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This from one of my closest friends and fellow memo readers:.
Your blog has been pretty bleak of late! I think you should drop politics and start writing about your grandkids!
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I recently posted an op ed by a friend and fellow memo reader, Sherwin Pomerantz. Sherwin is a thoughtful man, given to liberal thinking. In his article he stressed the need for compromise if a democracy is to succeed. I submit compromise is why man installs traffic lights. No one can always have it their way if society is to function.
The problem with compromise is it often leads to bad decisions and results and over time a build up can occur which becomes stifling and un-satisfying. That is when people feel compelled to rebel and democracy 's existence can, and as now, becomes threatened.
In the '60's protests against the Viet Nam War resulted because we were unwilling to win and many questioned the war's legitimacy. The war dragged on, Johnson demanded false counts and his generals gave him what he wanted. As the war dragged on, riots and protests grew, many fled to avoid the draft and blacks were disproportionately left to fight and die. Military service, prior to Viet Nam, was a good profession for blacks. It was more democratic than civilian life, promotions were basically based on performance and you know the rest.
Politicians began to turn against the war because they too became repelled by the needless slaughter but also because they were empathetic with the protesters either because they agreed or were unwilling to buck the tide so they caved, ie. compromised. Their compromise laid the foundation, in my humble opinion, for so much of the discord and racial tensions we experience today.
Consequently, I submit, there can also be a downside to compromise when it is "bad." Like everything in life, there is a good side and a downside even when something basically good is involved. Everything in moderation is the mantra by which I try to live even when it comes to compromise.
So why have so many become obdurate when it comes to compromising? Again, in the political arena, I believe we have so weaponized politics and made personal attacks and destruction so commonplace we have left little room for compromise. Winning, achieving power, belittling one's rival has become the goal. Compromise equates with losing and no one likes to lose so winning becomes ultimate.
So yes, Sherwin, I agree that in a better world compromise has it's place, is a very worthy goal and protects the continuance of a democracy. The problem is, again in my humble opinion, we no longer live in a halcyon world. The world we live in is more visceral and we have been driven to it by too many bad compromises that have led to disgust, anger, bitterness, frustration, disappointment and an unwillingness to be objective and thus compromise.
I submit the decline in our education system, which no longer puts emphasis on reasoning, is another major factor why compromise is anathema, We now emphasize diversity, racial preference and all those meaningless PC buzzwords which serve to divide our society.
Will we return to a semblance of compromise before we embrace a dictator and turn America into a parable akin to "Humpty Dumpty?" In my pessimistic cynical view I think not. The anti-compromise game must play itself out and I fear we will burn the house down in the mistaken belief we are saving it and the 2020 election is the best evidence I have to support my view.
We have become too much of a politically vindictive society and not a compassionate one.
The author of The Time Magazine article got it about right without consciously thinking she was.
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This is one way we citizens can help restore sanity to the education of our youth:
Socialism is infiltrating our school system nationwide and our children are being influenced to adopt radical beliefs that could destroy our culture and our Republic.
Fortunately, I believe there is a solution that could help turn the tide, educate our country’s youth against the dangers of socialism, and teach young people about the ideas of liberty.
My personal friend Connor Boyack is the author of the Tuttle Twins, a series of children’s books teaching kids about free markets, private property rights, the Constitution, and the ideas of our Founding Fathers. He is on a mission to distribute an additional 1,000,000 copies of the books into the hands of homeschool families, public schools, and libraries.
So far, Connor has distributed over 2 million copies of the Tuttle Twins to families and children across the country. Connor is leading the fight against socialist indoctrination in our schools creating a new generation of young people who love the ideas of liberty and our country.
Here is how Connor and the Libertas Institute plan to distribute 1,000,000 new copies of the Tuttle Twins:
- Homeschool children and parents actively teaching their kids about the ideas of freedom and U.S. history will receive copies for education at home.
- The Libertas Institute then plans to place tens of thousands of copies in public schools and libraries to give kids an alternative to the dangerous ideas of socialism.
- In order to do this, we must raise funds to print and distribute these books. It costs roughly $10 to produce and ship each book.
