Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, surprisingly voting this time with the majority, wrote courts concerned about the uneasy fit between this law and the J6 protestors’ actions should not lose sight of “the backdrop of a real-world context” Congress wrote into the law after the document destruction in the Enron scandal. “There was nothing as far as I can tell in the enactment history as it was recorded that suggests that Congress was thinking about obstruction more generally,” she said. Nothing but lawfare, she might have added.
Chinese Baby Factories Exploit Birthright Citizenship
Even before taking office, Trump’s influence is being felt on birthright citizenship. ICE, taking advantage of Biden’s absence as a leader, saw a California man sentenced to over 3 years in prison for running a business called USA Happy Baby that helped pregnant Chinese women travel to the United States to deliver babies who would automatically get American citizenship.
USA Happy Baby helped several hundred women travel from China to give birth to American citizen babies. The “tourists” paid as much as $40,000 for services including apartment rentals during their stays in Southern California and worked with overseas entities that coached women on what to say during visa interviews and upon arriving in U.S. airports, advising them among other things to wear loose clothing to hide their pregnancies.
“For tens of thousands of dollars each, defendant helped his numerous customers deceive U.S. authorities and buy U.S. citizenship for their children,” federal prosecutors wrote in court papers. USA Happy Baby worked with a multi-million dollar adjacent business called You Win USA which further coached pregnant Chinese women on how to get into the United States. Another business, Star Baby Care, boasted of bringing over 8,000 Chinese women to the U.S. to give birth. The businesses operate openly, and advertise freely in Chinese-language media both here and abroad. It is big business. Yet many of the women, lacking U.S. health insurance, gave birth as public charges using public funds.
Such businesses have long operated in California, Florida, and other states and have catered to people not only from China, but also from Russia, Nigeria, Korea, and elsewhere. It isn’t illegal to visit the United States while pregnant, but lying to consular and immigration officials about the reason for travel is when the primary purpose is to give birth in the U.S. is. Birth travel is driven by birthright citizenship, and Donald Trump wants to do away with both of them.
“I see this as a grave national security concern and vulnerability,” said Mark Zito, assistant special agent-in-charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Are some of them doing it for security because the United States is more stable? Absolutely. But will those governments take advantage of this? Yes, they will.”
So what is birthright citizenship? A child born in the United States (with limited exceptions) to a foreign citizen, legally or illegally present in the U.S., is by virtue of the 14th Amendment (the so-called Citizenship Clause) automatically and forever an American citizen. The child need only prove he was born in the U.S. At the age of 21 the child can begin filing green card paperwork for his extended family. The single American citizen in a family becomes the “anchor” through which all can eventually become legal permanent residents of the U.S. and soon after, citizens.
The 14th was adopted in 1868, in the aftermath of the Civil War as part of reconciling the status of millions of slaves brought to the United States. The Citizenship Clause specifically overruled the 1857 Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which had held that Americans descended from African slaves could not be citizens of the United States. The Amendment cleared up any ambiguities, stating “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
The most significant test of the 14th Amendment came in 1898, via United States v. Wong Kim Ark. The Supreme Court upheld a child born in the United States automatically became a U.S. citizen. At issue were laws passed after the Wong child’s birth that excluded Chinese citizens from entering the U.S. The decision in Wong is understood to mean that the legal status of the mother, as well as any secondary immigration laws below the Constitution, have no bearing on the granting of citizenship.
Doing away with birthright citizenship is another of Trump’s proclaimed Day One initiatives. In a campaign post, Trump wrote “On Day One, President Trump will sign an Executive Order to stop federal agencies from granting automatic U.S. citizenship to the children of illegal aliens. It will explain the clear meaning of the 14th Amendment, that U.S. Citizenship extends only to those both born in and ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States.”
The Trump campaign also said it would order on Day One the Social Security Administration to refuse Social Security numbers to newborn children without proof of the parents’ immigration status. Trump will issue the same order to the State Department, which issues U.S. passports. This would not require any action from Congress and because it would not grant/take away citizenship per se, would not directly violate the 14th Amendment in Trump’s interpretation.
Currently, a U.S. birth certificate is all that is needed to obtain a Social Security number and passport in most cases. The State Department considers U.S.-born children of illegal aliens to be subject to U.S. jurisdiction, and thus to have citizenship at birth. The State Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual takes the position Wong settled this issue. This means the Trump E.O. would likely be challenged immediately in lower courts and the case would be ripe for the Supreme Court to use to revisit Wong if they wished to. The Court could rule classes of foreigners on U.S. soil such as tourists (included already are children of foreign diplomats) are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and therefore their children, if born in this country, are not entitled to citizenship. The Court could also side with long precedent and refuse to even hear the case.
Another option for Trump would be to re-issue and this time enforce an Executive Order from Trump 1.0. Under this E.O., visitors can be denied temporary tourist visas if it’s found the “primary purpose” of their travel is to obtain citizenship for a child by giving birth in the United States. The rule does not currently apply to the 39 countries in the Visa Waiver Program, including Korea, and State in implementing the E.O. forbids its visa officers from even asking in most cases if an applicant is pregnant, making the order near-impossible to enforce. A revised E.O., which refines “tourism” to exclude planning to give birth in the U.S., extends the exclusion to the Visa Waiver Program, applies equally to ICE at the Ports of Entry, and prohibits the State Department from defanging the law in its implementing guidance, could go a long way toward at least slowing the flood of pregnant visitors to the U.S.
Trump could also order ICE to more aggressively pursue the baby facilitators now actively at work in the U.S., places like USA Happy Baby and You Win USA. ICE could productively look into how the organizations move money internationally, likely to find something akin to money laundering and tax evasion, even if the immigration laws themselves are too weak to hold up in court on a large scale.
What Trump cannot do is wipe away the 14th Amendment, and it is possible his other efforts to slow birth tourism will ultimately fail on this point. Then-House Speaker Paul Ryan in 2018 said “As a conservative, I’m a believer in following the plain text of the Constitution, and I think in this case the 14th Amendment is pretty clear, and that would involve a very, very lengthy constitutional process. But where we obviously totally agree with the president is getting at the root issue here, which is unchecked illegal immigration.”
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Trump versus the Visa Office
For all the emphasis on the southern border and The Wall, asylum procedures and criminal aliens, little ink has been spilled over the other side of immigration, the issuance of visas abroad to foreigners by the Department of State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs. Literally millions of temporary nonimmigrant visas (tourist visas, students, temporary workers) are issued yearly, many of which go to foreigners who have no intention of ever returning home. They join the millions who flood across the southern border, entering quasi-legally and staying on indefinitely illegally. What reforms are due at State visa offices worldwide?
Project 2025 is harsh towards the State Department in general, citing one study which concluded the department is a “crippled institution suffering from an ineffective organizational structure in which regional and functional policies do not serve integrated goals, and in which sound management, accountability, and leadership are lacking.” The major source of the State Department’s ineffectiveness, Project 2025 believes, lies in its institutional belief “it is an independent institution that knows what is best for the United States, sets its own foreign policy, and does not need direction from an elected President.” Strong medicine.
The Project contains many country-specific and region-oriented policy plans for State to follow to remedy all that. There’s always more to do, of course. For example, it is interesting how many major political events of the last few years crisscrossed the State Department: Hillary Clinton’s emails and Foundation shenanigans, the Steele Dossier and many things Russiagate, and the first impeachment and Ukraine. And never mind two Democratic presidential candidates, Clinton and John Kerry, found a home there. That’s an awful lot of partisanship for an organization which brags about being non-partisan.
Yet for all the policy and institutional changes proposed for State, it is the visa function which Project 2025 singles out as among the most important. The Project says “the department’s most noteworthy challenge on the global stage has been its handling of immigration and domestic security issues, which are inextricably related. The State Department’s apparent posture toward these two issues, which are of paramount importance to the American people, has historically been that they are of lesser importance than other issues and that they can be treated as concessions in broader diplomatic engagements. In other instances in which access to the U.S. in the form of immigrant (permanent) and nonimmigrant (temporary) visas could potentially serve as diplomatic leverage, it is almost never used. To some degree, the State Department and many of its personnel appear to view the U.S. immigration system less as a tool for strengthening the United States and more as a global welfare program. To ensure the safety, security, and prosperity of all Americans, “this must change.” Stronger medicine.
What the Project is getting at is visa issuance is typically divorced from larger policy issues and almost never used as a tool to gain concessions on other issues. It is instead given away, the mantra in the Bureau of Consular Affairs being each visa case is decided individually without reference to larger global issues. Yet in many countries, particularly in the developing world, visas are a form of currency, and possession of a full American tourist visa, or having a son at an American university on a student visa, are treated as much as a sign of wealth and status as a nice home or an imported car.
Upstairs in an embassy the ambassador and his staff may fret about trade deficits while downstairs in the Consular Section visa candy is handed out to locals as if nothing is the matter. Project 2025 wants this “Chinese Wall” knocked down. It would question why the U.S. imposes significant tariffs on China with one hand to pressure the CCP, while freely handing out 64,187 multi-year tourist visas in the month of September 2024 (latest statistics) alone. Similar statistics belie the leverage wasted in Russia (3,552 tourist visas monthly), Mexico (over 186,000 border crossing documents) and against Iran (1,092 tourist visas) just as examples. In most non-developed nations the burden of some sort of visa pressure would fall nearly completely on the elite as far as tourist visas, or on important companies with juice with their own governments in other cases (over 3,000 temporary worker visas were issued in China.) Exceptions could always be made for compelling American interests, such as Google’s or Microsoft’s H1-B workers. It would just drive home the point of using visas as a negotiating tool, as Project 2025 envisions.
For example, one could imagine the impact of withholding visa issuances on Central American nations unwilling to cooperate with the U.S. on returning migrants, or a recalcitrant Mexico looking at the “Remain in Mexico” plan likely to be a Day One proposal from the Trump administration.
Project 2025 also calls for the evaluation of national security–vulnerable visa programs to protect the American people. The State Department should evaluate several key security-sensitive visa programs it manages. These include the Diversity Visa program, the F (student) visa program, and J (exchange visitor) visa program. The State Department’s evaluation must “ensure that these programs are not only consistent with White House immigration policy, but also align with its national security obligations and resource limitations.”
Following the events of 9/11 a massive overhaul was done to the visa issuing system, and numerous steps were added to the process. These include fingerprinting and photographing all applicants, and coordinating file checks among State and the intelligence agencies. Supporters point to the apparent success of the program — no additional 9/11’s — but Project 2025 calls for a more detailed answer. The threat still remains — the U.S. issued over 1,000 student visas to Saudis in July 2024, 32 to Yemenis, and 338 to Iranians.
But in addition to the broader security questions about student visa issuance addressed by Project 2025, there lurks the individual case questions and whether or not these will be folded into the individual visa decision. For example, how many of those Iranian or Saudi student visas are issued to students planning to study STEM fields applicable to nuclear engineering? Such data are unavailable. While some cumbersome speed bumps for that sort of thing exist in the current system, State visa officers are not empowered, never mind not encouraged, to refuse such cases outright at first glance on national interest grounds in alignment with national security obligations. It ain’t rocket science, people.
Project 2025 seeks such change, change which will require serious new thinking in the Bureau of Consular Affairs and closer coordination between Consular and the so-called “political” side of State. State may have held paid “crying sessions” after Trump’s election win, but it looks like the tears are just getting ready to get started.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
A Word in Favor of Daylight Savings Time
When my Asian-born wife first learned about daylight Savings time (DST) she thought I was playing a trick on her. You mean, she said, everyone just sort of agrees it’s a new time all of a sudden? And the idea is to have an extra hour of daylight-ish time in the summer? Why not do the same for Saturday, and do away with say Wednesday, two birds with one stone?
She was right of course, it made no sense, to the point where much of the world is unsure what is going on in America. Do we really all agree to set our clocks forward or backward twice a year? In the pre-Apple watch era, how many people were late for work or school when they forgot to adjust manually that faux wood digital clock on the nightstand, the one with the red LED numbers? Did everyone sacrifice a morning feeling like they were hung over just so we could see the sun set an hour later in July?
These issues are not America’s alone to wrestle with. DST is observed in most of Europe, most of North America and parts of Africa and Asia around the Northern Hemisphere summer, and in parts of South America and Oceania around the Southern Hemisphere summer observe some variety of DST. The Brits even call it British Summer Time, which sounds more homey than Daylight Savings Time. Asia as a group seems to have little use for the concept, hence my spouse’s initial confusion. She kind of liked the idea in summer, when in Ohio we had a semblance of daylight until 10 p.m., but renewed her hatred for the thing in December, when gray days gave way to pitch black afternoons. It was no fun, those Ohio winters, and we could have used an extra hour then. Why not keep DST all year? But it was the change part that seemed to matter, you know, that cheery “spring ahead,” so no.
Donald Trump is siding with my wife in proposing to get rid of DST. Here’s why.
The biggest reasons for getting rid of Daylight Saving Time have to do with the negative health effects of losing an hour of sleep. That one hour throws our circadian rhythms out of whack. Hormones fluctuate, and sleep suffers for longer than one hung over morning. Some scientists believe that the effects of DST last up to two weeks. Sleep loss contributes to metabolic turmoil, weight gain, mood instability, irritability, and increased risks for accidents while driving or working. Furthermore, many sufferers of seasonal affective disorder (SAD), which results from a lack of sunlight during the winter months, are suddenly pushed back into the darkness the morning after DST. That loss of morning sunlight takes up to one month to return with the increasing daylight of spring. There’s some crazy serious stuff, too: the University of Alabama found a 10 percent increase in heart attacks the Monday after DST begins/ends. Similarly, the American Academy of Neurology says stroke risk rises by 8 percent. That stroke risk jumps to 65 percent for those over 65.
The other reason people give for getting rid of DST is that we don’t really need it anymore. DST was instituted to save energy. America started observing DST in 1917 and in 1975, DST was found to reduce energy waste by only 1 percent. By 1976, we figured out daylight saving time wasn’t significantly reducing energy waste at all. A contemporary report found the total electricity savings of Daylight Saving Time were about 1.3 Tera Watt-hour (TWh; for reference, the total 2007 electricity consumption in the United States was 3,900 TWh.) This corresponds to 0.5 percent per each day of Daylight Saving Time, or 0.03 percent of electricity consumption over the year. Meh.
So if DST is so bad, why not just get rid of it, sweep it away in another Day One Trump Executive Order initiative? Because the presence of DST at all and the start and stop times themselves, are codified by law. It’ll take an act of Congress to change things. Here’s a thumbnail history of DST to give you an idea how complicated this whole thing is:
“The Uniform Time Act of 1966 was the first federal DST law in the United States that was not part of a wartime initiative. The Act established that DST would begin on the last Sunday in April and end on the last Sunday in October. Then, the oil embargo of the early 1970s prompted temporary changes to federal DST policy, when the Emergency Daylight Saving Time Energy Conservation Act of 1973 imposed year-round DST for 15 months. A more enduring change, again with the intent of energy conservation, occurred in 1986, when the start date was moved forward by three weeks. The DST regime in practice today includes a further extension authorized within the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Having begun in 2007, DST now starts three weeks earlier, on the second Sunday in March, and lasts one week longer, until the first Sunday in November.”
There are a lot of solid reasons to end DST, I have to admit. But with all due respect to President-elect Trump and my wife, I’d like to suggest one reason to keep DST.
When the sun set around 7 p.m., nobody really had time to play outside as a kid after dinner. The streetlights would start to flicker on around 6:45 and that one kid whose mother would open the screen door and shout to come home would hear those shouts about the same time. Everybody knows playing outside after dinner is the most fun (nobody knows why but it is true.) Cars have their headlights on so yelling “car” to hold up play during a street baseball game was easier, so there’s that. But at least some of it was the thrill of being outside in the gathering darkness, shouting for “just five more minutes, please!” to finish a game of hide-and-seek or another inning of kickball or to snag a fly ball coming like a comet out of the looming darkness. Some of us with real baseball mitts used to play catch, the light helpful at first but by night’s end a rhythm had been established based on the sound of the ball on leather that did not need illumination. The extra daylight gave the ice cream man that much more time to get around to our street, too. We learned to basically see in the dark to keep the games alive, keep the play in play, until at least 9 p.m. when it was, everyone reluctantly admitted, bath time.
I realize nostalgia is a weak reason to keep DST alive, especially in the face of science that says it brings on higher risk for heart attack and stroke and especially since I am much, much closer to that heart attack danger zone than I am to playing outside after dinner. Still, I hope lawmakers spare a thought for what DST used to mean at least, even as prudence suggests its time has passed. It was a grand and glorious time to be a kid, that extra hour. It’ll be missed.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Showdown in DOGE City
The leaders of President-elect Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, have been meeting with Republican lawmakers recently. None of those involved shared details from their meetings, which was by design to allow for brainstorming. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) did say “Government is too big. It does too many things, and it does almost nothing well,” adding Musk and Ramaswamy would help usher in change. But how will Elon and Vivek actually seek change? What are their tools to bring to bear?
In an op-ed laying out their strategy, the duo said they would link administrative reductions, regulatory rescissions, and cost savings.
Cutting back on the sheer numbers of government employees is a fine starting point for Elon and Vivek. Using the controversial Schedule F, they hope to do away with the unofficial lifetime employment most Civil Servants enjoy. Civil service rules make firing for cause extremely difficult, and grind broader layoffs to a crawl if not a full stop. If Schedule F could be implemented early in Trump 2.0 (the plan was started in Trump 1.0 but failed to get any traction) it would be a decisive tool in clearing out civil service deadwood. They will not go easily, and the terms are tough; Vivek has vowed to cut 75 percent of the federal workforce. “This will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in government waste, which is a lot of people,” Elon added.
Another strategy for lowering government headcount is attrition. Trump could impose a government-wide hiring freeze, as he did when he took office in 2017, though many feel this may be too blunt an instrument. Musk and Ramaswamy suggest the Trump administration lean instead on separation incentives to get federal workers to retire early or accept buyouts. Elon and Vivek also plan to relocate some agencies out of D.C. and to offer generous severance packages to drive workers into retiring instead of moving.
An attrition move which has widespread Republican support in Congress is to end or curtail telework, back to at least pre-Covid levels. Ramaswamy predicted requiring more federal workers to go into their offices more frequently would cause many of them to quit. “If you require most of those federal bureaucrats to just say, like normal working Americans, you come to work five days a week, a lot of them won’t want to do that,” Ramaswamy said. “If you have many voluntary reductions in force of the workforce in the federal government along the way, great. That’s a good side effect of those policies as well.” How many Feds telework is itself the subject of much discussion; Speaker Johnson puts the figure at 99 percent of regular office workers, while the Office of Management and Budget claims 80 percent of the federal work hours are currently spent in-person and more than half of federal employees do not telework at all.
As for regulatory rescissions, the federal bureaucracy generates thousands of regulations and rules each year, another target for Elon and Vivek. Rep. Aaron Bean (R-FL) who will co-chair the House DOGE Caucus, quoted Musk as suggesting the United States is “no longer a democracy, it’s a bureaucracy” and his commission would work to ensure Congress, not “unelected bureaucrats,” dictate regulation. Changing things will not be easy. Agencies generally must go through notice-and-comment rulemaking to amend or revoke rules, though Musk and Ramaswamy suggest Trump may be able to revoke some rules unilaterally via executive order. Musk and Ramaswamy also believe Trump could direct agencies not to enforce some cumbersome regulations or those he believes are unlawful in light of recent Supreme Court precedent. The duo says “we will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws.” “He might get away with it,” said William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Congress’ power of the purse will turn into an advisory opinion.”
One obstacle the duo cannot overcome is the math of the federal budget. Roughly 60 percent of the budget is mandatory spending — things like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Trump promised to protect those programs. Another 10 percent of the budget is spent on paying interest on the national debt. That leaves around 30 percent of the budget “discretionary,” though roughly half of that goes to defense spending, which Trump also vowed not to cut. That remaining 15 percent of the budget, non-defense discretionary spending, is already at its lowest level ever as a percentage of GDP.
That said, Musk and Ramaswamy identified a number of potential reductions. These include several specific appropriations or federal grants they consider to be wasteful, such as for NGOs, DEI training, PBS, NPR, Planned Parenthood, and $1.5 billion in grants to international organizations. Musk previously advocated removing subsidies from all industries. Ramaswamy said DOGE will closely review CHIPS Act contracts, especially those the Biden administration accelerated.
More generally, law firm Gibson Dunn notes Musk and Ramaswamy have said Trump may decline to spend appropriations for which Congress’s authorizations have expired (called impoundment, confounded by the 1974 Impoundment Control Act.) The Congressional Budget Office has identified $516 billion in appropriations for 2024 associated with 491 expired authorizations of appropriations across a range of agencies, including a number of appropriations administered by the Department of Veterans Affairs, State Department, Department of Education, National Institutes of Health, Federal Aviation Administration, and NASA. Withholding such funds is subject to legal challenge. It would be politically unpopular to cut a number of these programs, such as veterans’ healthcare benefits and Pell Grants.
Musk and Ramaswamy will also scrutinize federal contracts that have “gone unexamined for years,” and conduct “large-scale audits during a temporary suspension of payments.” Ramaswamy said to expect “massive cuts among federal contractors… who are overbilling the government.” Everyone has a list. Sources of potential cuts could also be the Government Accountability Office High Risk List, which identifies programs particularly subject to waste, fraud, and abuse, and a list of thousands of proposed cuts Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) sent to Musk and Ramaswamy.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Syria: The View from 30,000 Feet
Originally published on Responsible Statecraft.
If a time traveler from 2024 went to the Middle East of some years ago with the intent of revealing the future, he might not be believed. He’d tell how the stalwart regimes of Quaddafi, Saddam, Pahlavi, and the Assad family were gone, their once stable countries now either in some level of chaos/failed state or under control of Tehran as proxies. Same for Lebanon and Hezbollah. The Palestinian Liberation Organization is gone, Hamas is beholden to Iran for its survival, and Egypt survives as a sort of U.S. ally, saved by American do-nothingism from the democratic possibilities of the Arab Spring.
