ConservativeReview and Breitbart both did some excellent reporting this past week exposing how bad the border funding deal was for President Trump and all Americans who want to see the border secured.
Here are some of the highlights:
It includes a de facto amnesty for those who smuggle minors into the country.
It gives liberal Texas local officials a veto over wall plans.
It spends a bunch of money to make illegal migrants more comfortable and give them legal help.
It expands visas to bring more low-wage workers into the country to keep pay scales lower.
It expands the "catch and release" approach that releases illegal migrants into the interior of the country.
It reduces border detention beds, thereby making it more likely illegal migrants will be released into the interior of the country.
Mitch McConnell controlled the GOP Senate negotiators on the panel that negotiated the package over a period of the last several weeks. They were all establishment Republicans, including Richard Shelby of Alabama who had undermined Roy Moore a year ago. They had no interest in advancing Trump's position on illegal immigration.
When the bill came up for a vote on Thursday, our own Thom Tillis voted in favor. Cotton, Cruz, Hawley, Lee, Paul, Rubio, Sasse and Scott were among those who voted against it. Richard Burr was missing in action.
In the House, to their credit, both Ted Budd and Mark Walker voted against it.
Trump went from stating that he needed $25-30 billion to having to accept just over $1 billion, with major strings attached. McConnell and Paul Ryan had slow-walked his requests for border wall monies during the first two years of his presidency. McConnnell, with an assist from Tillis, then stabbed him in the back with gusto over the last couple of weeks.
Some folks have legitimate constitutional concerns about the President undertaking this project unilaterally. Article IV, Section 4 seems to give the President the authority to protect the states against invasion. And there is no question that we have been facing a prolonged invasion for many years. It has now reached a critical point that threatens the safety and security and culture and identity and indeed, the very future of our country.
The exercise of presidential emergency powers according to federal law has been applied in a loosey-goosey fashion over the years. But now the democratic socialists and establishment Republicans will suddenly attempt to discover limits on the president's power to protect the country. The Republicans want to satisfy their donors; whereas the Democrats have several motivations. The law granting emergency powers probably needs to be revisited, but I think the President still has authority to act in this case.
We cannot presume that the federal courts will handle the challenges to Trump's exercise of emergency powers objectively, or even his prerogatives under Article IV, Section 4. We must presume the courts will inappropriately enjoin his actions. I hope I am wrong about that.
This is a very sad moment for the Republican Party. They have a President who is willing to correct a longstanding wrong; and they have refused to get behind him. Thom Tillis is Exhibit A.
I have had the opportunity to become fairly well acquainted with the Streeterville section of downtown Chicago. It lies immediately east of the Magnificent Mile, between Michigan Avenue and Lake Michigan. It is the area inland from the Navy Pier complex.
I have stayed at an Embassy Suites twice in that area; visited a really good, old-school Italian-American restaurant called Volare there several times; patronized a Whole Foods there on at least a couple of occasions; and attended a medical meeting at yet another hotel in that "neighborhood".
I was therefore a bit skeptical when I first learned about Jussie Smollett's allegations. The premise that he would have been attacked by two white guys there shouting, "This is MAGA country" seemed a bit of a stretch. Why?
First, it is not MAGA country. The city of Chicago has relatively few Trump supporters. And it is not the type of place where ardent groups of young Trump supporters would typically congregate. The area has somewhat of a typical urban/upscale mix, with lots of professional/managerial/executive types. Housing in the area will not be inexpensive.
Second, the area is relatively safe. Yes, there are homeless folks and other ruffians occasionally who will harass pedestrians, but they are not numerous, and they tend to be black more often than white.
The idea that two white folks would randomly select a black homosexual male like Smollett to harass or injure, while not impossible, seemed fairly unlikely in this area. Moreover, there simply are not large numbers of white folks looking to do that kind of thing unless there is some other motive, particularly in a place like Chicago.
But when Smollett made his allegations highly public, large portions of the media and the political left jumped right aboard. They implied that it was typical of what we can expect from Trump supporters.