You and I can help save the younger generation from socialism by supplying these children and their families the Tuttle Twins books!
I spoke with Connor Boyack, the President of the Libertas Institute and author of the books, and gave him my word I would help him raise $20,000 to fund distribution of the Tuttle Twins books to homeschool children, parents, and kids in public schools. Please consider donating the most generous amount you can to help put a Tuttle Twins book in the hands of a young child!
The best part about the Tuttle Twins? Kids actually enjoy reading them.
Parents aren’t forcing their kids to read them. They are written for children to enjoy and learn at the same time.
This is the most promising path to save our kids from indoctrination and the dangers of socialism. You and I can create a new generation of young conservatives to preserve our Republic.
As I said, Connor is a great friend of mine and I believe in what he is doing. The Libertas Institute and the Tuttle Twins are transforming this country and one our most promising ways to fight back against socialism in schools.
Please help me raise $20,000 in the next 48 hours by clicking here to make a donation and distribute copies of the Tuttle Twins to thousands of kids across the country!
Friend, I suspect you get a dozen emails asking you to donate every week.
This is much different.
This isn’t for some campaign or candidate that needs money.
This is a cause I am passionate about and believe can reverse the influence of socialism in our society. We just need to distribute these books and begin teaching our nation’s youth about the ideas of freedom and U.S. history.
It seems like you love our country, the ideas of liberty, and the Constitution as much as I do.
Which is why I am emailing you.
Please consider making the most generous donation you can and help me restore our Republic.
Please consider this a personal and urgent request from me.
Here is the link to donate again.
Senator Mike Lee
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Now that Biden is doing it, no longer radical.
Biden Set to Purge Trump-Era US
Attorneys...And Can You Guess Why Such a Move Is No Longer Scandalous?
By Matt Vespa
It’s that time of the transition, folks. The old vestiges of the Trump administration within the Department of Justice are about to be wiped out except for two. John Durham is sticking around as the special counsel investigation into Russiagate is still ongoing and David Weiss is remaining as he’s involved in a federal investigation involving Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. Everyone else is about to be asked to submit their resignations. The legal Red Wedding is here. It’s not scandalous anymore. Under Trump, this was seen as some power grab when it’s simply routine. Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno asked all 93 US Attorneys under the previous administration to get the hell out. Biden is doing the same and his successor will do the same to his US attorney appointees (via NBC News):
The Biden administration will begin
removing all Senate-confirmed U.S. attorneys appointed during the Trump
administration, with two exceptions, a senior Justice Department official said.
The process, which is not uncommon,
could start as early as Tuesday. They will be asked to resign.
John Durham will remain in place to
investigate the origins of the Russia probe, but not as U.S. attorney for the
district of Connecticut, the official said. He was appointed as a special
counsel and given extra protections for the inquiry by Attorney General William
Barr last fall.
David Weiss, U.S. attorney for
Delaware, will also remain in place. Hunter Biden, the president's son, said in
December that federal officials in Delaware were investigating his taxes.
[…]
In 2017, President Donald Trump abruptly ordered the
resignation of 46 U.S. attorneys who were holdovers from the Obama
administration.
Hold on, rewind that for a second in the blockquote. I’m sorry, folks—I spoke too soon. The liberal media still tries to make something out of nothing regarding anything Trump.
Gowdy Rips Democrats' Impeachment Case
Leah Barkoukis
“The process” of firing US attorneys from the previous
administration “is not uncommon” under Biden, but for Trump, it’s “abruptly
ordered.” In fact, that’s exactly how The New York Times framed this story in 2017, when Trump
went through the “the process, which is not uncommon,” of dismissing Obama-era
appointees in an…abrupt move. Nope. It’s just a process that occurs whenever
there’s a new administration, but it’s hilariously predictable how there is no
outrage over these firings now.
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Unity or division?
How to Keep
America Polarized
Democrats are happy to throw over any rule,
custom or convention that gets in their way.
By William McGurn
As the Senate convenes Tuesday to try Donald Trump for “inciting violence against the Government of the United States,” the big question isn’t whether he’s guilty. It’s whether the Senate has the right to try him at all.
