Judge Stops bumble/socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden’s DACA Expansion
bumble/socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden’s border crisis is surging. More than 188,000 migrants were caught illegally crossing the U.S. southern border last month, setting a 10-year record, and Customs and Border Protection agents have made more than a million arrests this fiscal year. Yet amidst all this, Americans received a bit of good news on Friday when U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen ruled that Barack scumbag/liar-nObama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) was in violation of the Constitution.
In his ruling, Hanen, a George W. Bush appointee who’s been at the center of other key immigration rulings, explained, “As popular as this program might be, the proper origination point for the DACA program was, and is, Congress.” Precisely. Recall that scumbag/liar-nObama himself repeatedly recognized that he did not have the authority to create DACA, only to later issue his infamous executive order subverting Congress anyway.
Besides scumbag/liar-nObama unconstitutionally circumventing Congress to establish DACA, Hanen also faulted the scumbag/liar-nObama administration for its failure to allow for the public to weigh in before establishing the program.
Hanen’s ruling effectively hits the brakes on the bumble/ socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden administration’s decision to reopen DACA to new recipients (Donald Trump had ended new applications in 2017), although the judge specifically highlighted that his decision would not have immediate impact on current DACA recipients in good standing.
Meanwhile, despite the growing flood of illegals surging across the border and an uptick in new COVID infections, the bumble/socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden administration indicated plans to end Trump’s use of Title 42, a law applied by Trump’s Centers for Disease Control to keep some migrants from entering the U.S. during a worldwide pandemic. The Washington Free Beacon reports: “As part of the preparation for that policy reversal, senior Department of Homeland Security officials warned staff that they will have to process up to 1,200 family units a day. That number of family units works out to 312,000 a year, assuming the border does not see any future surges. Following their release from custody, those migrants are in effect free to stay, said one DHS official, because many immigrants skip their immigration court hearings sometimes scheduled two years after they are initially detained.”
Yet even bumble/socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden’s de facto open-borders policy has its limits. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warned anyone thinking about fleeing the Cuban communist government’s crackdown on people protesting for freedom that they’re not welcome. “The time is never right to attempt migration by sea,” Mayorkas stated. “To those who risk their lives doing so, this risk is not worth taking. Allow me to be clear: If you take to the sea, you will not come to the United States.”
Just to be clear, those individuals fleeing from genuine political oppression by a brutal communist dictatorial regime will not be welcomed, but Central American migrants simply pursuing better economic opportunity will essentially be given a free pass. Might political calculations be the actual factor here? Cuban Americans vote more solidly Republican compared to other Hispanics in the country.
Finally, regarding the oft-referenced number of 11 million illegals living in the U.S., the real number is likely double, if not triple, that, as was determined by Yale and MIT academics in a 2018 study. This further explains the Democrats’ amnesty push. It’s not 11 million more Democrat voters; rather, it’s perhaps 22 to 33 million. ~The Patriot Post
A Rigged Election
The Democrat Party is The Party of Government. And the American people don’t trust their government. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center makes that abundantly clear, as less than one-fourth of Americans say they trust the federal government to do what’s right “just about always” (2%) or “most of the time” (22%).
And why should we trust Beltway politicos — especially if we believe in Liberty and limited government? After all, they spy on us, they lie to us, they sic the IRS on us, they collude with Big Tech to censor us, they discriminate against us based on race, and now we know — definitively — that they rig elections against us.
As Politico reports:
Last summer, federal officials in Delaware investigating corrupt/liar-Hunter Biden faced a dilemma. The probe had reached a point where prosecutors could have sought search warrants and issued a flurry of grand jury subpoenas. Some officials involved in the case wanted to do just that. Others urged caution. They advised Delaware’s U.S. Attorney, David Weiss, to avoid taking any actions that could alert the public to the existence of the case in the middle of a presidential election.
“To his credit, he listened,” said a person involved in the discussions, reported here for the first time. Weiss decided to wait, averting the possibility that the investigation would become a months-long campaign issue.
In short: They protected corrupt/liar-Hunter Biden, they suppressed the damaging truth, and they thereby rigged the election against Donald Trump.
If this sounds familiar, we’d point you to Big Tech’s censorship of another corrupt/liar-Hunter Biden bombshell just prior to the 2020 election. Were corrupt/liar-Hunter Biden a regular schlub, he’d be in prison, and his dad would be a deeply disgraced ex-politician. Instead, a corrupt/liar-Hunter is publishing books and secretly selling “artwork,” and his dad is the president of the United States.
