GOP’s Right to Reject Funding of Perpetual War

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

A dramatic meeting on Tuesday at the White House for sending $60 billion more to the NATO war in Ukraine was stacked 4-to-1 against conservatives. That is hardly fair but reflects the intense pressure by globalists to pour more money down this bottomless pit of war.

The two top Democrats in the House and Senate, plus Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) who does not represent a majority of Republican senators on this issue, joined with President Biden to browbeat Speaker Johnson to allow a House vote on the $60 billion supplemental appropriation. Johnson emerged from this meeting by properly saying that we need to put the crisis at our own southern border first.

Speaker Johnson is on the same side as Donald Trump, whose influence grows despite Democrats’ attempt to exclude him. Trump’s landslide victory over the globalist candidate Nikki Haley in her home state of South Carolina on Saturday continues his trajectory toward reelection in November, rendering Biden a lame duck for the remainder of his term.

The satirical Babylon Bee quipped, “Congress issued a dire warning to the American people Friday, sternly reminding voters that if they do not keep sending billions of tax dollars to Ukraine, the war might end.” American taxpayers should not be funding more bloodshed there.

Yet the newly installed Polish foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, went on CNN Sunday to demand this foreign aid, pompously telling Speaker Johnson that “the credibility of your country is at stake.” Sikorski speaks perfect English because he was educated at England’s Oxford University, which has promoted globalism since the time of the first Queen Elizabeth over 400 years ago.

Sikorski would not hold his position if the prior conservative Polish government had not foolishly allowed in more than a million Ukrainian migrants. This vast influx ran the Polish economy into the ground, and its GDP plummeted from a growth rate of 5.3% in 2022 to only 0.2% and high inflation in 2023.

Meanwhile Russia appears to be thriving by producing vast amounts of oil, in contrast with Biden’s anti-energy policies that hinder our economy. Last week Rosneft, which is Russia's largest oil producer, declared a 47% increase in its net profits for 2023, totaling $14 billion, and oil funds a third of the Russian government’s budget.

Russia’s military-based economy produces far more munitions than the West. Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), who opposes more funding of the war in Ukraine, told a conference of globalists last week in Munich that Ukraine uses in a month as many Patriot missile interceptors as it takes the United States a year to make, and the Patriot is now on a five-year back order.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Army announced its elimination of 24,000 positions, partly because of the shortfall in enlistment. Recruiting into our military has fallen far below expectations, and threats by D.C. politicians to send American troops to defend the borders of small NATO member countries will not be tolerated by voters.

Phyllis Schlafly called for disbanding NATO at the end of the Cold War, and she opposed the “mission creep” that has led NATO to meddle in Ukraine, in provocation of Russia. We should not support Ukrainian president Zelensky’s ambition to capture the Crimean peninsula, where the Russian navy has been stationed at Sevastopol for 240 years.

Zelensky canceled national elections that had been scheduled for this spring, and the globalists who pretend to care about promoting democracy should object to that. There is a large constituency of Ukrainian Americans in Ohio, where their Sen. Vance outspokenly opposes continued American funding of this war.

House Speaker Johnson has a superb opportunity to attach conditions before allowing a vote on sending billions more to Ukraine. First, Johnson should demand that Biden fully close our southern border to end illegal immigration there and, second, he should halt the funding of the politicized prosecutions against Trump and his supporters.

The latest data from the Biden Administration shows that Arizona has surpassed Texas in being inflicted with the largest invasion by illegal aliens. The Border Patrol reports that 250,000 illegals entered an Arizona sector in the last four months despite the treacherous landscape there.

The shocking murder of a young Georgia nursing student and “disfiguring her skull,” while she was jogging, was charged against an illegal alien arrested twice but released. “Instead of sending him back, Biden’s failed policies allowed him to be released into the country, where he murdered an innocent American girl,” Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) tweeted.