Smollett, as a black homosexual, fits neatly into two distinct identity groups ardently protected by the media/left complex. His allegations fit all their preconceptions and their overall worldview. And they did not question his story even one iota. They accepted it unquestioningly.
There has been much GOP/conservative tongue wagging at the emergence of the "new" socialist contingent within the Democratic Party. Conservative media has been focusing its attention on the insufferable Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is the obvious result of a complete absence of good parental role models and a failed education system.
Here in the eastern Triad, it is very easy to forget that we have had our share of similar politicians.
We used to have two United States Congressmen-- Brad Miller and Mel Watt-- who routinely had voting records to the left of Bernie Sanders. And that was way back when few people knew anything about Bernie Sanders.
These men used to be the object of considerable local political celebration; and were the toast of the regional mainstream media including the News and Record.
Another delightful example is Pricey Harrison, the career Raleigh politician who is militantly pro-abortion and anti-life. She was invited to the Rose Garden for the Obamacare signing ceremony. She has been a major mover of "green" legislation in the past which inherently represents governmental coercion. And she has recently co-sponsored legislation that seeks a laundry list of democratic socialist objectives forced upon the private sector: a 15% minimum wage, gender equity pay, requiring employers to offer paid sick leave and family leave, and allowing collective bargaining for public sector employees.
And then there is Greensboro's sweet Alma Adams who has never seen an abortion she did not like. She scores further left than Bernie Sanders on both the Conservative Review and Heritage Action scorecards. Adams no longer represents the eastern Triad; but as in the case of Pricey, it has been rumored she does not truly reside within her district.
The above discussion does not even remotely consider all our democratic socialist state legislators and local elected officials. But it is quite clear that we have had numerous elected officials who make Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders seem fairly routine.
The e-mail inbox had a bit of a surprise this evening.
It turns out that Reps. Larry Pittman, Mark Brody and Keith Kidwell have introduced a bill in the North Carolina House to nullify the Obergefell decision in the state of North Carolina. That would effectively reinstate the Marriage Amendment that voters had decisively passed during 2012.
Nullification is a legitimate tool for individual states to utilize when the federal government oversteps its bounds. Of course, the U.S. Supreme Court stole power from the states on this particular matter. It did so in a wildly inappropriate, scandalous, egregious, amoral manner; and was determined to place the religious liberty of orthodox Christians in jeopardy in the process. Of course, Jewish Supreme Court justices provided three of the five votes that wrote this new "marriage" law into existence nationwide.
There will be much indignation that such a bill was introduced in North Carolina. But remember that several democratic socialist states have deliberately legalized marijuana in spite of federal law to the contrary. They engaged in their own nullification of federal law with little protest. Of course, the socialists are capable of turning on a dime, so this ought not be surprising.
Never mind the ethical implications of these two men supporting this industry, and the potential effects legalization will have. Never mind there is still a federal law in effect. It is quite clear that the GOP establishment will support nullification when it pays.
Reps. Pittman, Brody and Kidwell in Raleigh did an admirable thing this week when they made a statement that we ought to nullify homosexual "marriage" in our state directed in a lawless fashion by the federal government. They deserve the most robust kudos. But I suspect the legislation won't see the light of day. The problem? Well, the Republicans are extremely risk-averse on the critical social issues. And perhaps more importantly, there is no financial pay-off to be gained, unlike the marijuana examples cited above.
Recently, I was asked to write an essay commemorating the 50th anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical, Humanae vitae, which affirmed the 2,000-year-old-Christian condemnation of contraception and induced abortion, and which predicted, in the wake of the Pill, various calamities that would strike the relations between men and women, and society at large. If Pope Paul’s prophecies can be faulted, it is that they were insufficiently pessimistic, for not even he imagined how fissiparous our concepts of sex would become, with genders multiplying faster than persons, and those staunch little braces for quick and easily comprehensible discourse—I mean pronouns—crushed to powder. He could not foresee the day when hideous drag queens would be invited to public libraries to tell sparkle-stories to children, in a kind of secular Sunday school. Pornography was not quite everywhere in Pope Paul’s time. Now every other child has seen things that would make the creepy boy of old behind the barn blush like Mrs. Grundy.
