Unpacking Supreme Court Justices’ Reasoning in Vaccine Mandate Decisions thumbnail

Unpacking Supreme Court Justices’ Reasoning in Vaccine Mandate Decisions

By Sarah Perry Parshall and Paul Larkin

For nearly 100 million American workers waiting breathlessly for an answer, a Thursday Supreme Court decision delivered good news for many, although not all.

In a rare late-day release of opinions, the Supreme Court issued its rulings in a pair of federal vaccine mandate cases that went to the court on an emergency basis.

In the first case—anticipated to have applied to approximately 84 million employees—and by a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court in National Federation of Independent Business v. OSHA stayed the implementation of the vaccination mandate that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration had issued in November 2021, requiring all businesses with 100 or more employees (with very limited exceptions) to direct their employees be vaccinated against COVID-19 or wear a mask at work and provide weekly negative tests for the disease.

In an unsigned opinion, the majority concluded that the government was not likely to prevail on its argument that OSHA possesses the authority to issue the vaccination mandate. It wrote that neither OSHA nor Congress had ever imposed such a requirement and that, “although Congress has enacted significant legislation addressing the COVID-19 pandemic, it has declined to enact any measure similar to what OSHA has promulgated here.”

“As its name suggests,” the court explained, “OSHA is tasked with ensuring occupational safety—that is, ‘safe and healthful working conditions.’” That means OSHA is only empowered “to set workplace safety standards, not broad public health measures,” and according to the justices, “no provision of the Act addresses public health more generally, which falls outside of OSHA’s sphere of expertise.”

The court classified the COVID-19 virus as not an “occupational hazard,” but a “universal risk” that “is no different from the day-to-day dangers that all face from crime, air pollution, or any number of communicable diseases.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, filed a concurring opinion. He emphasized that under the court’s “Major Questions Doctrine,” the court will not presume that Congress empowered an agency to resolve a question of broad economic or social policy without expressly authorizing in the statute’s text the authority to do so. The Occupational Safety and Health Act, he concluded, grants OSHA no such power.

Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, dissented. Breyer concluded that because “COVID-19, in short, is a menace in work settings,” as proved by the number of people it has sickened or killed, OSHA could adopt a vaccination or mask-and-test requirement for businesses.

The Daily Signal’s parent organization, The Heritage Foundation (which had filed an application with the Supreme Court to halt the OSHA mandate), reacted to the news Thursday. Heritage President Kevin Roberts trumpeted the victory in a public statement, saying:

The federal government has no business dictating the private and personal health care decisions of tens of millions of Americans, nor does it have the authority to coerce employers into collecting protected health care data on their employees. By striking down the Biden regime’s unlawful COVID-19 vaccine mandate, the Supreme Court has signaled its agreement with this basic tenet of a well-functioning and free society.

While the OSHA mandate is stayed for now, litigation on the merits of the government’s employer vaccine rule will continue in the lower court (the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals).

In its second opinion of the afternoon, the court—in Biden v. Missouri, another unsigned opinion, but this time, by a 5-4 vote—allowed the Department of Health and Human Services’ vaccine mandate (administered through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) for workers at federally funded health care facilities to take effect.

The court wrote that a global pandemic “provide[s] no grounds for limiting the exercise of authorities the agency has long been recognized to have.” It noted that as a condition of receiving federal funds, Congress authorized the secretary to promulgate such “requirements as [he] finds necessary in the interest of the health and safety of individuals who are furnished services in the institution.”

The court noted that it would be the “very opposite of efficient and effective administration for a facility that is supposed to make people well to make them sick with COVID-19.” It also concluded that the vaccine rule was not, as the states had claimed, arbitrary and capricious, and that the longer, more complicated notice-and-comment period as required by the Administrative Procedure Act (ensuring transparent rule-making from the federal government) would have been impossible.

Thomas, joined by Gorsuch, Alito, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, dissented, saying that the statutory provisions relied on by the government did not support its vaccine rule.

The justices noted that those provisions direct the “administration” of Medicare and Medicaid and are those that serve “the practical management and direction” of those programs, but there was no connection to that administration and a rule requiring “millions of healthcare workers to undergo an unwanted medical procedure that cannot be removed at the end of the shift.”

Thomas wrote that the government had a shaky foundation for its virtually unlimited vaccination through the Department of Health and Human Services, and if Congress had wanted to grant the agency the power to impose a vaccine mandate across all facility types and upset the state-federal balance (because only the state possesses the police power to mandate vaccination), it would have specifically authorized one.

In both cases, the question before the court was not how to respond to the pandemic, but who holds the power to do so.

For now—and until the litigation in the appellate courts below comes to an end—the answer is clear.

*****

This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

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Voting Rights and Wrongs in Georgia

By Joseph Knippenberg

I’m usually glad that I live in Georgia, but this election season, not so much. Republican election officials have been charged with virtually every kind of “voter suppression” scheme under the sun, with claims being made by activists and Democratic candidates, repeated in the press (both local and national), and alleged in lawsuits. I would love to say that our political nightmare is over, with Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams’ speech conceding that her Republican opponent Brian Kemp is legally entitled to occupy the governor’s office.

But not so fast: in her concession speech, Abrams was careful to distinguish between “legal” and “legitimate,” implying serious defects in both the laws governing elections in Georgia and in the ways those laws were administered. She also announced an organization—Fair Fight Georgia—to carry on her campaign. And yesterday, as she also promised she would do in her speech, Abrams filed a federal lawsuit alleging a host of constitutional and legal violations in the state’s conduct of the 2018 general election.

If that weren’t enough to prolong our electoral agony, since Georgia’s laws require runoffs between the top two contenders in the event that no one receives a majority of the ballots cast up to Election Day, we have to vote again by December 4th, when two statewide contests will be decided, one of them for the Secretary of State—the office at the center of all of our controversies. Christmas can’t come soon enough for this Georgia voter.

I wrote earlier this month about some of the deeper philosophical issues underlying our disputes—in Georgia and across the country—about voting. Here, I lay out some of the legal issues federal judges in Georgia have been asked to resolve in this election season.

There have been at least six separate lawsuits filed challenging various aspects of Georgia’s election laws and their administration. The first, Curling et al. v. Kemp et al., sought, rather late in the day, to force Georgia to exchange its aging touchscreen voting machines for voting technology that both is less easily hacked and provides a paper record of every vote. While Judge Amy Totenberg agreed with the alarming security concerns of the plaintiffs, she declined in her September 17th ruling to order the state to replace the old machines with paper ballots in an election where early voting was set to start in less than a month. The most immediate effects of the lawsuit were to raise questions about the administrative competence of the Secretary of State’s office, led by Brian Kemp, the Republican gubernatorial nominee, and to test the capacity of the state and local elections offices to deal with the blizzard of paper ballots that followed from the security concerns it raised. Indeed, encouraging absentee voting was one of the pillars of the Abrams campaign. What’s more, when local voting officials, out of an abundance of caution, restricted the number of touchscreen machines deployed on election day, some precincts were overwhelmed by the much higher-than-expected turnout.

The next case, Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda v. Kemp, dealt with one aspect of Georgia’s “exact match” law, which requires that the information provided on voter registration forms be verified by comparison with records maintained by the Georgia Department of Driver Services or by the Social Security Administration. Whenever a voter registration application fails exactly to match these records, the applications are held as pending and applicants are notified and have 26 months to cure the defects. While much has been made of the “disparate impact” of this measure on minority voters, for the vast majority of those who have that status, the cure is as simple as showing up at one’s polling place with precisely the same kind of photo identification as is required of everyone else. Those whose pending status is due to there being no record of U.S. citizenship are required to present proof of citizenship at the polling place to a “deputy registrar.” Judge Eleanor Ross found that this requirement severely harmed the affected individuals’ right to vote and ordered the state to increase the number of officials to whom this proof could be shown. Once again, it is hard to regard the initial regulation as an intentional effort to suppress votes.

The next case is Common Cause Georgia v. Brian Kemp, where Judge Totenberg ruled on an issue arising from the treatment of provisional ballots, of which slightly over 21,000 were cast in the 2018 election, amounting to approximately 0.54% of all ballots cast. While it is impossible at the moment to say precisely why all these voters were required to vote with provisional ballots, the evidence available at the time (by November 12th) suggests that about 40% may have encountered issues with their registration and another roughly 40% showed up to vote in the wrong precinct. Judge Totenberg found that database glitches caused some consternation and difficulty for some voters. These difficulties were compounded by errors made by workers at polling places and at county boards of elections. Her order required county elections supervisors and the Secretary of State’s office to make every effort to ascertain the registration status of those voters who had to use a provisional ballot for that reason, and required the production of all the evidence required to assess the treatment of these provisional ballots for a hearing at a later date.