When asked how all this could have happened, he’d explain with the exception of the Iranian Revolution and the PLO, it mostly had to do with the United States and its invasion of Iraq, the destruction of a stable (“evil” regime; they’re all evil) regime it turned out was a linchpin holding most of the whole Sykes-Picot world together. In 2003 the U.S. invasion began a process of inviting all comers to take hold of a piece of Iraq and see how far they might get with it. Many of the same ISIS and former al-Qaeda elements that now stand athwart Syria (and will no doubt soon begin fighting each other for control there) almost grabbed the entire country after the U.S.-trained and equipped post-Saddam Iraqi army ran from the field. It was left for the Iranians to take the reigns, fashioning Iraq into a client state after the U.S. cut its losses by cooperating with Iran to wipe out most of ISIS in Iraq and abandoning the Kurds who had foolishly believed the U.S. owed them a nation-state after all this.
American hubris led to the fall of Quaddafi after a U.S.-sponsored revolt of sorts ended up doing little more than creating a failed state in the once stable region. Pundits saw it, as they will wrongly see the fall of Syria, as a blow toward Russian ambitions in the area, not calculating the negative value of unleashing chaos in a region consumed by the Iranian-U.S./Israeli proxy war. As a side note, watching Quaddafi being sodomized on TV after he gave up his nuclear weapons assured the world North Korea would never do the same. But that’s another world away…
Nobody is going to miss the Assad family. Bashar’s father and the family ran Syria since a 1970 coup. Assad initially portrayed himself as a modern reformist, but he responded to peaceful protests during the Arab Spring with brutal crackdowns, sparking a nationwide uprising. As the ISIS rebels advanced, they took over many of the notorious prisons where the Assad regime had for decades tortured and killed political prisoners. As with Iraq being left open for anyone who wanted a piece of it and could find a way to hold it, Syria is going to dissolve. Israel already grabbed snippets of territory to round out its border with Syria, and destroyed the Syrian navy, rocket and chemical stores, and much of its air force because in chaos lies possibility if you have not already blown your money, lives, and goodwill in Iraq. Unlike in 2012, when Hezbollah came to Assad’s rescue against insurgents, Hezbollah today has few shock troops available to help. The internecine fighting among revolutionary groups will inevitably result in one of them seeking aid from Iran (who else? Turkey?), who’ll emerge as the victor of sorts in all this with another proxy statelet under its belt. A weakened Russia is out of the picture and appears to have already abandoned its naval base in Syria.
What’s left is to see what America has to say. There are 900 American soldiers on the ground today in Syria, and U.S. warplanes flew bombing missions accidentally in support of Assad against ISIS factions in their battles outside Damascus (strange bedfellows and all that.) Had all this happened a year ago, when Joe Biden was still nominally in charge of the U.S. military, you might have seen some sort of intervention, more of a blocking move really, to keep the ISIS factions from uniting, to limit their success or at least slow it down, and to interdict any Iranian help arriving from the east. Joe Biden is no longer really in charge of anything. He used up his Commander-in-Chief goodwill on two ugly proxy interventions, fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian and of course supporting Israel in Gaza. A year, or more realistically two or three years, ago Joe might have made the case for either direct involvement in Syria or hitching the old bull of America more directly to another proxy, maybe the beleaguered Kurds who still want a piece of Syria for their own. As it stands, Joe lacks the political oomph to do any of that in his final days in office and good riddance. We are in no position (and have no wherewithal) to take advantage of the situation in a positive way. This will be in spite of trying to claim the lead ISIS faction has a nice government on its mind. Any future expedient rehabilitation of the Syrian terrorists is analogous to the disingenuous glow up granted the Ukrainian Nazi militias (U.S. would recognize a Syrian government that comes from inclusive process, Secretary of State Antony Blinken says, uh oh.)
Incoming president Donald Trump has made it clear he wants no part of a war in Syria (and is not too enamored with continuing the one in Ukraine, either.) He tried in Term 1.0 to withdraw American forces from Syria and failed, and will likely try early on in Term 2.0 to pull them out. It would be the right thing to do and likely engender wide support. Americans getting killed in the Middle East for vague reasons is so-2003 and far from the mandate Trump was handed. Syria will sort itself out, with Israel on one side helping keep the fight inside existing borders (or less!) and Iran, if it is clever enough, siding with the ISIS group most likely to emerge as the most powerful in Syria, say Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, whom the U.S. considers a terrorist group. If all that fails to come true, expect another failed state in the heart of the Middle East.
Our Middle East time traveler would certainly have some explaining to do.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Whither the Department of Education? Is DOE DOA?
What is to become of the Department of Education (DOE)? Trump promised to get rid of it, and Elon and Vivek say they will follow-through and “delete” it. What does the Department of Education do anyway and will it be missed?
First off, what does the DOE not do. It does not choose textbooks or curricula, and it does not hire teachers. That is and has for a long time been done on the local or state level. What DOE does, broadly, is administer various entitlement and grant programs, passing down federal funds to local schools and the states. That those funds are often contingent on schools following various social justice dictates, such as Title IX on discrimination in school sports and activities by sex, is where the rub lies. See Project 2025, below.
A good place to start in understanding what DOE does is with Sen. Mike Rounds’s (R-SD) Returning Education to Our States Act (S. 5384) which seeks to eliminate the DOE and “redistribute all critical functions under other departments.” Rounds said the department has moved beyond its mission. “The Federal Department of Education has never educated a single student, and it’s long past time to end this bureaucratic department that causes more harm than good,” Rounds explained. “Local school boards and state departments of education know best what their students need, not unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.”
Under his plan, DOE programs and presumably some of its 4,200 employees would be spread across the departments of Interior, Treasury, Justice, State, and Health and Human Services as follows:
— relocate all functions, programs, and authorities of the Secretary of Education under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to the Department of Health and Human Services;
— relocate each authority and program of the Office of Indian Education of the Department of Education to the Department of the Interior;
— relocate the Fulbright-Hayes program to the State Department;
— relocate each Impact Aid program to the Department of Health and Human Services;
— the Federal Pell Grant program, the Federal Family Education Loan Program, the William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan Program, Health Education Assistance Loan program, the programs under the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002, the Educational Technical Assistance Act, and the Federal Perkins Loans Program will move to the Department of the Treasury. The Secretary of the Treasury will make allocations to states to support elementary and secondary education, including career and technical education based on the number of kids enrolled in public, private, and home schools. States can use this funding for any purpose relating to early childhood, elementary or secondary education. Treasury should do the same for college and university money allocated by in-school population.
— The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice will become responsible for enforcing civil rights laws applicable to the grant programs (DOJ enforces civil rights through litigation, not through the threatened nonjudicial withholding of education funds as is the case with DOE.)
“For years, I’ve worked toward removing the Federal Department of Education,” said Senator Rounds. “I’m pleased that President-elect Trump shares this vision, and I’m excited to work with him and Republican majorities in the Senate and House to make this a reality. This legislation is a roadmap to eliminating the Federal Department of Education by practically rehoming these federal programs in the departments where they belong.”
Critics, particularly in Project 2025, see efforts like Rounds’s as doing too little to change the philosophy behind a federal role in education. Some might see Rounds’s rehoming bill as something akin to shuffling the deck chairs around on the Titanic. Trump himself has bigger plans, stating “On Day One, we will begin to find and remove the radicals, zealots and Marxists who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education, and that also includes others, and you know who you are. Because we are not going to allow anyone to hurt our children.”
Speaking of his Secretary of Education nominee, Linda McMahon, Trump said “As Secretary of Education, Linda will fight tirelessly to expand ‘Choice’ to every State in America, and empower parents to make the best Education decisions for their families.” Taking education choices away from the DOE and handing them to parents is also a central focus of Project 2025.
Project 2025 is a focal point for DOE reform/elimination and goes further than Rounds. The Project says “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated. Ultimately, every parent should have the option to direct his or her child’s share of education funding through an education savings account (ESA), funded overwhelmingly by state and local taxpayers.” Title I is the largest portion of federal taxpayer spending under this federal education law, and the section provides additional taxpayer resources to schools or groups of schools in lower income areas. Over a 10-year period, Federal spending should be phased out and states should assume decision-making control over how to provide a quality education to children from low-income families. Some big changes in there, particularly the use of ESA’s to hand control over education directly to parents, given DOE’s poor track record — Federal intervention, the Project states, in education has failed to promote student achievement. After trillions spent on the collective programs at DOE, “student academic outcomes remain stagnant.” The ESA’s would be usable at both public and private schools, a major win for religious education and home schoolers.
At its core, Project 2025 wants to reduce the Federal level of involvement in education to zero, especially administratively, and leave the states — if not the parents — responsible for funding and controlling education locally.
In addition, the Project wants to treat taxpayers like investors in federal student aid. Taxpayers should expect their investments in higher education to generate economic productivity. When the federal government lends money to individuals for a postsecondary education, taxpayers should expect those borrowers to repay. It says “the [Biden] Administration drastically expanded college student loan forgiveness. The new administration must quickly commence negotiated rulemaking and propose the department rescind these regulations. In fact, the next Administration should completely reverse the student loan federalization of 2010 and work with Congress to spin off FSA and its student loan obligations to a new government corporation with professional governance and management.”
Project 2025 also gets into more “philosophical” areas, redefining sex strictly biologically for Title IX purposes, eliminating any benefits based on race, and establishing a Parental Bill of Rights for Education (“No public education employee or contractor shall use a pronoun in addressing a student that is different from that student’s biological sex without the written permission of a student’s parents or guardians,” “Prohibit accreditation agencies from leveraging their Title IV gatekeeper role to mandate that educational institutions adopt diversity, equity, and inclusion policies”) to push back on “woke” ideas in education.
There’s a bit of dissonance in Project 2025 regarding education that will need to be resolved. Its primary goal is the elimination of the DOE but at the same time secondary goals such as instituting a Parental Bill of Rights are exactly the kind of federal mandates requiring a bureaucratic vehicle such as the DOE to push them down into the recalcitrant states. It will be interesting to watch how this is resolved, and important to see what effect it has on the education of our children, and on the future of our country.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Trump Staffs Up for Immigration War
After Americans overwhelmingly give the White House, Senate, and House (you might as well count the Supreme Court in, too) to one party, which ran with a vow to limit illegal immigration on Day One of its control, what do you do if you’re governor of a liberal state? Why, you ignore the support Trump and the Republicans have in your state and try to work around the coming war on immigration in direct opposition to the Federal government in Washington. Might as well be 1860 all over again.
“Democrats,” says the New York Times, “envision flexing their power in these states to partly block the Trump administration’s policies — for example, by refusing to enforce immigration laws.” The Times claims some of the planning in blue states began in 2023 as a potential backstop if Trump won, but the preparations were largely kept quiet to avoid projecting public doubts about Democrats’ ability to win the election. The anti-populist Democratic effort will rely on the work of hundreds of lawyers being recruited to combat Trump policies. Advocacy groups are workshopping cases and recruiting potential plaintiffs to challenge expected regulations, laws, and administrative actions. For example, Democracy Forward, a legal group formed after Trump won in 2016, has a multimillion-dollar bank roll and more than 800 lawyers on call.
Governors Gavin Newsom of California and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois are mobilizing their Democratic-controlled legislatures to gird their states loins against the future Trump administration. Newsom’s legislature issued a proclamation to “safeguard California values and fundamental rights in the face of an incoming Trump administration… bolstering California legal resources to protect civil rights, reproductive freedom, climate action, and immigrant families.” Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker took a more direct stand, stating “You come for my people, you come through me,” apparently referring to migrant families and illegal alien criminals as “his people.” Pritzker and Governor Jared Polis of Colorado announced the formation of a group called Governors Safeguarding Democracy.
Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey vowed to protect the state’s “citizens and residents.” While New York’s sanctuary city-loving mayor lies low in the face of ethics charges, Governor Kathy Hochul convened the Empire State Freedom Initiative to combat “threats” from the Trump administration, including on immigration. She and Trump-hating Attorney General Letitia James vowed to be warriors in the fight to, in Redstate’s words “stop what the American people just voted for.” Sanctuary cities and other localities across the U.S. have, since Biden took office, freed more than 22,000 criminal migrants wanted by federal immigration authorities, according to data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE.) The number of criminal aliens freed into the country by sanctuary authorities could potentially be much higher given many times local law enforcement releases criminal migrants before ICE is aware of them and files a detainer notice.
But it is not all bad news. Oklahoma is launching a program, Operation Guardian, to turn over illegal immigrants already in prison to ICE to jump-start Trump’s deportation effort. Governor Kevin Stitt shared with the Washington Examiner plans to expeditiously deport 526 convicted illegal immigrants as soon as Trump takes office. “We want to be the first state that works with President Trump,” Stitt said. “Right now, we have over 500 people incarcerated in Oklahoma who have broken the law, who are criminals, and they also are illegal. We would love to get them out of the state of Oklahoma, out of the country.” The state pays $36,000 to house them each day, according to the governor’s office.
Trump is staffing up for the war. In addition to Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff, Trump is set to install an immigration hardliner in a major White House role, a position that does not require Senate confirmation and will enable him to enact Trump’s immigration agenda across the federal government. Tom Homan, who’ll be immigration czar, formerly headed (but was never confirmed as) the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) division responsible for arresting, detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants. The two men’s prompt installation in senior White House roles, says Politico, among the first personnel selections for Trump 2.0, signals immigration enforcement is a “top priority.”
Immigration is a complex affair in the U.S., with the immigration legal code longer and more complex than the tax code. Miller, Homan and their staffs will need to poke holes in various parts of DHS in general but also look deeper into the bureaucracy. There’s the Department of Labor, which issues work permissions for many visas (such as the H-1B likely of interest to Elon Musk), the Department of Justice, which runs the immigration courts, and the Department of State, which issues the actual visas themselves abroad. Project 2025 specifically calls out the “Diversity” Immigrant Visa lottery, and F and J student visas as in need of an overhaul. “This is the biggest national security vulnerability this nation has seen since 9/11 and we have to fix it,” Homan said.
But initially Trump’s immigration plan will focus on the reported 1.2 million illegal alien criminals loose across the U.S. This population was created by the Biden-Harris administration by allowing migrants to flow across the border without any vetting being done. The plan was especially egregious when dealing with citizens of places like Venezuela, which refuse to cooperate with U.S. law enforcement. Next in line may be military-age Chinese males. All of this targeted enforcement is a far cry from the “mass deportations” feared by the Left.
Trump is serious about all this, beyond personnel choices. Trump confirmed on Truth Social he will declare a national emergency and use military assets to help him carry out his deportation plans. Trump also pledged to continue building the U.S.-Mexico border wall, revive the Remain in Mexico program, hire more border patrol agents, and end birthright citizenship for those born on U.S. soil to illegal migrant parents.
“I’ve got to go back and help because every morning I get up, every morning I’m pissed off about what this [Biden] administration did to the most secure border in my lifetime. So I’m going to go back and do what I can to fix it,” said Homan. “I have seen some of these Democratic governors say they are going to stand in the way. They are going to make it hard for us,” he said. “Well, a suggestion. If you are not going to help us, get the hell out of the way. If we can’t get assistance in New York City, we may have to double the number of agents we send to New York City. We are going to do the job. We are going to do the job without you or with you.”
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Trump v. The Bureaucracy
The war has begun. It’s Trump, Elon, Vivek Ramaswamy, and their new Department of Government Efficiency versus the Federal bureaucracy in a no-holds barred cage deathmatch. The first punches have been thrown; who will win? At stake are your tax dollars.
U.S. election night 2024 was a somber affair in Europe, as U.S. officials in most European capitals abandoned the usual watch parties. Watch parties used to be a long-standing American diplomatic tradition, held at embassies with invited local guests to watch the election results dribble in, showcasing our democracy. Great care was taken to make the party patriotic but not partisan; both candidates were featured and usually a mock election was held, with host country government officials voting one way or another. About the only bad part of the night was listening to American diplomats like me struggling to explain the Electoral College system in bad Mandarin or high school Spanish.
But there were few parties this year, thanks to what some call “The Trump Effect.” Many officials are still hurting from the 2016 election that left many top members of America’s diplomatic corps exposed as they absorbed the killer election results in front of journalists, foreign diplomats, and local officials. “I don’t think there was appetite to watch another Trump victory,” said a senior American diplomat based in Europe, adding that the 2016 embassy events had been “calamitous.” “The decision to nix election night festivities may also reflect the unusually politicized nature of America’s diplomatic corps. There is deep unease about the strength of the U.S. democratic system after disputes about the outcome of the 2020 election led to an attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters,” says Politico.
With that as a scene-setter, Washington bureaucracy is preparing for war. Months before the election, in April 2024, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued new protective guidance to agencies as they implemented regulations strengthening “guard rails” on the conversion of career federal workers out of the civil service and into the excepted service. This refers to the infamous Schedule F planned by Trump as one of his Day One initiatives. OPM’s regulations establish a definition of “policy-related” jobs, whittling it down to escape Trump’s campaign definition by referring only to noncareer political appointments, and stipulating when an employee’s position is “involuntarily” converted out of the Civil Service, they retain “the status and civil service protections they had already accrued,” which would render the new rules of Schedule F moot. OPM’s version also grants federal workers the right to appeal any job reclassifications resulting in the loss of civil service protections to the Merit Systems Protection Board, a creaky-slow agency which could tie up Trump’s changes for years, case-by-slogging-case.
But despite Biden’s OPM efforts to protect the federal workforce from any upcoming Schedule F changes, analysts say there may be little the bureaucracy can do to stop them. Even the April 2024 rule could easily be rescinded, either after a 90-day notice-and-comment period or immediately with a new interim final rule. Schedule F fights can be expected to get deep into the weeds of how the U.S. government system works (or doesn’t work) through its tangle of regulations and laws. Never mind snatching returning rockets from the air and self-driving cars, Elon Musk will have met the most complex challenge of his time. Give Elon a hand by delving into the dense OPM’s guidance on Schedule F yourself.
So what is Schedule F anyway? Though it failed to go into practice, in Term 1.0 Trump issued an executive order that would have stripped firing protections from many civil servants. This effort was labeled “Schedule F” because that is the name of the new employment category the executive order created (Schedules A–E already existed.) The administration created Schedule F based on language exempting positions “of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character” from employment protections. Previous administrations and Congress always understood the language to apply only to a smaller number of positions traditionally filled by political appointees, Schedule C, not civil servants.
The civil service was once a good idea in theory to protect workers from politics and make sure the mail got sorted and the tariffs got collected. But fast forward to today and all sorts of employees, including many in organs like the National Security Council and the State Department, are now civil servants. Their protections against political interference have only grown stronger over the years, to the point where it is near impossible to fire one of them, even for cause. This leads to the legendary “lifetime jobs” most civil servants enjoy.
The problem is that some of those civil servants are in positions to oppose the president’s initiatives. They can block action relatively safely, protected as they are from being fired. This is what Trump wants to change in Term 2.0. He wants to be able to fire some of these servants at will. They will not go away easily. The terms are tough; Vivek has vowed to cut 75 percent of the federal workforce. “This will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in government waste, which is a lot of people,” Elon said.
Elon and Vivek are not fighting alone.
Some in Congress are already thinking ahead, anticipating the push-back from the affected civil servants. The Stop Resistance Activities by Federal Employees Act (STRAFE) would penalize federal employees if they obstruct a lawful order from administration officials. It requires agencies to report alleged violations to the White House every six months. Representative August Pfluger’s (R-Texas) Act directs OPM to craft new mandatory training for senior federal employees on the penalties imposed if they were to oppose, obstruct or impede directives from the president, vice president or any other political appointee. “Career unelected bureaucrats cannot be allowed to undermine the agenda of any future president,” said Congressman Pfluger.”We must ensure that the network of federal employees that brazenly carried out resistance activities under the first Trump Administration is not unleashed again.” The STRAFE Act is designed to mitigate resistance within federal agencies, ensuring a more cooperative and compliant federal workforce.
STRAFE has four components: 1) training for federal employees clearly outlining prohibited activities intended to obstruct or undermine the directives of the sitting administration; 2) penalties, on par with Hatch Act violations, for federal employees who engage in resistance activities (civil penalties can reach $1,000); 3) an external complaint reporting process, bypassing the traditional Inspector General channels within agencies, to ensure a more transparent system and 4) periodic reports from each federal agency to the Executive Office of the President, providing updates on complaints and status of actions taken against those engaging in resistance activities.
Needless to say, civil service advocacy groups oppose the STRAFE Act, saying STRAFE and Schedule F are just veiled efforts to politicize the federal workforce. “The election of Donald Trump as the next president of the United States is not the result our union was hoping for,” said Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees. Matt Biggs, national president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers said “it feels different—in 2016, he was still something of an unknown. Now we have Trump’s first term anti-union executive orders and Schedule F on top of that, and we have Project 2025, the blueprint of exactly what they’re going to do. So it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out exactly what they have planned. As a union that represents federal employees, we have to prepare to defend our members.”
Game on, Elon and Vivek.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
What’s Changed?
Things don’t often change overnight. Change tends to happen slowly, then fast, in small increments and then big jumps, but rarely does one night matter that much. So it is with the election; American did not change the night it re-elected Donald Trump president but the election of Donald Trump did mark a significant change in America.
There are some quick and easy changes to note. Most polling shops should just close up, they are worthless. The election the polls told us would be down to a skin of our teeth tie ended up a solid blowout, with Republicans taking the presidency, the Senate, and (likely) the House. Polls are seemingly unable, now, after three presidential elections, to dig into the thoughts of Republicans in general and shy Trump voters in the specific. Whatever it is, whatever methodology is challenged by these voters, the polls are of little value. It’s a joke now to remember CNN the night before the election touting some “solid gold” poll showing Trump would lose Iowa.