It was not supposed to be so, according to the Pope’s disloyal opposition. The Pill was supposed to bring on the maturity of the layfolk, an increased reverence for sex and marriage, responsible cooperation between the sexes, and la-di-da. A colossally and laughably incorrect prognosis, that...
The sexual innovators in the time of Pope Paul were laying their bets on the Age of Aquarius. Well, there never has been and there never is going to be a time in which that most powerful drive in the human animal, the sexual, will be peaceful, meek, respectful of persons, kindly, and rational, rather than dangerous, bold, often selfish, often cruel, and almost always irrational...
I suggest that we are in the midst of the flip of a switch. For 2,000 years, the Christian understanding of marriage has been forming the Western consciousness, touching it with what I dare to call supernatural characteristics, and elevating it (slowly, haltingly, with much confusion, but with a certainty as regards the destination) toward the natural—not as in brute nature, but as in fallen human nature redeemed and on the way to purification.
For 2,000 years, men and women in the West have been learning the hard and slow but liberating lesson that sexual desire is not for individual persons whether they consent or not, but for the common good, and is oriented toward marriage and the rearing of children. For 2,000 years, they have been trained to believe that the murder of children is evil. For 2,000 years, they have been trained to believe that woman, the physically weaker vessel, and the sex less likely to produce geniuses in arts and letters and technology and great leaders in battle, is the equal of man in the sight of God... They learned that adultery defiles a man as it defiles a woman. They learned that men are to love their wives as Christ loved the Church, laying down His life for her...
(Y)ou cannot have half a jungle, dear people. You cannot have the veneer of Christian reticence and respect for others, while indulging in the glee of pagan lust.
President Trump had some excellent pro-life comments during his State of the Union address last week. It was inspiring to hear him state a scriptural truth that humans are made in God's image:
Trump made a call for building a "culture of life". But in fact, George W. Bush had made this same call nearly two decades ago when he ran for president. This type of call is by no means new; and regrettably, no progress has been made from the standpoint of overturning Roe v. Wade and making abortion illegal in more jurisdictions since Bush made his statements a long time ago.
Why has there been little progress? A couple of articles this week provide a good part of the explanation.
First, Stefano Gennarini at Public Discourse explains the tendency of "conservatives" to lose on many substantive issues such as abortion. I will generously excerpt the reasons this happens:
(T)here is something in the political disposition of conservatives that always puts them at a disadvantage. Conservatives, by definition, are in favor of conserving the status quo. They do not really have a political project and only ever play defense.
Debates between conservatives are almost always about how much ground to concede to progressives—whether or not to fight particular progressive gains. They are never about what can be done to advance a concrete conservative political agenda.
Since conservatives never advance their own positive agenda, when progressives make gains, the progressive agenda of yesterday becomes today’s status quo for conservatives. The political center inexorably shifts further and further to the left. It is as though the political process were rigged from the start to favor progressives.
Under this predicament, a reversal of progressivism’s gains is not just elusive, it is impossible. If the status quo is the end game for conservatives, then there can never be hope for a long-term political victory, only momentary setbacks to the progressive agenda. The most conservatives can ever hope for is a temporary respite from the relentless advance of progressivism...
The capitulation of social conservatives to the rape exception in the abortion debate is emblematic of how eager conservatives are to find a new status quo with every progressive turn. Once thought of as a way for conservatives to restrict abortion with support from Democrats, the health and rape exceptions have now become the de facto position for the majority of Republicans.
By contrast, Democrats went from claiming abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” under the Clinton administration to championing “shout your abortion” and making abortion a litmus test for the Democratic party under Nancy Pelosi. And while pro-lifers squabble over the rape exception and heartbeat bills, abortion groups and their supporters are united in asking for restrictions on pro-life speech and the abolition of any conscience protections for medical providers...