One day later (November 13th), Judge Leigh Martin May ruled in Martin, et al. v. Crittenden, et al., a case that follows an earlier one, Martin, et al. v. Kemp, et al. (October 24th). Both deal with the treatment of absentee ballot applications and absentee ballots. While the earlier case addressed signature mismatch issues, the later one dealt with a host of issues regarding the information voters are required to provide accompanying their absentee ballot. Judge May crafted a reasonable solution to problems that arose from signatures on absentee ballots or applications that didn’t match what the county had on file: voters were to be given prompt notice of the mismatch and offered an opportunity to cure the defect; no longer would counties be permitted summarily to reject these applications and ballots. This strikes a reasonable balance between the right to vote and concerns about ballot security and fraud that prompted the signature requirement in the first place. In the later case, the plaintiffs sought much more extensive relief than Judge May ultimately granted. Rather than agree that “so-called ‘immaterial errors or omissions,’ such as the failure to provide the voter’s year of birth, failure to sign the oath, or other clerical mistakes,” should not lead to the rejection of the ballot, she enjoined one large suburban Atlanta county from rejecting absentee ballots that did not have the voter’s correct year of birth supplied. Assuming that other information provided in the absentee ballot application or in the material accompanying the absentee ballot itself was sufficient for establishing the voter’s identity, she held that requiring the correct year of birth was superfluous. Perhaps it is, though I wonder if her assumption that the person who submitted the absentee ballot application is the same as the person who submitted the absentee ballot is entirely sound and justifiable. In any event, it is interesting here that the voting rights advocates could not convince a generally sympathetic federal judge that dispensing with almost all the informational gestures required of absentee voters was warranted by the Fourteenth Amendment. While they would have expanded ballot access almost entirely at the expense of ballot integrity and security, Judge May held the line.

Finally, in Democratic Party of Georgia v. Crittenden, Judge Steve C. Jones extended the holdings of the two aforementioned Martin cases to every county in the state. In so doing, he agreed with Judge May in refusing the Democratic Party’s plea for more extensive relief. Furthermore, he turned back the Party’s request that people who sought to vote in the wrong county be treated the same way as those who sought to vote in the wrong precinct within a county. He accepted the defendant’s claim that the state’s compelling interest in preventing election fraud justified rejecting out-of-county provisional ballots as a “’reasonable, nondiscriminatory restriction’ upon the right to vote.”

I don’t know how many times I have read or heard the litany of complaints regarding “vote suppression” in Georgia. Having read all these rulings, here’s what I am led to conclude. Georgia’s inattention to modernizing its voting technology produced problems in 2018, largely because local voting officials were unprepared for the unprecedented increase in turnout fueled by a very effective Stacey Abrams voter registration and get out the vote effort, not to mention the countermobilization (at least outside Georgia’s metropolitan areas) organized by the Brian Kemp campaign. No federal judge has yet found anything wrong with the laws governing voting in Georgia, though some administrative practices were found wanting. While voting rights advocates and the Democratic Party wanted to make it as easy and convenient as possible for voters to cast their ballots, the federal judges for the most part took seriously state concerns with the security and integrity of the election.

*****

This article was first published in Law & Liberty and is reproduced with permission.

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The Forgotten 15.9 Million People

By Craig J. Cantoni

The rest of the story about race and poverty

You probably won’t be surprised by the following poverty rates by race/ethnicity:

Asians:  8.1%

Non-Hispanic Whites:  8.1%

Hispanics:  17.0%

Blacks:  19.5%

U.S. Average:  11.4%

Year:  2021

Source:  https://www.federalsafetynet.com/us-poverty-statistics.html

You might be surprised, however, by the following absolute numbers of Americans in poverty, especially the last number:

Asians:  1.6 million

Blacks:  8.5 million

Hispanics:  10.4 million

Non-Hispanic Whites:  15.9 million

If the last number surprises you, perhaps the reason is that it is rarely cited by the media or social-justice activists. The number reveals the falsity of the popular refrain that all whites come from privilege.

A cautionary note: Statistics by race are always squishy, because the racial categories are ill-defined, because the categories overlap, because a large percentage of Americans have biracial parents, because the “Hispanic” category is a catchall and not a single race or single ethnicity, and because the “White” and “Asian” categories are also catchall categories, encompassing hundreds of ethnic groups and an array of skin shades and socioeconomic classes. Moreover, there is variation in the numbers depending on the source and the reporting period, a problem compounded by the COVID pandemic’s negative impact on income.

Except for whites, the poverty rates for all four groups have declined significantly over recent decades. To wit:

From 1970 to 2019, the poverty rate for blacks declined from 31.8% to 18.8%. (The decrease in poverty for blacks is even more significant if one goes back to 1965, when the poverty rate for blacks was 40%.)

From 1970 to 2019, the poverty rate for Hispanics declined from 22% to 15.7%, even though a lot of poor and unskilled Hispanics immigrated to the US during this period.

From 1985 to 2019, the poverty rate for Asians declined from 19% to 7.3% (numbers aren’t reliable prior to 1985 for Asians).

From 1970 to 2019, the poverty rate for whites increased slightly from 7.0% to 7.3%.

Note:  The above numbers were interpolated from a graph, so they may not exactly match published statistics.

Source: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/09/poverty-rates-for-blacks-and-hispanics-reached-historic-lows-in-2019.html

In any event, regardless of someone’s race, ethnicity or pigment, it stinks to be in poverty.

It should go without saying that poverty varies considerably by locale, but it has to be said because that’s another complexity generally overlooked by the media and social-justice activists. Several examples are below.

The poverty rate as of 2019 was:

32.3% for blacks in Wayne County, Michigan (Detroit),

35.7% for whites in Harlan County, Kentucky,

34.0% for Hispanics in Erie County, New York,

22.0% for Hispanics in my home county of Pima County, Arizona (the county reports a rate of 23.6% for 2021),

32.9% for Asians in Calhoun County, Texas,

8.3% for Asians in Palo Alto, California,

4.2% for whites in Palo Alto, California, and

0.86% for whites in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Source:  https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/acs-percentage-poverty-2015-2019.html

The last two locales above (Palo Alto and Chevy Chase) are populated by progressives who bemoan white privilege and virtue-signal about diversity and inclusion. Whites in Harlan County probably have a different perspective on those topics.

Poverty also varies considerably by the ethnic groups and nationalities within each catchall category. For example, within the Asian category, Hmong Americans and Cambodian Americans have poverty rates of 37.8% and 29.3%, respectively.

For some sick reason, many of America’s intelligentsia and media want Americans to believe that poverty isn’t lowered in two-parent families. They point out the fact that black children with two parents in the household are mired in poverty at double or triple the rates of white children with two parents in the household. But what they don’t point out is that the poverty rate of black children decreases significantly if both parents are in the household. Not only that, but crime decreases and test scores increase. 

Also left unsaid is that it takes generations of stable family life to build social and financial capital. For example, my working-class parents had more income and education than their poor and poorly educated immigrant parents, I have more education and income than my parents did, my son has more income and education than I did at his age, and his kids might have a chance of getting into a prestigious university and joining America’s elites, although having elite status would be anathema to my son and his delightful wife, who, by the way, has a Filipino mother and a Mediterranean father. (What race does that make her?)

A related subject for another day is income inequality, which is indeed a growing problem in the U.S. but not as serious a problem as reported, after all forms of income are included in comparisons; that is, not just wage income but also income from transfer payments (welfare and entitlements), earned income tax credits, and the value of such non-cash benefits as public education and free or subsidized medical care. Incidentally, metro San Francisco, which is one of the most liberal parts of the country, has the highest income inequality of all major U.S. metro areas.

A very serious problem for a fuller discussion on another day is the middle class being under siege, especially the lower half of the middle class. This is an important issue because a thriving middle class keeps the nation, and any nation, from bifurcating into a two-class society of a powerless poor and the powerful wealthy, as is common in Latin America.

In the last 37 years, college tuition has increased 129 percent in constant dollars—this by institutions that profess to care about inequality and social justice while reaping the benefits of sticking students with $1.6 trillion in student loans. Housing costs have seen a similar increase, resulting in a decrease in homeownership, so that nearly three in eight homes today are rentals. As author and commentator Victor David Hanson says, “The result is a new American peasantry, of millions of Americans who own little or no property.” In that sense, they are similar to property-less medieval peasants dependent on property-owning overlords.

The bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie have been hated by the intelligentsia throughout history. America is no exception. After bearing the above costs and the brunt of the downsides of globalization and immigration, America’s lower middle class has been insulted as clingers, deplorables and irredeemables. 

At the same time, as seen at the beginning of this commentary, the nearly 16 million whites in poverty have been largely ignored or demeaned.

This doesn’t make for racial and class harmony but does make for political extremism and demagoguery.

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In Praise of Kyrsten Sinema

By Neland Nobel

It is likely that Senator Sinema and yours truly would have significant policy differences. She remains in a political party that has drifted so far leftward that sensible people like Sam Nunn and Joseph Lieberman would not be welcome. That she remains with such a party would indicate that she still generally agrees with its agenda but apparently not all its tactics. Therefore, she is likely not an ideal Senator for a right of the center state.

In her Senate speech provided in the video section, she repeats baseless charges that two Democrat impeachment proceedings against President Trump were to protect our Constitution (not a plot hatched by Hillary Clinton) and the January 6th riot was “an insurrection”, while not mentioning a peep about Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots that gripped the country for more than six months. She says she is in favor of the John Lewis Act, which would federalize our elections, which are a state function.

It is hard to know if this was just necessary verbiage to prove her liberal bona fides, or whether she really believes these things.

Why then should be praised?

Because despite her lip service to the Progressive agenda, she knew full well that her vote would stop the left-wing pendulum from swinging further. The speech then needed to say to Democrats that she is still one of them, but feels the extremism of the party is out of control. Both she and Senator Manchin know full well their two votes stand in the way of the Progressive juggernaut and both have chosen to stand on conviction.  She knew it effectively guts substantial parts of the Biden agenda and slows down their desperate attempt to ram through Constitution changing legislation before the mid-term election. She went ahead and did it anyway.

Thank you Senator Sinema for your common sense and historical perspective.