Questions about the constitutional
legitimacy of this impeachment are a good hint why the nation is moving further
away from the healing and unity Joe Biden called for in his victory speech.
Certainly the policies of the Biden administration will take the country in a
new direction. But if divisions between Americans deepen, it will be less
because of the policies themselves than the means used to ram them through.
Start with impeachment. Given the Constitution’s lack of clear-cut language on the issue, there are legitimate arguments for impeaching and trying a president who’s already left office. Surely, however, an honest debate would begin by at least conceding that one reason there are so many unresolved questions is that what we have in this case is so outside the norm.
It wasn’t until 1868, 79 years after
George Washington’s first inaugural, that the nation had its first presidential
impeachment, of Andrew Johnson. It took another 130 years until President Bill
Clinton’s impeachment in 1998. But in the space of 13 months, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has managed to impeach Mr.
Trump twice, equaling all the previous presidential impeachments in U.S.
history.
Both impeachments have been rushed affairs, the first launched
by the speaker’s decree rather than a vote of the House. As Sen. Mitch
McConnell complained that first time ’round, “the House Democrats’ impeachment
inquiry is breaking critical precedents, denying the administration important
rights that were afforded other presidents, and violating basic rules of due
process.” This time is no better. The ranking member of the House Rules
Committee, Rep. Tom Cole, points out that Democrats chose “to race to the floor
with a new article of impeachment, forgoing any investigation, any committee
process or any chance for members to fully contemplate this course of action
before proceeding.”
Adding to the aura of capriciousness is that the whole purpose
of impeachment is to remove a president from office. Again, there exists a
respectable argument that a president who has left office can still be
impeached, if only to bar him holding office in the future. But there is also
an argument that impeaching and trying a president after he has left is
gratuitous and will set troubling precedents of its own.
Unfortunately, impeachment isn’t the only area where the extraordinary
has become the order of the day in Mr. Biden’s Washington. From lawmakers’
calls to abolish the Electoral College or kill the filibuster to President
Biden’s flurry of executive orders and the unprecedented move by Democrats to
strip GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments over flaky
statements she made before entering Congress, today’s Democratic majority has
no patience for any rule, practice or convention that stands in its way.
This is especially true for rules designed to encourage
compromise and ensure that a majority cannot simply run roughshod over the
minority. Even the losers can accept the outcome of a fight in which they have
been fairly voted down after being allowed to make their case. But when people
believe they lost because the rules of the game were changed, it makes them
start looking for revenge, and the tit-for-tat can turn our parties into
Hatfields and McCoys.
Take the $1.9 trillion Covid-19
relief package that passed the Senate with a tiebreaking vote cast by Vice
President Kamala Harris. This
could have been a bipartisan bill. But that would have required some give and
take. Democrats decided they weren’t going to give.
Instead, they opted to use the budget-reconciliation process to
get around the 60 votes they would have needed to overcome a filibuster. Though
reconciliation is permitted—and both Republicans and Democrats have used it
before—it isn’t unbounded. The Byrd Rule, for example, limits the process to
measures such as taxes and spending, which have a direct effect on budget
outlays or spending. This is to prevent senators from using reconciliation to
sneak through extraneous items they’d otherwise find difficult to pass.
Some Democrats now find the Byrd Rule too confining, and they
want to throw it overboard because some of the measures they hope to include in
the relief package—e.g., a $15 hourly minimum wage—would likely fall afoul of
it. So some are calling on Ms. Harris to overrule the Senate parliamentarian,
opening the door to using reconciliation to pass all manner of legislation
unrelated to the budget process.
Republicans and Democrats are never going to agree on the big
policies. But what people want and what they will settle for are two different
things. The real hope for unity isn’t that one side will surrender to the
other’s policy agenda but that both will work within a clear, fair and honest
process.
But it can’t work if the majority gets the outcomes it wants by
changing all the rules of the game.