More worrying still, conservatives do not show the slightest proclivity for the kind of social upheaval that leads to political results. While pro-lifers quietly and patiently pray that Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts may one day reverse Roe v. Wade—without any assurance whatsoever that this will indeed eventually happen—angry abortion crowds hurl insults at Kavanaugh as if he already had reversed it.
If conservatives were interested in real change, the March for Life would paralyze Washington, DC for a day each year, like the Women’s March. Instead, it barely gets covered by the media. Conservatives are so calm and polite that Metro Police do not even have to attend the March for Life, or even attempt to estimate the crowd size. While this is not to encourage rioting, pro-lifers need to find ways to make the pro-life cause more visible and effective both socially and politically...
What if the victories of social progressivism have less to do with the ideology of the founding than with the moral failure of men and women in every generation to stop evil from progressing? What if abortion, homosexual marriage, poverty, corruption, and other such social ills came to pass because of the sins of individual men and women who had the chance to do the right thing but chose not to? As the famous saying long attributed to Edmund Burke goes, “All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to stand by and do nothing"...
Maybe conservatives keep losing in America because they are constantly betrayed from within their own ranks. Think of the many Christians who failed to take a principled stand against abortion in key political moments, and the clergy who gave them a pass. Think of the conservatives who become googly-eyed every time a Republican is in the White House and fanatically defend Republicans even when they are clearly slow-walking pro-life policy, much as they have abandoned the pro-family cause altogether.
The only way to reverse the gains of progressives is for conservatives to embrace militantly a “thick” version of conservatism, one that is more than just a disposition to preserve the status quo. This much is clear. A status quo conservatism too often degenerates into being concerned only about the economic status quo, leading conservatives to fall back to the minimum common denominator of tax reform.
Conservatism must be about more than just conserving the present configuration of political and economic power in society. It must have substantive aims and concrete political targets. For this to happen, conservatism must be rooted in perennial principles of the natural law and religious traditions. Only through these principles can politics and economics help society flourish...
More importantly, in order to succeed, conservatives will need men and women of principle. Moral apathy is a spiritual condition. It is the reason for the complicity and complacency that have allowed the sexual revolution to spread in our society...
If conservatives quietly retreat on social issues rather than attempt to upset the political balance of society by challenging progressives with moral demands, conservatives will continue to be on the wrong side of history; and the left will only make more and more of its own moral demands for sexual autonomy. Conservatives will just default back to tax cuts and the economic status quo as American society continues to disintegrate.
The irony is that the economic prosperity to which American conservatives cling so effectively was, in large part, created thanks to the great influence on American society of institutions like the family and churches, as Tocqueville famously observed. These conservative social institutions have been the backbone of American society, politics, and commerce. They have never before been under attack as they are now.
As conservatives capitulate to the sexual revolution and America hurtles toward demographic and fiscal collapse almost on pace with Europe, the Psalmist’s aphorism on riches rings truer than ever: “In his riches man lacks wisdom, he is like the beasts that are destroyed” (Psalm 49).
Daniel Horowitz points at the recent decision by Chief Justice John Roberts to stay some pro-life legislation passed in Louisiana. He says it is due to a failure to try to fix systematically the judiciary:
I take no pride in seeing my thesis on the judiciary being proven correct every week, but once again we see that once we regard even lower courts as supreme to other branches on purely political questions, then simply “appointing better Supreme Court justices” will not matter. Much like drinking coffee with a fork, the more we accede to judicial supremacy, only using all our capital to get “our guys” on the high tribunal, the more we lose more of the existing members to the system. John Roberts has long ago become the new Anthony Kennedy, a fact that is now becoming obvious even to conservative court-worshippers...
