid vaccination on everyone. On Friday FDA vaccine advisers voted 21-0 for children younger than 5 years to receive the Covid vaccine.

This affects infants as young as six months, with unknown long-term consequences. In April, a poll showed that only 18% of parents wanted to have the Covid vaccine given to their infant children.

A vaccine cannot be licensed unless its safety and effectiveness is proven by six months of data, but only two months are required under an emergency use authorization. As with adults and teenagers, the FDA exploits this same loophole to urge Covid vaccination of infants, despite how there is no genuine emergency for young children to receive this controversial vaccine.

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 PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

Trump says Election was Stolen

Donald Trump has released a statement, opposing the J^ House show:

Stop the Count

On Election Night, America watched as my lead grew and grew over Joe Biden, as I was set to claim another victory. By the morning of November 4th, the day after the Election, I led by 700,000 votes in Pennsylvania,1 300,000 in Michigan,2 and hundreds of thousands in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin.3 Then, the same “little dictators” who destroyed the separation of powers made the treasonous decision to stop counting.4 These same states, who had counted millions of ballots in a single day, had to stop counting in order to count a few hundred thousand ballots over the next four days to call the race on November 7th.

Why would it take four more days to count a few hundred thousand votes when they had counted millions in one day? They needed time to traffic the ballots and manipulate the outcome of the Election. The Swamp was so determined to keep their stranglehold on power that they delayed the results of the Election so that they could find, manufacture, or produce more ballots, after they knew how many they needed to beat me. They cheated! There’s no reasonable explanation for why it took so much longer to count the few remaining ballots as opposed to the millions on Election Day – other than they needed to traffic more ballots, and it took four days to produce the ballots and do it. They couldn’t have done it without an elaborate ballot trafficking scheme.

If the J6 congressmen were honest, they would address what Trump says.

All of the voting and counting should be done on election day. There is no good explanation for doing it any other way, and no way to trust the outcome if it takes many days.

Pork and Injustice in Senate Gun Control Bill

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

With fanfare, a gun control compromise was announced by the U.S. Senate on Sunday and its supporters seek passage by the end of next week. But instead of addressing the recent mass shootings, this legislation wastes billions of dollars in handouts to liberal groups while advancing feminist ideology.

The mass shootings had nothing to do with alleged domestic violence. Yet a central part of this gun control bill is to broaden a lifetime deprivation of Second Amendment rights of men subjected to accusations by women.

Teenage boys are the worst perpetrators of the mass shootings, who typically lack any relationships with girls. Yet the Senate gun control bill jeopardizes rights and reduces job opportunities for men who have been accused by women of unwanted touching, as Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was.

Ten Republican Senators, four of whom are retiring now at relatively young ages, support this gun control bill. None of the other six are up for reelection this year, and half of them include perennial anti-Trumpers Mitt Romney (R-UT), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Bill Cassidy (R-LA).

The 60-vote filibuster threshold in the Senate will block passage unless all ten Republicans cross over to the Democrat side on this. After wasting $54 billion on Leftist politicians in Ukraine, allocating billions more to Leftist groups in our country may not seem like much.

But a billion dollars to push enactment of gun control at the state level, such as euphemistically named “red flag” laws that can be misused, could improperly go toward tipping the scales in close elections. The billions of dollars in new funding for mental health clinics would not have prevented the recent shootings by defiant teenagers.

If mental health experts cannot distinguish between men and women, how could they reliably identify potential killers? In some cases mental health clinics can be a means to take children away from good parents, or install mental health testing in public schools to detect and deflect conservative political attitudes.

Couching feminist ideology in gender-biased terminology, the legislation seeks to close the so-called “boyfriend loophole” to cause lifetime deprivations of Second Amendment rights. A spat with a girlfriend, as many popular athletes, politicians, and others have once had, would then be misused to stigmatize and exclude for life these men from ever holding a job that entails carrying a gun.

The Lautenberg Amendment, enacted in 1996, already denies for life the Second Amendment rights of any man ever convicted of a minor misdemeanor domestic violence charge, which is sometimes broadly defined to include even offensive touching of one’s wife. Now Democrats want to expand this to enable any girlfriend to make a false accusation that could result in men being barred for life from jobs in the military, police, or other gun-carrying professions.

Johnny Depp spent millions of dollars and several years of his life to clear his name of false domestic violence accusations. But most men are unwilling or unable to do that, instead accepting a misdemeanor plea bargain; they should not permanently lose their constitutional rights and job opportunities because of it.

Gun control zealots want to expand the draconian Lautenberg Amendment, even though it would not have prevented any of the recent mass shootings by teenage boys. The Senate bill would deprive men for life of Second Amendment rights based on a mere restraining order requested by a girlfriend, which is often issued based on an unproven accusation and without a hearing for the accused.

Many injustices already arise under current law when a man does not realize that a misdemeanor offense from decades ago senselessly makes it unlawful to possess a gun for his own defense today. Rather than be warned about this or moderately fined, he faces mandatory imprisonment for owning a gun for self-defense merely because of an obscure federal law.