Identity politics seems to have run its course. Kamala did not run heavily on her multiple identities as a BlackAsianWoman except until near the end, where she switched to her Sunday church accent (it was ripe for an SNL parody except SNL was fully onboard the Harris campaign bus and not willing to risk insulting anyone with an “edgy” parody) and dragged out a tired-looking Barack and a boyish-looking Michele to chew out black dudes for not voting for Kamala (as if being chewed out was a good election strategy.) There was barely a flamboyant gay or trans person in sight on Kamala’s team, unlike the showpiece drag queens Biden attached to himself last round — remember the guy in the red dress with the bright red lipstick and shaved head? And in the end America elected an old, wealthy, white Republican, Semi-Macho, Man. Read the room, Dems.
There’ll be changes in the bureaucracy of Washington, either via Elon Musk, RFK, Jr., or the use of Schedule F. Trump will again fill any Supreme Court vacancies, this time with a Republican Senate unlikely to challenge his choice in confirmation hearings. As in Term One, this may prove to be one of Trump’s most transformational accomplishments.
It’s doubtful the MSM learned anything from its work on 2024, given it did not learn much from its failures in 2016 and 2020, so change is unlikely. Across the mini-spectrum from CNN to The Atlantic, the MSM unabashedly promoted Kamala Harris at every chance, and bashed Trump whenever possible. All pretext was discarded, right down to dear SNL, who gave Kamala free, puffy air time the weekend before the election, a move so grotesquely out of line that parent network NBC was forced by FCC pressure to hand over two minutes of expensive commercial time to Trump to balance things out ahead of a spanking. Even as they were reporting Trump’s victory, CNN and MSNBC kept injecting little digs about him being a fascist and all that. In its obituary for the 2024 campaign, the New York Times wrote “for the first time in history, Americans have elected a convicted criminal as president. They handed power back to a leader who tried to overturn a previous election, called for the ‘termination’ of the Constitution to reclaim his office, aspired to be a dictator on Day 1 and vowed to exact ‘retribution’ against his adversaries.” They still don’t get it.
The media and Democrats face a forced change of view over January 6. The events of that day never mattered much, despite efforts by the media/Dem establishment to replay things in every format possible. “The real America becomes Trump’s America,” said Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at New York University. “Frankly, the world will say if this man wasn’t disqualified by Jan. 6, which was incredibly influential around the world, then this is not the America that we knew.” Indeed, it was not the America they knew; it was an America more concerned about food prices and interest rates than settling political mud fights. The results of November 5 should be seen, among other things, as a referendum on things like J6. They never mattered except to some elites and their media. Can we hope never to speak of them again?
The election should hopefully change the view of those elites toward the more than half of America who voted for Trump. Unlike what is believed inside the Beltway, the election vindicates Trump’s argument Washington has grown out of touch, that America is a country weary of war, crazed immigration, and political correctness. Can we as a nation now stop being offended so readily and stop calling everything in turn racist or perhaps the new Trump magic word no one understands, fascist? Does every discussion need to include “but what about the trans people?” Maybe they can take care of themselves for awhile. “The Trump presidency speaks to the depth of the marginalization felt by those who believe they have been in the cultural wilderness for too long and their faith in the one person who has given voice to their frustration and his ability to center them in American life,” said Melody Barnes, the executive director of the Karsh Institute of Democracy.
Elections do indeed matter. The Democrats tried to defeat Donald Trump in ever way possible — by any means necessary — before the election. They impeached him twice, indicted him 88 times, and attempted to murder him twice. Despite efforts to force him off the ballot in multiple states, he stayed on the ballots, aided by a judicial system that in part had not fully drunk the Kool Aid.
One of the most significant things to have changed, or that we now acknowledge as changed, having had the MRI of an election with a clear outcome, is the permanence of Trumpism. There’ll be books and dissertations defining it, but it is clear whatever it is that Trump is, it is a large part of the American body politic now. Not only did Trump capture the usual red states, he flipped some blues and even in areas where he did not win, racked up high scores, 40 percent or more. The polls obviously missed all this, but the reality is there are a lot of Trump supporters –a mandate for change — and it even looks like he won the popular vote.
Trump is indeed about divisions in America, but more about understanding, acknowledging, and profiting from them than creating them himself. He is unlikely to know how to heal them; it is something it is time to learn to live with and govern over, not simply wipe away half the electorate as garbage or deplorables. They are us. There is little need to worry about Trump seeking retribution or misusing the military; much of that was theater, off-the-cuff remarks or attempts to rile up the crowds. Look to his first term and past the crying around J6 and you’ll see how he’ll govern in round two. And get used to it, because Trumpism is now the Republican party platform. The half-assed attempts to seize control of the party by the Never Trumpers and the neocons failed completely. With J.D. Vance as the candidate in 2028, the Trump legacy will dominate modern American politics well beyond that of Reagan. 2016 wasn’t a fluke, 2020 was.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Why Kamala Harris Lost
This was an angry election; none of that “which candidate would you rather have a beer with” stuff here. Trump is an angry man representing angry constituents. Harris was angry things were not going her way and constantly expressed the Hillary-esque idea of “how could I possibly be losing to a guy like Trump?” Both sides prioritized personal attacks over policy. At times it felt like elementary school playground stuff, name calling, but in the end it was much more serious than that. Harris lost because she tried to make “Trump is a fascist” into her closing argument and no one was listening anymore. The girl had truly cried wolf for the last time.
Now to be fair Harris’ fate is also because she is wholly unqualified for the toughest job in the world, having distinguished herself as Vice President of Nothing. She was an empty suit and kept showing it. A candidate created whole from the womb by the media with a past that supposedly did not matter and a future as vague as her recollections of that past. As the saying goes, she had one job — the border — and made a royal mess out of doing nothing about the many problems there to the point where thousands of migrants (we use the word as a generic term because no one in the Harris house cared whether they were legal, illegal, asylees, protected peoples or whatever witches’ brew our immigration system could cook up) poured in.
Harris did nothing of substance as VP; she made matters worse by having no real plans or polices for her presidency but to give away money. Softball questions from the ever-so compliant MSM were met with ever-vaguer answers, bits of biography, and then some nasty remark about Trump. It was Orange Man Bad all over, and the electorate had had enough. Trump’s shortcomings were baked in after what seems like an eternity of campaigning, never mind years in the White House itself. The “Never Trumpers” had had their day four years ago. Most Americans had taken Trump’s measure, for good or ill. By contrast, many Americans remained unsure who Harris was and what she stood for. In the background, Biden’s inflation and the fastest rise in interest rates since the early 1980s nagged. And working people worry much more about payday than they do J6.
J6 was an embarrassing day for America but given a) it had no chance of making Trump the election winner and b) two weeks later, with not much in between, Biden was inaugurated. It was all about a day of rage, an angry expression of an unfavorable situation not unlike the BLM protests one summer that burned down pharmacies and convenience stores but accomplished little more. The system worked. The riot was put down. Congress, including Republicans, reassembled and certified Biden as the next president. Rage is not insurrection and while the People seemed to have figured this out by election day 2024, Harris and her ilk never did. It made Harris seem uninformed and out of touch, desperate enough to get elected as to cry the sky is falling over and over. It was tactic that did not work in 2016, was not decisive in 2020, and had little air left in it for 2024 except for the MSM and the Harris campaign, basically one in the same anyway.
Still, some of it might have stuck had it not come on the heels of the seemingly endless and seemingly pointless lawfare campaign. Mollie Hemingway of Fox News wrote “This lawfare against Donald Trump has been their beginning argument, middle argument, and ending argument. It obviously has backfired completely. The whole goal was to make sure that Donald Trump would be imprisoned, bankrupted, so discouraged, so distracted by being off the campaign trail dealing with these various examples of lawfare from Democrat prosecutors at the federal and state and local level, that he wouldn’t win. Well, he’s about to win, most likely, and it is a stunning rejection by the American people of that lawfare campaign.” “Should Trump defy history and return to the White House as a convicted felon, he will send a message to the world that elections don’t matter,” added the Daily Beast, quite unaware how democracy and elections work.
There were other factors. History may regard 2024 as a peak for gender-based politics, wrote the Wall Street Journal: “Mr. Trump’s all-out appeal to a controversial model of masculinity that emphasizes toughness and strength is mobilizing hard-to-reach men, including members of racial and ethnic minorities. This prospect obviously worried the Harris campaign, which rushed out an agenda for black men.”
The media has so little credibility left its endless formal and informal endorsement of Harris not only did not matter but was tiresome. So desperate for an October surprise, they beclowned themselves with stories like this. The Atlantic had published a similar “Hail Mary” story in September 2020 citing anonymous sources claiming Trump canceled a 2018 visit to a French cemetery where American troops are buried, declaring that they were “suckers” and “losers.” The credibility of that story has also been refuted, with former national security adviser John Bolton denying Trump uttered these words and asserting the former president did not visit the cemetery for reasons related to weather and security. So why not try a failed move again?
And Liz Cheney — in what alternate universe did it seem like a good idea to bring in the Cheney family to help support a Democrat with progressive followers? Dick Cheney is personally responsible for the deaths of millions and Liz does not believe in abortion. Where are the Democratic votes in that steaming pile of war-mongering neoconism?
But the worst was saved for last, a Harris campaign closing argument based on a coordinated effort to proclaim Trump is an actual fascist, a real-life Dr. Evil who seeks the presidency so that he can rule as a dictator, destroying the Constitution and the rule of law as he goes about his nefarious tasks. It is the ultimate expression of Trump Derangement Syndrome, the ultimate Orange Man Bad. And it is what the Harris campaign chose to run on in the campaign’s final days.
The coordinated fascist line began with Generals Kelly and Milley announcing Trump is a flat-out fascist who seeks to be a dictator. Kamala Harris called an “emergency” press conference to tell the world that he is the second coming of Adolf Hitler. “Donald Trump is out for unchecked power. He wants a military like Adolf Hitler had, who will be loyal to him, not our Constitution,” she said. “He is unhinged, unstable, and given a second term, there would be no one to stop him from pursuing his worst impulses.” “He’s Talking Like Hitler’,” said The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, who warned Trump wants ‘absolute power’ in his second term. She also spoke about the similarities between Trump’s rhetoric and what she found in her research from the Stasi archives of East Germany’s secret police. “Trump is Hitler,” claimed James Carville. “Donald Trump’s got this big rally going at Madison Square Garden. There’s a direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the 1930s at Madison Square Garden,” Tim Walz said during a campaign stop. Other Democrats such as Hillary Clinton made similar comparisons. Liz Cheney declared with authority either you vote for Harris, or this “may well be the last real vote you ever get to cast.” Whoopi Goldberg even explained how Trump is committed to being a dictator who will “put you people away… take all the journalists… take all the gay folks… move you all around and disappear you.” The October Surprise was the Dems ran out of ideas and could only fling around the “F” word. So much for the convention-era Harris’ promise of joy.
The public did not buy it. When asked whether Trump or Harris “would do a better job” of “defending against threats to democracy,” 43 percent picked Trump while 40 percent chose Harris. This was the same result when Biden was the nominee. While over half said that threats to democracy were important to them, the voters trusted Trump (44 percent) more than Biden (33 percent) in protecting democracy. Voters, featured on Mark Halperin’s 2WAY platform, commented Harris’ Hitler remarks were off-putting or unlikely to help her win the November election, while none raised their hands when Halperin asked if the vice president should be campaigning on this issue.
Most damning of all, Harris’ Hitler remarks were called out by an actual Holocaust survivor. In a powerful video clip circulating on social media, Jerry Wartski, a Holocaust survivor, blasted Harris and her fellow Dems for comparing Trump to Hitler and his supporters to Nazis. “Adolf Hitler invaded Poland when I was nine years old. He murdered my parents and most of our family. I know more about Hitler than Kamala will ever know in a thousand lifetimes,” he stated. “For Harris to accuse President Trump of being like Hitler is the worst thing I’ve ever heard in my 75 years living in the United States.”
When your campaign is based on insulting the memories of actual Holocaust survivors for political gain, your campaign has run out of gas. Kamala Harris ended up where she did most of all because she had no real connection to the American people. She was a manufactured entity, full of catchphrases at first, paranoid, bitter insults at the last. Her disappearance from public life will not be missed.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Why Vote Trump?
A number of my friends and family members are surprised at my decision to support Donald Trump for president. Some others, quiet Trump voters themselves, seem even more surprised I am willing to do so publicly. I am not a Republican per se, having nonvoted many times, voted Democrat in some elections, and supporting issues across the spectrum, but this election seems clear.
I keep a careful household budget and know exactly how much more food, gas, and minor luxuries such as a meal out have cost me over the past three years. I can see to the dollar what inflation has cost me (and that it is real) and know this wasn’t the case under Trump. The economy under Trump had ups and downs, largely due to Covid, but I fail to see anything on that scale driving Biden-Harris’ inflation. I instead see massive spending, loan forgiveness, and other policies which seem to have an affect. I see Harris promising to give away vast sums of money to various groups (childcare, small businesses, home buyers, black entrepreneurs) which will be likely to promote inflation. And never mind me, Biden-Harris introduced their economic policies and massively increased spending without regard to their impact on low-income Americans for whom all this is survival-level stuff, not a headline. We can’t afford another four years of this.
It is easy to look up how many total migrants were allowed into the United States under Trump, legal green card recipients, gray zone humanitarian paroles and Temporary Protected Status people, and estimated straight-up illegals. Under Biden-Harris the latter categories so grossly outnumber the first it raises concern. I hear from old friends in Ohio how their small town schools and social welfare systems face severe challenges taking care of new migrants imposed on them by policy decisions made without consideration. I read the news to see how New York City is scrambling to find and pay for hotel rooms for newly-arriving migrants. The system is out of balance and it is because of very clear decisions made by Biden-Harris when they took office vis-a-vis the southern border in 2021, not the failure of some Trump-torpedoed immigration legislation years later. I want to vote for Trump so that we can control the border once again. I am not anti-immigration– I am the son of an immigrant, the spouse of another, and father-in-law to a third, all legally obtained — but fully in favor of a more orderly system which represents American needs instead of Biden-Harris campaign slogans. When you let people in by the millions — “most of whom are unvetted, most of whom you don’t know who they really are,” said JD Vance — you’re going to have problems with Venezuelan prison gangs I want my vote to help fix.
I vote on foreign policy issues perhaps more than the average person, and here my support for Trump is clear. Russia invaded Crimea under Obama, and invaded Ukraine under Biden-Harris, and did not invade anywhere under Trump. The Middle East was at relative peace during his term, with the Abraham Accords a positive sign then. Biden-Harris hands over a weakened global deterrence, with major wars in the heart of Europe and at hotspots in the Middle East, including Israel attacking on the ground inside southern Lebanon again for the first time since 2006. Iran is ever-closer to being a nuclear threshold state, and no one has talked to nuclear-armed and angry North Korea for four long years. “Results matter,” says Foreign Policy, “and the relative peace and prosperity that prevailed during Trump’s first term may make him the most effective U.S. foreign-policy president in the post-Cold War era.” I vote Trump in hopes of more of that, and less of the kind of lack of planning and missing thought demonstrated in the evacuation of Afghanistan.
I am not troubled by Trump’s interactions with Putin, Xi, and Kim Jong Un. One negotiates with one’s enemies for high stakes, not one’s friends (remember Reagan and Gorby?) It sickens me to see diplomacy thrown out the window under Biden-Harris in favor of two new Cold Wars (plus North Korea.)
This will not be the last election in a democratic United States. Trump is far from the perfect candidate, his flaws more obvious than most of his predecessors. But the perfect candidate is elusive, and so one must accept much of the good and realize the imperfect is baked in. Trump is a bore at times, crude in his language and demeaner, but he is not a dictator. For all the noise about J6, power transferred peacefully to Joe Biden days later. It was one bad afternoon, folks. Trump as a man who supposedly does not respect the rule of law used the law to fight off two impeachments and a multiple lawfare accusations. When he lost a case, he appealed, and did not call out any right wing militia to overpower the court which found him guilty. He spends a lot of money on lawyers for someone who does not respect the rule of law, and a lot of money on campaigning for someone hoping to become a dictator. Like Russiagate, this is outright propaganda and does not give me pause when voting. I do not vote scared.
JD Vance is capable of being president if need be. I doubt Tim Walz could step in; America is much bigger than the Minnesota he repeatedly called on for examples in the Vice Presidential debate. His court jester roleplay at rallies doesn’t help. He does not seem serious; stage-angry yes, but ready to take on the great issues of America, no.
I am weary of being called a fascist or racist because of my vote, and seeing good people disregarded as losers and garbage for their considered democratic choices. I think the Democratic party has veered way too far left for me to even consider my vote, apparently not that they’d want it.
I prefer to vote in the positive, for someone rather than against someone. But to spend a little time with Kamala Harris is to see she is not ready to be president. She was not really ready to be vice president, losing throughout the Democratic primaries and only being scooped up by Joe Biden as VP because she hit the right demographic buttons. Be fair — if she was such a catch why didn’t she win any primary races? And remember how during the first three years of the Biden administration the vibe was how useless a VP Kamala was proving to be. That was all swept away in the excitement of clearing the voting slipway of old man Joe and shoving someone young-ish forward. As with the vice presidency, Kamala did not earn her nomination to run for president, because she wasn’t qualified to do so.
In addition to her almost entirely blank slate of accomplishments over three years, Kamala has steadfastly refused to explain her policy positions in detail, or tell us her plans foreign policy-wise other then to continue what Biden has done in regards to Israel and Ukraine (such as take no serious action when 45 American citizens are killed by terrorists and 12 are taken hostage.) She brings no vision to the people and it is dead solid certain we can expect more of the same if she were to be elected (she even told us so on The View.) She is either trying to hide her real views on things or hide the fact that she doesn’t have real views; Harris is most likely an empty vessel waiting for the Deep State to tell her what to do, all appetite without substance. She lied to the American people about the mental health of the president and maliciously accused those who provided video evidence of his decline of sharing doctored videos. Thank goodness Biden likely at least fought back against the 25th Amendment in the Democratic coup against him.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Trump Foreign Policy, Term II
What will foreign policy be like in Trump’s Term II? The bar is low for Trump 47. It is not like the other guys have done much better.
Biden-Harris hand over a weakened global deterrence, with major wars in the heart of Europe and at hotspots in the Middle East, including Israel attacking on the ground inside southern Lebanon again for the first time since 2006. Iran is ever-closer to being a nuclear threshold state, and no one has talked to North Korea for four long years. American troops are on the ground in Israel.
There is increased Chinese provocation in Asia. Yet Joe Biden’s China policy is unnecessarily adversarial, impractical, and dangerous. China was artificially reimagined as an enemy-in-a-box as the wars of terror sputtered out. Biden envisions China as an autocratic foe for democracy to wage a global struggle against. “On my watch,” Joe said, “China will not achieve its goal to become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most powerful country in the world” as if they had asked. Biden went on to claim the world was at an inflection point to determine “whether or not democracy can function in the 21st century.” In Biden’s neo-Churchillian view, the U.S. and what the heck, the whole free world he believes he is president of, are in a death match with China for global hearts and minds.
Obama? His administration saw the successful Russian invasion of Crimea with little U.S. reaction, the naggingly continued presence of the U.S. military in the Middle East, including expansion of Americans fighting into Libya, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere. Despite this, the world suffered the rise of the Islamic State and chaotic immigration into Europe. The George W. Bush administration launched two full-on wars of choice without any strategy for victory, destroying American credibility in the wake of the devastating events of 9/11 it failed to stop. Millions died on all sides.
Trump on the other hand in the foreign policy realm saw a broader sharing of costs within NATO, albeit at the price of being falsely criticized to this day for threatening to abandon the alliance. The United States pulled most of its troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan as Trump took steps to make good on his campaign promise to wrap up the Neocons’ endless wars. More importantly, Trump did not initiate any new conflicts in the region, as had Clinton in Somalia, Obama and Bush, everywhere else. The Doha agreement with the Taliban provided an exit strategy for the U.S. from Afghanistan, however poorly executed by the Biden administration. The Abraham Accords, a series of normalization deals, lowered tensions in the Middle East, and the ISIS Caliphate was eliminated within Iraq, oddly with the mostly off-the-record help of the Iranians. For the first time in decades there was the ever-so-slight possibility of progress with North Korea as Trump became the first sitting president to meet with its leader (and was mocked for it by Democrats.)
“Results matter,” says Foreign Policy, “and the relative peace and prosperity that prevailed during Trump’s first term may make him the most effective U.S. foreign-policy president in the post-Cold War era.”
As for Term II, Trump makes clear wrapping up the war in Ukraine is a top priority, going as far as to promise to end it in the months between being reelected in November and Inauguration Day in January. While that timetable may not be possible, because among other things Citizen Trump would be violating the Logan Act by conducting diplomacy on behalf of the United States, it does make it crystal Trump will not continue to feed weapons and money into the meat grinder outside Kiev that seems to produce no positive results.
Whether he has some special relationship with Putin or not, Trump will radically change policy by opening rounds of diplomacy with Russia. Russia at this point appears ripe for discussions, seeing its efforts to make ground progress inside Ukraine going nowhere. Like with most inconclusive wars, the resulting “peace” agreement will be messy. Russia has no reason to quit the field empty handed and Ukraine will no doubt have to cede territory, maybe under the guise of a “Russian-controlled buffer zone” or some other clever excusing term. No one can today say what the cost to each side in men and dollars has been but it has been substantial and thus free from the nationalist pornography of the Biden administration about the “free people of Ukraine,” some sort of deal will be likely. A Republican-controlled Congress will make things move even quicker.