Is this a rotten country or what?
Sometimes we wonder whether the lefties at Politico even understand the gravity of what it is they’re reporting. Last week, for example, they published a piece about how “bumble/socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee” are planning to work with SMS carriers to censor what we send via our personal text messages. But did Politico raise any alarms about the First Amendment issues of that revelation? Did the word “Constitution” even appear in the article? (Those are rhetorical questions.)
Politico, in fact, was one of dozens of media outlets that refused to talk about corrupt/liar-Hunter Biden in the run-up to the 2020 election. In fact, these “journalists” actually did the opposite: They helped our corrupt government spread disinformation about corrupt/liar-Hunter’s laptop. “More than 50 former senior intelligence officials,” they reported two weeks before the election, “have signed on to a letter outlining their belief that the recent disclosure of emails allegedly belonging to bumble/socialist/ scumbag/liar-Joe Biden’s son ‘has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.’”
No intelligent person ever believed this deceptively worded deep-state ruse. But the mainstream media dutifully reported it. Just before a presidential election. To help drag its guy across the finish line.
As for today’s news, Politico no doubt pondered the damage that the story might do to bumble/socialist/ scumbag/liar-Joe Biden’s campaign, but did they even think about the countervailing damage that delaying the administration of justice would have on the Trump campaign? And what about the federal prosecutor, Weiss, who actually made that decision? Did he consider the ramifications fully, or only partly? Whatever happened to blindfolded Lady Justice? You remember: the one with the scales and the sword? Let’s think about the information that was kept from us the people — the people who are tasked with making informed decisions when we cast our ballots. As National Review reports, “The U.S. Attorney’s office had been investigating allegations that the president’s son was engaged in pay-for-play Chinese business engagements, potential money laundering, violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and tax evasion.”
We’re not talking about jaywalking here. These are serious allegations. And they point – just as they always do – to our two-tiered justice system: one tier for the Left, and one for the Right.
As one of our colleagues quipped this morning, “Imagine if the person of interest had been Donald Trump Jr. I’m sure they would have extended the same courtesy, right? Right?”
Yeah. Just imagine. ~The Patriot Post
Democrats Are the Party of Corporate Oligarchs
It’s no secret that the Democrat Party is obsessed with race. A racist and racially divisive Critical Race Theory has been introduced into every agency of the federal government, and President bumble/socialist/ scumbag/liar-Joe Biden, who once promised to be a “uniter,” never misses an opportunity to tell Americans we live in a systemically racist nation — when he’s not busy labeling every effort to protect voter integrity as “Jim Crow 2.0,” or the greatest threat to democracy since the Civil War. Why the relentlessness — with ample assistance from a corporate media echo chamber? Because if the national conversation ever turned to class, all hell would break loose — and most of that hell would be directed at a Democrat Party that has abandoned working- and middle-class Americans in favor of globalist oligarch billionaires.
Make no mistake: The pandemic, in all its permutations — the lockdowns, the wholly arbitrary division of people into “essential” and “nonessential” workers, the suppression of drugs, therapies, and viral origination theories inimical to ruling class interests, the exponential increase in unconstitutional powers seized by megalomaniacal politicians, and a 2020 election in which at least four states violated their own laws and the U.S. Constitution to “facilitate” voting — has been an absolute boon for the billionaire class.
Quite simply, while ordinary Americans endured fear and hardship, people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and a number of other billionaires saw their net wealth surge to dizzying heights: A devastating pandemic made the world’s richest people $5.1 trillion richer.
In stark contrast, ordinary Americans were bludgeoned. Between March 2020 and February 2021, a whopping 80 million became jobless, and from June to November 2020, approximately eight million dropped below the poverty line. Wages declined while inflation has soared. Small businesses that employed millions of Americans — and posed a serious problem for the bumble/socialist/ scumbag/liar-Biden administration’s central planners — were also decimated.
Just as tragic, approximately 93,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2020, setting an all-time record. Opioids were the primary driver of those deaths, including fentanyl, which is made in China and smuggled across what used to be our nation’s southern border by drug cartels.
What’s the bumble/socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden administration doing about it? As of May, nearly 2,000 more pounds of fentanyl were seized by CBP officials compared to last year.