The politicians in D.C. should focus on the many problems along our own border before sending more money to fund a boundary dispute in Eastern Europe. Trump promises to end this war by forcing Ukraine and Russia into a negotiated settlement, which is the sensible approach.

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.

Biden Imprisons His Rivals Until They Die, Too

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The hue and cry about the recent death of Putin critic Alexei Navalny in a Russian prison overlooks that Biden and the Deep State are trying to imprison Trump until he dies, too. Anti-Trumpers in our country have been misusing the legal system with a vengeance ever since Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Trump compared Navalny’s death, while under a three-decade prison sentence, to the relentless lawfare to imprison and bankrupt himself. Some scoffed at that comparison, but Biden and his minions are trying to treat Trump as Putin reportedly mistreated Navalny.

Trump posted on Truth Social, “The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country. It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction.”

President Trump properly commuted the 14-year sentence of Democrat Rod Blagojevich, but Biden has not pardoned or released any of the Trump supporters who have received even longer sentences for non-violent activity. While pro-Trump protestors are imprisoned in a Gulag as Navalny was in Russia, Biden and his media supporters applaud.

Biden’s prosecutors demanded a 33-year prison sentence for Enrique Tarrio for a January 6-related protest even though Tarrio was not even at the Capitol that day. Tarrio received a 22-year sentence, while other Trump supporters were sentenced to more than 15 years and it seems likely some will die in prison as Navalny did.

The Republican-controlled House in Congress lacks initiative, merely reacting to demands by liberals for massive foreign aid. The GOP House should condition their vote on any Continuing Resolution on a termination of all funding for the prosecutions against Biden’s political rivals.

In globalist-controlled England, the second-highest target of the Deep State has his final hearing before its top court before he is extradited to the U.S. Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, is being sought by U.S. prosecutors for what would be a show trial here followed by life imprisonment.

Federal espionage charges pending against Assange for exposing lies by the government carry a maximum prison sentence of 175 years which means that Assange, like Navalny, would probably die in a U.S. prison. To persuade a British judge to approve extradition, the Feds absurdly represented that they might allow Assange to serve out his sentence in his native Australia.

Assange has always lived outside of the U.S. and is a citizen of Australia, so this is an abuse of globalist power for the Deep State to insist on bringing him here for a trial. He and his wife predict that he’ll die in jail here if the British High Court allows the extradition.

Wikileaks published information showing how much the federal government has been lying to the American people. That should not be a crime, but embarrassing the Feds is, in their view, the most heinous crime of all.

It was Assange and Wikileaks who published 20,000 leaked emails from high-level officials at the Democratic National Committee in the summer of 2016, which proved that Democrats had lied in pretending not to be siding with Hillary Clinton. Democrats then insisted without evidence that Russian hackers trying to help Trump were the source of the emails, another lie that Assange rebuked.

That leak helped discredit Hillary Clinton during her campaign for president, and was considered to be a reason she lost to Trump. Assange has been a target for a political prosecution ever since, and globalists persuaded the UK Home Secretary Priti Patel to approve in 2022 his extradition to the U.S.

Biden’s Secretary of Homeland Security, the recently impeached Alejandro Mayorkas, has personally prevented Biden’s political rival RFK Jr. from receiving customary Secret Service protection despite multiple criminal intrusions of his home and an armed thug pretending to be a U.S. Marshal showing up at an RFK Jr. campaign event. Yet anti-Trumpers have remained silent about this mistreatment by Biden of his rival.

This is another issue that the GOP-majority House could hold a vote on, and enact a resolution calling on Biden to provide Secret Service protection for his political rivals. RFK Jr. is polling at 7% nationwide which is more than enough to justify providing him with the same protection that presidential candidates have typically received in prior elections.

Northwestern law professor Steven Calabresi calls the recent New York judgment of $355 million plus interest against Trump and his family “a travesty and an unjust political act rivaled only in American politics by the killing of former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton by Vice President Aaron Burr.” When liberals complain about a regime misusing its power against a rival, then they should look first at how Biden is doing this.

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.