With China, Trump may choose to refine the struggle more as competition, primarily economic, between near-peers than WWIII-lite. Between 1991 and March 2020 Taiwan’s investment in China totaled $188.5 billion, more than China’s investment in the United States. In 2019, the value of cross-strait trade was $149.2 billion. China is Taiwan’s largest trading partner. “One country, two systems” has not only kept the peace for decades, it has proven darn profitable for all sides. As Deng Xiao Ping said of this type of modus vivendi, “who cares what color a cat is as long as it catches mice.” China might one day seek to buy Taiwan, but until then what incentive would it have to drop bombs on one of its best customers? They even invited Taiwan to the Beijing Olympics and participated alongside them in Paris.
There’s also the U.S. to consider, as any cross-strait violence would affect U.S.-China relations. The total Chinese investment in the U.S. economy is over $145 billion. U.S. investment in China passed $1 trillion. When Covid shut down world logistics, everyone learned the American economy is dependent on Chinese manufacturing and vice-versa. China is the second largest foreign holder of U.S. government debt. If something interfered with all that commerce, China would have to find a way to use unfinished iPhones as a food source. Occasional saber rattling aside, the Chinese are literally betting the house on America’s continued economic engagement, not war over some miserable little islands in the South China Sea.
Expect Trump, in recognition of the economic struggle, to maintain or expand the China tariffs he put into place and Joe Biden grew. America will continue to build out its navy in the Pacific via strategic cooperation with Japan, South Korea, Australia, and perhaps India (the U.S. Pacific Command relabeled itself the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command.) Indeed, if Trump really wanted to put pressure on China he would expand relations with India, the world’s largest democracy, across the board. In East Asia, Trump’s insistence on greater burden-sharing with South Korea and Japan did not, as Politico worried at the time, “push the bilateral relationships near the breaking point.” Instead, it worked.
It would not be surprising for Trump to try to restart a relationship with North Korea. His nascent efforts came very close to being Noble Peace Prize stuff, something clearly on Trump’s mind. Lessening the nuclear threat against Japan and South Korea, as well as diluting the value of North Korea as a buffer state for China in East Asia, are all goals worth pursuing. The North has demurred on testing nukes during the four “out years” of Biden (North Korea last tested a nuclear weapon in 2017) perhaps as a signal it is still willing to talk with a suitor should one have the guts to knock on the door.
Trump in moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem showed he is willing to make diplomatic moves against Tel Aviv’s desires, and he may do something similar with Gaza. Trump telegraphed his strategy to Netanyahu: do what you need to do in Gaza but get it done soon and declare your victory. It is hard to say what role the hostages, including American citizens, will play in all this other than as complicators. Biden has essentially and shamefully made believe there are no Americans involved to remove the U.S. from any actionable role. Trump could go another way, demanding behind closed doors the release of the American hostages will see him apply more pressure to Israel. If the hostages remain, he’ll unleash the IDF from American diplomatic pressure. There is rarely a “win-win” scenario in the Middle East in general and Israeli-Arab affairs in the specific, and this is another case of that.
Which leaves Iran, another strategic tender spot left substantively untouched by the Biden administration even as it expands its role in the region and influence globally. The Biden administration had hoped to seal a revised nuclear deal with Iran, says Foreign Policy, but when those negotiations failed early on, the West was left without a backup plan for stopping Iran’s nuclear program. Trump in 2018 pulled out of the nuclear agreement negotiated by the Obama administration, leaving a vacuum in policy that 47 needs to fill effectively in Term II. Trump’s Term I focused on isolating Iran, which he calls “the leading state sponsor of terrorism.” On the other hand, Trump, speaking to reporters in New York City, didn’t go into detail about what he, if reelected, would seek in any agreement but said that talks are necessary because of the threat posed by Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. “We have to make a deal, because the consequences are impossible. We have to make a deal.” Iran’s new reformist president says he, too, wants to rekindle the nuclear deal.
Failure on Iran will continue to drag the whole of the Middle East further down the path toward nuclear brinksmanship, a poor legacy for Term II. Trump would do well to remember the old diplomatic adage: if you don’t talk with your adversaries, you will certainly hear from them.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Three SCOTUS Cases to Watch in the New Term
While the new Supreme Court term does not promise anything as life-changing as overturning Roe v. Wade, several cases offer potential change to First Amendment rights, resolution of questions over transrights, and a Second Amendment case which can affect a large number of ghost gun owners.
First Amendment
The question of the First Amendment and porn rights is represented by Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, in which the court will consider a Texas law requiring porn websites to verify a user’s age. That 2023 Texas law requires viewers pass some sort of test showing they are over 18, and also requires porn websites to display health warnings about the psychological risks of adult material (which the porn industry disputes) to include “addiction, impaired development, and increased demand for prostitution and child exploitation.” Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Utah, and Virginia all have similar age verification laws.
The key point of contention will be whether or not the process “unduly burdens” legitimate adult porn users in pursuit of their First Amendment rights, or whether the state has a “compelling interest” in protecting children such as to require the age verification test. The Free Speech Coalition, representing the adult industry, argues “Of central relevance here, it requires every user, including adults, to submit personally identifying information to access sensitive, intimate content over a medium—the Internet—that poses unique security and privacy concerns,”
At first glance it appears to have all the impact of say clicking through a simple age verification box, but in fact the decision could have sweeping implications for First Amendment protections, looking into the broader question of whether the speech rights of adults outweigh potential harms to minors.
First Amendment protections have often cut across the liberal/conservative divide, and the court has generally ruled in favor of protecting children, and so is likely to uphold the Texas age verification test. Oral arguments have yet to be scheduled.
14th Amendment
The court will also look at transrights. In U.S. v. Skrmetti, the Supreme Court will consider a Tennessee law banning gender transition treatments for minors. The law prohibits health care providers from giving hormones or puberty blockers to “enable a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex.” Two transgender boys and one transgender girl are challenging the law, alongside the Biden-Harris Justice Department and a doctor, claiming it violates the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.
More than 20 states (affecting an estimated 100,000 trans adolescents and teenagers) passed laws halting minors’ access to puberty blockers, hormone therapy, or gender-affirming surgery, meaning the justices will in essence decide the constitutionality of gender-affirming care bans for minors using the Tennessee law as an example. The question of “equal protection” arises from the fact that the Tennessee law prohibits the hormones only for one purpose, gender transition, while allowing their use in other cases unrelated to transition. That suggests the law unconstitutionally discriminates on the basis of sex.
The Biden-Harris administration challenged Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care. “The laws are inflicting profound harms on transgender adolescents and their families by denying medical treatments that the affected adolescents, their parents, their doctors, and medical experts have all concluded are appropriate and necessary to treat a serious medical condition,” the Justice Department wrote in court filings.
Greg Germain, a law professor at Syracuse University, told Newsweek the case will be an interesting test for the Supreme Court. “Allowing the use of drugs for certain conditions and not others does not strike me as violating equal protection. But it’s the ultimate political hot potato these days,” he said. Oral arguments have yet to be scheduled.
Second Amendment
Garland v. VanDerStok, asks whether a kit for assembling a gun, or the sum of a set of parts capable of making a gun, is in fact a gun and thus subject to regulation, needing a serial number, its owner requiring a license and background check, etc. The court recently heard oral arguments in the case, a challenge to a regulation by the Biden-Harris Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) that places new requirements on previously untraceable “ghost guns” assembled by the buyer.
The untraceable gun parts are typically purchased online; sales surged until an April 2022 ATF rule (part of the Biden-Harris administration’s crack down on ghost guns) amended the definition of a firearm to include self-assembly kits and collections of parts. It also stipulated partially assembled weapons that can easily be converted to full firearms must be registered as guns. Some of the “kits” are largely-assembled weapons, needing only a few holes drilled and lower receivers fitted to slides to function. A quick look online reveals a vibrant market for the goods. Some claim the full kits can be made into a functioning weapon by anyone who can handle an IKEA build; others say it is a very difficult job. If upheld by the court, all of these devices would need to be registered, doing away with ghost guns.
The justices seem inclined to OK Biden-Harris’ ghost gun rule via some creative examples.
“Is it the case that components that can easily be converted into something constitute that thing before they are converted as a matter of ordinary usage?” Justice Samuel Alito asked Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, who argued in favor of preserving the ghost gun rule. “I’m going to show you: Here’s a blank pad, and here’s a pen,” Alito said. “Is this a grocery list?”
“There are a lot of things you could use those products for to create something other than a grocery list,” Prelogar replied, prompting Alito to try another example.
“If I show you, I put out on a counter some eggs, some chopped up ham, some chopped up pepper and onions, is that a western omelet?” Alito asked.
Prelogar again said no, because even that collection of ingredients could be used to make something else, while the parts kits at issue in the case “have no other conceivable use” beyond making a firearm.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked “Would your answer change if you ordered it from Hello Fresh, and you got a kit, and it was like turkey chili, but all of the ingredients are in the kit?” Barrett asked.
“We would recognize that for what it is,” Prelogar responded. “It doesn’t stretch plain English to say I bought omelets at the store, if you bought all of the ingredients that were intended and designed to make them.” Prelogar did say the Hello Fresh example was a better comparison, since the kit is intended to be made into chili and nothing else.
More than base skepticism, Barrett’s rebuttal to Alito, says Politico, was “notable because she was one of two conservative justices who joined with the three liberal justices last year to allow the ghost gun rule to take effect despite lower-court rulings that put it on hold on the grounds that it exceeded the authority Congress granted to federal officials in the Gun Control Act of 1968.”
Justice Roberts joined in trying to understand.
“Just what is the purpose of selling a receiver without the holes drilled in it?” the chief justice asked.
“Well, just like some individuals enjoy, like, working on their car every weekend, some individuals want to construct their own firearm,” the attorney for the ghost gun industry responded.
“Well, I mean, drilling a hole or two, I would think, doesn’t give the same sort of reward that you get from working on your car on the weekends,” the chief retorted.
Also weighing on the justices’ minds were the number of crimes committed with ghost guns, with the ATF reporting a 1000% increase between 2017 and 2021. And thus “by the end of arguments, you could practically hear the 6–3 majority [in favor of registering ghost guns] clicking into place,” wrote Slate.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Can Trump Use Schedule F Declare War on the Federal Bureaucracy?
What is Schedule F and can Trump use it to declare war on the Federal bureaucracy, maybe parts of the Deep State itself?
In October 2020, during the first administration, Trump issued an executive order that would have stripped firing protections from civil servants. This effort is referred to as “Schedule F” because that was the name of the new employment category the executive order created (Schedules A-E already existed.) The administration claimed the authority to create Schedule F based on statutory language exempting certain positions “of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character” from employment protections. Previous administrations and Congress always understood the language in a gentlemanly way to apply only to a smaller number of positions traditionally filled by political appointees, Schedule C, not civil servants.
It all makes more sense if you understand what the Civil Service is in practical terms. Simply put, there are basically three categories of Federal government employees. There are political appointees, seven thousand of them, all listed in the “Plum Book,” who serve at the pleasure of the president (“at will”) and change with each administration. These might include the Secretary of State as well as the head of an obscure water board connected to some forgotten Federal dam project. They are handed out as patronage and/or to ensure the president has his own people in “key” jobs, people who will loyally support his agenda and initiatives. His team, serving until he fires them or a new president is elected.
Next up are employees who are not appointed and are not civil servants but who hold their ranks and positions from administration to administration. The most obvious bunch are the uniformed military; the president does not appoint new generals and corporals when he assumes office. This category also includes the State Department’s Foreign Service, the diplomats, who serve from administration to administration.
The largest category of Federal employees are the civil servants, the so-called rank and file of the government, literally two million of them, 60 percent of whom work for the Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security. Civil servants were created by the 150-year-old merit based civil service system, first established by the Pendleton Act of 1883, which ended the well-developed spoils and patronage system which proceeded it. Earlier formats of government were all appointees, leading to massive corruption in the hiring process and complete losers being appointed to what should have been key jobs. So the mail did not get sorted properly and the tariffs were not collected correctly except if by chance a competent person squeezed through the system. There was no way a president and his team could monitor employees down to the day-to-day level, either to ensure minimum competence or to protect them from arbitrary firing to clear the way for someone more important’s nephew.
Creating the Civil Service was a good idea in theory — protect the workers from politics, and the mail gets sorted and the tariffs get collected. But fast forward to today and all sorts of employees, including many in places like the National Security Council and the State Department, are now civil servants. Their protections against political interference have only grown stronger over the years to the point where it is near impossible to fire one of them, even for cause. This leads to the almost-apocryphal “lifetime jobs” most civil servants enjoy. The problem is that some of those civil servants are in positions “of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character” which might see them oppose the president’s plans and initiatives (think civilian Alexander Vindman types.) They can block action relatively safely, protected as they are from being fired. And nobody voted for them; most people cannot name one of them. This is what Trump wants to change. He wants to be able to fire some of these servants (perhaps part of the Deep State) at will. They would be “excepted service” employees under the new Schedule F. In addition to Trump’s first term nascent attempt, this has been tried before; an illicit effort by President Nixon to exert “political control” over the federal bureaucracy failed. Schedule F proponents seek to implement the proposal through legal means.
“Here’s my plan to dismantle the Deep State and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption once and for all, and corruption it is,” Trump said last year. “First, I will immediately re-issue my 2020 executive order restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. And I will wield that power very aggressively. Second, we will clean out all the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them.” The Republican party’s platform makes similar claims toward removing civil servants deemed resistant of the president’s policies — “We will hold accountable those who have misused the power of government to unjustly prosecute their political opponents. We will declassify government records, root out wrongdoers, and fire corrupt employees.” Independent of the Party and Trump, Project 2025 advocates for much of the same things, backed up by a database of some 20,000 people whom it feels might fill the newly-opened former Civil Service jobs. The Project is not kidding around as to its goal with Schedule F — the aim is “to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”
How many employees are we talking about out of the two million civil servants? A drop in the bucket. One Trump official who worked on Schedule F estimated it could apply to some 50,000 federal workers. Some Trump allies think it would not be necessary to fire anywhere near that many workers because firing a few would produce the desired “behavior change.” Other former Trump officials’ comments and actions led one professor to conclude that the 50,000 figure “is probably a floor rather than a ceiling,” according to GovExec.com.
One can imagine what opponents of Schedule F are saying. The plan would completely transform the way in which “accountability works in the federal government, but to be able to do it with the full consent of law in a way that the Nixon administration never had,” said Don Kettl, of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and cofounder of a group opposed to Schedule F. “It would remove all of the political, constitutional, and legal checks that the system current has. It’s worth thinking about how we might try to improve the responsiveness and accountability of the federal government, but is the fix an effort to try to politicize it?” The fear is Trump unleashed could scramble the federal government, opening needed positions and not filling them, or filling them with patrons and returning the system to its bad old days when the government’s business was just not getting done properly.
Former federal executives warn Schedule F and conversion of tens of thousands of federal employees into at-will political appointees could harm the nation’s security posture. Others say it will hurt Federal recruiting efforts. “This change would not just hinder government efficiency, it would also be disastrous for the American people, draining the federal government of institutional knowledge, expertise, and continuity. It would slow down services, make us less prepared for when disaster strikes, and erode public trust in government,” said chair Gary Peters (D-MICH) of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
The Biden administration took steps to try to make it harder for a future administration to reinstate Schedule F, including publishing new regulations barring federal employees from losing their civil service protections due to an involuntary job reclassification. These regulations will have to be rescinded, eliminating any chance of implementing Schedule F on Day One. “It would probably take at least two years to resolve the constitutional questions, which at that point, even if Schedule F loses, it would provide two years for the administration to establish a new pattern of practice,” said Kettl. But with a few breaks and given enough time, Schedule F is difficult but doable. And badly needed.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
John Kerry Says to End the First Amendment!
John Kerry, the former U.S. Naval officer, senator, secretary of state, and candidate for the presidency, who has taken the oath of allegiance to the Constitution many times now says “our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it [disinformation] out of existence.”
So finally a major Democrat says the quiet part out loud. Our freedom of speech has made it so easy for disinformation to flourish in the media biome that it is becoming impossible to “govern” the masses. Kerry explained at a World Economic Forum meeting “The dislike of and anguish over social media is just growing and growing. It is part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue. It’s really hard to govern today. You can’t — the referees we used to have to determine what is a fact and what isn’t a fact have kind of been eviscerated, to a certain degree. And people go and self select where they go for their news, for their information. And then you get into a vicious cycle… You know there’s a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities in order to guarantee that you’re going to have some accountability on facts, etc. But look, if people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick, and, you know, has an agenda and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.”
Kerry articulated what many Dems have only hinted at, abolishing the broad protections of the 1A to “clean up” disinformation and create a “better” democracy. It is Jefferson on bad drugs, Jefferson who saw the 1A creating an informed populace necessary for a democracy to flourish replaced by the exact opposite. Now, that populace can no longer be trusted to read ‘gooder, and must have “referees” to help keep it in line. In other words, government and private industry partnerships to police social media and other forms of information.
We’ve seen a test case of Kerry’s dream in the wild with pre-Musk Twitter. As Twitter became a more powerful player in social media and then as a source of news for many people in general, the company and the government worked together (see the Twitter Files; the same applies to Facebook and other social media giants) to censor information deemed detrimental to a gullible public. They deleted individual “bad” tweets, promoted “good” ones, and cleansed the environment of dissenting voices by suspending offending accounts. This of course was all done on the edges of the First Amendment, Twitter as a private entity being immune from the 1A and the government acting, well, like a dictator’s censor until they got caught.
The primary focus of all that censorship in contrivance of the 1A was Covid, where dissenting voices were stifled and what we now know to be government lies about masks and social distancing were promoted. The desire to prioritize public obedience over public health drove the censors. Similar processes kept Americans from initially reading the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop and shaped an election, Hillary Clinton’s email shenanigans, the entirety of Russian Hoax materials claiming Donald Trump was a sleeper agent and, earlier, lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq used to justify a decade of war and the deaths of millions. So while censorship is bad, censorship that directly deprives a democracy of information the way a choke hold deprives an innocent man of oxygen, is wicked. John Kerry thus already has a pretty good idea what a United States without the First Amendment might look like and he said what he said anyway.
What Kerry and his ilk really want already is a part of life in Great Britain, prior restraint of speech. The UK has no 1A, in fact, no constitution at all. In the U.S., the highest law of the land is the Constitution, in this case, the First Amendment of the Constitution. Any law or regulation passed by Congress must also pass the Constitutional test (which is what the Supreme Court does.) In Britain, Parliament is supreme and any Act passed there is interpreted and enforced directly by the courts. So Kerry cannot vote the 1A out of existence whereas in Britain Parliament can create any number of Acts that shape the landscape of free speech. One thing Parliament has enabled is prior restraint; it is possible for the British government to stop publication of something before it is published. In the case of governmental information the only criteria is when it is “in the national interest” to do so (this also gets into the fascinating tangle between the U.S. Espionage Act and the UK Official Secrets Act, a complexity beyond this article.)
The U.S. does not allow prior restraint under the 1A; 1A foes want it. The most significant hearing over all this was in 1971, when the late Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. No one had ever published such classified documents before, and reporters at the Times feared jail. A court ordered the Times to cease publication after initial excerpts were printed, the first time in U.S. history a federal judge censored a newspaper via prior restraint (albeit common in the UK.) In the end, the Supreme Court reversed the lower courts and handed down a victory for the First Amendment in New York Times Company v. United States. The Times won the Pulitzer Prize. Ever since media in the U.S. mostly published secrets as they found them.
Law professor Steve Vladeck points out “although the First Amendment separately protects the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press, the Supreme Court has long refused to give any separate substantive content to the Press Clause above and apart from the Speech Clause. The Supreme Court has never suggested that the First Amendment might protect a right to disclose national security information. Yes, the Pentagon Papers case rejected a government effort to enjoin publication, but several of the Justices in their separate opinions specifically suggested that the government could prosecute the New York Times and the Washington Post after publication, under the Espionage Act.” In Britain an entity could theoretically be punished with prior restraint and then again if what they ultimately printed was libelous (libel laws also differ greatly between the U.S. and the UK), for example. In the United States, however, even speech which may ultimately be punished in some way (for example, libelous speech) may not normally be subject to prior restraint.
We have seen what a world without the 1A looks like from an American perspective and it is not good. We are approaching a time when the freedom to speak will no longer exist independent of the content of speech. What you’re allowed to say could depend on government’s opinion. We have had a peek at what government will do, blocking important debate on issues that affect the health of every American, or which could sway an election in the case of Russiagate or the Hunter Biden laptop. There is a reason the Founders placed so much emphasis on free speech, leading to lessons as prominent a statesman as John Kerry, who now reimagines free speech as a liability to democracy, clearly forgets.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
For Next Time, Memo to Trump
If there is a next debate (you say no, but it depends on whether you’re ahead or behind in a month, and a fair choice of moderators being offered) it won’t be for a few weeks or so, leaving you, Trump, plenty of time to tidy up some of the missed opportunities from the first debate. Try some of these ideas. They’ll work on the trail, too.
For any of Kamala’s new programs under her “opportunity economy,” such as tax cuts for small businesses and a measly $25k for first-time home buyers (the average house costs $412k, so Kamala’s offer is only about half of the down payment. But try things in California where the average housing cost is $793k) punch back with “You’ve had three years, why haven’t you just done it?” and follow-up with “And how are you going to pay for that, with tax increases on the middle class?”
One of your most effective points in the first debate was in your closing statement, when you asked Kamala rhetorically why she did not initiate any of her special programs as Vice President. The question should next time be aimed directly at her, as it puts her in a real bind; either she can admit as VP she did very little and had power enough to do even less, or throw Joe under the bus and claim he stymied her initiatives. It is win-win for you. In addition, the question drives home the larger point of tying Kamala to the Biden administration. Harris needs badly to show something to the public to give them a reason to think she would be different than the last four years. She is desperate not to run as the pseudo-incumbent, all that “turn the page” and call for change stuff she borrows from Obama 2008, and you should be equally desperate to hold her to what has and has not taken place these last four years. Reminded the public the Biden-Harris administration created all the major issues Harris raised as problems (economy, immigration) during the debate.