Even more devastating for America’s working class, the administration has effectively eliminated any effort to maintain secure borders. Data reveal that America is on track to endure 1.7 million illegals arriving at the border by the end of 2021. Moreover, a whistleblower has informed Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the bumble/socialist/ scumbag/liar-Biden administration is using the U.S. military to secretly disperse illegal immigrants throughout the nation, without congressional knowledge or input.
These illegals will undoubtedly be competing with lower- and middle-class Americans for jobs, and anyone who objects to either the unnecessary competition for work or the fundamental transformation that arises from the addition of an illegal population larger than the population of Austin, Texas, in the first seven months of the year will be labeled racist and/or xenophobic.
Not that Americans can count on getting a reliable picture about this or any other topic the bumble/socialist/ scumbag/liar-Biden administration considers “problematic.” In a stunning revelation made last Thursday, White House Press Secretary liar-Jen Psaki admitted the administration is “in regular touch with the social media platforms” to make sure they are taking “faster action against harmful posts” that spread “misinformation” about COVID-19.
Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald put this contemptible collaboration between the government and Big Tech billionaires in the proper perspective: “If you don’t find it deeply disturbing that the White House is ‘flagging’ internet content that they deem ‘problematic’ to their Facebook allies for removal, then you are definitionally an authoritarian.”
Part of what irritates the administration is the pushback on its plans to go door-to-door in an effort to coerce Americans to get vaccinated. What should infuriate Americans on top of the apparent evisceration of privacy laws regarding their medical records is the reality that the same administration is apparently sanguine with the fact that 30% of illegals in ICE custody have refused to be vaccinated.
“During the 1980s cultural war, the left’s mantra was ‘race, class and gender,’” columnist Victor Davis Hanson reminds us. “Occasionally we still hear of that trifecta, but the class part has increasingly disappeared. The neglect of class is ironic given that a number of recent studies conclude class differences are widening as never before.”
What’s changed? “Some 65% of the Americans making more than $500,000 a year are Democrats,” he adds, “and 74% of those who earn less than $100,000 a year are Republicans, according to IRS statistics.”
Thus, the party that once promoted itself as the champion of working-class Americans has become “a bicoastal party of elites from corporate America, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the media, universities, entertainment and professional sports,” Hanson concludes. “All have made out like bandits from globalization.”
How much have they “made out”? The six largest corporations in the world — Apple, Amazon, Alphabet (Google, YouTube, etc.), Microsoft, Tesla, and Facebook — each have a market cap larger than the gross domestic products of all but the top 17 nations in the world. And with the possible exception of Tesla, each of the others, along with a number of other billionaire-controlled corporate and Wall Street entities, are more than willing to promote and protect the interests of the Democrat Party — by any means necessary.
Thus, Americans can continue to expect a steady diet of belittlement, courtesy of bicoastal billionaires who decry the “white privilege” of millions of Americans who have never known privilege, white or otherwise. Or the likes of scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton and Barack scumbag/liar-nObama, who dismiss those same people as “deplorables” and “bitter clingers,” respectively. Or the likes of BLM “revolutionaries” like cofounder Patrisse Cullors who speaks of “victimization” from the comfort of one of her four homes.
In the meantime, her fellow BLMers support the Communist regime in Cuba, and Democrats offer late and tepid support to the dissenters less than two weeks after spending the Fourth of July weekend denigrating the same American flag Cuba protesters are waving in defiance. Simultaneously, a corrupt FBI urges Americans to monitor their friends and family for “homegrown violent extremism,” and the same administration that has rolled out the red carpet for illegals pouring across the border tells Cubans not to “even think about” fleeing to America.
Why? Because unlike the avalanche of illegal border-busters, Cubans are not reliably Democrat.
This new reality has been a long time in the making. Columnist Angelo Codevilla warned us 11 years ago that “as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct.”
Eleven years later, the space between corporate oligarchs and the Democrat Party has become nonexistent. The bumble/socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden administration has taken everything that would be considered unconstitutional if the government did it and “outsourced” it to (ostensibly private enterprise) oligarch allies.
Tragically, outsourced tyranny is still tyranny. And when the 2022 midterm elections take place, Americans of every race, religion, and ethnicity would be wise to remember they have far more in common with each other than they do with a corrupt, dysfunctional, America-hating ruling class and its corporate oligarch allies that use race to distract and divide them.