She seems to have a sense of decency about her and a sensible view of what government can and should do. She knows that America was never designed as a popular democracy. It is a representative democracy or more properly, a republic. She seems to appreciate how badly divided the country is now and would like to do some healing that President Biden promised to do.

Majority rule can be tyrannical and the Founders knew it. She seems to know it as well and respects the wisdom of the separation of powers. Although the filibuster is not part of the Constitution, it serves in much the same spirit as the separation of powers, a governor on the passions of factions.

Since the direct election of Senators a century ago made the Senate more like the House, important changes in the governing structure of the country should require more than just a one vote majority in both Houses, but instead, a substantial consensus before legislation is passed.  This forces all groups to negotiate with each other rather than ram through legislation with the thinnest of margins.

In her remarks upholding the Senate filibuster, she recognized the Senate was supposed to be the deliberative body further from the passions of the immediate than the House. The Senate is supposed to balance the House, not imitate it. She respects the Senate and its crucial function of buffering extreme legislation by forcing opposing parties to seek compromise and consensus.

She deserves praise for her courage. Reading what other Democrats are saying about her is disturbing; calling her a “traitor”, a white supremacist, and racist, must be hurtful. She is being harassed by left-wing activists that interrupt her personal time at a wedding and these zealots even had the temerity to follow her into the bathroom. You can bet with assurance she is being pressured by the Progressive press and party leadership. That she is willing to take these extremists on for the sake of conviction is commendable.

They thought their bare knucke tactics would break her. So far, they have not. Good for her.

The timing of her recent remarks cannot be just accidental. Coming just after President Biden gave one the most vicious and divisive speeches perhaps ever for a President, it seemed to be her answer to him.  

Peggy Noonan, a reliable Trump critic at the Wall Street Journal called the speech “aggressive, intemperate, not only offensive but meant to offend.” Indeed, it was uncommonly low demagoguery, even for a Progressive. More than rhetorical flourishes, Biden has turned the Department of “Justice” and the FBI lose on political opponents, sort of secret police to enforce views that object to Black Lives Matter or want to say something to their local school board. It is one of the most frightening developments one can contemplate.

He compared all that disagreed with his agenda to insurrectionists, enemies of the state, white supremacists, and compared his Republican opponents to famous bigot Democrats such as Jefferson Davis, Bull Connor, and George Wallace.

Senator Sinema’s message was one of bringing the country together not tearing it apart. She knows that many Arizonans that are not Democrats are in fact decent people who just happen to have a different point of view.

One wonders if the Progressive wrath that has been set loose on herself has served to be a kind of epiphany to her. She has been on the receiving end of their bullying tactics and has seen the ugly underbelly of her party, and she has rightly become concerned and horrified.

She should be praised for her modesty.  In her remarks, she acknowledges that while she was selected as Senator and hired to make judgment calls on arcane legislation, she still has an important function to represent her constituents. It is not all about her, it is about listening to others and representing the broad spectrum that makes up the state of Arizona. She knows most Arizonans do not want the filibuster to be abandoned and moderates and conservatives accused of being domestic terrorists.

She apparently listens beyond her party leadership and the echo chamber of the left-wing press.  That is a good trait.

Today, it seems most political leaders pay lip service to this representative function, except when they approach election time. Then suddenly they recognize “we the people”, instead of “we the lobbyists” or “we the party”. Since she is not up for immediate election, that she would think of actually representing the views of her citizens, is refreshing. It indicates she really believes in that important responsibility and it is not just posturing.

What a contrast she is to our other Senator, Mark Kelly, who is silent as a fence post as his party labels all political opponents as terrorists.  As a former fighter pilot and astronaut, you would think he would be a tough guy, but the Senator with courage from Arizona is a tough gal.

To be sure, she will likely continue to vote for the Administration’s nominees for important posts, and will also likely vote largely with her party on legislation as she has in the past. Therefore, she will continue to disappoint those more conservative than she is. She is, after all, a Democrat.

But it seems only fair to praise her for her courage and conviction. She is standing tall right now. And she is doing so with some of the nastiest and most ruthless people hounding her around the clock. She could have caved in but she didn’t.

She also likely knows a lot more about the political pulse of Arizona than Clueless Joe Biden. She knows the next election cycle will be a disaster for Democrats. She not only is more moderate than Biden, but she is also a far smarter politician.

Bully for her. Meanwhile, if she ever wants to change her political philosophy and switch parties, I am sure she could be accommodated.

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The Supreme Court’s Ruling On Vaccine Mandates Is Frighteningly Weak

By Margot Cleveland

Justices Roberts and Kavanaugh both acquiesced in the Biden Department of Health and Human Services’ power grab.

It’s long been axiomatic in the legal profession that tough facts make bad law. Yesterday’s forked decisions from the Supreme Court in two vaccine mandate cases now add a corollary to that principle: Quick cases make milquetoast opinions.

The Supreme Court heard the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and Medicare/Medicaid mandate cases in tandem on an expedited basis last Friday. Although court observers expected lightning-fast decisions, the opinions in National Federation of Independent Business v. Department of Labor and Biden v. Missouri didn’t drop until Jan. 13.

The high court issued both decisions as per curium, or “by the court,” unsigned opinions, with a 6-3 majority staying the OSHA de facto vaccine mandate in National Federation and a 5-4 majority in Biden v. Missouri allowing the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ rule requiring vaccines for medical facility workers to take effect. Justices John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh switched sides to join the court’s leftist members in the Medicare/Medicaid case, with Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito issuing separate dissents joined by Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch in Biden v. Missouri.

In National Federation, the six-justice majority entered a stay to prevent OSHA’s “emergency temporary standard,” requiring employers with 100 or more employees to either compel their employees to become vaccinated or to test weekly for Covid and wear masks at work, from going into effect. The court concluded that­ the employers, states, and other entities and individuals challenging the rule were “likely to succeed on the merits of their claim that the Secretary lacked authority to impose the mandate.”

The nine-page majority opinion methodically detailed the backdrop to the Biden administration’s OSHA work-around and the procedural history. That saw the case going from the Fifth Circuit, where the federal appellate court had stayed the rule, to the Sixth Circuit, where after all of the cases challenging the rule were joined the Cincinnati-based court removed the stay.

After laying out these details, the National Federation court then analyzed the rule at issue and concluded that the challenge to OSHA’s emergency vaccine mandate was likely to succeed because the federal agency “lacked authority to impose the mandate.”

While correct, the majority opinion said little of matter. Yes, “administrative agencies are creatures of statute” and “have only the authority that Congress has provided.” And, no, in passing the Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1970, Congress did not plainly authorize OSHA “to order 84 million Americans to either obtain a COVID–19 vaccine or undergo weekly medical testing at their own expense.”

Merely adding that OSHA’s rule was “no ‘everyday exercise of federal power,’ but “instead a significant encroachment into the lives—and health—of a vast number of employees” that required Congress to “speak clearly” provided little upgrade to the opinion: Given the breadth of the overreach and the offense to our constitutional republic, passion was required, not pedanticism.

Justice Gorsuch’s concurrence, joined by Justices Thomas and Alito, dabbled more directly in first things, from the separation of powers to federalism to self-governance.

“There is no question that state and local authorities possess considerable power to regulate public health,” Gorsuch began, before stressing that “the federal government’s powers, however, are not general but limited and divided.” Thus, the federal government must both “invoke a constitutionally enumerated source of authority” and “act consistently with the Constitution’s separation of powers.”

On this latter point, Gorsuch provided a much-needed exposition. Article I of the U.S. Constitution provides that “the national government’s power to make laws” belongs “with the people’s elected representatives.” If Congress seeks to provide its legislative powers to unelected officials, Justice Gorsuch continued, it must do so clearly and purposefully.

“But the Constitution imposes boundaries here,” he stressed, for “if Congress could hand off all its legislative powers to unelected agency officials, it ‘would dash the whole scheme’ of our Constitution and enable intrusions into the private lives and freedoms of Americans by bare edict rather than only with the consent of their elected representatives.”

Called the non-delegation doctrine, it prevents “government by bureaucracy supplanting government by the people,” Gorsuch wrote, quoting the late Justice Antonin Scalia, before stressing the importance of that principle to the case at hand: If OSHA had the power to mandate vaccines or testing, as it asserted, “that law would likely constitute an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority.”

Sadly, Gorsuch’s concurrence could not garner the agreement of the majority of justices, leaving the bland opinion put forth for the court in National Federation to control.

The real tragedy came, however, in the companion case of Biden v. Missouri. That case was argued the same day, but with the Supreme Court ruling on Jan. 13 that the Department of Health and Human Service’s vaccine mandate for medical facilities receiving Medicare and Medicaid funding could go into effect.

While at first blush the cases seem substantially different, with National Federation concerning an emergency rule issued by OSHA and Biden v. Missouri addressing a mandate applying only to recipients of federal Medicare and Medicare funds, at the core the cases involve identical concerns: Whether Congress did, or could, grant unelected bureaucrats such broad power over Americans.

Unlike the National Federation case, in Biden v. Missouri, Justices Roberts and Kavanaugh both acquiesced in the Department of Health and Human Services’ power grab, based on “a hodgepodge of provisions.” Justice Thomas exposed that reality in his dissent, which Justices Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett joined.