Harsh penalties in this draft gun control bill would be enforced by inflexible federal courts, and a bill proposed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) seeks 5-year mandatory minimum sentences for a gun peacefully carried by someone having a minor outdated offense. Some judges like locking up someone for a long time for the “offense” of harmlessly carrying a gun, based on an outdated misdemeanor triggering a deprivation of his Second Amendment rights.

Older men, husbands, and fathers are not the people who have been committing these horrific shootings. Teenagers addicted to video games are the culprits, yet this supposedly bipartisan legislation is silent about that.

Gun rights were unjustifiably taken away from peaceful participants in the Trump rally on January 6. One who pled guilty to a minor misdemeanor petitioned the judge to restore her gun rights, which the Trump-appointed judge granted but was criticized for it by the media.

Pouring billions of dollars into Leftist groups to advocate for state gun control laws, funding bigger mental health clinics, and imprisoning older men due to an unproven domestic accusation or minor misdemeanor will do nothing to stop mass shootings by teenagers.

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 PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

J6 Propaganda Show Won’t Stop Trump

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

While Trump-endorsed candidates win stunning primary victories in Ohio and Pennsylvania, Democrats and the liberal media go all out with a propaganda hearing to air Thursday evening at 8pm Eastern. ABC, CBS, NBC, and every other network except Fox gang up with the same futile goal: to try to stop one man, Donald Trump.

Americans have already heard and rejected the anti-Trumpers’ fraudulent spin on last year’s January 6 rally at the U.S. Capitol, and the public has long since moved on. More Americans prefer Trump to Biden now, as we struggle to cope with the “Bidenflation,” another foreign war, and many other problems.

But rather than address real issues facing our country, Democrats and Liz Cheney (R-WY) resort to their theater of the absurd. They will present their tedious, biased version of January 6, while Tucker Carlson will compete with an honest explanation of what happened.

The U.S. Capitol is a public building, and video evidence shows that police officers opened an entrance to welcome the rally-goers inside on January 6. Other video evidence shows uncharged individuals who infiltrated a peaceful crowd and incited confrontations that day, yet government witnesses refuse to explain the active role of government agents and informants.

Liz Cheney is not a Hollywood actress, and should not embarrass herself by trying to be one. No amount of make-up can transform her dog-and-pony show into anything more than an amateurish county fair skit.

Desperate people do desperate things, and no one is more desperate than Cheney now as she faces a rebuke by Wyoming voters in her primary in two months. She is delusional if she thinks Wyoming voters support her never-ending jihad against Trump.

Congress lacks credibility with the American public, and few are fooled by its fake, self-serving investigations. The Pelosi-led House has failed to gain traction with its headline-grabbing subpoenas, contempt citations, and silly disclosures of old text messages.

A reality show about how the Deep State mistreats January 6 activists would have higher television ratings. Video from the “D.C. Gulag,” where patriots who exercised their First Amendment rights at the Capitol remain incarcerated under inhumane conditions without a trial, would attract a larger audience.

The first witnesses at the upcoming prime-time hearing should be the provocateurs who were never arrested or charged. They need to be asked why they incited the crowd, and who paid them to do that. Federal agents spend too much of their time in undercover work that borders on entrapment, eliciting alleged criminal conduct that never would have occurred without their incitement. The recent jury acquittals of men accused of trying to kidnap the Michigan governor was a repudiation of government sting operations.

The next witnesses at the upcoming J6 hearing should be the many innocent people who entered the Capitol to peacefully exercise their First Amendment rights. The public should hear about the toll that the Deep State infringement on their constitutional rights has taken on them and their families.

A real hearing would invite testimony by Trump supporters abused in the DC Gulag, who could be brought into the hearing room in shackles and chains. Then the public would benefit from testimony by their family members about how difficult this ordeal has been for them.

Television ratings might perk up from abysmally low levels if the colorful Shaman were invited to appear in costume. He was callously sentenced to nearly 3.5 years in prison for the “crime” of his entertaining protest against Vice President Mike Pence, who had planned to fly to Israel that same day rather than listen to Trump supporters.

Viewership would perk up by inviting testimony from the guy who declared he “broke the internet” by carrying off Pelosi’s podium. That was genuine entertainment by the stay-at-home dad Adam Johnson, for which he received a 75-day prison sentence, and rewatching those images would attract a larger audience than the communist-style show hearing that Pelosi and Cheney will air.

A television audience might gather if there were candid testimony about the DOJ’s biased practice of prosecuting conservatives more harshly than liberals. The unfair sentencing recommendations by the DOJ of J6 participants was criticized by federal judge Trevor McFadden: “The U.S. Attorney’s Office would have more credibility if it was evenhanded in its concern about riots and mobs in the city.”

Democrats and Liz Cheney are in panic mode now a mere 4 months away from early voting for the midterm elections. If the negative 13-point approval/disapproval rating of Biden persists then it will be a Republican landslide, which Democrats are trying anything to avert.

Fortunately, Americans dislike propaganda shows. Trump’s post-show mockery of the Pelosi-Cheney charade will be more worthwhile and interesting.

Congress was humiliated by the public on January 6. But Congress has not learned, and steps into more embarrassment for itself.

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 PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.