Vote accordingly. ~The Patriot Post
Socialism in America
“Marxists often refer to socialism as the first, necessary phase on the way from capitalism to communism.” —History.com (November 2020)
“The goal of socialism is communism.” —Vladimir Lenin
Americans need to stand shoulder to shoulder in unity against socialism, now the economic platform of the political Left. The very ideology that has destroyed nations and millions of lives is at the core of the Democrats’ policy playbook and growing more and more popular among younger ideologues who are indoctrinated to believe Big Government cares for them.
Younger adults stupidly embrace socialism because they have not learned their history. Most Americans have some idea that more than six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust by Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the Nazis), though they’re under the grossly mistaken assumption that Nazis were “right-wing.” Yet few know that more than 100 million were put to death at the hands of communists — the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin, China’s Mao Zedong, Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, North Korea’s Kim Il Sung, Cambodia’s Pol Pot, Ethiopia’s Mengistu Haile Mariam, and Cuba’s Fidel Castro.
A June 2021 Axios/Momentum poll of Americans showed 57% held positive views of capitalism. Looking at 18- to 34-year-olds, however, those with a positive view of the economic construct of freedom was only 49% — with 46% reporting a negative view. Narrowing the age to 18- to 24-year-olds, only 42% held a positive view of capitalism. And, no, this is not isolated to the Left. Among those surveyed age 18-34 who identified as “GOP leaners,” the positive view of our market system had fallen from 81% in 2019 to only 66% in 2021.
Socialism is in America now. It’s here because our focus was on winning elections and not hearts and minds as a Center-Right effort. In America today, socialism, the precursor to communism, begins with seeing handouts as a right. It’s important to remember that the top 1% of income earners pay 40% of all taxes, with the top 10% of earners paying 71% of all income taxes. Education is another mark of modern American socialism, with K-12 public education yielding 62% of students graduating without reading at grade level — though students can easily tell you all about Black Lives Matter, “white privilege,” and how to have safe sex.
With higher education, tuition increases, ironically but predictably, as aid and support increases. Yet students are unable to find jobs that pay salaries to pay back their debt and sustain their lifestyle — a lifestyle consisting of an unlimited-data smartphone to go along with housing, food, and transportation. Many states are now offering at least two years of free college, and still the cry for tuition forgiveness and completely free higher education sounds in the promotions of the Left.
If you don’t think public education is being socialized, look at the tenth plank of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto: “Free Education for All Children in Public Schools … Combination of Education with Industrial Production.”
The process of socializing work and wages has been rushed on by the COVID pandemic. If there is a universal wage without work, the government competes with the private sector where merit is rewarded financially and with greater opportunity. With guaranteed income without work, the labor force shrinks. All the signs posted for hiring and the need for workers is due to the government choosing what work is essential, with a base pay regardless of the work (or lack thereof). A quick lesson in a planned, government-run economy proved devastating.
The sixth goal of the Communist Manifesto is “Centralization of the Means of Communication.” The echo chamber created by broadcast and cable news programming, the censorship on social media platforms, and the selective reporting and biased framing of information corresponds directly to the rise of socialism’s popularity. When you add to that the public shaming and bullying in the form of canceled culture, you arrive at today’s cultural divide and destruction of our precious freedoms. Political dissent is banned and only propaganda is permitted.
The Democrat Party pushes to indoctrinate our students, redefine our families and genders for the purpose of sameness and government approval, and control our private property along with the ability to earn wealth based on merit and expertise, not sameness.
Patriots, the elections of 2022 are simple decisions between those on the Left working to destroy our Liberty and those candidates who are willing to fight for our constitutional republic. ~The Patriot Post
WHO Admits Rejecting Lab Leak Theory Was Wrong
The World Health Organization is having second thoughts about its dismissal last year of the lab leak theory origin for the COVID-19 pandemic. On Thursday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus admitted that there was a “premature push” to rule the lab leak theory as “extremely unlikely.”
Tedros sought to blame the unscientific rush to judgement on a multitude of “unintended errors” within the WHO and vowed to correct them. Something tells us these errors were more of the politically intended variety rather than accidental, but we digress. At least the WHO is finally admitting that the lab leak hypothesis is not some crack-pot conspiracy theory.
“I was a lab technician myself, I’m an immunologist, and I have worked in the lab, and lab accidents happen,” Tedros stated, adding, “It’s common,” therefore “checking what happened, especially in our labs” is important. Furthermore, “If we get full information, we can exclude [the lab leak theory].”