The mandatory vaccination rule issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) failed to find statutory support in the governing statutes, Justice Thomas explained. While Congress authorized the CMS to “publish such rules and regulations . . . as may be necessary to the efficient administration of the [agency’s] functions,” and to “prescribe such regulations as may be necessary to carry out the administration of the insurance programs,” the vaccine mandate has no more than a “tangential” connection to the management of Medicare and Medicaid, Thomas wrote.

Nor did the various random statutory provisions grant HHS the authority to “require[] millions of healthcare workers to choose between losing their livelihoods and acquiescing to a vaccine they have rejected for months,” Justice Thomas explained, before stressing: “Vaccine mandates also fall squarely within a State’s police power, and, until now, only rarely have been a tool of the Federal Government. If Congress had wanted to grant CMS authority to impose a nationwide vaccine mandate, and consequently alter the state-federal balance, it would have said so clearly. It did not.”

‘Today, however, most federal law is not made by Congress. It comes in the form of rules issued by unelected administrators.’

Congress’s failure to expressly authorize the CMS to mandate vaccines at Medicare- and Medicaid-funded facilities represented but one of the problems with the rule. Justice Alito, in a separate dissent joined by Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, and Barrett, added to the analysis a discussion of CMS’s failure to comply with the notice-and-comment mandates Congress established before agencies could promulgate regulations. That violation, Alito explained, doomed the vaccination mandate because there was no “good cause” to sidestep those requirements.

In finding the CMS violated the notice-and-comment rule, Alito stressed, as did Gorsuch in his National Federation concurrence that, “under our Constitution, the authority to make laws that impose obligations on the American people is conferred on Congress, whose Members are elected by the people.”

“Elected representatives solicit the views of their constituents, listen to their complaints and requests, and make a great effort to accommodate their concerns,” Justice Alito continued, noting, “today, however, most federal law is not made by Congress. It comes in the form of rules issued by unelected administrators.” Under these circumstances, then, the notice-and-comment period proves indispensable, Alito explained—unless, that is, you are the Biden administration.

The Biden v. Missouri dissents, however, did not go far enough. The same separation of powers problems plaguing the OSHA regulation apply equally in the context of the CMS rule. Yet the dissenting justices gave short shrift to those concerns.

The question is, why? Also, why did Gorsuch’s concurrence in the OSHA case only garner three votes, including his own? Was it the procedural posture of the case: A hearing not on the merits but on the propriety of a stay? Was it the time crunch? Was it a desire for more detail and nuance?

Or was it because reaching a truly conservative five-justice majority is as elusive as an end to this pandemic?

*****

This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

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Biden Brings Us Record Inflation, It Impacts Your Taxes Too

By Gary Polland

Inflation rages due to runaway Federal spending by Joe Biden and his Democrat allies. John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics uses the numbers based on how CPI was calculated from 1980 and 2017 (real numbers), before the politicians took out a number of factors that results in the understatement of inflation.

For 2021, actual inflation rate was 15%. It does not just result in higher prices, but inflation also drives your taxes higher.

Here is a list of federal taxes not indexed for inflation:

1. Mortgage debt cap to which interest is deductible1.

2. Exemption for sale of a home

3. State and local tax deduction

4. Deductions for capital losses

5. Thresholds for the 3.8% surtax on net investment income

6. Threshold for paying taxes on Social Security payments, not adjusted since

1994!

7. No adjustment for inflation’s impact on investment income

*****

This article was published in Texas Conservative Review, and is reproduced with permission.

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The Consequences of Obsessive Category Disorder

By Craig J. Cantoni

In the name of diversity, America’s racial classifiers obliterate diversity.

Long ago, long before the diversity movement and the sprouting of departments of diversity and inclusion in academia, government, media, and industry, I lived in a San Antonio barrio, where my friends and neighbors who were Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans, referred to themselves as “Mexican,” and where I referred to myself as “Italian.”

Since then, I’ve lived in Phoenix for 30 years and am now living in Tucson, where Mexicans still refer to themselves as Mexicans, unless they’ve had the misfortune of being miseducated in college and/or working as a programmable automaton in Big Media, Big Academia, Big Business or Big Government. 

In these big institutions of conformity and appalling ignorance of history and anthropology, Mexicans are agglomerated with other distinctly different nationalities and ethnocultural groups and plastered with the labels of “Hispanic,” “Latino,” or the latest linguistic monstrosity of “Latinx.”

This labeling is done by people who see themselves as educated, enlightened, and open-minded, but prove otherwise in their thoughtless parroting of utterly ridiculous “racial” concoctions. (The penultimate word in the preceding sentence is in quotes because today’s racial categorization is mostly anti-science, in that it has little basis in evolutionary science, genetics, or anthropology.)

Inanity, and possible insanity, also can be seen in the other “racial” labels that have become the lingua franca of those with a pathological need to reduce the rich diversity of the nation and the world to six categories that are an incongruous mix of skin color and geographic origin. In addition to the official and specious category of Hispanic are the official and specious categories of White, African American, Asian, Native American, and Pacific Islander.

Given current trends, it may come to pass someday that people will be required to wear their assigned label on their backside, like a bumper sticker for humans.  

I’ll return to the other catch-all categories momentarily but will first finish the discussion on Hispanics (aka Latinos, Latin Americans, or Latinx).

The word “Latinx” was masterfully ridiculed in a December 19, 2021, op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. I can’t do a better job than the op-ed and letters in exposing the silliness of such nouveau terms as “Latinx,” so I won’t try; but I will mention some facts about Latin America apparently not known by those inflicted with Obsessive Category Disorder, or OCD.

One fact is that an estimated 30 million people of Italian descent live in Brazil, which is the largest country by population in Latin America. To that point, here are questions for those with OCD:  How should these Italian Brazilians be classified—as Hispanic, White, Latino, Latinx, or Latin American? And for the millions of Italians who have intermarried with black, Spanish, and indigenous Brazilians, are their offspring considered to be people of color, and if so, what color? (If you’re not sure what color is produced from mixing the colors of olive, black, brown, beige, and white, you can call a color expert at Sherwin-Williams or your local hardware store.)

Even miseducated college graduates might know enough to understand that the Romance languages spoken in Latin America have their etymological roots in the Latin language, which is how Latin America got its name. (Given that I studied Latin for four years in high school, I’m an honorary Latin American.)

Another explanation for how Latin America got its name can be found in the wonderful work of history, The Last Emperor of Mexico, by Edward Shawcross. Unfortunately, directors of diversity and inclusion won’t read the book, because it’s three standard deviations above the average IQ for the “profession.”

Anyway, Shawcross explains that in the 1850s, under the reign of Napoleon III, French thinkers invented the term “Latin America” to rally southern Catholic peoples against a feared onslaught from northern Protestant peoples. He goes on to write, “Soon after a French journalist used it in print in 1856, a Columbian living in Paris wrote a poem warning that the Anglo-Saxons, as he referred to the United States, were the mortal enemies of Latin Americans.”

This dovetailed with a belief of Catholic monarchs that due to cultural and historical differences between Catholicism and Protestantism, Anglo-Saxon nations were better suited to democracy and liberalism while Latin nations were better suited to monarchies. In turn, this became a pretext for French, Spanish, and Habsburg monarchs, who, fearing republicanism and American hegemony in the New World, to attempt to recreate their own hegemony, by taking the side of Mexican rebels who wanted to overthrow the fledgling Mexican republic and restore the monarchy.

On a personal note, although I am not an Anglo-Saxon Protestant or an apologist for Anglo-Saxon imperialism and colonialism, I’ve long held that the parts of the Americas where Latin-Catholic culture is more dominant than Anglo-Saxon-Protestant culture are less free, less prosperous, and less liberal, in the classical sense. This also applies to certain parts of the United States, which I won’t identify here, because it’s too easy to be misunderstood without writing a long dissertation on the subject.

Having covered the official category of Hispanic, let’s turn now to the other official categories of White, African American, Asian, Native American, and Pacific Islander. As with the Hispanic category, those inflicted with OCD have reduced a large number of distinct nationalities and ethno-cultural groups to this handful of categories. Then, in violation of equal rights and equal opportunity laws, they discriminate against those in the concocted White category, and more recently, against those in the concocted Asian category, in college admissions and in hiring and promotions, in the name of diversity and inclusion.

Note the incongruous and inconsistent way that the categories are organized. Only one of the categories, the White category, refers to skin color. The rest refer to the geography of origin: Africa for African Americans, Asia for Asians, the Americas for Native Americans, the Pacific Islands for Pacific Islanders, and Europe’s Hispanic Peninsula, or the Iberian Peninsula, for Hispanics. The only exception is when African-American category is called the Black category.

Whoever coined these categories should be arrested for committing a crime against the field of anthropology. The crime has resulted in absurdities, in people having their heritage overlooked or insulted, and in much political mischief.

Take the Asian category, where scores of unique nationalities and ethnocultural groups are lumped together as if they are homogenous. 

To see firsthand how absurd this is, try convincing Filipinos and Koreans that they are the same as the Japanese. Or, following the lead of corporations, appoint a Han Chinese or East Indian Hindu to a board of directors or senior management position to represent all peoples who hail from Asia, including Uyghurs, Mongolians, Eastern Russians, Malaysians, Pakistanis, and many others.

This is as ridiculous and insulting as believing that Boston Brahmins or the Pilgrims or the Chesapeake Bay colonists were no different from my poor Italian ancestors or the ancestors of Albanian Americans, Iranian Americans, Jewish Americans, Walloon Americans, and so on for hundreds of other groups force-fitted into the White category and stereotyped as privileged, bourgeois, racist, and oppressive.  Yes indeed, that certainly describes my immigrant grandfather, who worked as a coal miner in southern Illinois; or my wife’s grandfather, who worked as a field hand in the oil fields of western Pennsylvania.