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Democrats understand the key to winning is not through fair elections and the ballot box. It is through manipulating laws and the ballot box. Will Republicans fight back, make their case in an intelligent and cohesive manner or will they fall flat on their face and defeat themselves through internal disunity and create chaos? Frankly I think Republicans believe in the "every man for themselves " concept. What they need is six months in Marine Boot Camp to learn winning comes through unity.
If You Thought the 2020 Elections Were Chaotic, Just Wait
by J. Christian Adams
H.R.1 packs into one 791-page bill every bad idea about how to run elections and mandates that the states must adopt the very things that made the election of 2020 such a mess. It includes all of the greatest hits of 2020: Mandatory mail ballots, ballots without postmarks, late ballots, voting in precincts where you do not live.... The Senate companion bill, S.1, might be even worse.
In 2020, states such as Nevada and New Jersey sent ballots through the mail to anyone on their registration lists despite having voter rolls full of errors. The Public Interest Legal Foundation documented thousands of ineligible registrations in Nevada alone that received mail ballots. Some were sent to vacant lots, abandoned mines, casinos and even liquor stores.
States also would be blocked by H.R.1 from signature verification procedures.
H.R.1 rigs the system for any lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the law. All lawsuits can only be filed in one court -- federal court in the District of Columbia. And all opposition must be consolidated into one brief with only one attorney being able to argue the merits.
There is a federal mandate, passed in the 19th Century, to have one single election day.... Like Obamacare earlier, H.R.1 transitions our federalist Republic to some other brave new system that purports to right generations of structural wrongs, while at the same time entrenching other wrongs.
H.R.1 packs into one 791-page bill every bad idea about how to run elections and mandates that the states must adopt -- the very things that made the election of 2020 such a mess. It includes all of the greatest hits of 2020: Mandatory mail ballots, ballots without postmarks, late ballots and voting in precincts where you don't live. It includes so many bad ideas that no publication has satisfactory space to cover all of them. The Senate companion bill, S.1, might be even worse.
These bills rearrange the relationship between the states and the federal government. The Constitution presumes that states regulate their own elections, but the Constitution has a big "but" in what is called the Elections Clause. The Constitution says, "but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations." For over 200 years, Congress rarely used this power. After all, the power was put in the Constitution only to prevent the states from suffocating the federal government out of existence by never holding federal elections.
Do not assume that the bills will stall and wither in the process. They are named H.R.1 and S.1 for a reason. The bills are the top priority of the newly empowered Democrats in Congress.
Dissatisfied with the effectiveness of the last federal mandate -- 1993's Motor Voter law -- H.R.1 dispenses with the idea that an American should go affirmatively register to vote.
In 2020, states such as Nevada and New Jersey sent ballots through the mail to anyone on their registration lists despite having voter rolls full of errors. The Public Interest Legal Foundation documented thousands of ineligible registrations in Nevada alone that received mail ballots. Some were sent to vacant lots, abandoned mines, casinos and even liquor stores.
States also would be blocked by H.R.1 from signature verification procedures.
H.R.1 rigs the system for any lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the law. All lawsuits can only be filed in one court – federal court in the District of Columbia. And all opposition must be consolidated into one brief with only one attorney being able to argue the merits. It also grants automatic intervention to any legislators who want to join in the fight against the lone opposition.
It prohibits states from conducting list maintenance on the voter rolls. That means deadwood and obsolete registrations will stack up.
HR.1 and S.1 are omnibus bills that would change every American citizen's -- and foreigner's -- relationship to voter registration.
Universal automatic voter registration has, for years, been a top priority of the institutional left. In fact, H.R.1 would do away with actual voter registration and instead make the voter rolls merely a copy of anyone already on a government list -- such as welfare recipients and other social service beneficiaries. The bills would expand well beyond to federal entities like the Social Security Administration, Department of Defense, Customs and Immigration, and elements of Health and Human Services.
Naturally, a giant federal database would serve as the home for this list of people who must be automatically registered to vote, whether they know it or not.
Imagine the number of government databases in which your information is contained. Do your names and addresses all match? Does Social Security know you moved out of your birth state? Are your married and maiden names different? Did you get a driver's license before obtaining American citizenship?