As longtime readers of this column know, Roberts has been joining the liberal justices for quite some time in allowing bad lower court injunctions to remain in place, surreptitiously ensuring that the left-wing judicial agenda remains untouched despite the supposed new orientation of the Supreme Court. He has done this in other abortion cases, immigration, election law, and with a crazy global warming lawsuit – always refusing to categorically rein in the lower courts for stepping outside of bounds of judicial norms. However, the Louisiana decision takes Roberts’ power play to a new level of active aggression against the Constitution. Unlike in the other cases, the circuit court opinion below him (in June Medical Services, LLC v. Gee) actually got this one right and reversed a trial court injunction on the abortion law. Now, Roberts is actively issuing an injunction that the Fifth Circuit blocked, as opposed to simply allowing a lower court injunction to remain in place. The new Anthony Kennedy indeed. Or worse...
When lower courts issue injunctions against Supreme Court precedent, including decisions Roberts himself recently wrote, he has no problem taking a hands-off approach to those lower courts. But somehow, when a conservative lower court merely allows a state to mind its own business in a case that might brush up against a recent Supreme Court decision he himself disagreed with and now has the votes to overturn, Roberts parachutes in to overturn the lower court.
We are witnessing this trend every day with immigration cases...
For all the capital we have burned trying to get those who burn us onto the court, isn’t it time we use our political capital, messaging, and political power to return the courts to their original job?
Another interesting issue is that we are once again promoting "born alive" legislation. Many of us cheered when similar legislation passed Congress 16 years ago during the Bush II administration. But the Family Research Council explains that law lacked enforcement mechanisms. And so now, sixteen years later, we are trying to pass a bill that has some teeth.
Once again, this is all ultimately a political failure on the part of Republicans who represent themselves to be conservatives. It is also, to some extent, due to profoundly sinful attitudes held by significant percentages of the population. But public sentiment is much more opposed to legal abortion on demand than the media/left complex will even remotely concede.
Let's hope Trump is the leader who will fix this. But it will likely require at least another two or three "conservative" justices because the Republicans in Washington are otherwise worthless.
A couple of months ago, I had posted here about the fact that the leader of the state Medicaid agency and the CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina are both graduates of the Obama Administration. They lead organizations that altogether control the health care coverage of nearly 6 million North Carolina residents. I asked, tongue in cheek, what could possibly go wrong.
Thanks to a convergence of public and private-sector health care leadership..., North Carolina is now on the verge of something different: a set of reforms that would create an unprecedented, accelerated shift in how health care is paid for in the state, and the way social risk factors are incorporated in health care payment and delivery systems. Over the next five years, the state is poised to make an estimated 70 percent or more of health care payments through alternative payment models. No other state is on track to reform payments so much and so fast with the goal of improving population health and care delivery while lowering health care spending.
The Hi-Tech Act and Obamacare, both passed and signed into law during the early years of the Obama Administration, set the tone for these changes. But Republicans in Congress and in the North Carolina General Assembly jumped eagerly aboard, passing measures that adopt many of the same techniques those two initial pieces of legislation encouraged.
The basic approach? Coerce physicians and health care facilities to adopt the use of electronic health records, and force them to make them available in cyberspace. Create proxy organizations that dictate how medical care will be delivered, or encourage insurers to do so. Structure things so that these proxy organizations or insurers will be at considerable financial risk if too much money is spent. And penalize health care providers if they violate the algorithms that dictate how care must be delivered.
Medicaid reform in North Carolina adopts this approach. But Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina is now also encouraging it heavily; and is quickly trying to move all its insured members toward this model. Other insurers are jumping aboard to varying degrees.
And health care consumers will have no clue it is happening. All the decisions are made behind the scenes; and patients will often have little basis for understanding what care is being withheld from them.
This is an inherently progressive approach; and has been granted the imprimatur of both major parties.
In fact, both parties benefit from this new approach. Republicans and democratic socialists alike receive ample campaign contributions from insurers, managed care companies, big data companies and health care systems. By adopting this approach, they also are able to avoid making the difficult political decisions associated with truly containing health care costs. That would require disentangling and deactivating 75 years of governmental intervention in the health care marketplace that created the problems with health care costs in the first place.
All of these types of businesses-- insurers, managed care companies, health care systems, big data companies-- potentially benefit from these changes being implemented.
