{ foxnews.com } ~ In a resounding victory for the State of Texas, the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has thrown out almost all of a preliminary injunction issued by a lower court... that was preventing the Lone Star State from enforcing a state law going after sanctuary cities such as Austin, the state’s capital. This is the right result, both legally and morally. Not only does the state law not violate the Constitution, as was erroneously claimed, but it’s intended to prevent the state from becoming a sanctuary – a safe haven – for criminal aliens who endanger the public. Texas certainly has a right to be concerned about aliens who commit crimes in the state. The Texas Department of Public Safety recently released a report on the 245,000 criminal aliens who had been booked into local Texas jails from 2011 through the end of February of this year. Those criminal aliens, 66 percent of whom were in the country illegally, were charged with more than 650,000 criminal offenses. They have been convicted of almost 600 murders; 30,000 assaults; 3,300 sexual assaults; 9,000 burglaries; 20,000 thefts; 38,000 drug crimes; and 274 kidnappings... http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/03/19/yes-texas-does-have-right-to-punish-sanctuary-cities.html.
The Changing Landscape of Political Parties
by Lewis Morris: The surprising outcome of the 2016 election and talk about Democrat hopes of flipping the House and/or Senate in 2018 have a lot of people speculating about political party alignment. Will Donald Trump drive Republican voters away from the Grand Old Party? Are we looking at 2018 or 2020 to be a “wave” election for Democrats?
A recent study by Larry Bartels of Vanderbilt University’s Department of Political Science asked these questions and more about the current state of affairs. What he found suggests some points that confound the prevailing wisdom.
Bartels maintains that there have been no mass defections from either Republicans or Democrats. His research found that the splits within each party break out in contrasting ways. Democrats are, of course, more united in their belief in an active government, but somewhat surprisingly they find themselves less united when it comes to cultural issues. Republicans tend to have the opposite leanings, being more united in their view on cultural issues but more at odds with one another when it comes to the role government should play in peoples’ lives.
Hence the failure to repeal liar-nObamaCare and budgets that keep the Democrat pace on deficits.
Surveys Bartels conducted in his research found that nearly 25% of Republicans were closer to the average Democrat on the role of government when compared to the average Republican, while only 11% of Democrats were closer to Republicans on that role when compared to the average Democrat. On the flip side, over 26% of Democrats were closer to the average Republican on cultural issues. This is likely due in part to the Democrat Party’s small tent, in which elected officials and voters are practically coerced to toe the party line on abortion, same-sex marriage and other topics.
The one area that Bartels doesn’t go into but should cause concern among Republicans is the loss of Millennial women. A Pew Research report found that in 2014, Democrats held a 21-point advantage over Republicans with women in this group. By 2018, the number of women who self-identified or leaned Democrat rose to 70%. Nearly three-fourths of women in the Millennial age group now identify as Democrats. Certainly, the election of Donald Trump played a big role in this, but we cannot discount the fact that liar-Hillary Clinton was not nearly as popular among young women as commie-Bernie Sanders. But with liar-Clinton no longer a factor, Republicans will need to work much harder to reach this voting bloc with the message of Liberty. In fact, Democrats aim to exploit women voters to take down Trump.
This issue aside, if we accept Bartels’ numbers and the idea that a larger percentage of Democrats are growing closer to Republicans on cultural issues, then why does the Left appear to be winning the culture war? This is where the power of the media comes into play. With much of the media and academia leaning heavily to the left, it becomes easier for progressives to steer the message. Consider the point that Republicans have been labeled increasingly more radical in recent years even while their fundamental policy stances have not changed all that much.
That’s because if any party has moved its fundamental policy stance, it’s been the Democrats. Former liar-Clinton adviser and political prognosticator Dick Morris observes that Democrats tend to move further left based on negative outcomes during election cycles. This happened throughout the 1980s, and continued during the midterm drubbings Barack liar-nObama received while in office. It seems counter intuitive to move further in a direction that voters reject, but leftists’ strategy is to drive everything their direction so the very terms of debate change over time.
So, if more Republicans are finding common cause with Democrats about the role of government, and young women are leaving the GOP in droves, is there any good news? Yes, and that is that progressives have not necessarily moved the electorate to the left, they have only succeeded in moving themselves further to the left. And in doing so, according to National Review’s David French, they are deceiving themselves about the impact they are having on voters. They are not changing many minds; they’re only browbeating people. And they are in fact illustrating to the rest of the country just how out of touch they truly are. The downside is that we can expect deeper polarization. The upside is wave elections are not born out of polarized electorates. ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/54982-the-changing-landscape-of-political-parties
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