On the economy, remind people food prices rose 5.3 percent under your administration while in Biden’s first three years food prices increased, conservatively, by 20.3 percent.
Almost 50 percent of Americans think the U.S. economy is in a worse state now than it was when Biden-Harris took office in January 2021. It’s true; the Census Bureau released an update earlier this month on income, poverty, and health insurance in the United States. Income-wise many Americans were still not quite better off than they were in the last pre-pandemic year, 2019, nor necessarily even than they were in 2020. In the latest Times/Siena poll, Harris trailed you by 13 points on the economy, the issue that matters most to voters. It’s one of the main reasons why she’s tied and not ahead of you in the race overall.
Create a simple app that calculates what groceries would have cost four years ago. People plug in their current register tape numbers and are told what a similar basket of goods would have cost under your administration. It actually looks like someone had once done most of the heavy lifting on this one already. One of your official Super PACs launched a website (now defunct) named “Biden-Mart” that let users compare Trump-era grocery prices to current costs under Joe Biden’s administration. Biden-Mart.com, published by the Make America Great Again Inc. PAC, featured an interactive grocery checklist encouraging users to “check off the items… to compile your weekly grocery list and see how much more expensive your bill has become under Joe Biden.” There were over two dozen common food staples to choose from, including coffee, dairy products, and a variety of different fruits and vegetables. For example, a two-pound bag of apples, two pounds of ground beef, seven lemons, one gallon of milk, and one pound of sugar and coffee each totaled $30.07 — a killer 57.11 percent increase from the $19.14 it cost during your administration. Egg prices remain 72 percent higher today than when Biden entered office in early 2021. Biden-Mart used data mostly from the United States Department of Agriculture so it should be relatively quick to reconstruct the app.
And build a separate app that calculates gas and mortgage costs. It will remind people during your first three years in office, food prices rose by 5.3 percent as wages soared past them at 12.7 percent growth. Wages have not kept up with food prices during Biden-Harris. It is one thing to talk about inflation as this percentage or that, quite another to reach into a voter’s pantry and hit them with a specific dollar amount. As the Harris-favoring New York Times wrote “Optimistic words and some admirable proposals aren’t enough to overcome the discontent and anger that a large majority of Americans feel about the economy.” Harris word-checks “freedom” with abandon, but never mentions freedom from debt, from living paycheck-to-paycheck because of inflationary practices under Biden-Harris. Harris, as vice president, cast the tie-breaking vote economists point to as the cause of inflation — the ironically named “Inflation Reduction Act.” Remind the people they deserve better.
The Biden-Harris administration admitted some 21 million aliens, dramatically more than under the Vietnam War evacuation and the Mariel Boatlift combined. Will you Kamala admit another 21 million under a Harris administration? Talk about what that number means; in 2021, there were around only 3.66 million live births in the United States.
Focus on narrative, personal stories about ordinary Americans unfairly burdened by unchecked migration. Never mind the dogs and cats, Springfield, Ohio, a semi-rural town of only some 60,000 people, ended up playing host to 15,000 Haitian immigrants. They overwhelmed the city’s medical and social services systems to the point where the governor had to send in state troopers and millions of dollars as a palliative. Still the poverty rate for the city is 22.7 percent, well-above the state average of 13.4 percent. Fatal car accidents in Springfield increased four-fold last year, due to a surge of Haitian migrants unfamiliar with U.S. driving rules.
Or the slaughterhouses and meat packing plants that employ migrant children. Talk about individual victims of migrant street crime in New York City, showing photos of a Midtown overtaken by homeless and drug users. The latter ties also in Harris’ time as a prosecutor and Attorney General in California where, same as in New York, many criminals who should have been taken off the street were given bail or simply released in the wake of “woke” law enforcement post-Floyd.
Whenever possible, follow Ronald Reagan, who at the close of his 1980 debate against President Jimmy Carter, asked simply “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” It is a rare American who will be able to answer unequivocally yes. The ones who say “no” are likely to be among middle-of-the-roaders who can swing your way in November.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Demonization of Opponents is a Death Warrant in America
In many Third World countries falling out of power means being declared an enemy of the people who needs to be done away. In some situations that means trumped up charges and made up evidence — lawfare — to mislabel the fallen leader as evil and justify the life sentence he receives. In other situations jail is not secure enough, such as when the fallen leader still has many supporters, and that means he must be killed. The murder can be a well-planned assassination, an “accident” or straight up up against the wall execution. It’s all necessary for the greater good, especially if the nation wants to claim higher goals at work, such as saving itself from a worse fate such as loss of “democracy.” Dictators in power become democracy advocates in word at least and dictators out of power become fascists, infidels, and enemies of the people.
Donald Trump is an enemy of democracy itself, says the Left, in writing and from the debate stage. It is then not surprising when people, often mentally ill enough to accept the base argument that someone who served four years as president and defeated multiple impeachment attempts without resorting to tanks on the Capitol lawn, and who has run through the electoral system for president three times, is not a believer in democracy. The would-be killers have seen lawfare fail. Of course it did, it was based on in one instance the manipulation of the justice system to relabel a payoff to a porn star as part of a legal Nondisclosure Agreement from a simple misdemeanor (if that) into 34 separate felonies. In another instance, lawfare was so weak an attempt on the candidate that a single woman’s vague testimony from decades earlier was enough to convict him, the fine enough to seriously bring him down to near bankruptcy, all enabled by a Covid-era legal maneuver to revitalize the charges long past their statue of limitations due date.
In other instances the lawfare was too thin a cloth to even hurt — Trump once faced 91 charges in four jurisdictions. Now he faces 12. He’s been convicted on the faux 34 ones noted above and seen 45 charges dismissed. Those left-over charges face their own challenges after the Supreme Court determined in July Trump has broad immunity from prosecution for actions undertaken while in office. Like in most Third World countries, the lawfare was executed by clumsy but politically loyal amateurs, relying on home turf advantage to overcome their weak cases. And speaking of democracy, lawfare to date has also been defeated (convictions alone don’t matter when the goal is political destruction) by some judges still willing to uphold the ideals of a fair system and dismiss unfair charges.
With lawfare essentially failing off the table, it is time to redemonize Trump to create a manifesto for the mentally ill American who will carry out the grim final round.
In an article subtitled “Donald Trump is warning that 2024 could be America’s last election,” The National Review alerts us if Trump wins America is pretty much done being a democracy. “If we don’t win on November 5, I think our country is going to cease to exist. It could be the last election we ever have,” Trump said out loud, so it could not be hyperbole, busting the chops of the mass media like a smart-aleck guy from Queens might do, or throwing red meat to his unwashed supporters like a wily candidate might do. And of course Trump lost in 2020 and democracy muddled on.
After that in The National Review you get the standard list of bad things Trump has said: “He has claimed that he wants to be a dictator, but only on ‘day one,’ and plans to install his legal allies at all levels of government. And his Cabinet? It’s sure to be full of ideologues, immigration hard-liners, and outright fascists. Even conservative judges claim he’ll shred the legal system… It might not be a stretch to suggest that Trump could plan another January 6–type event if he loses. After all, only months prior to the Capitol insurrection, he urged the Proud Boys to ‘stand back and stand by.'”
In a recent The New Republic, one writer imagined possible election outcomes, concluding “The election cycle either ends in chaos and violence, balkanization, or a descent into a modern theocratic fascist dystopia. Trump will… use every means available to achieve an America with no immigrants, no trans people, no Muslims, no abortion, no birth control, Russian-style ‘Don’t Say Gay laws,’ license to discriminate based on religion, and all government education funding going to religious schools. Blue states will try to resist this and invoke the same states’ rights and ‘dual sovereignty’ arguments, but it’s unlikely they will succeed due to conservative bias on the Supreme Court and the Trump administration’s willingness to blow off court rulings it doesn’t like. If Trump goes straight to a massacre via the Insurrection Act, civil war is on the table.” “Putin does what [Trump] would like to do,” Hillary Clinton has said. “Kill his opposition, imprison his opposition, drive journalists into exile, rule without any check or balance. That’s what Trump really wants.” In short, says the Washington Post, “a Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.”
There are a lot of grievances packed in there, triggers and dog whistles all.
And what politics of fear round-up would be complete without Trump’s misquoted out-of-context “Now if I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath for the whole—that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.” Somewhere after that comes a mention from the Left of how our system of bypassing the popular vote in favor of the Electoral College is undemocratic even if it has resulted in a democracy each and every time it has been used since the Founders created it.
An element of “Trump is Hitler” has always been missing, Trump’s own version of Mein Kampf. Hitler was famous for writing (from prison) exactly what he planned to do once he gained power. Now there is Project 2025, a document disavowed numerous times by Trump that pundits from the Left to include Kamala claim is Trump’s nefarious blueprint for a second term. Trump’s team did not write Project 2025, Trump has not cited it in his speeches, but it is stuck to him by the Left like tar.
And as a call to arms, Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, said democracies, with their strong protections for civil liberties and the rule of law, don’t drop dead of a heart attack. Instead, they die slowly, incrementally, poisoned at the roots by the fear and anger instilled by demagogues like Trump. It’s Trump’s own fault! Adam Kinzinger wrote on X “MAGA pretending they didn’t light this fire is gaslighting to the 100th power.” For those who need more intellectual backup to calling for murder, welcome Jonathan Chait, who wrote “Donald Trump Is a Threat to Democracy, and Saying So Is Not Incitement.” It’s OK, they seem to say, because Trump asked for it. He’s worth killing is the broader message. “I believe that more Americans have to be willing to endure what frankly is discomforting and to some extent kind of painful, to take him at his word and to be outraged by what he represents,” said Hillary Clinton. “We can’t go back and give this very dangerous man another chance to do harm to our country and the world.”
Unlike in the Third World there will be no hand-picked assassin here. There is also no conspiracy per se to assassinate Trump. Instead, the Left is certain that if they send out enough signals someone mentally ill enough in armed America will do what they want in their hearts done. It is the patriotic thing to do, like time travelers smiting baby Hitler. A jihad.
The Left is too coordinated in its words and actions to not know what it is doing. Trump knows it; during his debate with Harris he remarked that he took a bullet to the head for some of her remarks that he is anti-democratic. Trump’s would-be assassin knows it, claiming “democracy is on the ballot.” What happens next sadly seems to revolve around luck. It was a hair whisper away in Butler, Pennsylvania that that Trump rally did not end with a “back and to the left” blood and brain splattered scenario. It was luck a lone Secret Service agent spotted a gun barrel poking out of cover from the perimeter of the Mar-a-Lago golf course and fired to prevent the killer from getting off a round. Next time? In the face of so many sparks being thrown into tinder by the Left, how much more luck can Trump count on to see him through to Election Day?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Exploiting the Military Dead
We’ve reached the place in America where people can believe Trump taking a photo is more disgraceful than the Biden-Harris administration getting a son killed on a badly conceived final day in Saigon.
It began when Donald Trump was invited to attend a wreath-laying ceremony in honor of the 13 American service members who were killed as a result of the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan three years ago August. During the visit, the former president was asked to take pictures with the family of Staff Sergeant Darin Taylor Hoover—one of the service members killed in the 2021 suicide bombing at Abbey Gate outside the Kabul airport in Afghanistan—at his gravesite. Democrats then used that photo to attack Trump, with some claiming he broke federal law simply by being present, and that he had disrespected the dead simply by his presence.
Kamala Harris led the hand-wringing, saying “As Vice President, I have had the privilege of visiting Arlington National Cemetery several times. It is a solemn place; a place where we come together to honor American heroes who have made the ultimate sacrifice in service of this nation. It is not a place for politics. And yet, as was reported this week, Donald Trump’s team chose to film a video there, resulting in an altercation with cemetery staff. Let me be clear: the former president disrespected sacred ground, all for the sake of a political stunt.”
As for exploitation, turn next to pearl-clutching The New York Times, who sent a reporter to record the names of those buried near where the Trump photo alongside the 13 Gold Star families was taken and then find their families to seek an anti-Trump quote. As their way of honoring the dead, the Times called out Master Sgt. Andrew Marckesano, an eight-tour combat vet who died by suicide in 2020, and whose headstone inadvertently appeared in the photos of Trump with the Gold Star families. The Times tracked down sister Michele who said only “We hope that those visiting this sacred site understand that these were real people who sacrificed for our freedom and that they are honored and respected accordingly.” So much for reptilian journalism.
“When you take a photo of your loved one then other headstones are gonna be present as well,” Senator and veteran Tom Cotton (R-AR) said. “Frankly, I think it’s very disappointing that The New York Times went and found a family whose headstone was featured in that photograph of another Gold Star family and then went to them to try to embarrass the Gold Star families who wanted President Trump there.”
We’re sure the family was honored to have Master Sgt. Andrew Marckesano brought into all this by the Times, and was pleased the Times did not bother to talk about the epidemic of solder suicides which plague our best. Nope, Marckesano was only worth exploiting to the point where one of his relatives might backhandedly criticize Trump. He was used again by a heartless media strung out on TDS. Bonus: The New York Times scolding not just Trump, but all those who appeared in the picture taken in Section 60. That included several Gold Star family members.
Yet here is a photo of Joe Biden at Arlington with a grieving Gold Star relative, in Section 60, with plenty of names visible on adjacent headstones. No evidence The New York Times contacted any of their relatives. Is it no less exploitive and political? What was its intent if not to add to the propaganda and political noise that Joe Biden cares about the troops’ deaths? Joe Biden also used shots of Arlington National Cemetery and flag-draped caskets in a recent political ad. You can even see the names on the gravestones in the video with the caption reading “Donald Trump doesn’t know a damn thing about service to his country.” Most of the ad text is Biden “quoting” President Trump degrading military service based on unknown sources from debunked reporting by liberal tabloids. Here’s another. FYI: Joe Biden depended on the same kind of medical deferments Trump did to stay out of the military during the Vietnam war. Harris never served and her running mate misrepresented his National Guard experience.
Arlington National Cemetery is a difficult place to visit. On the one hand signs admonish visitors to show respect to the dead of so many wars while on the other hand hordes of sweat-drippy tourists race from one famous grave site to another to the Tomb of the Unknowns as if the place was the Disneyworld of Death. It is all solemn as a cheerleader, and yes, many photos are taken of headstones with names visible, the fallen men and women treated as props for selfies to show back home. And here we are outside the Tomb! Looks just like on the tee vee! is the next shot.
All this drives home the point Arlington exists for many purposes, many ends. But here is one rarely spoken of: it is a place for Commanders-in-Chief to confront the results of their decisions. They all made the pilgrimage at some point, the warmongers Bush and Obama, game faces on. This stands in for neither man ever sweating in body armor in the Iraqi summer sun, or wincing when a bullet flew too close, or watching someone now in Section 60 die in their lap.
Biden and Harris were not at Arlington to meet the 13 Gold Star families because they were afraid. They stood aside from those men and women as they stood aside from their decision to use those men and women in a terrible war which they now want us to forget. Biden in particular bears a heavy burden, having sponsored the war for eight years as Obama’s vice president and then continuing to do so under his own administration. Now, for Harris to rake Trump over the coals for posing for some photos instead of taking responsibility for the dead in the those photos tells you much about the woman, crying exploitation while shirking the responsibility of her own exploitation of those young lives.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Debate Questions for Kamala
Trump told the press he thought ABC should be “shut out” of hosting a debate, but then added that he and his team were still “thinking about” whether he should participate in the one with Kamala Harris scheduled for September 10, adding that Harris and her team “want to change the rules.” Specifically mentioned was a Harris demand microphones be kept on throughout the debate, allowing the candidates to interrupt one another and talk over each other’s answers. Trump wanted this for his debate with Biden, and did not get it, so it is unclear why he would object to it now. “I’d rather have it probably on,” Trump said. “But the agreement was that it would be the same as it was last time.”
But microphone on or muted, Donald Trump must meet Kamala Harris for the debate. It will be perhaps the only opportunity to press her to answer actual, unscripted questions about her plans and policies, and keep the whole thing from devolving into just traded insults.
Harris took a page out of Joe Biden’s 2020 basement campaign playbook to duck most media interviews far into her run for the White House. It is a curious strategy, locking out the media when they are so sympathetic and would likely toss her a few softball questions and leave it at that. Harris need only create the appearance of openness and cognitive thought on the issues of the day (welcome to The View) and take a brief step away from her TelePrompTer, to silence the few critics she has on this matter. The worry is because “almost all of her worst moments as vice president have come in live interviews,” as one analyst said. A single pabulum-plagued CNN chat with Tim Walz along as her emotional support animal does not move the needle.
The trick would be for Trump to be prepared with questions of his own for Harris, pointed, specific questions he could pose to her in the course of the debate, as a sort of replacement to the wishy-washy stuff the ABC hosts are likely to spoon out to her. Here are a few suggestions.
— A few weeks ago we passed the sad three year anniversary of America’s 2021 final withdrawal from Afghanistan. Some 13 Americans died in that operation, alongside countless Afghans and others. You have mentioned you were the last person in the room with President Biden when he approved the plans for the evacuation. What advice, specifically, did you give Joe? Did he take it? You said you were “comfortable” with the president’s decision and admired his courage for making the call at the time. In retrospect, what changes would you have made, for example, not limiting the evac to a single site as was done, allowing the Taliban to focus its own forces? As a follow-up, I was at the wreath-laying ceremony in August for those American killed that day. Why weren’t you? As a second follow-up, what specifically has been done in the past three years to bring out safely those Afghans who had risked their lives to assist us in that war but were left behind during the evacuation? How many have been brought to the U.S.? If you don’t know, why not?
— One more follow-up on Afghanistan. At a conference in Detroit for the National Guard Association of the United States, I (Trump) argued American’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan was a domino that led to global conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine. I stated “Caused by Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, the humiliation in Afghanistan set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world. It gave us Russia going into Ukraine. It gave us the October 7 attack on Israel, because it gave us lack of respect.” Is this true? Can you tell us your best answer of why Putin waited until I was out of office to invade Ukraine? He invaded Crimea under Obama and now Ukraine under Biden. Do you see the same pattern many Americans do in that timing?
— When did you first notice Joe Biden’s mental facilities starting to fade, and what did you do about it? Did you tell anyone? Discuss it with his doctor? Why not? Did you ever participate in a discussion about the 25th Amendment? When was that? You publicly took no position on Joe’s stepping down. Why not, as one of the people best suited to observe him and his decision-making up close?
— You never won any primaries. What qualifies you to have been appointed the Democratic candidate? Shouldn’t whoever was in second place coming out of the primaries have been given consideration? Please answer using the phrase “will of the people.”
— When I left office the price of a gallon of gas was $2.17. It is now about $3.40 under Biden-Harris. Why?
— You advocate for price controls, specifically on food items. How will you do this without putting most grocery stores out of business? Do you know what the average profit margin is for food stores? It’s 1.6 percent. The industry’s slowed same-store sales growth of only 2.1 percent last year was driven by Biden-Harris inflation. How much more can you cut? Google meanwhile enjoys a 26.77 percent margin. What are your plans to put a price cap on that? And again, what about gas prices? Plans?
— Almost 50 percent of Americans think the U.S. economy is in a worse state now than it was when Joe Biden took office in January 2021. Do you think they blame you, too, or do you consider most Americans too stupid to realize how good the economy actually is under your leadership? Bidenomics fanboy Paul Krugman actually went as far as writing in the Times, “Until recently I thought everyone — well, everyone following economic issues — knew this. There are two big questions right now about the U.S. economy,” says Krugman. “One is why it’s doing so well. The other is why so many Americans insist that it’s terrible.” Stupid voters, not keeping up with the Times.
— Back in 2019, Biden slammed my imposition of tariffs on $300 billion worth of Chinese imports. He said “Trump doesn’t get the basics. He thinks his tariffs are being paid by China. Any freshman econ student could tell you that the American people are paying his tariffs.” In 2020, while campaigning for the White House, Biden vowed to remove my tariffs if elected. Instead, he kept my tariffs in place and imposed $18 billion in new, additional tariffs on China. Are you prepared to say now I was right?
— The previous two administrations averaged about 5,000 individually-selected cases per year, not per day as under Biden-Harris, crossing the southern border. Past uses of mass parole as under Biden-Harris include the one-time flood of migrants after the Vietnam War (340,000 people; 75 “Biden-Harris Border Days”) and the Mariel Boatlift (125,000; 27 “Biden-Harris Border Days”) from Cuba. Every administration, Republican and Democratic, used parole in emergencies; before Biden-Harris, it was never the cornerstone of an ongoing mass migration program. Parole used this way is part of the asylum process which is being abused daily on the southern border. Do you plan to continue the use of mass parole on this scale? Why? Can you even explain how immigration parole works alongside asylum claims?
— Which sanctuary city mayors have you spoken to personally? What did they tell you about the burden on their cities of these Biden-Harris immigration programs? Did you consult with any of them before unleashing this virtual invasion of migrants as to how they would deal with it all? Why not? If you have not yet spoken to these sanctuary city mayors about this, why not? I noticed the Democratic mayor of New York City was not invited to speak at your convention. Another “why” question, I suppose.
— My administration was criticized for putting “kids in cages,” actually a Clinton-era policy. Now, the Biden-Harris administration has lost track of more than 320,000 migrant children who crossed the border without parents, according to a Homeland Security Inspector General’s report released in August. These children — who were released into the U.S. to “qualified sponsors” — are now at risk of sex trafficking, forced labor, and other forms of exploitation. One federal whistleblower said that she believes many of these vulnerable kids could already be in the hands of criminals and traffickers. What is being done to track the welfare of these kids? It’ll be a helluva job, I tell you: some 291,000 migrant children who arrived as unaccompanied minors were never given a date to appear in immigration court, meaning there is no way to track their whereabouts. That’s in addition to the 32,000 children ICE released into the U.S. with hearing dates who then failed to show in court. You seem sympathetic; in 2021, I mean when you visited the southern border for the first and only time you said, “This issue cannot be reduced to a political issue. We’re talking about children, we’re talking about families, we are talking about suffering.”
— Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg expressed regret Facebook caved in to the Biden-Harris administration to censor content. Zuckerberg admitted in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan senior Biden administration officials “repeatedly pressured” Facebook teams to suppress Covid content the platform otherwise would not have restricted. Zuckerberg also conceded the platform should not have censored the Hunter Biden laptop story. The White House asked companies to censor specific individuals over vaccine-related speech, including Tucker Carlson and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Kamala, what was the purpose of this censorship? What were your administration’s goals, particularly with the Biden laptop story? How does it square with the First Amendment?
— When will you delineate the actions under Biden-Harris you stand behind and those which you are trying to run away from?
— If you suddenly find yourself unemployed in January 2025, what job prospects are you considering?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Biden Impeachment Plan Has the Meat, Fizzles Nonetheless
House Republicans released a little-noticed 291-page impeachment report that should have exploded over the Democratic National Convention like an October Surprise, but in the end fizzled like a wet July 4th sparkler. The facts are there, largely thanks to Hunter’s laptop, but the drive to impeach a lame lame duck president seems to have lost its moment. The depth of the report and the impeachable offenses it delineates does add some interesting background as to why Joe Biden might have dropped out of the presidential race, however. It looks like he ducked a helluva punch.
The impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden found he committed several “impeachable offenses,” according to a report released by the House Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means Committees. Republicans have been investigating Biden for over two years, subpoenaing witnesses and riffing through documents pertaining to his family business. And of course, that laptop of Hunter’s.
— The report shows Biden participated in a conspiracy to monetize his office of public trust to enrich himself and his family. Among other aspects of this conspiracy, the Biden family and their business associates received tens of millions of dollars from foreign interests by leading those interests to believe they would provide them “access to and influence with the Vice President.” (Many of these transactions were detailed previously by TAC.)
— As Vice President, Joe Biden attended dinners with his family’s foreign business partners and spoke to them by phone, often being placed on speakerphone by Hunter Biden. For example, in 2014, Vice President Biden attended a dinner for Hunter Biden with Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina, whose husband was the former mayor of Moscow. Following the dinner, Baturina wired $3.5 million to Rosemont Seneca Thornton, a front company created by Hunter Biden. Then, months later, as Hunter Biden and his business associates continued to solicit more money from Baturina, Vice President Biden participated in a phone call where he told Baturina, “you be good to my boy.” In April 2014, a Kazakhstani oligarch wired $142,300 — the exact price of Hunter Biden’s sportscar — to a bank account used by Hunter. Biden and his business associates leveraged the Vice President’s political power to obtain millions of dollars from a corrupt Romanian businessman. The report is chock full of such specific examples.
— Several witnesses testified Hunter Biden involved his father in business dealings with Romanian, Chinese, Kazakhstani, and Ukrainian companies, resulting in $27 million flowing to the Biden family. For example, around 2014, Hunter Biden explored a joint venture with Chinese businessman Henry Zhao and his company, Harvest Fund Management, “a $300 billion Chinese financial services company closely connected to the Chinese Communist Party.” When it appeared the deal was not going through, he called his father for assistance. Similarly, while Hunter Biden served on the board of directors of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma from 2014 to 2019, he utilized his father’s position to relieve pressure the company was under from a government investigation. In doing so, Vice President Biden changed U.S. policy in order to withhold a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee until Ukraine stopped the investigation into the company affiliated with Hunter Biden.
— After leaving office, Joe Biden and his family continued their financial relationships with corrupt Chinese businessmen who would send the Biden’s millions of dollars. Some of the money was laundered through one of Hunter’s front companies and returned “clean” in part to Chinese entities in the U.S.
— The Biden family “leveraged Joe’s positions of public trust” to obtain over $8 million in loans from Democratic benefactors. Millions of dollars in loans have not been repaid and the paperwork supporting many of the loans does not exist.
— Biden knowingly participated in this conspiracy. It is “inconceivable” Biden did not understand he was enriching his family by abusing his office.
— The evidence also establishes the Biden family went to “great lengths” to conceal the conspiracy. Foreign money was transmitted to the Biden’s through complicated financial transactions. The Biden family laundered funds through intermediate entities including Joe’s brother Jim and broke up large transactions into numerous smaller transactions. “Substantial efforts were made to hide Biden’s involvement in his family’s business activities,” the report stated. While Jim Biden claimed he gave this money to Joe Biden to repay personal loans, Jim did not provide any evidence to support this claim.
— The report concluded “President Biden’s participation in this conspiracy to enrich his family constitutes impeachable conduct. By monetizing the Vice Presidency for his family’s benefit, he abused his office of public trust, placing the welfare of his family ahead of the welfare of the United States. He also put foreign interests ahead of the interests of the American people… Joe Biden conspired to commit influence peddling and grift. In doing so, he abused his office and, by repeatedly lying about his abuse of office, has defrauded the United States to enrich his family. Not one of these transactions would have occurred, but for Joe Biden’s official position in the United States government. This pattern of conduct ensured his family—who provided no legitimate services—lived a lavish lifestyle. The evidence uncovered in the Committees’ impeachment inquiry reflects a family selling the ‘Biden brand’ around the world with President Biden—the ‘big guy’—swooping in to seal the deal on speaker phones or in private dinners.”
The House Republican report also cites Joe for illegally retaining classified documents at his home and other locations and states under Biden’s presidential tenure, the FBI and the Department of Justice afforded “special treatment” to Hunter Biden regarding his criminal investigations. The FBI and DOJ allegedly “slow-walked” the investigation, interfered with routine investigative procedures and allowed the statute of limitations to expire on the most serious felony charges to benefit Hunter. The White House refuted the allegations, and called the report a “failed stunt.”
This was all supposed to be a bombshell, dropping on the first day of the Democratic National Convention. The problem was it was no longer Joe Biden’s convention — he had been removed from running for president via a coup within the Democratic party, leaving the report to fall on deaf ears. But before one gets too cynical over the timing of this report, remember the circumstances surrounding the initial report on Hunter Biden’s laptop (the contents of which formed the backbone of these conclusions.)
In Hunter’s case the laptop emails were buried by the establishment media. This power arose from interplay between the American intelligence services and corporate-media figures, working for the benefit of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party since 2016. That interplay came to maturity in 2020.
As the New York Post broke the story that a laptop full of Hunter Biden’s files contained potential evidence of a pay-for-play scenario involving then-candidate Joe Biden just ahead of the presidential election, almost in real time more than 50 former senior intelligence officials signed a letter dutifully published by Politico claiming the emails “have all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The signers said their national-security experience made them “deeply suspicious the Russian government played a significant role in this case. If we are right this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.”
The letter was an act of evil brilliance. It played off prejudices cultivated during 2016 that the Russians manipulated American elections. In fact, most of the signatories — James Clapper and John Brennan among them — had played key roles in misdirecting public opinion around the DNC-server hack and later the whole of Russiagate. Among the establishment, the meme quickly became into “the laptop is fake.”
The report released by the House Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means Committees shows once and for all there was no fake, and that had the information on the laptop been looked into when it was first released on the cusp of the 2020 election, those election results would have been very different. As it is, Joe Biden and his son Hunter cheated the hangman. Joe is a lame duck, Hunter a forgotten tragic vaudeville act. The report, which should have set Washington on its ear, instead will fade into obscurity. Joe Biden not only cheated on his country and made millions, he got away with it all. Not a bad trade for giving up on an election he was sure to lose anyway.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Trump Again Proposes End of Birthright Citizenship
Candidate Donald Trump renewed his pledge to end a long-standing constitutional right, saying he would sign an executive order on day one ensuring children born to parents who do not have legal status will not be considered U.S. citizens, as they are now. “The United States is among the only countries in the world that says even if neither parent is a citizen or even lawfully in the country, their future children are automatic citizens the moment the parents trespass onto our soil,” Trump said. What are Trump’s chances of success with such an executive order?
Since the end of the Civil War, any child born in the U.S. (excluding the children of foreign diplomats, who are not born “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States”) is a citizen, the doctrine of jus soli. This right is written into the 14th Amendment to the Constitution (1868), which says “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” The language was included in the constitutional amendment enacted after the Civil War to ensure former slaves and their children were recognized as citizens.
The rule is simple: born in the U.S. equals for almost everyone citizenship. It does not matter if one or both parents is an illegal alien or in some other status, such as a tourist (see “birth tourism, below.) Changing the rule, as Trump again proposes (Trump pledged to end birthright citizenship when first running for president in 2015 and he raised it again in 2018 as chief executive. But he never issued an executive order), has apart from a nearly insurmountable challenge of needing to amend the Constitution if the Executive Order survives lower courts, also bothers the question of birthright citizenship having been subjected to legal tests dating back to the turn of last century. It is possible the Supreme Court would not even hear the new case as the law is so clear.
Chief among these tests was Wong Kim Ark v. United States (1898). Wong concerned a Chinese man born in the United States to two non-citizen parents. Under the 14th Amendment, he was granted American citizenship at birth. He left the U.S. and upon return was denied entry based on the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited Chinese citizens from entering. Wong fought the case to the Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor, declaring him and all subsequent children born in the U.S. (except diplomats) citizens regardless of their parents’ status. The later case of Plyler v. Doe (1982) eliminated any doubt over whether Wong applies to all aliens, even illegal aliens.
The Supreme Court’s majority concluded the phrase from the 14th Amendment “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” referred to being required to obey U.S. law; on this basis, they interpreted the language of the 14th Amendment in a way that granted U.S. citizenship to children born to foreigners. The dissenters argued being subject to the jurisdiction of the United States meant not also being subject to any foreign power, i.e., not being claimed as a citizen by another country via jus sanguinis (inheriting citizenship from a parent. That reading in the minority’s view would exclude “the children of foreigners, happening to be born to them while passing through the country.” The judgment was controversial from the start; an editorial published in the San Francisco Chronicle on March 30, 1898, expressed concern Wong “may have a wider effect upon the question of citizenship than the public supposes.” Specifically, that it might lead to citizenship and voting rights not only for Chinese but also Japanese and American Indians. The editorial suggested that “it may become necessary… to amend the Federal Constitution and definitely limit citizenship to whites and blacks.”
All of this could affect birth tourism. In his last administration, Trump issued an executive order outlawing B1/B2 tourist visas for birth tourism, where an alien comes to the U.S. specifically to give birth here and “create” an American citizen, an “anchor baby,” who will file for legal status for his parents at age 21. Prior to Trump’s E.O., traveling to the U.S. to give birth was fundamentally legal, although there are scattered cases of domestic authorities arresting operators of birth tourism agencies. Women abroad were often honest about their intentions when applying for visas and even show contracts with doctors and hospitals to prove they would not become public charges.
As it stands, visitors will be denied temporary visas if it’s found the “primary purpose” of their travel is to obtain citizenship for a child by giving birth in the United States. The rule does not apply to the 39 countries in the Visa Waiver Program, and State in implementing the E.O. forbids its visa officers from even asking in most cases if an applicant is pregnant, making the order hard to enforce. “This is the first recognition that it’s not OK to use a visitor visa for the purposes of ‘birth tourism,’ so it has a symbolic strength in that respect, at the same time it’s not a very effective way at going after the ‘birth tourism’ industry,” said an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. While the federal government does not specifically track birth tourism, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention annually publishes the number of known births in the U.S. to foreign women who reside overseas — around 10,000 such births every year for the past few years.
Though Project 2025 does not mention birthright citizenship, if Trump were to follow through on his plan to issue an executive order on day one, here’s how it might unfold. The Trump campaign said it would order the Social Security Administration to refuse to issue Social Security numbers to newborn children without proof of the parents’ immigration status. Trump would issue the same order to the State Department regarding passports. This would not require any action from Congress and because it would not grant/take away citizenship per se, would not directly rub against the 14th Amendment.
Currently, a U.S. birth certificate is all that is needed to obtain a Social Security number and passport in most cases. The State Department currently considers U.S.-born children of illegal aliens to be subject to U.S. jurisdiction, and thus to have citizenship at birth. The State Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual takes the position Wong settled this issue. This means the Trump E.O. would likely be challenged immediately in lower courts and because it does not directly address the 14th Amendment, would be ripe for the Supreme Court to use to revisit Wong indirectly if they wished to. The Court could also side with long precedent and refuse to even hear the case. The latter is the most likely outcome, and Trump’s third try at changing birthright citizenship would end just like his two earlier two.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Politics and Military Service
Tim Walz exaggerated his military rank and decided not to deploy to Iraq with the unit he once helped lead. He made up combat experience. JD Vance called him out, leaning back onto his own record as a Marine deployed to bloody Anbar province during the Iraq War and actual experience outside the wire. It’s the latest chapter in America’s long, confusing relationship between politics and military service.
The relationship extends back to the Founders, who chose an actual war hero as the first president. Fast-forward to the post-war era, and the White House was home to multiple veterans, including actual combat vets such as Harry Truman (WWI), Ike, and John F. Kennedy. Vietnam took its toll, with the emphasis shifting to those accused of lack of service, predominantly Bill Clinton who went to Britain for school to avoid the draft. Ironically, Clinton won against George H.W. Bush, a decorated veteran pilot of WWII.
But the real politics of service and holding office was again Vietnam-related, and again in the negative. John Kerry ran for president against George W. Bush (himself possessing a very dubious military service record, deploying domestically and avoiding the Gulf War in an Air National Guard role his powerful father helped him secure) presenting himself as a war hero for having served with valor as a Swift Boat captain in Vietnam. Kerry was awarded three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and a Bronze Star, which turned out to not be enough. A group calling themselves Swift Boat Veterans for Truth produced blindingly effective television ads claiming Kerry was a fraud, that he did not deserve the medals he won and the valor he claimed. Kerry tried remaining above the fray. He was, after all, a war hero, with the medals to prove it. His military record was defended by others, including Senator John McCain of Arizona, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam and one-time presidential candidate himself, who called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth “dishonest and dishonorable.” But the mud stuck to Kerry and contributed to his loss. “Swiftboating” became part of America’s political vocabulary.
Military service was again a campaign issue in 2016, when Donald Trump’s draft exemption for bone spurs was considered dubious and labeled draft dodging. He went on to win. Trump’s exemption was not revived in the media in 2020, however, when he faced off against Joe Biden. Joe received five student draft deferments during the Vietnam War draft, the same number as Trump and Dick Cheney, and in 1968, when his student status was wrapping up, he was medically reclassified as “not available” due to asthma as a teenager. Funny, despite having worked as a high school life guard and played sports. Some 60 percent of men in the Vietnam generation took active measures to qualify for a deferment, while up to 90 percent of National Guard enlistments (domestic service instead of Vietnam) were draft-motivated. Bernie Sanders applied for conscientious objector status until he aged out of the draft. Mitt Romney received both student and religious deferments to avoid Vietnam. Trump’s (Clinton’s, Cheney’s, Biden’s, Bush’s, Sander’s, Romney’s, et al) story is “surprisingly typical of his generation,” wrote one historian. And in the end no Vietnam vet has been elected president, and three who dodged the draft were.
The Iraq/Afghan Wars cleansed America of Vietnam in many ways, at least as far as its view of the warriors went. In past presidential elections, Pete Buttigieg referred to himself “as the first veteran president since George H.W. Bush” and defended NFL national anthem protests by noting “Trump would get it if he had served.” He claims he “put his life on the line” for those rights. Meanwhile, former presidential candidate Seth Moulton was a commander in the initial company of Marines to enter Baghdad in 2003, returning for a total of four combat deployments. Tulsi Gabbard did two full tours in the Middle East, one inside Iraq. She volunteered to become the first state official to step down from public office to serve in a war zone, 10 years before Pete went to Afghanistan.
Current Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance served as a Marine in Iraq. Democrats criticized him for this, claiming in his role as a combat correspondent Vance was not “in combat” and thus has no right to be critical of others for their service, however far from the guns it might have been. The problem is that is not true. My own role in Iraq (I spent a year there with the State Department embedded with the 10th Mountain Division and others) was not dissimilar to Vance’s. I reported to the Embassy in Baghdad about what was happening around me based on personal experience, escorted journalists into the field, and visited towns and farms accompanying the Human Terrain teams, anthropologists hired to understand better the hearts and minds of the Iraqis. In each instance our missions were combat missions, designed to protect the people we escorted against the unknown factors we might encounter in the Sunni Triangle. More to the point, stationed at Forward Operating Bases as was Vance, I was mortared dozens of times, usually at night, a helluva a way to be shaken from sleep. To claim none of that is the equivalent of real war experience and to claim none of that gives one the right to evaluate the experience of others who ask to be evaluated, means not understanding the Iraq War and all it had to offer.
Which brings us to Tim Walz. As reported by The American Conservative, “Walz enlisted in the Army National Guard at the age of 17. During the course of his service, he did not enter combat, although he did deploy for six months to Italy during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. By 2005, he had served for 24 years and achieved the rank of command sergeant major. In February of the same year, he filed paperwork to run for Congress in Minnesota.
“While some have claimed that Walz did not know about his battalion’s future deployment before his retirement—he retired some months before his unit was mobilized—in March 2005 his campaign released a press statement informing the public of his intention to continue his run for office despite a potential deployment to Iraq. The statement read, ‘As Command Sergeant Major I have a responsibility not only to ready my battalion for Iraq, but also to serve if called on. I don’t want to speculate on what shape my campaign will take if I am deployed, but I have no plans to drop out of the race.’
“In May 2005, Walz retired from the Army National Guard two months later as a master sergeant, not having held the position of command sergeant major for a sufficient period of time to qualify for retirement at that rank. In August, his battalion was mobilized for Iraq, another soldier taking Walz’s place as command sergeant major of the unit.”
Nothing to be ashamed of there except the lying. Walz never deployed into a combat zone, as he claimed in anti-gun ownership ads made as part of his gubernatorial campaign. Walz avoided service in Iraq by retiring. Walz retired a Master Sergeant, a lower rank than claimed at first in his campaign bio. Walz’ bio was later amended under criticism by JD Vance and others that it was inaccurate.
Accusing a 24-year veteran and former Master Sergeant of abandoning his troops is a serious insult in the veteran community. One influencer called for veterans to post pictures of themselves while deployed under the meme “Me not being Tim Walz.”
Walz like all veterans faced choices, made choices, and now must live with those choices and be judged by them in new contexts. Vance correctly debates the statement that any military service creates civics lessons one just can’t get any other way, and calls Walz out to account for his past statements. Vance did not go into the local VFW hall one hazy afternoon to start picking apart veterans’ tales of war. It is ignoble to disparage any veteran, especially by another veteran. Vance instead judged a man who stood up and asked to be judged on his record. Vance’s actions are themselves much of an act of courage these days when critical thought on military service and politics is the third rail of journalism.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Anti-Democratic Dem Manipulators Strike Again (and Again)
The Democrats continue to run to course — manipulating — most recently, Joe Biden out of the presidential race. Their history for the last decade has been one of manipulation and dirty tricks, false promises and anti-democratic actions. They campaign claiming Trump is out to destroy democracy when at the same time can’t seem to find enough anti-democratic ways to behave themselves.
Dirty tricks have long been a part of politics, but in the last decade the Democrats have turned the machine up to eleven. The year 2015 was a pivotal one in that it presented to the American people a massive plot to undermine a candidate for president based solely on direct lies. Russiagate was comprehensive in scope, touching not only on candidate Trump but also on his advisors and key staff. The plot was so outrageous — Trump was an actual Russian agent, a living Manchurian candidate — that it had to be true. The MSM certainly believed it. Indeed, the MSM’s hand-in-glove cooperation with the Democrats is another key feature of the last decades’ evil shenanigans. Had the Democrats had a straight-forward enough candidate to run against Trump (Hillary dragged way too much baggage around with her to beat a Trump in the process of creating a movement with MAGA, never mind winning an election.)
Clinton was not necessarily the only loser in 2016. “The seeds,” writes the New York Times, “of President Biden’s reaction to the Democratic Party’s 2024 crisis of confidence in him were planted in that manipulation to send her to the head of the ticket. It was in October 2015 when Biden, then vice president, announced in the White House Rose Garden that he would not run against Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination.” What was left unsaid was the manipulation applied to Biden to not take his case to the people but instead allow President Obama, Clinton and others in the Obama camp to force him to the sidelines. He was manipulated into not running to clear the path for Hillary, Bernie’s surprising showing not planned nor withstanding. He’d be dealt with by a similar process, leaving behind a very successful run only to be humiliated at the Convention as a has-been. The anti-democratic message to both men was clear: tonight ain’t your night, kid, the boys from Chicago got the fix in. Yer gonna have to take da’ dive.
Trump’s 2016 win was not the end of the Democrats’ manipulation and dirty tricks, simply the beginning of another phase. In addition to the remnants of the whole extended Russiagate plot, Trump faced down the Emoluments Clause, two impeachments, claims Trump gave away intelligence info to Putin in Helsinki hoax, the Putin is Trump’s spy handler hoax and Trump has been an agent since the 1980s hoax, and a bizarre celebrity Twitter contest about the best way to decapitate Trump (a full list here.) The intent was to try and drive Trump from office either indirectly by humiliating him or directly, by claiming he was mentally ill and the 25th Amendment needed to be invoked. If he could not be actually removed from office, the manipulations were hoped to neuter the president politically even as he still sat in the Oval Office. That they all failed was not for a lack of trying on the part of the Democrats.
If the 2024 presidential campaign started the day Trump left office in January 2021, so did the Democratic manipulation campaign against him, this round built on lawfare, the manipulation of actual laws to force Trump into court, convict him as a felon, maybe bankrupt him, certainly embarrass him, all in hopes of driving him from the race or at a minimum weaken his hold on large numbers of voters. Though several cases will likely drag on through the election, the cases concluded accomplished none of their goals. If anything, Trump the martyr is stronger as a candidate than ever before. What matters here is the ongoing pattern of dirty tricks and manipulations, not whether they succeed, or, like the impeachments and the trials, fail in their larger political purposes.