Well, good luck with getting full information. Beijing has already prevented a serious investigation into its Wuhan lab, which WHO officials seemed all too happy to play along with in their March report in which they suggest that a natural or zoonotic origin of COVID was “a likely to very likely pathway.” Again, what has changed between then and now to have the WHO essentially reverse itself?
The short answer appears to be a concern over credibility. As considerable consensus has grown among scientists for the possibility, if not probability, of the lab leak theory origin, the WHO seems to have also realized that it can’t simply succumb to Beijing’s propaganda. Tedros tacitly acknowledged as much when he stated, “I think we owe it to the millions who suffered and the millions who died really to understand what happened.” ~The Patriot Post
GARY BAUER
Misinformation & Misdirection
According to bumble/socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden, the demonstration at the Capitol Building on January 6th was the worst event since the Civil War, and maybe even worse. Well, since the administration is waging war on “misinformation,” remember these facts:
Only one person — Ashli Babbitt — died inside the Capitol Building, and she was an unarmed Trump supporter.
The death toll in the Civil War was a little bigger — approximately 600,000.
For bumble/socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden to engage in such hyperbole is beyond disgusting. I do not want to hear another Republican senator — Mitt Romney, Rob Portman, Susan Collins, rino-Lisa Murkowski — say, “I may disagree with bumble/socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden, but he’s a really nice guy.” No, he isn’t!
A “really nice guy” does not lie about racism and white supremacy, as bumble/socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden does whenever he references Charlottesville.
A “really nice guy” does not demonize half the country as “bigots” and “segregationists” because they support voter ID laws and commonsense election security measures.
A “really nice guy” does not suggest that his political opponents will put people “back in chains.” He does not scare people about voting. There is not one legal American who cannot vote if they follow the rules.
But if we were facing an insurrectionist threat to take over America, what might it look like?
Well, it would use rhetoric to inflame racial differences, throwing gasoline on a fire. When predictable riots erupt, it would encourage them as “mostly peaceful protests.”
You would see, as we have seen in pre-revolutionary communist movements, a concerted campaign to demonize law enforcement and the military in order to alienate the citizens from the people who protect them.
You would see a concerted effort to end all checks and balances that prevent an unbridled power grab. What would that look like?
There would be proposals to nearly double the Supreme Court, so that one president could make multiple immediate appointments in order to instantly create a new majority.
You’d abolish certain rules and procedures (the Electoral College, the filibuster, H.R. 1) that are meant to protect various legitimate interests.
You’d engage in widespread censorship. The media would engage in overt partisan propaganda, while completely ignoring real news that hurts its preferred party.
You’d co-opt the intelligence agencies and use their extraordinary powers against your political opponents.
You’d establish a double standard of justice, and you wouldn’t hide it because the whole point is to intimidate your opponents.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Here’s the bottom line: Conservatives need to stop being so defensive. They need to start saying to the left, “You’re the insurrections, and here’s why!” It’s not a hard case to make. Conservatives are not the ones insisting America is evil and must be “fundamentally transformed.” (See below.)
bumble/socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden’s Terrorist Nominee
The left-wing media have concocted a fake threat to the country called “white nationalism,” as if people of all races don’t ardently love America. People are being monitored with the help of the Big Tech giants using vague criteria. At the same time, bumble/socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden is actually attempting to put an eco-terrorist into the United States government.
Tracey Stone-Manning is just the latest in a long list of bumble/socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden’s extreme nominees. She promoted terrorist threats against loggers, warning that if they cut down trees in a particular forest, it could be the last thing they ever do because the trees were “spiked” with metal objects that could kill loggers.
The group she was involved with, Earth First, has a history of such eco-terrorist acts. Eco-terrorism, entirely a creation of the left, has been a serious problem. From spiking trees to attacking research labs to the Unabomber.
So, while the FBI is arresting people with Lego sets, Joe Biden wants to install a radical activist who participated in terrorist acts in a top government job.
The Marxist Threat
Earlier this week, I noted that the threat facing America wasn’t coming from conservatives trying to secure our elections, but from Marxists pushing critical race theory. This is such a critical point that I want to revisit it today.
The controversy over critical race theory IS NOT about the need to fight racism. As a nation, we have made tremendous progress toward racial reconciliation. The United States stands alone among other leading Western nations for the very fact that we have elected a black president and a black vice president. Canada, England, France, Germany haven’t done that.