SCOTUS Should End Favoritism to Anti-Trump Prosecutors

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The politically motivated federal prosecutors of Trump, as led by Jack Smith in D.C., have been ordered by the Supreme Court to respond in a week, by February 20, to Trump’s attorneys on an appeal that may decide the upcoming election. Democrat-appointed federal judges have allowed Smith and his political hacks to bypass ordinary procedure in seeking a pre-election criminal trial of Trump using the biased jury pool of D.C.

Ordinary procedure would afford Trump’s attorneys many months to appeal the one-sided decisions against him, but the Democrat-controlled D.C. Circuit has violated its own court rules to try to hurry a trial before the election. A verdict by jurors who voted 95% against Trump in the last election could then have an undue influence on voters nationwide.

This is the same case that prosecutor Jack Smith demanded the Supreme Court take up on an emergency basis last December, which the Court unanimously declined. Smith argued then that the issue of legal immunity for Trump’s actions as president could only be decided by the Supreme Court in an expedited procedure, such that his criminal trial of Trump in D.C. could begin.

But now Smith is expected to argue the opposite, and try to persuade the Supreme Court to allow the trial to proceed without a full appeal before the High Court. Smith’s goal is to time this criminal trial for prior to the election, which is not a proper motivation for prosecutors who are supposed to be focused on enforcing the law.

Last week the D.C. Circuit denied Trump’s assertion of legal immunity for his official actions while president on January 6, 2021. The Democrat-majority judges on the D.C. Circuit, which is the intermediate federal appellate court there, gave Trump’s attorneys less than a week to seek a stay in the High Court to prevent a restarting of this criminal trial.

Trump’s attorneys did so on Monday with their reasonable request for the Supreme Court to restore ordinary procedures, so that Trump can object to this unprecedented prosecution of actions he took while president. Absolute immunity has protected the official acts of every president until Donald Trump; otherwise politically motivated prosecutions could occur whenever the Deep State disagrees with a president.

Last week, at the oral argument in the appeal of Colorado’s exclusion of Trump from the ballot, the battle lines were drawn such that 4 Republican-appointed Justices are on the side of Trump, while 3 Democrat-appointed Justices oppose him. An Obama appointee, Justice Elena Kagan, was artful in not offending Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whose votes liberals need to prevail 5-4 in the more important criminal case.

Justice Kagan was able to pull Roberts and Barrett over to Biden’s side on the issue of dismantling the border fence in Texas, to conservatives’ dismay. No opinions were issued with that 5-4 decision last month, and perhaps no explanation will accompany the upcoming decision on whether to grant Trump’s request for a stay of the federal D.C. prosecution.

Unlike Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Barrett’s questioning in the Colorado ballot case last week contained some hopeful signs for the pending appeal of the criminal case. She repeatedly referred to “President Trump,” rather than demeaning him as the “former president” as other justices did.

Justice Barrett also pointedly questioned whether President Trump received due process while being excluded from the ballot in Colorado, which he did not. Trump’s due process was violated when the Colorado court admitted hearsay evidence from Nancy Pelosi’s one-sided J6 Committee and allowed a sociologist to criticize Trump supporters.

Early during oral argument the questioning by Chief Justice John Roberts made it apparent that he would be voting against Colorado’s exclusion of Trump from its ballot, and the liberal bloc of the Court cannot prevail without Roberts’ vote on their side. The liberal media then expressed dismay at how the Left side of the Court did not lash out at Trump, but such comments would have been futile and only alienated Barrett, whom the Left needs.

Chief Justice Roberts has spent his entire career in D.C. ingrained into the Deep State, and he fretted that Republican states would retaliate against a Democrat presidential candidate if Colorado were to prevail in excluding Trump from its ballot. Roberts framed this in terms of federal versus state power, declaring that the 14th Amendment was enacted to restrict state power rather than allow states to exclude candidates from ballots as Colorado attempts.