The 2020 election between Trump and Biden was close, so close that the appearance of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden which showed both Hunter and Joe tangled up in foreign money could have swung the race. Democrats again responded with a manipulation, another full-on falsehood, with 52 Deep State personnel writing an open letter claiming the laptop was likely Russian disinformation designed to discredit Biden and smear the tail end of the campaign. With MSM help as direct as canceling Twitter accounts which sought to tell the truth, to the usual prime time pundits barking in unison about the false nature of the laptop, what would have been a turning point in the campaign was squashed.
The next Manipulation Grande started in the 2020 campaign, hiding a very old and senile Joe Biden from voters so they did not know what kind of man they were actually voting for. In the 2020 campaign the broad excuse was Covid, relegating Biden to a campaign by TV out of his basement. It was actually a good gimmick for a weary nation, and no one suspected it was all flim-flam to hide Biden’s growing dementia. Once past the victorious 2020 campaign, the MSM was enlisted to hide Biden’s age-related dilemmas from the public through editing, selective camera angles, denials, and just plain old falsehoods. Biden literally tripped down the stairs of Air Force One several times without much comment from the pundits; why should they comment, they were in on the game, ignoring the real Biden unscripted at events all over the country.
In fighting for his political life, Biden cited the “fact” that he won the primaries for the 2024 election. Question is, who did people vote for, a spry, older person or a manipulated image of an unhealthy person? Biden cited many reasons for remaining in the race, placing particular emphasis on the argument that he was the choice of Democratic primary voters, and that it would be wrong to disregard their voice. “The voters of the Democratic Party have voted. They have chosen me to be the nominee of the party. Do we now just say this process didn’t matter? That the voters don’t have a say?” Biden wrote. “It was their decision to make. Not the press, not the pundits, not the big donors, not any selected group of individuals, no matter how well intentioned. The voters – and the voters alone – decide the nominee of the Democratic Party.” Driving the point home, Biden painted his stand as critical to his larger defense of American democracy. “How can we stand for democracy in our nation if we ignore it in our own party?” Then he did because he was told to do so by his master’s voice.
But some have questioned whether Democratic voters truly did place their trust in some version of Biden, or whether the choice was instead made for them. “We never had a real primary process. We never had a real debate in this country,” said one observer. “Everybody decided, for their own political reasons, that the best option was to shut down dissent, shut off choice, and force the public into this choice of an election they never wanted any part of.” That’s called manipulation.
What will happen to Kamala and what will be her cooked up October Surprise? And whither the party, likely to lose in 2024 despite a decade of failed manipulations devoted to winning? Will they play fair next round?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Biden’s Immigration Obsession Floods U.S. with Migrants, Kamala with Troubles
Immigration ranks as one of the top three issues affecting voter opinion (Biden’s age was number 1, immigration number 2, and inflation/economy in third place.) There’s little more Biden can do about number 1, and little he seems to want to do about number 3, but on immigration Joe will leave quite a record for Kamala Harris (assuming she’s the candidate) to drag into November.
The problem is Joe Biden was obsessed with immigration. He was obsessed with finding new ways to bring more migrants to the U.S. — some tricks resulted in tens of thousands of people entering, others just a few hundred. The numbers seem to matter less than the process. Such is obsession. Harris seems not to share his zeal, but inherits it as a legacy (and an electoral problem) just the same.
Harris’ problem began on the southern border, where practically concurrent with taking office, Joe threw open the doors. The Trump campaign is already releasing ads tying Harris to Biden’s policies there. The ad claims “If you ever wondered how Joe Biden could get the border so screwed up. Remember, he had help,” a narrator reads. “Here’s Biden appointing Kamala Harris to be his border czar to deal with illegal immigration. And here are a record number of illegal immigrants.”
Under the Obama administration the standard was about 1,000 attempted crossings a day. By the time the Trump administration ended, the U.S. was deporting more people than were illegally coming into the country. In less than a month under Biden, the number of people illegally coming into the country shot up to more than 6,000 per day. Even with Biden’s most recent executive order cutting back on immigration, up to 2,500 crossings are still allowed each day. For the past three years, Biden policy allowed nearly 6,000 asylum seekers to illegally cross the border daily, seven days a week. That number meant the southern border alone produced an average 1 million immigrants every 200-odd days, a significant number given otherwise only about 1 million legal green card–type immigrants are allowed into the U.S. each year.
Some 2.5 million joined the illegal population under Obama, actually slightly less than under George W. Bush. Biden broke those records in about his first 18 months in office with the wide-open southern border. More than 8 million migrants have entered the U.S. along the southern border since Biden took office in January 2021, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data. That Harris was ostensibly in charge of border affairs does not help her at all; it gives her some sort of ownership and limits any behind-the-scenes denials. She seems at minimum sympathetic; in 2021, she visited the southern border to say “This issue cannot be reduced to a political issue. We’re talking about children, we’re talking about families, we are talking about suffering.”
In mid-June Biden-Harris announced a new amnesty policy lifting the threat of deportation for tens of thousands of illegal aliens married to U.S. citizens. Biden (to be fair, it was likely almost 100 percent his idea) promoted the new program at a White House event to celebrate the Obama-era “dreamers” directive that offered deportation protections for young undocumented immigrants. The policy allows roughly 490,000 spouses of U.S. citizens an opportunity to apply for a “parole in place” program, which would shield them from deportations and offer work permits if they have lived in the country illegally for at least 10 years. The new policy also removes a legal barrier to allow qualifying immigrants to apply for permanent residency and eventually, U.S. citizenship. It’s a privilege previously reserved solely for spouses of U.S. military members. Those newly-eligible will have three years to apply for citizenship, in time for the 2028 elections if Harris were to get that far.
To invoke some Obama-love, Biden announced another policy on the 12th Anniversary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA; “Dreamers”) making recipients of the program eligible for visas, rather than the temporary work authorization they currently receive under the Obama executive order. Getting a visa potentially legalizes the DACAs and sets them up for a shot at permanent residence and then U.S. citizenship. This move could affect as many as 530,110 active DACA holders. This number does not include the pending applications that cannot be processed due to ongoing litigation. As of December 2023, estimates are that the eligible DACA population to be 1,161,000 were the program to resume in full under Harris.
One way to cut back on deportations is to hamstring the parts of the U.S. government involved in uncovering information that could lead to deportation, in this case with unaccompanied minors. The Department of Health and Human Services is no longer inquiring about the criminal histories of migrant teens in its care. A senior HHS official overseeing the program for solo child migrants told the House Judiciary Committee that even though agency officials contact the embassy of whichever country unaccompanied children hail from, they do not request any criminal records. They do verify date of birth, the child’s birth certificate, and whether the “child” is suspected of being an adult. The result is more than 400,000 have been released into the U.S. in the last few years, with 70 percent of that group aged 15 or older and male. This all raises grave concerns about Central and South American gang members taking up residence in the U.S. via this loophole. The gangs once established won’t be going away, something a President Harris would have to answer for.
There’s also some small scale stuff that help illustrate the whole. One U.S. Customs and Border Protection office in an unnamed airport did not have an effective process for detaining and removing inadmissible travelers. In a two year period CBP released at least 383 inadmissible travelers from custody; 44 percent of the travelers did not return for their removal flights and disappeared into the United States. Overnight detention requests for inadmissible travelers before removal flights are denied because of staffing and bed space limitations. In addition, CBP does not have enough overtime funds to pay officers to detain inadmissible travelers at the airport after operating hours. CBP also cited difficulties transferring inadmissible travelers to another airport because they must receive permission from the airline involved.
There’s also the so-called “Dark Brandon” scenario, where lame duck Biden, freed from election-related restraints, makes more immigration changes by executive order for Kamala to take responsibility for. Either way, Biden was a terrible president on immigration issues and some Democrat is going to have to pay for it.
Biden (and by extension, Harris) is appealing to a very small part of the base. Over two-thirds of Americans disapprove of his handling of the border. Even Hispanic voters are not swayed by Biden. A recent poll showed a large number of Hispanic people favor the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. The CBS News/YouGov poll found 53 percent of registered Hispanic voters favor the government starting “a new national program to deport all undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S. illegally,” a program already proposed by Donald Trump.
Candidate Harris faces the worst of two worlds. As the sitting Vice President she is expected to support Biden’s (unpopular) policies. As a Candidate she must drag those policies forward, and must limit ideas of her own or face calls of disloyalty from the party base. Indeed, a Politico article on policy differences between Biden and Harris failed to even mention immigration. Immigration is probably the most significant of those double-edged issues, but other divisive topics, from Ukraine to Gaza, suggest hers will not be an easy road.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The One About Biden’s Age
The big problem for Joe Biden is two problems: the first is about his age and ability to be president and the second, getting around the fact the White House, abetted by the MSM, has been lying for years ago about the first problem.
Some 85 percent of voters think Biden is too old to be president. That massive number of Americans must include almost everyone who has cared for an aging relative and knows the signs: mixed up words, forgotten details, the long, empty stares where conversation used to be. Joe Biden is a sick man by any of those standards. His public speaking is disjointed, punctuated by long pauses, lost trains of thought, and funny-not-funny “gaffes” like calling Ukraine’s Zelensky “President Putin” at the NATO summit. Whether is it Parkinson’s disease, early onset dementia or full-blown Alzheimer’s, Biden has something very serious wrong with him that leaves him incapable of doing the most difficult job in the world well. His debate performance and other stumbles are symbols of a deteriorating man, not signs of a bad night, with the real worry focused on the next four years, not the previous two weeks. Biden’s boast he faces a cognitive test every day is belied by the results of that test: endless war in the Ukraine with no path to victory, endless war in Gaza where the Israel mocks Biden’s red lines, and then the domestic issues of immigration and the economy, with intransient inflation eating away at paychecks. If those things are the test, Biden fails.
As with the Israelis, there is also the problem of Biden appearing weak on the world stage, where the results are harder to judge because the timelines for things like Chinese hegemony are so long and obtuse. Yet one wonders how seriously our adversaries (and friends) take a guy who comes across as having set aside solid foods a few months ago. Those abroad must be like those domestically, who wonder in any given setting which version of Joe they’ll get — the angry, Bad Uncle Joe of the State of the Union, the pretty normal scripted Good Uncle Joe, or the zombie-stare, off-script Joe, as seen in his debate with Donald Trump.
Like many who follow politics closely, I was not surprised by Biden’s debate performance, and on first glance thought it just mediocre, certainly not cause for a crisis. But that’s because I consume too much alternate media, and have seen the endless string of viral clips of Biden falling down the main stairs of Air Force One (and being reassigned to the shorter crew stairs in response.) I’ve seen the memes and loops of his many gaffes, and the awkwardly long pauses where Joe just drifts off when he is no longer in the spotlight or next to Jill. So the debate was little surprise to me. But for those whose media diet is slim, and whose images of Biden were relegated to highly edited MSM clips, they saw Biden in-the-real for the first time and it shocked the hell out of them. It was clear what so many have said before to little belief: the Emperor has no clothes on.
The last of which brings us to Biden Problem Two, the fact that the White House, Democratic Party and Biden himself have been, abetted by the MSM, lying to us for years about the condition of first Candidate Biden and then President Biden. We now can surmise the 2020 campaign from his basement by Biden, supposedly run that way because of Covid, was actually a subterfuge, a way to spoon feed good images and sound bites of Biden to the public and hide his ongoing condition. Clever propaganda, like Franklin Roosevelt appearing to “stand” at public events when in fact in private he was wheelchair-bound due to polio.
Biden’s problem is not with the undecided voters, it is with his Democratic base. How can they believe him after such malarkey? Indeed, it was only a week before the debate that the White House was claiming video of Biden wandering off and/or falling down was the result of nefarious editing and visual trickery (that line of argument seems to have dissipated quickly post-debate.) Now it is a dead solid accepted fact that Biden is senile, and Democrats are paralyzed. No one is listening to anything except questions about Biden’s ability and why this was hidden from the public.
You’ll hear no mea culpa from the MSM about remaining quiet over what they knew from their own close contact with the President, as they remained silent after lying about Russiagate and Hunter’s not-Russian laptop. They saw the real Joe Biden and instead of informing the American people, acted as agents of the Democratic party to help cover things up. In an era where everything about Trump is fair game and then some (if there’s no lead story today make one up!) the media was silent about Joe. Why will anyone believe them about anything Biden-related going forward? This is the same MSM which for four years of Trump bleated emptily about the 25th amendment and how Trump was unstable, unqualified, and mentally ill.
That leaves the Democrats in a dilly of a pickle. If they can’t force Biden to retire voluntarily, they — including Kamala — carry all of the baggage above with them into November, and likely lose to convicted felon Donald Trump, who looks put together in comparison. Trump was supposed to be the one a little crazy, but what happens when the Situation Room phone rings at 3 a.m. and Biden confuses Zelensky with Putin again? It appears the Democratic party, which has accused Trump of being anti-democracy, could end up running a candidate who never won a primary, removing the loser via some back room process as transparent as chocolate pudding. Remember all the moaning about the many political and Constitutional crisis Trump was to unleash? Here’s a real one.
And what of a potential second term for Biden? Second term presidents are lame ducks by definition, and Biden, lacking the confidence of his own party and own party Congressmen, is unlikely to get much done. Any trust built up over his first four years in office is now damaged by what may be seen as a betrayal. The calls for the 25th Amendment and for Biden to retire won’t stop once the election is over; you can count on Republicans and maybe even some Democrats to keep them alive throughout a second term.
Maybe it will be easier than that. Instead of a mediocre post-NATO press conference, perhaps Biden will really screw something up, soon, and make it easy for Dems to decide. And time is not on their side. It is wrong politically and morally to prolong Biden’s agony, and the party’s. Like a shelter dog who has bitten his handlers just one time too many, the party faces the decision on how best to put down Joe Biden.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The Real Problem with Biden’s Age
I was only a little surprised by Biden’s debate performance, and on first glance thought it just mediocre, certainly not cause for a crisis. But that’s because I consume too much alternate media, and had seen the endless string of viral clips of Biden falling down the main stairs of Air Force One (and being reassigned to the shorter crew stairs in response.) I’ve seen the memes and loops of his many gaffes, and the awkwardly long pauses where Joe just drifted off when he is no longer next to puppet master Jill to cue him. So the debate was little surprise to me. But for those whose media diet is slim, and whose images of Biden were relegated to highly edited MSM clips, many saw Biden in-the-real for the first time and it shocked the hell out of them. It was clear what many had said before to little belief: the Emperor had no clothes.
Some 85 percent of voters thought Biden was too frail to be president. That massive number of Americans must include almost everyone who has cared for an aging relative and knows the signs: mixed up words, forgotten details, the long, empty stares where conversation used to be. His debate performance and other stumbles were symbols of a deteriorating man, not signs of a bad night. Biden’s boast he faced a cognitive test every day was belied by the results: endless war in the Ukraine with no path to victory, endless war in Gaza where the Israel mocks Biden’s red lines, and the economy, with intransient inflation eating away at paychecks. Biden failed at the real meat of the job, which is not being discussed, never mind just the bad optics. His own stubbornness and the games played around him weakened America at home and left it exposed and vulnerable to forces abroad.
Which brings us to Biden Problem Two, actually a Kamala problem, the fact that the White House, Democratic Party and Joe himself have been, abetted by the MSM, lying to us for years about the condition of first Candidate Biden and then President Biden. We now can surmise the 2020 campaign from his basement by Biden, supposedly run that way because of Covid, was actually a subterfuge, a way to spoon feed good images and sound bites of Biden to the public and hide his ongoing condition. Clever propaganda, like Franklin Roosevelt appearing to “stand” at public events when in fact in private he was wheelchair-bound due to polio. The Wall Street Journal reports congressional leaders were worried about Biden’s mental state back in 2021. Democrats covered it up. That’s who Kamala is beholden to, leaving the Democratic base to consist of Pelosi, Schumer, and Jeffries.
Kamala’s problem is not with the undecided voters, it is with Democratic voters. How can they believe her after such malarkey? Indeed, it was only a week before the debate the White House was claiming video of Biden wandering off and/or falling down was the result of nefarious editing and visual trickery (that line of argument dissipated quickly post-debate.) Then it became a dead solid accepted fact that Biden was senile, and Democrats were paralyzed. No one listened to anything except questions about Biden’s ability. No one seemed to ask but likely thought about why this was hidden from the public. Kamala begins her campaign shouting into the wind “Believe me!” Why should anyone? Did she not see Biden’s deterioration and keep silent about it? Meanwhile, the Democratic party, which has accused Trump of being anti-democracy, is running a candidate who never won a primary, removing the loser via some back room process as transparent as chocolate pudding. Remember all the moaning about the many political and Constitutional crisis Trump was to unleash? Here’s a real one.
You’ll hear no mea culpa from the MSM about remaining quiet over what they knew from their own close contact with the President, as they remained silent after lying about Russiagate and Hunter’s not-Russian laptop. They saw the real Joe Biden and instead of informing the American people, acted as agents of the Democratic party to help cover things up. In an era where everything about Trump is fair game and then some (if there’s no lead story today make one up!) the media was silent about Joe. This is the same MSM which for four years of Trump bleated emptily about the 25th amendment and how Trump was unstable, unqualified, and mentally ill.
To make things worse, the MSM pivoted twice in a two week span, jumping on Biden to quit the race like school cafeteria bullies (Bill Maher called them “Mean Girls who smelled blood in the water”) and then to spew out funereal-like dirges about Biden the statesman when he did drop out (Biden clung to the Resolute desk like a Titanic survivor and then left office with the same grace he showed in Afghanistan.) It was almost as if someone was directing the whole affairs from afar. Maybe it was this guy — MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner admonished the home team corporate media to ramp up its negative coverage of Trump while not “ginning up” reasons to criticize the Vice President. Kirschner, on YouTube, urged the media to prioritize critical coverage of Trump while treating Harris better than it treated Biden following the June debate.
The so-called defenders of democracy abetted a cover-up and a coup in plain sight. Credibility? Why should anyone believe them about anything Kamala-related going forward?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Can the President Now Kill Americans?
Never mind the Supreme Court and immunity, he’s had the power to kill an American citizen since 2010.
Justice Sotomayor, in her dissent from the majority decison in Trump v. United States to grant the president immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts he commits while in office, wrote: “The long-term consequences of today’s decison are stark… The president of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, perhaps the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he will now be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team Six to assassinate a political rival? Immune.”
Picking up on Sotomayor’s fears, left-wing media and pundits fantasized about President Biden having Donald Trump and the conservative Supreme Court justices killed as an official act following SCOTUS’ presidential immunity decision. “If I was Biden I’d hurry up and have Trump murdered on the basis that he is a threat to America’s security,” a radio host wrote on X. Is that OK now, as he reasoned?
The biggest problem with willy-nilly assassinations is the Fifth Amendment, which provides for due process before an American is deprived by the government of life, liberty or property. Capital cases require a grand jury. So while Biden may claim immunity if ordering Trump’s murder, he can’t get around the unconstitutional nature and thus impeachability of his action, immunity or not. Right?
Where things start to get fuzzy is with the assassination thing and Seal Team Six. The Seals conduct targeted killings all the time, nailing a terrorist here and an insurgent there across the Mideast. Officially these are labeled as “catch or kill” missions but there seems to be very little catching. The bin Laden raid is one high-visibility example where the kill option was explicit and primary. Of course when the Seals are busy elsewhere, drone assassinations are always a presidential option, as in the case of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. None of these people are Americans with any Constitutional rights, and none were killed on American soil, so it all falls loosely under some category of acts of war or whatever. Which brings us to Anwar al Awlaki.
Al Awlaki and his 16-year-old son were American citizens assassinated via targeted drone attack in Yemen by the United States in autumn 2011. Al Awlaki had once been a friend of the American military, invited in the aftermath of 9/11 to speak and lunch at the Pentagon. A few years later, al Awlaki was connected by the same U.S. government to al Qaeda, apparently mostly as a propagandist who may or may not have taken on an online role in persuading other Westerners to join the cause.
In 2012 Attorney General Eric Holder said of the al Awlaki killing and the Fifth Amendment the “U.S. can lawfully target American citizens” and “that a careful and thorough executive branch review of the facts in a case amounts to ‘due process’ and that the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment protection against depriving a citizen of his or her life without due process of law does not mandate a ‘judicial process.’” It was unknown at the time, but Holder was referring to a secret white paper prepared by the Office of the Legal Counsel laying out the legal justification for the U.S. government to kill one of its own citizens extrajudicially, in apparent violation of the Fifth Amendment.
The white paper was finally released in 2014 and showed a convoluted legal process had been created to legalize the American citizen killings and thus render the president immune for having ordered them. The essential element for the kill to be legal, the document says, is “an informed, high level official of the U.S. government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States.” Capture must be found to be unfeasible, and the kill must follow the existing laws of war.
The rest of the justification simply flows from there in a perverse chain of logic: the president has the obligation to protect America, al Qaeda or its like are a threat, and being in al Qaeda is more relevant than whatever citizenship the target may hold or where he is located (“citizenship does not immunize the target.”) International borders and other nations’ sovereignty are not an issue if the U.S. determines the host nation is “unwilling or unable to suppress the threat posed by the individual targeted.” But what about that due process promised Americans in the Fifth Amendment?
The Fifth Amendment right to due process (and perhaps to a lesser extent, the Fourth Amendment right against unwarranted seizure, i.e., a life) are dismissed casually in the white paper by a claim the U.S. interest in “forestalling the threat of violence and death to other Americans that arises” trumps any constitutional rights for the individual. This is described as part of a Fifth Amendment “balancing process.”