To circle back to the subject of diversity on corporate boards, a board would need thousands of directors to represent all of the world’s peoples. To get an idea of how many peoples there are, go to the following link, scroll through the list of ethnic groups that come up, and click on the names of the various ethnic groups to get the names of the sub-groups within each one.

Only those with Obsessive Category Disorder can believe that they are furthering racial enlightenment and diversity by obliterating this rich diversity and by using such fatuous words as “Latinx”.

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Military Documents About Gain of Function Contradict Fauci Testimony Under Oath

By Editorial Staff

  • Military documents state that EcoHealth Alliance approached DARPA in March 2018 seeking funding to conduct gain of function research of bat borne coronaviruses. The proposal, named Project Defuse, was rejected by DARPA over safety concerns and the notion that it violates the gain of function research moratorium.
  • The main report regarding the EcoHealth Alliance proposal leaked on the internet a couple of months ago, it has remained unverified until now. Project Veritas has obtained a separate report to the Inspector General of the Department of Defense, written by U.S. Marine Corp Major, Joseph Murphy, a former DARPA Fellow.
  • “The proposal does not mention or assess potential risks of Gain of Function (GoF) research,” a direct quote from the DARPA rejection letter.
  • Project Veritas reached out to DARPA for comment regarding the hidden documents and spoke with the Chief of Communications, Jared Adams, who said, “It doesn’t sound normal to me,” when asked about the way the documents were buried.

[WASHINGTON, D.C. – Jan. 10, 2022] Project Veritas has obtained startling never-before-seen documents regarding the origins of COVID-19, gain of function research, vaccines, potential treatments which have been suppressed, and the government’s effort to conceal all of this.

The documents in question stem from a report at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA, which were hidden in a top-secret shared drive.

DARPA is an agency under the U.S. Department of Defense in charge of facilitating research in technology with potential military applications.

Project Veritas has obtained a separate report to the Inspector General of the Department of Defense written by U.S. Marine Corp Major, Joseph Murphy, a former DARPA Fellow.

The report states that EcoHealth Alliance approached DARPA in March 2018, seeking funding to conduct gain of function research of bat-borne coronaviruses. The proposal, named Project Defuse, was rejected by DARPA over safety concerns and the notion that it violates the basis gain of function research moratorium.

According to the documents, NIAID, under the direction of Dr. Fauci, went ahead with the research in Wuhan, China and at several sites across the U.S.

Dr. Fauci has repeatedly maintained, under oath, that the NIH and NAIAD have not been involved in gain of function research with the EcoHealth Alliance program. But according to the documents obtained by Project Veritas which outline why EcoHealth Alliance’s proposal was rejected, DARPA certainly classified the research as gain of function.

*****

Continue reading this article at Project Veritas.

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Some Timely Satire: No Left-Wing Extremists in the US

By Craig J. Cantoni

Judging by media coverage, there are only right-wing extremists.

Groucho Marx said that he didn’t want to be a member of any club that would have him. To paraphrase the comedian, I don’t want to be a member of any political tribe that would have me, especially not the control freaks who want to remake America into their extreme image and subjugate me and my loved ones and take our stuff and constitutional rights.

Thankfully, there are no longer any extremists on the left for me to guard against—at least according to the media. Extremists only exist on the right.

That explains why the pejorative “right-wing” is used in the media ten times more or so than “left-wing.” It also explains why there has been an avalanche of stories about the threat of right-wing extremists and white supremacists and no stories about left-wing extremists and white Marxists.

One can only conclude that there is no one on the left like the Arizonan who, along with other numbskulls, stormed the Capitol wearing an animal skin and Viking horns—a freak who made me ashamed to be an Arizonan.

The unbathed, scraggly rioters in Portland, Seattle, Kenosha, and other cities must’ve been on the right, despite their claim that they were Antifa, or anti-fascists, because extremists are only on the right. 

Being learned people with an exceptional knowledge of history, the Antifa no doubt knows that the right is often the left, and vice versa. Journalists certainly know this, considering that they are even brighter and more versed in history than the Antifa, due to having a degree in the toughest major in college next to an education major.

Here’s a quick history lesson for the unlearned who don’t have the intellect of Antifa or journalists: The word “fascism” got its name in Italy from the bundle of sticks called “fasci,” a symbol of the collective nature of Benito Mussolini’s fascism. As with Hitler’s National Socialists, fascism was a combination of nationalism and socialism. The fascists may not have owned the means of production, but they didn’t have to, because they controlled the capitalists, which is the dream of control freaks like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Elizabeth Warren.

Are AOC and EW right-wingers?

More history: Starting with the Progressive Era in the early twentieth century and continuing for a few decades, white eugenicists led the powerful eugenics movement, which had the mission of stopping undesirables from reproducing, through forced sterilization and other measures. They called themselves progressives but must’ve been right-wingers in disguise, because progressives would never have resorted to such an abuse of government power.

Likewise, President Woodrow Wilson, a former Ivy League academic, called himself a progressive but must’ve been a right-winger. After all, no one on the left would’ve passed the Sedition Act and arrested reporters for speaking out against American soldiers being slaughtered in the First World War. Similarly, no one on today’s left would cancel people or get them fired for exercising their First Amendment right of free speech.

Senator Joe McCarthy was indeed a right-winger (and a drunk). He was so extreme that he went after lovey-dovey Kumbaya Americans who wanted to turn America into a Communist paradise like the Soviet Union and Red China, which, combined, starved and executed tens of millions of people. He is so vilified for what he did that the word “McCarthyism” is synonymous with “right-wing extremism.” Funny thing, though, the word “Wilsonism” or “eugenicism” did not enter the political lexicon as being synonymous with “left-wing extremism.”

All of this shows that the left is smarter than the right. Progressives and their fellow cadres in the copycat media have commandeered the language to their advantage and convinced America’s youth that the only threat to their freedom and well-being comes from the right.  

Speaking of right, Groucho Marx was indeed right. Americans should not want to be a member of a political tribe on either the right or left that harbors extremists, even if the tribe would have them.

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David Takes on Goliath

By Bruce Bialosky

When growing up, “Polack” jokes were all the rage for a while. People would ask me if I were of Polish descent given my last name. I would answer no — that is for names ending in “ski” and not “sky.” I am Lithuanian. That was a made-up fable. Flash forward 40 years when a cousin located me after listening to the Dennis Prager radio show where I was a guest. We met up and he provided me with a complete family history showing my ancestors had come to America from a small town in Lithuania. My heritage was indeed validated after all. I currently could not be prouder to be from the great country of Lithuania.

That is because little Lithuania (with its three million residents) told China to take a long walk off a short pier. China has decided to try to crush Lithuania economically because it allowed Taiwan a representative office in their capital, Vilnius.

Because of their refusal to kowtow to China, the fascists who run China have blocked all imports from Lithuania. It gets worse. China is trying to crush Lithuania. Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mantas Adomenas, stated, “China has been sending messages to multinationals that if they use parts and supplies from Lithuania, the companies will no longer be allowed to sell to the Chinese market or get supplies from China. We have seen some companies cancel contracts with Lithuanian suppliers.” 

One might think such an action is against the World Trade Organization (WTO) rules. The WTO, where President Clinton supported China becoming a member, has once again proved their worthlessness by not stepping in to stop this obviously unacceptable act by the Chinese. 

If you are not aware, China is preying on smaller countries by using their economic might to crush any opposition to their plans and to assure non-recognition that Taiwan even exists on the planet. They have really dug themselves into the Western Hemisphere unlike any country has since the Monroe Doctrine was issued in 1823. 

The Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and Panama stopped their recognition of Taiwan in favor of China. These three countries, which would have a greater affinity to Taiwan because of their size and desire to stay independent, have been bought off by China. These countries are just a few of the Western Hemisphere countries playing footsie with China. Other countries in Latin America like Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Chile, have close economic ties with China and would be pressured by the Chinese bullies to comply with their policy wishes.

This is what makes Lithuania’s stand more unique. The bigger question is what will the EU do? The EU did state they are launching an investigation into whether the WTO rules have been violated by China’s actions against a member state. It is yet to be seen whether Lithuania’s actions will cause a real rift between the EU and China. It will be a test of whether the EU leadership has a commitment to its member states or whether the larger EU members (France and Germany) are the unprincipled money-grubbing lackeys I have always thought them to be. At a recent meeting of the 27 members, the issue was not even brought up as France — which holds the rotating six-month presidency of the EU — vetoed it. 

A recent EU statement: “The EU remains committed to its One China Policy and recognizes the government of the People’s Republic of China as the sole government of China.” That is all well and good if we were still living in the 1970s when there was still some question as to whether the government of Taiwan had any interest in going back to the mainland. Fifty years later Taiwan is an independent democracy of 24 million people who want to maintain their independence from the Bullies of Beijing. 

The Free World must back Lithuania here and tell China to stop its unreasonable demands that the world comply with all its actions. If we do not draw a line here, they know we will do nothing to stop them from taking over Taiwan. The first country that needs to step up and back the Lithuanians is you guessed it – the United States. This is a good test of the backbone of Joe Biden and Antony Blinken.

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Sinema Stands Up to Biden, Dem Leadership on Axing Filibuster

By Casey Harper

The same week that President Joe Biden called for “getting rid of” the filibuster to push through Democrats’ agenda on federalizing elections, U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., doubled down on her opposition to ousting the long-established Senate rule.