The good news is that Roberts’ pandering to liberals in other cases has cost him credibility with the four right-of-center Justices: Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh. Hopefully Justice Barrett realizes that Roberts is a creature of D.C., and will not be led astray by him again.

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.

Sports Gambling Addiction Invades Super Sunday

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Sports gambling takes center stage with the Super Bowl being televised from Las Vegas on Sunday. Apps available on everyone’s phones makes betting during this game more accessible and convenient than ever before.

A small initial bet then goes into an internet surveillance system that exploits this information to target the bettor with a barrage of ads enticing him to gamble further. This is a gold mine for the online gambling companies, led by FanDuels and DraftKings, both of which are airing expensive Super Bowl ads this year as is BetMGM.

Calls to gambling addiction hotlines have already spiked in the 38 states where sports betting has been legalized. When Ohio authorized sports gambling last year, calls to the state’s gamblers’ hotline tripled in the very first month.

The New York Times recently quoted the former Senator Bill Bradley (D-NJ), who sponsored a federal ban on sports gambling as a retired professional basketball star. Some pretend that sports gambling “can now be controlled,” he said, “and I just don’t think it will be controlled. I think it will pervade the culture.”

The U.S. Supreme Court regrettably struck down Bradley’s federal ban on sports gambling in Murphy v. NCAA (2018), and all but 12 states have since legalized betting on these games. Gambling addiction has risen to an all-time high.

An employee of one NFL team, the Jacksonville Jaguars, stole $22 million from the team in order to lose virtually all of it on sports gambling. The team is attempting to recover that stolen money from the online gambling companies, but they refuse.

Last week a federal district court in New Jersey dismissed a lawsuit by another victim of gambling, declaring that casinos have no legal duty to stop taking bets by a compulsive gambler. New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act is supposed to shield against unconscionable acts by companies, yet gamblers as consumers are not protected as other consumers are.

More than half of college and even high school students gamble now, and one out every 5 college students admits to spending some of his student loans or financial aid on sports betting according to a survey by Intelligent.com. Many college athletic departments even partner with sportsbooks to promote more gambling to students at the college.

The highest percentage of victims are young men and their families. But wait, this year bookies are taking bets concerning Taylor Swift at the Super Bowl, on what she will wear and whether Travis Kelce will propose to her, and 20% of women aged 18 to 49 are online sports gamblers.

Known as “prop bets,” these are wagers on issues unrelated to the game, such as what shade of lipstick Taylor Swift will be wearing. Offshore gambling sites are processing bets on this and as many as 89 aspects of Swift and the Super Bowl, for all the Swifties who will be tuning in, although prop bets are illegal in some states.

Until recently, the NFL strictly kept gambling out of football, but now it has partnered with online gambling companies to tap into the profits and boost television ratings. On Monday NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said that the NFL seeks to ensure “the action on the field is genuine and without any outside influence,” but three dozen players and league officials have already been found in violation of the rules.

Holding the Super Bowl in Las Vegas this year injects more gambling into the sport. While players are told not to place any bets while there, it is impossible not to walk past a “one-armed bandit,” the ubiquitous slot machine, in that city.

Fourteen out of 15 experienced oddsmakers told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that they felt Las Vegas would never host the Super Bowl. This is like holding a fireworks competition in a dry, flammable forest despite warnings about the high risk of fire.

Studies show that 16% of gambling addicts attempt suicide, more than 20 times the rate in the general population and the highest of any addiction. Today young adults are compulsively betting through apps on their phones, including while in the shower, while driving, and in the middle of the night.

Microbetting entices sports fans to bet live on the next play, but they are competing against predictive AI tools that know the odds far better than a fan can. Scientific evidence shows that young adults do not have a fully developed ability to assess risk-benefit until age 25.

A pagan holiday was long celebrated on December 25 until Christianity displaced that with Christmas. As gambling promoters take over Super Sunday and some call for a national holiday the following Monday, it is time to rein this in by urging everyone to delete their gambling apps on their phones instead.

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.