The balancing process cited as conclusive enough to justify the extrajudicial killing of an American, according to the white paper, stems from of all things a 1976 Supreme Court case, Mathews v. Eldridge, where the Court held that individuals have a statutorily granted property right in Social Security benefits, that the termination of those benefits implicates due process, but that the termination of those benefits does not require a pre-termination hearing. The balance test for the Fifth Amendment to apply to murders as laid out in that case has three components [notes added]:
(1) The importance of the private interest affected. [In a kill case, the private interest is the life of an American citizen.]
(2) The risk of erroneous deprivation through the procedures used, and the probable value of any additional or substitute procedural safeguards. [In a kill case, since the American will be dead, it is impossible to ever “correct” the mistake. The Court held that “If the risk of error is minimal, then the need for additional procedures declines. If the risk is high then additional procedures would be merited.” So, with the potential of a recoverable error, less process is needed. The more serious a mistake might be if committed, the more (perhaps non-judicial) process needed.]
(3) The importance of the state interest involved and the burdens which any additional or substitute procedural safeguards would impose on the state. [According to the kill white paper, the idea that killing the American saves potentially thousands of other Americans lies is the state’s interest. The burden of the U.S. government to follow any procedural safeguards, such as a trial in absentia where the target could have his side presented by a lawyer, is not addressed in the kill white paper]
In short, the balancing test says that in some situations, the president can kill an American citizen extrajudicially. No need for Supreme Court-granted immunity, like in the Wizard of Oz he has always (at least since 2010) had the power.
“Where national security operations are at stake, due process takes into account the realities of combat,” then-Attorney General Eric Holder said. “Some have argued that the president is required to get permission from a federal court before taking action against a United States citizen who is a senior operational leader of al-Qaeda or associated forces. This is simply not accurate… our government has the clear authority to defend the United States with lethal force [and] our legal authority is not limited to the battlefields of Afghanistan.”
So can the president really kill an American, in America? There are no known test cases, but some very disturbing testimony by then-FBI Director Robert Mueller.
Mueller, appearing before a House subcommittee on whether the same criteria used to kill Americans abroad also would apply in the United States and whether the President retained the “historical” right to order such assassination on U.S. land, said that he simply did not know whether he could order an assassination of his own against an American here in the U.S. “I have to go back. Uh, I’m not certain whether that was addressed or not” and added “I’m going to defer that to others in the Department of Justice.”
Note that Mueller had the option of saying flat-out “No, no, the FBI can’t order an American killed in the U.S.” or maybe “No, even the President can’t order a hit on an American here in the U.S. where the full judicial system, Constitution, and other protections apply.” Mueller did not say those things. Instead, in 2012 under oath before Congress, the senior G-man of the United States, who to get his job had to swear an oath to uphold the Constitution, was so worried about perjury that he was unable to say whether or not the U.S. government can indeed kill one of its own citizens inside the United States without trial.
Immunity may have its dangers, but it is only a small part of the problem given the vast expansion of presidential capital power in the aftermath of 9/11.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
SCOTUS via Fischer Frees Trump from J6 Charges?
This is how lawfare works. The Supreme Court on June 28 likely exonerated 350 of 351 defendants, rebuking Biden’s Department of Justice for abusing an existing law to go after January 6 participants and turn them into felons. You wanna guess who the one last defendant still in trouble is?
Donald Trump remains charged with two counts of obstructing an official proceeding. At issue was part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (Title 18, Section 1512(c)(2)), which was enacted after the collapse of the energy giant Enron and contains a broad catchall provision that makes it a crime to corruptly obstruct, influence or impede any official proceeding. The justices rejected the idea this statute, initially intended to criminalize things like shredding documents or tampering with evidence in corporate malfeasance cases, could be stretched by the Justice Department to include the disruptions of the counting process that took place on January 6.
The SCOTUS case is Fischer v. United States, brought by defendant Joseph Fischer, a former police officer seeking to dismiss the charge accusing him of obstructing an official proceeding, specifically the certification by Congress of Joe Biden’s election victory. It involves a federal law which provides anyone who “obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so” commits a felony and can be imprisoned for a maximum of 20 years. The law was repurposed against J6 defendants, claiming their protest obstructed the business of Congress certifying the election of Joe Biden to the presidency. This was a novel use to create a felony out of the J6 protestors’ actions, as typically illegal or disruptive protesting is just a misdemeanor.
There are also First Amendment issues with criminalizing protests against the government that were more or less ignored in these cases (though Justice Amy Coney Barrett did touch on the 1A in her dissent, and during oral arguments stated “People are going to worry about the kinds of protest they engage in, even if they’re peaceful, because the government has this weapon.”)
Trump is in the picture because he too is charged with obstruction and conspiracy to obstruct, with the government claiming he worked in a variety of forms to overturn the 2020 election and make himself president for a second term (that this was Constitutionally and technically impossible is somehow not relevant.) One aspect of this was Trump’s efforts to “exploit” the Capitol riot to his own ends, from which the obstruction charge arises. Specifically, the indictment says “Donald J. Trump did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree with co-conspirators, known and unknown to the Grand Jury, to corruptly obstruct and impede an official proceeding, that is, the certification of the electoral vote.”
SCOTUS said in its recent decision the interpretation used to convict 350 men was wrong. They said prosecutors overstepped the bounds of the law in using an obstruction statute to charge members of the group that stormed the Capitol. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, read the law narrowly, saying it applied only when the defendant’s actions impaired the integrity of physical evidence. Lower courts will now apply that new, stricter standard, and it will no doubt lead them to dismiss charges against many defendants. Those already in jail will likely see their sentences reduced and future trials will not include the obstruction charge. Left unspecified at present is the fate of the 52 people convicted exclusively under the law challenged in Fischer, with no other charge — 27 of whom are still serving sentences for that in federal prison.
But don’t worry about those J6 guys getting off too easy. The New York Times, practically salivating, writes “Some federal judges in Washington who are handling the January 6 cases have already signaled that they are willing to increase the sentences defendants receive on crimes other than the obstruction count in order to make up for any loss in prison time.” Still, Trump saw the decision as a plus, posting on Truth Social this was a “a massive victory for J6 political prisoners.”
But what about Defendant 351, Trump himself? Special counsel Jack Smith stated Trump’s charges will not be affected, saying Trump’s conduct could be considered a crime under even the narrow SCOTUS reading of the law. The former president is accused of tampering with documents (the law reads “have taken some action with respect to a document, record or some other object”) through his plot to create false slates of electors claiming he won in states actually carried by President Biden. The accusations against him include that scheme to concoct illegitimate documents to disrupt Congress’s processing of electoral college votes, namely, fake elector ballots “cast” for Trump by fake electors. In other words, the J6 guys obstructed the vote count through their protest, acts now deemed by the Supreme Court to be an over-application of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. Trump is charged under the same law but for different actions, those fake elector ballots.
Because that’s how lawfare works, ignoring the intent of any given law — common sense, in many cases — in favor of microscopically picking out and if necessary reinterpretating those parts of the law might lead to a conviction. The goal is not justice or a search for truth, it is 3D Tetris designed to see if some set of actions can be twisted to fit any available law that might lead to a conviction.
That was the essence of Trump’s felony counts in the so-called “hush money” trial. What was essentially a bookkeeping error, labeling money paid to lawyer Michael Cohen as “legal expenses” when it was actually something else (reimbursement for money he supposedly gave to Stormy) grew into serial felonies because the prosecutor wanted it to. As an example, the Clinton campaign committed the exact same bookkeeping error, labeling money for Michael Steele to produce the infamous Russian dossier as legal expenses, and faced only a fine of $8000. No jail time hanging, no attempt to overturn the campaign for president, not even a decent slap on the wrist. That’s lawfare. Republican lawmakers, including Senator Tom Cotton and Representative Jim Jordan, filed a brief in Fischer’s case saying the Justice Department is using the law as an “all-purpose weapon against perceived political opponents.”
Same for those classified documents. Classified was found purloined and improperly stored by Joe Biden (never mind Hillary Clinton and her email server) but no charges were filed. Trump faces a raft of charges for essentially the same act, without much explanation other than “face it kid, that’s lawfare.”
There’s one last wrench to throw into the works, immunity. Following the verdict in Fisher, the Court one work day later ruled in Trump v. United States the former president is entitled to absolute immunity from prosecution for official acts, and sent his J6 case back to the lower court. The SCOTUS ruling does draw a critical distinction between official and private conduct. VP-hopeful J.D. Vance called it a “massive win,” as did Trump himself on Truth Social. Practically speaking, this all likely delays any verdict on Trump’s J6 actions until after the election, when it will not matter. Lawfare, however, is here to stay with us and it is unlikely that Trump will be its last victim.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Trump Wants Free Green Cards for Every College Grad
In a move which both is self-defeating and which exposes the fundamental problem with America’s immigration system, Donald Trump proposed “automatically” giving green cards to foreign nationals who graduate from a U.S. college.
A Trump spokesperson clarified the offer to include both two-year and junior colleges, and to include every foreign student except those who are “communists, radical Islamists, Hamas supporters, America haters, and public charges.” Trump said this was another “Day One” plan for him. The goal is to “to keep the most skilled graduates who can make significant contributions to America.” Currently foreign national college grads have to either leave the U.S. after graduation, work for two years as “practical trainees” and then depart, or apply for a hard-to-get work visa/change of status.
The plan of course is self-defeating on its face. Trump, like most people who read it, thinks his plan will scoop up the PRC MIT A.I. PhD with the 4.0 GPA who wants to work for NVidia, forgetting America’s college system includes pay-for-play schools, visa mills, aimed directly at foreigners who just want a student visa to allow them to work in the U.S., at whatever job. Trump also forgets perhaps his own college days, which must have included a kid who just barely got by and graduated with a C- average in Medieval Music Theory. Not much demand for that, from American or foreign grads. Once again, in order to get the baby America is drinking the bathwater, too.
The concept of a merit-based system in the U.S. is not new. Trump 45 flirted with the idea but never moved to implement it. Even Hillary Clinton proposed a plan to link college grads to green cards. Since 1965 the American immigration system has been tied to the concept of family unification, with little interest paid to anything merit-based. The core problem with the family reunification system is the primary qualification to immigrate legally is simply that family tie. So America gets the drunk brother alongside the nuclear physicist sister. It’s a crap shoot. There is no connection to America’s economic needs. You get the nuclear physicists from Stanford but you also get the drunk modern art appreciation majors from Podunk U. Things work similarly at the border, where America gets whomever survives the Darwinian slog through Mexico. The family reunification system is a legal hangover, as would be Trump’s plan to gift each college grad with a green card.
The American family unification system, with its small number of merit-based visas tagging along (mostly in the H-1B category) is near unique in the industrialized world. Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand use primarily a merit system based on “points.” Based on national needs, an applicant with no relatives in Canada will accrue points based on education (Canada awards 135 points for a Master’s, only 30 for a high school diploma), language ability (extra points toward immigration up north if you are fluent in English and French), and job skills. But you may not need a master’s in computer technology for Canada: they’ll take you if you’re a quantum engineer, but they’ll also take you if you are a tar sands miner willing to live five years in the unsettled west. The key is tying merit-based points to the nation’s economic needs.
The U.S. is stingy with the merit-based visas it does offer. Out of a total legal immigrant pool of about one million, the annual cap for the 2023 fiscal year was 65,000 skilled worker visas, plus only an additional 20,000 visas for foreign professionals with a master’s degree or doctorate from a U.S. institution. However, not all H-1B visas are subject to this cap. For example, up to 6,800 visas are set aside each year for the H-1B program under the U.S.-Chile and U.S.-Singapore free trade agreements. Something special about skilled people in Chile compared to, whatever, Columbia? Back to that baby and his bathwater.
Through the end of the 19th century, America essentially had no immigration law. The country was huge, land was available for the taking, and the need for unskilled workers seemed bottomless. The waves of Germans, Irish, Jews, and Italians came from every dump across Europe and beyond. They entered an America where New York City was a center of light manufacturing and the source of more than half of all ready-made clothing, and the vast Midwest was blanketed with farms and steel plants hungry for workers. This system gave way as the first real immigration laws, targeting the Chinese, who were no longer needed to build the railways out west. Following WWI, Italians and eastern European Jews, who were considered “inferior,” were banned. Racism played a significant role, but it dovetailed more than coincidentally with an economy that was shrinking (ultimately, the Great Depression) and demanding more skilled workers.
The years following WWII saw a massive change in immigration law. In the booming post-war economy, it was believed there was room for everyone again, and old racial wrongs were righted by removing national quotas and emphasizing family unification. Most post-war immigrants, unlike those of the great waves of the 19th and early 20th centuries, were the relatives of earlier immigrants. Little attention was paid to who these people were, what education and skills they had and, most significantly, what the needs of the American economy were in comparison. This is the system largely in place today.
But what if we can do better, a lot better, for the needs of the 21st century?
The monetary reasons are there, what Trump is aiming for. Immigrants and their children founded nearly half of the Fortune 500 companies. These include 5 of the top 12: NVidia, founded by a Taiwan national with a Master’s from Stanford; Apple; founded by the son of a Syrian, no degree; Google, cofounded by a Russian immigrant, also with an M.A. from Stanford; Amazon, founded by the son of a Cuban immigrant with a degree from Princeton; and Costco, founded by the son of Canadian immigrants (San Diego City College) whose family emigrated from Romania. These companies alone posted a combined revenue of $1.4 trillion in fiscal year 2023, more than the gross domestic product of many nations. And immigrants are about 80 percent more likely to start a company than U.S.-born citizens.
And that’s not to say someone else, in this instance the UK, hasn’t already tried the idea and screwed it up by being too generous. Britain has a scheme which allows most college grads to stay on for two years and work toward residency (as does in fact the U.S., it’s called “Optional Practical Training” with its own arcane set of regulations, available to almost all foreign students.)
The UK Graduate Route, which is a post-study visa, allows graduates to stay and work in the UK for up to two years after finalizing their studies. The government estimates that this visa has attracted many migrants to the UK, with them often misusing their benefits. More than 40 percent of people coming to the country for employment purposes in 2023 came from India or Nigeria. Talks for new rules follow plans to ban British universities from accepting certain postgraduates, in an effort to reduce net migration in the UK, which is highly driven by international students.
So there are lessons learned out there. Meanwhile, let’s not make the same mistake with college grads we made with relatives of earlier immigrants; this time let us separate the baby from the bathwater and get rid of the less valuable part. Instead of handing out green cards willy-nilly with each diploma, subject grads to a merit-based system, with points awarded to skills/majors in demand, accredited schools that rank well nationally, high GPAs, as well as English ability and proven entrepreneurial skills. Trump is close to right in singling out foreign-born college grads. We need only to tweak the system he proposes to pick out the very best America deserves.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Misdirection! Hunter Biden Conviction Hides the Real Crimes
Misdirection. That’s what you call it when a magician distracts you from looking at the real point of interest, waving his right hand in the air vigorously while his left slips the selected card into his jacket pocket. You’re fooled, but you’re satisfied. You even play along.
Well, if you like magical misdirection, you must be very happy to see Hunter Biden convicted of lying about his drug use to illegally buy a gun, making him the first child of a sitting U.S. president to be convicted of a crime. Hunter was fully guilty, no doubt, confirmed by the rapid three-hour turnaround decison reached by the jury. He’ll face a similar fate in September when he stares down three felony and six misdemeanor tax offenses in California, alleging he failed to pay $1.4 million in taxes between 2016 and 2019 while spending millions more on drugs, escorts, exotic cars, and other lux items. He is unlikely to do time in any case, though you’ll hear uninformed pundits on the MSM bellow about maximum penalties in hopes of creating the illusion of parity between the Hunter and Trump convictions. See, there’s a felon in each family, the system is fair!
The problem is that misdirection thing.
No court is set to look at what Hunter did to amass his millions while a crack addict, and no court is set to look at the slimy connections between Hunter’s made-and-spent fortune and his dad, the once vice president and now president of the United States. A reasonable jury might conclude Hunter made his money off peddling influence to daddy, and that daddy at the very least passively played along, and thus a court of public opinion might wonder if that leaves Joe Biden unqualified to be president (if he ever was…)
The story, if ever told in a court or elsewhere, will get ugly quickly as they say — one can sketch in the outlines even now. Hunter, desperately addicted to drugs and sex following his brother Beau’s death, to the point where he had a scummy affair with his dead brother’s widow, needed money badly. The world responded with a whisper in his fevered ear that Hunter could set up some consulting companies and create the appearance of selling access to his father, then vice president. A grieving dad, watching his last son fall into the pit of crack addiction, tries to humor the venture along until that gets too real over some shenanigans in the Ukraine and a looming China deal (“10 percent for the big guy,” read one email.) Dad pulls the plug on his end of the caper, but Hunter keeps selling, finding foreign yokels willing to pay for the illusion of access. Along the way he taints not only Joe but his uncle Jim Biden as well. Fueled by his addiction, Hunter never stops until finally things collapse completely and he is stopped.
As you the voter, the real jury, consider the evidence, remember a few things. Joe Biden said of Hunter, “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” And during a debate with Donald Trump, Joe Biden dismissed his son’s laptop emails as disinformation from Russia. After becoming president, Joe said his son Hunter was innocent, even after Hunter pleaded guilty to tax evasion. None of that is true. Misdirection.
This sordid story has credibility now in that in the course of the Hunter gun trial the contents of his laptop were validated by the FBI as real. The FBI of course knew for some time the laptop was real, and we explained here why a thoughtful outside observer would come to the same conclusion even without the FBI’s forensics. Hunter’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski confirmed his emails were legitimate months before the FBI. The New York Times agreed, reporting on an FBI criminal investigation into Hunter’s business and tax activities based in part on the contents of the laptop.
Here’s what Hunter’s laptop revealed in our reading of its contents as made available to TAC and elsewhere. Hunter, with no previous experience in the energy field, joined the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma at a salary of $83,000 a month. What was his actual job at Burisma? The question is important because on April 16, 2014, while Joe was vice president, he met with Hunter’s business partner, Devon Archer, at the White House. Five days later, Joe travelled to Ukraine to lobby for increased fracking. Burisma was one of the few companies licensed to frack in Ukraine. Burisma made hundreds of millions of dollars from Ukraine’s new policy. Burisma eventually paid more than $4,000,000 for Hunter’s and Archer’s board service.
While Hunter and Archer were serving on Burisma’s board, Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was investigating Burisma and its owner. In his official position as vice president, Biden demanded Ukraine fire Shokin, and threatened to withdraw one billion dollars in U.S. military aid if it did not do so. Shokin was fired.
While serving on the Burisma board, Hunter and Archer sought meetings with senior State Department officials, including SecState John Kerry (Christopher Heinz, John Kerry’s son, is part of one of Hunter’s front companies) and then-Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken (Blinken coordinated the 51 intel officers’ letter that claimed Hunter’s laptop was likely Russian disinformation.) What did they all discuss? The reason to ask that question is because it appears whatever Hunter’s job description, his value to Burisma was perceived access to the Executive Branch. Joe was at least a passive participant in the scheme, maybe more than that. The most charitable reading of the sleazy saga is that Joe Biden, one of the most powerful men in the world, is a gullible idiot. At least that sounds better than “co-conspirator.”
The laptop goes on to show Hunter, through a number of front companies, accepted money from foreign firms and moved that money to the U.S. where it was parceled out to other entities, including Joe’s brother Jim (Jim regularly invoiced Hunter for office expenses and employee costs, as well as a monthly retainer cost of some $68,000, plus other fees in the tens of thousands of dollars for unknown services.) It all smells bad — multi-million dollar transfers to LLCs without employees, residences used as business addresses, legal tricks shifting cash from Cyprus to the British Virgin Islands. Can Hunter explain why his fees traveled such circuitous routes? What did he pay Uncle Jim for, and why did Jim appear to return/kickback some of the money paid him?
What is this money all about? in 2014, Hunter received $3.5 million from Elena Baturina, the richest woman in Russia and the widow of Yury Luzhkov, the former mayor of Moscow. Baturina became Russia’s only female billionaire when her company received a series of Moscow municipal contracts while her husband was mayor.
The majority of the contents of Hunter’s laptop are a jumbled record of international business ventures. Outstanding in the haystack are a large number of wire transfers to and from clients. Those with traceable addresses appear to be mostly anonymous shell companies run out of lawyers’ offices, with no employees, and fuzzy public paper trails. A typical one involved $259,845 traveling on April 2, 2018 from Hudson West III in New York to a numbered account held by Cathay Bank in Asia. Hudson West was created by Hunter Biden’s own law firm, Owasco, with several Chinese nationals, including a Ye Jianming associate. Ye Jianming is chairman of CEFC China Energy, who reportedly had close ties to both the Chinese government and the PLA. He’s was arrested in China on corruption charges and has essentially been disappeared.
A 2017 email chain involving Hunter brokering an ultimately failed deal for a new venture with old friend CEFC, the Chinese energy company, described a 10 percent set-aside for the “big guy,” whom former Hunter Biden partner Tony Bobulinski publicly identified as Joe Biden. Joe also took Hunter to China with him in December 2013 on Air Force 2, and met with Chinese leaders while Hunter tried to make deals on his own.
There is a lot more but you get the picture. A lot of appearance of malarkey from a senior statesman like Joe who should have known better. In places like China and the Ukraine, where corruption is endemic, it is assumed the sons of powerful men have political access to their father. Hunter traded on those assumptions for millions of dollars, and Papa Joe stood by understanding what was happening. Every father wants to help his son, and we can imagine Hunter went to his dad time after time, pleading for just one more little favor to get past his sordid past. You know, for Beau.
The emails are a multi-pronged series of pointers which deserve the scrutiny of a courtroom to see if there is a smoking gun. To dismiss them because they may be incomplete is to fail to understand the difference between evidence and conclusion. Let’s hope we learn the lesson before November 5.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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