Despite Democratic leadership’s push to alter the filibuster to pass legislation for a federal takeover of state elections, a bipartisan majority has remained in opposition. Sinema doubled down in that opposition Thursday, casting serious doubts on any changes to Senate rules.

“There’s no need for me to restate my longstanding support for the 60-vote threshold to pass legislation,” Sinema said from the Senate floor Thursday. “There’s no need for me to restate its role in protecting our country from wild reversals of federal policy. This week’s harried discussions about Senate rules are but a poor substitute for what I believe could have and should have been a thoughtful public debate at any time over the past year.”

Sinema went on to argue that removing the filibuster would only add to the nation’s division, not unity.

“But what is the legislative filibuster, other than a tool that requires new federal policy to be broadly supported by senators, representing the broader cross-section of Americans,” Sinema said. “Demands to eliminate this threshold from whichever party holds the fleeting majority amount to a group of people separated on two sides of a canyon, shouting that solution to their colleagues.”

U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., has also expressed reservations about nixing the filibuster. Politico reports that multiple other Democratic senators, including Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., are on the fence as well. Their opposition makes changing the Senate rules or passing Democrats’ federal voting bill, unlikely.

“We need some good rules changes to make the place work better,” Manchin told reporters this week. “But getting rid of the filibuster doesn’t make it work better.”

Sinema quietly pushed back against Biden’s “Build Back Better” legislation last year, but Thursday’s floor speech was a public rebuttal of Biden’s call to action earlier this week.

Biden delivered a blistering speech in Atlanta Tuesday where he accused opponents of Democrats’ voting legislation of racism, opposing Democracy, and wanting “chaos to reign.” He advocated for “getting rid of” the filibuster to push through federal voting laws that would give the federal government sweeping control of state elections.

Biden argued that Republican state legislatures’ legislative efforts in recent years to shore up election integrity were actually attempts at voter suppression. Democratic Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer has made similar comments and called for changing the filibuster rules.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell responded to those comments, calling them “profoundly unpresidential.”

“The President repeatedly invoked the January 6th riot while himself using irresponsible, delegitimizing rhetoric that undermines our democracy,” McConnell said. “The sitting President of the United States of America compared American states to ‘totalitarian states.’”

A key line of attack against the Democratic effort to end the filibuster has been their previous positions on the issue. Both Biden and Schumer have publicly supported the filibuster in the past.

U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., lambasted Schumer for just that in a speech from the Senate floor, repeating Schumer’s previous comments that removing the filibuster would make the Senate “the rubber stamp of dictatorship.”

“The bottom line is very simple: the ideologues in the Senate want to turn what the Founding Fathers called the cooling saucer of democracy into the rubber stamp of dictatorship,” Cotton said, reiterating Schumer’s past comments. “They want to make this country into a banana republic where if you don’t get your way, you change the rules! Are we going to let them? It will be a doomsday for democracy if we do.”

Near the end of his speech, Cotton pointed out his words had all been taken from Schumer himself.

“Every word of my speech today was originally spoken by my esteemed colleague, the senior senator from New York, Chuck Schumer,” Cotton said. “Senator Schumer spoke so eloquently in defense of the Senate’s rules, customs, and traditions when the fortunes of his party looked a little different. My, how times have changed.”

*****

This article was published by The Center Square and is reproduced with permission.

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They Are Neither Socialists nor Communists

By Bruce Bialosky

A wise man during a recent lunch pointed out to me that Republicans and Conservatives often banter about terms, calling Leftists either Socialists or Communists. Mark Levin has an excellent, well-researched, bestselling book out on the subject called American Marxism. But are they really?

This very thoughtful and insightful person stated that they really are not Marxists, etc. He suggested I write a piece on the topic. Here we are.

Most Leftists have abandoned the name Communists because it became tattered — not because of the failed policies or the millions of people murdered. The reason is because of the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the collapse, Leftists have abandoned the term much like they stopped calling themselves Liberals and have since ruined the word progressive.

The preferred term these days is “Socialist.” They have even become more inventive with many calling themselves “Democratic Socialists.” The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has sold itself a bill of goods that they are not totalitarians. They just want all decisions made through the government.

If they are neither Socialists nor Communists, what are they? They are something you cannot call someone without casting a negative aspersion on them or you or both. What they are and what my enlightened friend pointed out is that they are Fascists. Now that your ears are burning, hear me out on this because my friend is correct.

Fascism used to compete with Communism. The reality is both are a form of totalitarian government that oppresses and murders people, but they are distinctly different. That is why in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the two groups were fighting on the streets of Germany to contest the ruling government. As you know, the Fascists won that battle and the Nazis became the symbol of evil for all mankind.

So why was my friend correct that they are Fascists? Communism is a manner of government where all the means of production is controlled centrally. There is no division between the government and the economy.

Fascism is central control through a capitalist system. Socialism nationalized property explicitly, while fascism coopts the means of production by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest”—that is, as the totalitarian authority wants it used. That is why after WWII Germany was able to again become a productive society so quickly despite the complete devastation of the country. Their industrial leaders (capitalists) were still in place after the war. Think Volkswagen.

If you think of post-war China which is often called Communist China, it has not been Communist the entire time. Certainly, it started out as Communist under Mao Tse-Tung. They even had the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s so Mao could cleanse the country of capitalism. Then Deng Xiaoping came to power acknowledging that Communism does not work as an economic system and the country was a mess. He instituted changes that allowed capitalism to flourish in the country. Currently, Xi Jinping is cracking down on capitalists and their companies, thinking he can go back to the days of Mao without killing their economy. Notice all the capitalists he is either harassing or arresting. We will see how that works out. But for over 30 years China was fascist and still is. It just has not acknowledged it.

We are experiencing a lot of fascism in America. Interestingly, it radiates mostly from those who state they are anti-fascists. For example, look at how free speech is being suppressed. Anybody who is not a lying politician knows the Left has been suppressing free speech through private companies, the most prominent of which are Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and others. These companies function as news services while stating they are exempt from normal press rules allowing them to block speech the Left does not like.

The entire pandemic has operated in a fascistic manner through private industry. Face mask mandates, vaccine mandates, proof of vaccination mandates, mask mandates on airplanes. Companies are forced to use resources to control their customers while the companies’ non-compliance would result in significant financial penalties.

When President Biden announced private industry vaccine mandates, he had no authority. He stated the rules would be issued through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Every company fell in line except to my knowledge one — The Daily Wire. For over two months there were no rules, but companies were complying. As soon as the regulations were issued multiple lawsuits were filed and many courts ruled against the mandate. Yet so many companies were used to our government operating in a fascistic manner they just complied based on a speech by the President.

States, particularly ones run by Leftists, have gotten into the act. They have forced their policies down the throats of capitalist companies. We who live in California have a multitude of these diktats forced on capitalist companies who once again are subject to severe penalties for non-compliance. For example, you cannot get a straw for a drink in California unless you beg for it. Now you cannot get plastic silverware with take-out food unless you beg for it. Neither of these rules will solve any kind of pollution problems, but legislators are fascists and keep issuing these diktats.

Recently, they required stores to have gender-neutral toy shelves if they are selling toys. There are hundreds of these kinds of top-down fascistic rules where legislators who have never run a business control businesses that are just trying to operate and produce a profit.

If you think that these fascist directives for business just affect major businesses – think again. Gardeners are typically entrepreneurial immigrants who are working their way up the economic ladder for themselves and their families. There is not a high level of education needed nor are the businesses capital intensive. California has outlawed a mainstay of these hardworking people’s tools – gasoline leaf blowers and lawnmowers. Not only will these people need to buy new battery-operated equipment, but it is estimated a three-person crew will need to carry with them 30 or more fully charged batteries to complete their daily workload. Another fascistic order telling small businesses how to operate.

Fascism is attractive to these totalitarians. They do not have to control the means of production; they just control the laws under which the method of production works. Use the wrong material in a building and you are fined. Do not enforce the Fascists’ laundry list of incomprehensible rules and you are fined. The Fascists line their coffers while getting their societal plans enforced. They use the fines to force more diktats down the throats of people just trying to make a living. And as opposed to Communism, in a Fascist government the companies are capable of producing a product like an automobile or a washing machine.

Whether Communist, Socialist, or Fascist, they are all totalitarians. They are all run by people who think they know better than the average person, so they try to tell people how to run their lives. The name “Fascist” was ruined forever by Hitler and his gang of thugs. The Left likes to tell you that Fascism is right-wing which is the big lie. It is akin to Communism but just differs in the means of production. Communism’s means of production has failed everywhere it has been tried. So, what is a totalitarian to do other than become a Fascist but call themselves Socialists?

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The Legalized Sexualization Of America’s Young Children

By Marilyn Quigley

Let’s peek in on a typical classroom scenario approved by the National Sex Education Standards (NSES). Mr. Smith’s 7 and 8-year-olds are answering true-false questions: 1) “Sexual intercourse should be ONLY between a cisgender male and cisgender female.” 2) “There are only two genders.” 3) “Cisgender boys who identify as girls must go only into restrooms labeled ‘BOYS.’”

The correct answers are all FALSE according to NSES.

The class discussions necessary for small kids to understand the test terms should drop the jaws of sane parents. Second graders still play hide-and-seek and may take stuffed animals to bed. Now public-school teachers are destroying their innocence in explaining the widely (and wildly) differing sexual behaviors of adults in bed.