You can see the pitfalls. One person will be "registered" to vote multiple times, with slight variation in names, and perhaps greater variation in residence addresses.
Making it "easier" to get registered to vote through automatic registration from government lists might seem attractive, until you consider the disaster of universal auto-mail voting as we saw in 2020.
H.R.1 and S.1 will force states to push ballots into the mail. It builds slack into the election system. Decentralized mail elections introduce error because of error-filled rolls. Mail-in ballots delay results, create uncertainty and push the elections into kitchens and bedrooms where election officials cannot observe the voting process and cannot protect the voter from coercion.
H.R.1 takes the absolute worst emergency rule changes of 2020 and enshrines them as federal law. Gone also are state witness and notary requirements during the mail ballot application process. Nor may states enact identification requirements of "any form" for those requesting a ballot. That means no more voter ID as a matter of federal law.
States also would be blocked by H.R.1 from signature verification procedures.
It gets worse. The 791-page bill also includes:
"Congress can reduce a state's representation in Congress when the right to vote is denied." Without qualification or definition, Congress could rely on this sentence unilaterally to cut the number of House members from any state it claims is denying the right to vote.
It criminalizes anyone who uses state challenge laws to question the eligibility of registrants wrongly. The penalty is up to one year in prison per instance.
It prohibits states from conducting list maintenance on the voter rolls. That means deadwood and obsolete registrations will stack up.
It criminalizes publishing "false statements" about qualifications to vote and "false statements" about which groups have endorsed which candidates. Information banned from being published includes false qualifications to vote and the penalties for doing so. What is a false statement will apparently be in the minds of the Justice Department lawyers who bring the charges. And if they do not act, the law provides a private right of action to individual plaintiffs to drag speakers to court. You can be sure this provision would be used as a merciless weapon against political opponents.
And in case it was not clear that H.R.1 was dismantling state power to run their own elections, the bill makes it clear: "The lack of a uniform standard for voting in Federal elections leads to an unfair disparity and unequal participation in Federal elections based solely on where a person lives." In other words, state laws which have the Constitutional authority to determine the voting eligibility of its residents, will be preempted by a federal uniform standard.
That is not all. Nationwide, states must accept mail ballots on Election Day plus 10 days later. States are allowed to add extra time to the window. No more election day. It will be election season, with a month of early voting and weeks of ballots arriving and being counted.
And of course, unlimited ballot harvesting -- having a third party "help" to fill in and gather up ballots, then drop them off at a polling station or other designated station -- is guaranteed.
Misinformation, protests, unrest, and even violence were all symptoms of the trauma of 2020. Activist groups and collusive officials in 2020 turned courts into weapons to transform state laws into election procedures that were favorable to one particular party. H.R.1 would finish the job, and federalize the policies and election procedures that made 2020 such a mess.
It is no solution to presume that federal rules, even if they were crafted the right way, would solve the problem. When Washington D.C. gets control over elections, the policy always skews in one direction.
I worked at the Justice Department, where career staff ignored federal laws they didn't like, and only enforced the ones they thought would help advance their political beliefs. Motor Voter, for example, had a federal mandate that states clean voter rolls. Guess what happened after that rule passed in 1993? No private enforcement actions were brought for two decades until I brought one against Indiana.
There is a federal mandate, passed in the 19th Century, to have one single election day. The bureaucrats in Washington in charge of enforcing that law ignore that law. Federal mandates are a one-way political ratchet. They always and only help one political party.
The nation has seen this line of thinking before. Like Obamacare earlier, H.R.1 transitions our federalist Republic to some other brave new system that purports to right generations of structural wrongs, while at the same time entrenching other wrongs. Unifying American experiences such as coming together to vote on one single Election Day, governed by rules passed by state legislators, well, to the authors of H.R.1, that is just old fashioned.
J. Christian Adams is the President and General Counsel for the Public Interest Legal Foundation and a former Justice Department lawyer. He also served on the Presidential Advisory Commission for Election Integrity and currently is a Presidentially appointed Commissioner on the United States Commission on Civil Rights.
© 2021 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.
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