Here in our state, the leadership of the North Carolina Medical Society quickly jumped aboard, much like lapdogs. Progressives captured the organization; and the society has received funding from the types of businesses listed above. The state medical society therefore felt no need to protect patients or physicians from these changes.
In any case, patients in North Carolina will be experiencing fairly dramatic changes in the near future. It remains to be seen to what extent it will be obvious that care is being withheld from them.
In case you had not noticed, the new cause celebre within media/left circles in North Carolina is the plight of LGBT citizens who cannot get protective court orders against domestic violence under state law.
We are told that North Carolina is the only state in the union that does not offer domestic violence protective orders for LGBT citizens.
But wait a minute. The premise that these folks might need domestic violence orders suggests that there are some really terrible people in this crowd. That is a bit confusing because those who control the media have been indoctrinating us over the last two decades that the members of this group are wonderful and praiseworthy and virtuous and humanitarian and fashionable and every other affirming adjective we can possibly conjur.
How could it be that they might threaten or commit domestic violence?
But there is more. A fascinating article by Robert Lopez provides even more perspective. Mr. Lopez is a gentleman who escaped the gay lifestyle, and who spent his early years visiting the gay baths that exist in certain liberal cities.
He describes a social hierarchy in the gay baths that he likens to racketeering. He says the pattern is abuse and cover-up.
He describes very young gay men being victimized by wealthy, older men. There was even a recent incident when two were found dead after some drug-related sex play. Two other gay men who had been married by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg have been recently accused of rape.
In some cases, the older gay men target minors. One particular high-profile offender is described as targeting young, vulnerable Hispanic men.
For anyone who speaks out, they try to destroy you.
Of course, this type of information completely contradicts the picture the media/left complex has pushed on the American public normalizing homosexuality and advocating special rights. Of course, in the process, they assaulted the religious liberty of orthodox Christians.
But the truth is available for anyone who is honest enough to see it. And the recently publicized agenda item for domestic violence orders in North Carolina illustrates a portion of that truth.
Perhaps the very best part of President Trump's State of the Union address was his commentary regarding socialism. I really enjoyed his words. Here is the excerpt:
He could also have mentioned that socialism has resulted in massive bloodbaths with ruthless socialist leaders taking 100 million lives or more-- most often their own people-- in the old Soviet Union; China; Nazi Germany; Cambodia; and other areas.
On the Republican side of the aisle, there were some boisterous cheers as Trump made his remarks. They began to chant "USA! USA! USA!". I used to enjoy these displays; but now I recognize them as profoundly phony.
The Republicans in Congress do not even remotely aspire to roll back socialism. They had a great chance with Obamacare and they obdurately refused to do so. Reconsideration of the history of the last century can only lead us to conclude that they have left in place virtually every entitlement program that was ever enacted. They have added some of their own.
From a broader standpoint, they have been profoundly statist. They have passed and supported legislation that gives the federal government license to exceed its truly constitutional limits. They don't seem to hesitate to impose requirements on the private sector. They have played a complicit role in building the massive administrative state. That is a manifestation of socialism also.
The fact is that we have a mixed capitalist/socialist economy. The socialist component is much greater than some will admit.
When Trump advocates the governmental imposition of paid family leave as promoted by his daughter, that is a form of socialism. Yes, he has rolled back many regulations, and that counters the socialist zeitgeist at least to some extent. When he pushes further central interventions in the health care sector, that tends to increase socialistic control.
And yes, the democratic socialists are, of course, much more enthusiastic about socialism than the Republicans. It is a central part of their political worldview, after all.
But when the congressional Republicans chanted "USA" last night in response to Trump's remarks, it reminded me that they do absolutely nothing to oppose the socialism we already have in our country. They think it would be too risky politically; and many of them are fully supportive of the socialism we have. They merely play defense, half-heartedly; and when the democratic socialists achieve offensive victories, the Republicans refrain from reversing them.
That is a recipe for incremental socialism, which apparently continues to be our future. And that is particularly true given the continued influx of large numbers of immigrants-- legal and illegal-- who do not respect or share America's founding principles.
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