Too many public-school leaders have entered the morass of mental derangement and opened little innocent minds to concepts rated “R” because they are labeled “sex education.”

Dr. Judith A. Reisman, professor and former consultant to the Department of Education explains: “Little brains are not designed to process sexual stimuli of any kind.” Sexualized behavior is learned by what children see, hear, or experience — yes, even in school.

Down the hall from Mr. Smith, the 10- and 11-year-olds review their lessons using NSES core expectations for elementary grades including the joys of masturbation and how hormone blockers help transgender children.

Their vocabulary test includes gender identity, gender nonbinary and expansive, and lesbian, to name a few. The test covers differing behaviors of sexual intimacy and how same-sex couples can acquire children, such as in-vitro fertilization and surrogacy.

Virginia middle-school children 13 and 14 will soon reveal their “sex lives” in the Fairfax Youth Survey including these questions:

  • How old were you when you had sexual intercourse for the first time?
  • During your life, with how many people have you had sexual intercourse?
  • Have you ever had oral sex?

Youth barely into puberty will assume, then, that the norm for kids their age is to be sexually active.

The Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), established by Dr. Mary Calderone, previous medical director for Planned Parenthood, was partially funded by Hugh Hefner’s Playboy organization. These are the opening words on the SIECUS website: “[T]he ability of the federal government to enact sweeping sex education requirements continues to be a focal point of advocacy efforts.”

NEA resolution B-53 Sex Education instructs that “…programs should include information on… diversity of sexual orientation and gender identity…homophobia…lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) issues.”

Parents who disagree with any of the above are called bigots, meaning almost 30% of Americans are so-labeled by far-left extremists who seek to cancel their rights. These tax-paying parents deserve to remove their children from the required “health” (sex ed) courses, yet 29 states have no opt-out provision.

Nobody disagrees that young children need sex-abuse education. Kids should also understand that Miguel, who has two daddies, can be a friend and so can Harriet, who was born as Harry. But youngsters should be spared details of Harry’s puberty-blocking medication and what daddies and mommies do in their bedrooms.

And when children do receive such information, it should be from parents — who know their own values and children. The late Dr. Melvin Anchell, American physician, psychoanalyst, and educator, writes that indoctrinating young children sexually causes “irreparable harm” that can last throughout their lives.

Lori Porter, of Parent Rights in Education explains: “…it [is] now okay to show what can only be described as ‘sexually obscene’ material to minor children in the classroom, but it [is] still quite illegal to show that same material to children in any other venue.”

Independent Women’s Voice recently designed a TV spot showing illustrations in a Virginia school library book. Stations deemed it too explicit for late-night audiences.

How do the schools get by with making pornography available to minors, while 49 states and federal laws prohibit it? It’s simple: “Sex education” (called health) is exempt. 

Today’s parental outrage is not aimed against what “woke” parents do sexually or teach their own children. Parents are demanding their rights to control how they educate their children about sex beyond the basics of human anatomy, awareness of sexual diseases, and pregnancy prevention, the former boundaries for sex education in schools.

Today, however, public educators feel free to tell little Sophie and Sammy that although each was born with a vagina or a penis, those organs can be changed. And if the kids ever feel they need to discuss details, they should talk to the school counselor, not their parents.

Heads up, “educators” — you are not co-parents of America’s children.

Heads up, politicians — you must amend laws to prohibit pornography in public schools. The recent Virginia gubernatorial elections revealed politicians ignore that fact at their political peril.

*****

This article first appeared in The Independent Women’s Forum and is reproduced with permission.

Most Reckless Fed Ever: “Real” Federal Funds Rate Now the Most Negative Ever thumbnail

Most Reckless Fed Ever: “Real” Federal Funds Rate Now the Most Negative Ever

By Wolf Richter

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Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

Even most junk bonds have negative “real” yields. And the Fed is still fueling this madness.

After a year of brushing off inflation as temporary, while inflation spread deeper and further into the economy, and got worse month after month, the Fed is finally talking about tightening. But so far, it’s just talking about it. It’s still repressing short-term interest rates to near 0% – with the effective federal funds rate, which the Fed targets with its interest rate policy, at 0.08%. And the Fed is still printing money hand-over-fist, though at a slightly slower rate than two months ago.

Meanwhile, the broadest measure of inflation, the Consumer Price Index (CPI-U) jumped by 7.04%, the highest and worst since June 1982, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics today. But we cannot compare today to 1982:

  • In June 1982, inflation was coming down; now inflation is spiking.
  • In June 1982, the effective federal funds rate (EFFR) was 14.2%. Today it’s 0.08%.
  • In June 1982, the Fed did not engage in QE; today it’s still massively buying assets.

So now we have the bizarre situation where the EFFR is 0.08% and CPI-U inflation is 7.04%, and the inflation-adjusted EFFR, or “real” EFFR, is a negative 6.96%, the most negative real EFFR in the data going back to 1954:

The “real” interest rate on savings accounts and CDs is similarly negative in the -7.0% range. The real yield of short-term Treasury bills is similarly negative in the -7.0% range.  Even the 10-year Treasury yield, now at 1.7%, is -5.3% in real terms.

Even most junk bonds are traded with yields below the rate of inflation. The average BB-rated “real” junk bond yield is -3.3%. Taking more risk, the average B-rated “real” yield is -2.0%…..

*****

Continue reading this article at Wolf Street.

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Sinema Deals Death Blow to Biden’s Final Push to Suspend Filibuster

By Caroline Downey

Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema declared Thursday that she will not vote to suspend the filibuster in order to pass two voting bills championed by her party, all but guaranteeing that President Biden’s top legislative priority will fail.

Speaking on the Senate floor, Sinema reiterated her well-established commitment to preserving filibuster and rejected the argument — made by her party leaders and Biden himself — that the rule represents an unacceptable obstacle to passing the Freedom to Vote Act and For the People Act.

“There’s no need for me to restate my longstanding support for the 60-vote threshold to pass legislation. There’s no need for me to restate its role in protecting our country from wild reversals of federal policy,” she said before the chamber Thursday. “This week’s harried discussions about senate rules are but a poor substitute for what I believe could have and should have been a thoughtful public debate at any time over the past year.”

“But what is the legislative filibuster, other than a tool that requires new federal policy to be broadly supported by Senators, representing the broader cross-section of Americans?” the senator asked. “Demands to eliminate this threshold from whichever party holds the fleeting majority amount to a group of people separated on two sides of a canyon, shouting that solution to their colleagues.”

She said that she is dedicated to making her public service in Congress reflect the diversity of her constituency in Arizona and the nation at large, urging her Democratic colleagues to stop viewing them as ideological monoliths that automatically get on board with every radically progressive proposal.

The House of Representatives passed legislation Thursday that merged both bills, but it will not advance in the evenly-divided 50-50 Senate given Sinema’s opposition……

*****

Continue reading this article at National Review.

Arizona Supreme Court Explains Voids of State Vaccination, Mask Ban Laws thumbnail

Arizona Supreme Court Explains Voids of State Vaccination, Mask Ban Laws

By Cole Lauterbach

Arizona’s high court has elaborated on their decision to void additions to the most-recent state budget, saying lawmakers ran afoul of provisions in the state constitution meant to simplify legislation.

Justices released their unanimous opinion Thursday [January 6] in Arizona School Boards Association et al. v. State of Arizona. The ruling, initially announced in September, affirmed a lower court ruling that said the Legislature went against two parts of the Arizona Constitution.

The opinion nullifies the state’s ban on mask mandates in schools, laws shoring up local election security and other laws justices concluded had little to do with the state budget.

The constitution’s “title provision” says lawmakers cannot include extemporaneous provisions into a proposal that doesn’t relate to the topic it’s named after. Should those extra facets of a bill be struck down by the court, the rest of the bill would stand.

“Although the bills’ challenged sections may superficially relate to those subjects, this does not satisfy the requisite inquiry,” the opinion read. “Contrary to the State’s claim, a closer examination of the challenged sections manifests the disconnect between the titles and the substantive provisions.”

Justices ruled portions of House Bill 2898, Senate Bill 1824, Senate Bill 1825 and Senate Bill 1819 violate the title requirement.

Justices said the Legislature titled these bills as “appropriation” and “budget reconciliation” or “budget procedure” provisions but have sections that are entirely unrelated to those issues.

The constitutional “one-subject rule” requires legislation to stick to one realm of law. If a bill is struck down under this provision, the entire law is struck down. This is the challenge plaintiffs alleged the state was guilty of “log-rolling” several non-budgetary laws into one bill.

The court found SB 1819, which contained 52 different sections, was unconstitutional under this rule.

“Our conclusion is inescapable: SB 1819 contains an array of discordant subjects that are not reasonably connected to one general idea, and certainly not to budget procedures,” the opinion read.

The state warned that nullifying any of the provisions retrospectively could open the state to challenges regarding previous years’ budgets. Justices disagreed, saying the challenges wouldn’t stand up to long-spent funds.

*****

This article was published by The Center Square and is reproduced with permission.

‘We Will Cut Taxes.’ Ducey Lays Out His Final Arizona Budget Priorities thumbnail

‘We Will Cut Taxes.’ Ducey Lays Out His Final Arizona Budget Priorities

By Cole Lauterbach

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey is reaffirming his commitment to lowering the state’s tax burden.

In his final budget address, the Republican governor took the podium in the joint session of the state Legislature on Monday to give special attention to his seven-year record of shrinking and streamlining government.