We have black Supreme Court justices, governors, senators, mayors and police chiefs. Black actors, musicians, sports stars and billionaires like Oprah are among America’s most popular celebrities.
America is not a “systemically racist nation.” It is insane to even suggest that.
But critical race theory is a Marxist ideology, and you don’t have to take my word for it. Its creators and most visible promoters are all avowed socialists.
Former Harvard Professor Derrick Bell is considered the founder of critical race theory (CRT), a spinoff of Marxist critical theory and critical legal theory. Bell once described CRT as “often disruptive because its commitment to anti-racism goes well beyond civil rights, integration, affirmative action, and other liberal measures.”
Cuba is in the news as thousands have taken to the streets protesting the communist nation’s lack of freedom, opportunity and basic necessities.
But Nikole Hannah-Jones, the founder of the 1619 Project, once praised communist Cuba as “the most equal, multi-racial country in our hemisphere.” Jones explained: “Cuba has the least inequality, and that’s largely due to socialism.”
Such ignorance is shocking. There’s little to no inequality in Cuba because NO ONE has anything. That’s what the protests are all about!
Ibram X. Kendi, a leading proponent of CRT, has declared that racism and capitalism are “conjoined twins.” In a 2019 interview, Kendi said, “Racism and capitalism emerged simultaneously, they have grown together, they have ravaged together — and one day they’ll ultimately die together.”
Last week, I told you about a children’s “anti-racism” book that presents capitalism as a racist devil.
The founders of the Black Lives Matter movement described themselves as “trained Marxists.” Yesterday, we reported that the BLM organization expressed its full support for the oppressive communist Cuban regime.
All Americans of goodwill agree that racism is wrong and should be condemned. But Marxists are now exploiting that goodwill. Under the guise of fighting racism, this Marxist movement has amassed tremendous influence over academia, the media, corporate America and the Democrat Party.
With your continued prayers and support, Campaign for Working Families will elect more America First candidates like Burgess Owens and Byron Donalds who will fight critical race theory and unapologetically defend America!
Good News
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey signed legislation banning critical race theory.
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich is suing the bumble/socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden Administration to enforce effective Trump-era border security measures, including construction of the border wall.
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Second Amendment rights of young adults to own a handgun for self-defense.
The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the right of churches to adhere to their own moral teachings. It’s shocking that such a court ruling was even necessary.
Several states are advancing school choice legislation, giving parents more options when it comes to schooling their children.
California abandoned its radical effort — for now — to push critical race theory in the new math curriculum.
The Senate passed legislation banning all products from Xinjiang, the region where communist China has established concentration camps to carry out its genocide against the Uyghurs. ~The Patriot Post
HANS VON SPAKOVSKY
The Supreme Court Gets It Right on Section 2
The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee is not only the correct result under the applicable law — Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — it is a common-sense decision that upholds traditional state voting rules that Section 2 was never meant to reach. The court upheld Arizona’s ban on vote trafficking (or what is euphemistically referred to as “vote harvesting”) and the state’s requirement that an individual vote within his assigned precinct for his ballot to count.
The importance of this case in the field of voting law — and in the midst of a fierce, contentious fight over election-reform laws implemented by the states — cannot be overemphasized. Ever since the seminal case of Thornburg v. Gingles in 1986, where the court laid out the test (the Gingles factors) for determining a violation of Section 2 after it was amended by Congress in 1982, all of the cases that have come before the court have involved redistricting and vote-dilution claims.
Brnovich was the first case, as Justice Samuel Alito writes in his majority opinion, which considers how to apply a Section 2 challenge to state laws governing the time, place, or manner of an election, to wit, “how ballots are collected and counted.” Such cases have “proliferated” in the lower federal courts, but none have reached the Supreme Court before this one.
Those unhappy with the Shelby County decision in 2013 and the ending of the Section 5 preclearance process have been trying to persuade courts to lower the Section 2 test to the much looser “disparate impact” standard of Section 5. In fact, Alito points out that is exactly what the dissent, authored by Justice Elena Kagan and joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, would do — use a simple disparate-impact standard to determine a Section 2 violation. This is not something contemplated by the text of the statute or its legislative history. It would create a standard that would make it difficult for a state to ever make any changes to its election laws.