“We will cut taxes,” Ducey said. “It’s really not that complicated; it’s just basic common sense. Government takes in more than it needs to pay the bills, and the taxpayer should get to keep his or her hard-earned dollars.”

The speech marks Ducey’s eighth and final budget address. The two-term Republican is term-limited after the current year. Ducey boasted about the state’s historic tax cut that he signed but remained tied up in court, contrasting it with federal proposals to increase taxes.

“It all makes our commitment of returning money to the people more important than ever. Washington D.C. might have their eye on your paycheck – but at this Capitol, the only special interest on our mind is the taxpayer,” Ducey said.

If it withstands a legal challenge, Arizona’s progressive income tax that tops out at 4.5% would gradually flatten out to 2.5% with another cut for wealthy filers who must pay Prop. 208’s 3.5% surcharge for income over a certain amount.

Ducey highlighted Arizona’s economy, one of the few states fully recovered from the pandemic-related job losses. A report from Arizona’s Office of Economic Opportunity estimates the state will create an additional 700,000 jobs by 2030, many of which are in the technology sector.

In addition to educational programs to assist in learning loss, Ducey proposed a new push to educate Arizonans to take on technology jobs. Computer chip fabrication factories such as Intel, solar panel companies like Meyer Burger and others plan to expand in Arizona in the coming years. Ducey wants to provide the education needed to fill these high-paying jobs.

“Let’s invest in the worker, arming them with the skills they need for our growing semiconductor and advanced manufacturing industries,” he said. “So come June, we’re launching a summer camp with an emphasis on catching kids up in key areas: math, reading, and American civics. We will lead the way to eliminate learning loss.”

Despite pay increases in recent years, Arizona public school teachers remain some of the lowest-paid in the nation.

As of Jan. 1, Arizona is officially in a Tier 1 Colorado River water shortage. The change doesn’t affect residential Arizonans, but the nearly 18% reduction of water to the state will hit the agriculture industry. To address this, Ducey is proposing a $1 billion investment to “secure Arizona’s water future for the next 100 years.”

Ducey plans to submit his budget for legislative consideration on Friday.

*****

This article was published by The Center Square and is reproduced with permission.

Human Smuggling Is Booming in Arizona, With Deadly Consequences thumbnail

Human Smuggling Is Booming in Arizona, With Deadly Consequences

By Charlotte Cuthbertson

COCHISE COUNTY, Arizona—Wanda Sitoski loved holidays. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter—you name it, she had boxes of decorations for them all.

But her upcoming 65th birthday was more significant than most, as Sitoski was poised to retire, kick back, and travel.

On Oct. 30, 2021, as she drove to her favorite expensive restaurant to celebrate with her son the evening before the big day, a 16-year-old who was smuggling four illegal aliens in his car ran a red light at 105 miles per hour and killed her instantly.

“All she wanted to do was retire and drive to the Grand Canyon. She wanted to sit in peace and quiet. And a 16-year-old kid took all that away from her,” Sitoskis’s son, Edward Fritsch, told The Epoch Times.

“The day that happened, my soul was split in half.”

Cochise County in Arizona shares 83 miles of international border with Mexico. The illegal immigrants coming through the county aren’t seeking asylum—they’re doing everything they can to avoid law enforcement and get to Phoenix, according to Sheriff Mark Dannels.

“These people can’t turn themselves in, they’ll get deported. These are the bad people. We’re dealing with the worst of the worst,” he said.

Border Patrol apprehensions in the Tucson sector, which includes Cochise County, almost tripled in 2021 compared to 2020.

In the fiscal year 2021, border agents apprehended more than 190,000 illegal aliens in the sector, compared to 66,000 the year before. Thousands more evaded capture.

Dannels said his office currently tracks between 900 and 1,000 smuggling vehicles in the county every month—a massive increase that began escalating at the start of President Joe Biden’s tenure.

Drivers are being paid about $1,000 per illegal alien they smuggle.

The immediate destination is usually Phoenix, which is used as a hub to travel to other cities throughout the United States.

“It’s like the cartel Uber. They just stage in public places all along the roadways waiting to get called up to go pick them up,” Dannels said.

*****

Continue reading this article at The Epoch Times.

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Foreign Funding of Elections Update

By Sarah Lee

In early October, we reported on a disturbing trend related to foreign funding and U.S. lobbyists—namely, American lobbyists were taking in millions to help influence elections, circumventing the law that disallows outright foreign funding of elections.

[M]ore disruptive are foreign nationals attempting to influence the outcome of American elections. The Foreign Agents Registration Act seeks to address this problem because under federal law foreign nationals cannot legally contribute to political groups or campaigns in order to influence U.S. elections.

But where there’s a will, there’s a lobbyist looking to cash in.

OpenSecrets reported in August the payouts to American lobbyists hired with foreign funds to help influence elections numbered in the millions.

The influence foreign money has on U.S. elections has apparently become quite the popular issue—although not enough that it’s in the spotlight, but that may be by design—as initiatives and legislation have popped up in Washington to tamp down on the activity.

FEC Warning

Following a warning in August by the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) that the agency doesn’t do enough to address the threat of foreign influence in elections, Democrats reintroduced a bill “that would block foreign-owned corporations from spending company funds to influence U.S. elections.”

The bill would extend the federal ban on political donations from foreign nationals to multinational companies that are at least partially owned by foreign nationals. Following the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision that allowed corporations to spend unlimited sums to influence elections, some U.S. subsidiaries of foreign-owned companies have made large donations to super PACs.

What’s interesting about this effort is that while it targets huge corporations and purports to address an oversight at the FEC, there’s another, bipartisan effort that is also quietly working toward a similar end. This effort is backed by the leftist group Common Cause, whose President Karen Hobert Flynn has stated, “Americans deserve to know who is trying to influence our voices and our votes, and foreign entities should have zero role in determining American elections.”

Proposed Legislation

The FEC, while disallowing foreign funding of elections, has allowed foreign funding of ballot initiatives—a practice Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) and Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) and Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) mean to address with their proposed bills Protecting Ballot Measures from Foreign Influence Act (S. 3345 and H.R. 6177).

Notably, the bill ensures that the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) could not assert authority over those State or local ballot initiatives or ballot referendums.

“Foreign donors should not be able to influence America’s democratic process,” Rubio said. “It is already illegal for foreign nationals to donate to political candidates, parties, and committees. The Protecting Ballot Measures from Foreign Influence Act will extend that commonsense protection of our political process to ballot initiatives and other referendums. We must do everything we can to protect the votes of American citizens.”

Sen. Banks is also spearheading the effort to force disclosure of foreign ties of those appearing before Congress as witnesses.

Banks’ legislation, the Truth in Testimony Reform Resolution, would dramatically expand foreign funding disclosure requirements for witnesses at congressional hearings:

All House witnesses would be required to list foreign government donors to think tanks and research outfits employing them, whether they are testifying in an individual capacity or as representatives of those organizations.

They also would have to list funding from foreign political parties and state-owned entities.

The legislation would expand the disclosure requirement to include all such funding, not just funding for work on the specific policy areas at issue in their testimony. [formatting adjusted]

When both sides of the political aisle in Washington, DC, are fighting to address foreign funding of elections—and warring over who gets there first—it’s probably a good sign for the American people and for election integrity in general.

*****

This article was published by Capital Research and is reproduced with permission.

Newsom, Democrats Go for Californians’ Guns thumbnail

Newsom, Democrats Go for Californians’ Guns

By John Seiler

Even as crime is surging in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom and his allies in the legislature are seeking to make it more difficult for citizens to defend themselves.

This week, Assemblyman Phil Ting (D-San Francisco) introduced Assembly Bill 1594, which reads, “This bill would specify that a gun industry member has created or maintained a public nuisance, as defined, if their failure to follow federal, state, or local law caused injury or death or if the gun industry member engaged in unfair business practices.”

It’s a blatant attempt to bankrupt the gun companies, a clear violation of the Second Amendment “right of the people to keep and bear arms.” The 2008 Heller decision by the U.S. Supreme Court clearly affirmed that meant an individual right, not just that of a state militia. And a right obviously can only be exercised if one has the physical means to do so.

For example, the First Amendment right to freedom “of the press” can only be exercised if paper companies are not impeded in their business of selling paper to publishers and the public. If the “paper industry” could be sued because, say, terrorists used paper to publish plans for attacks, then the paper would go up in cost so high the exercise of freedom “of the press” would be impinged.

AB 1594 was introduced after Newsom reacted against a U.S. Supreme Court action that let stands, for now, a Texas law allowing private citizens to sue abortion providers. It’s by no means clear the court will let that law stand permanently. But Newsom said in a Dec. 11 statement, “If states can now shield their laws from review by the federal courts that compare assault weapons to Swiss Army knives, then California will use that authority to protect people’s lives, where Texas used it to put women in harm’s way.”

Newsom’s spokesperson, Daniel Lopez, reiterated that sentiment in a statement Tuesday, “So long as the United States Supreme Court has set a precedent which allows private citizens to sue to stop abortions in Texas, California will use that same ability to save lives.”

Actually, pro-lifers say abortion takes a life, and with modern medicine childbirth rarely leads to the death of the mother. All medical procedures involve some risk, including abortions, not only to the baby, but for the mother.

Guns also are specifically mentioned in the Bill of Rights, while abortion only has become a right since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision—still controversial—which the court might reverse or modify.

*****

Continue reading this article at The Epoch Times.

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