The majority opinion rejects this proposed conversion of Section 2, and although Alito says that the court is not “announc[ing] a test to govern all VRA §2 claims” that apply to the “time, place, or manner for casting ballots,” it is identifying “certain guideposts” that lead to the court’s decision. For practicing election lawyers, this is virtually the same thing as a test.
One of the biggest problems the challenges faced in this case was captured by the second line in Alito’s opinion: “Arizona law generally makes it very easy to vote.” It is difficult to make a discrimination claim stick when a state has such an open and extended process for voting as Arizona does. The state gives its residents the ability to vote “by mail or in person for nearly a month before election day.”
This fed into the court’s application of the text of Section 2(b) that the law is violated only if the election process is not “equally open to participation” by a minority group “in that its members have less opportunity” than other voters to participate (emphasis added by the court). Thus, the “touchstone” of Section 2 is the requirement that voting be “equally open,” and the DNC just couldn’t make the case that voting is not equally open to all of the residents of Arizona regardless of their race.
On the Gingles “totality of the circumstances” factors and the guidelines applied in this case, the court said that “several important circumstances should be mentioned.” First of all, the “size of the burden imposed by a challenged rule is highly relevant” (emphasis added). Every voting rule imposes some burden on a voter since “voting takes time” and “some travel, even if only to a nearby mailbox.” A voting system that is “equally open” and that provides everyone an “equal opportunity” to vote “must tolerate the ‘usual burdens of voting,’” and “mere inconvenience cannot be enough to demonstrate a violation of §2.” This factor alone should be enough to eviscerate many of the challenges to voting laws over issues like drop boxes and rules governing absentee ballots.
Second, the “degree to which a voting rule departs from what was standard practice when §2 was amended in 1982 is a highly relevant decision.” Again, this factor should make many of today’s challenges extremely difficult to maintain because almost all of the rules governing the election process were much stricter in 1982, when no state had early voting, drop boxes, online voter registration, and as the court says, states “allowed only narrow and tightly defined categories of voters to cast absentee ballots.”
Third, the “size of any disparities in a rule’s impact on members of different racial or ethnic groups is also an important factor to consider.” However, all voting rules will have some “predictable disparities in rates of voting,” no matter how neutral they are. The “mere fact [that] there is some disparity in impact does not necessarily mean a system is not equally open” and most importantly, “very small differences should not be artificially magnified.” Given the very minimal disparities that exist among different groups of voters on almost every regulation governing registration and voting, this also weighs heavily against challengers.
Fourth, courts “must consider the opportunities provided by a State’s entire system of voting when assessing the burden imposed by a challenged provision.” This means that “where a State provides multiple ways to vote, any burden imposed on voters who choose one of the available options cannot be evaluated without taking into account the other available means.” Since states these days provide numerous, different avenues for individuals to vote, from early voting to absentee balloting to actually casting a ballot the old-fashioned way — on Election Day — challenging one particular change in one of these methods will be difficult to sustain.
Finally, “the strength of the state interests served by a challenged voting rule is also an important factor that must be taken into account.” No doubt to the dismay of opponents of election reforms, the court held that a “strong and entirely legitimate state interest is the prevention of fraud” because it can change the outcome of a close election, dilute the votes of eligible citizens, and “undermine public confidence in the fairness of elections and the perceived legitimacy of the announced outcome.” What is most important about this is that states don’t have to show evidence of past fraud to justify legislative actions intended to prevent future fraud.
As practitioners in this area know, the Gingles case outlined other factors to take into account in a Section 2 vote dilution analysis. The court says that those other factors “are less helpful” in cases like Brnovich, and some are, in fact, “plainly inapplicable in a case involving a challenge to a facially neutral time, place, or manner voting rule.”
The majority is extremely critical of the disparate-impact analysis that the dissent says should be applied to these types of Section 2 cases. Alito says that the dissent “strains mightily to obscure its objective,” which is to “undo as much as possible the compromise that was reached between the House and Senate when §2 was amended in 1982.” That compromise added the language of Section 2(b) to specifically avoid this provision being interpreted and applied as merely requiring the showing of a disparate impact or effect in order to prove a violation.
The majority has it right when it comes to how Section 2 should be applied in these types of cases. It will remain an effective tool to stop actual racial discrimination in the voting context, but it will not be what critics of this decision would like — a partisan tool that can be used to stop public-policy decisions with which they disagree on how individuals register and vote in a particular state. ~The Patriot Post
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