Category Archives: Constitution

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, January 6, 2021:  

A last-minute flurry of requests from more than 115 Republican state legislators in so-called swing states descended on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Vice President Mike Pence, asking to delay Wednesday’s opening and counting of Electoral College votes for president.

Each expressed variations on the same theme: we need more time to investigate claims of election fraud and, if so, to invalidate the slate of electors each state has sent to Vice President Pence.

One of those letters, signed by 88 state Republican lawmakers, said:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, December 30, 2020: 

After reviewing Representative Louie Gohmert’s lawsuit to give Vice President Pence power to throw out Electoral College votes, Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe wrote it off, calling it “jaw-droppingly stupid” and “the dumbest lawsuit of all.” Ohio State University law professor Edward Foley was slightly less histrionic: “The idea that the Vice President has sole authority to determine whether or not to count electoral votes … is inconsistent with a proper understanding of the Constitution.”

Ironically, back in 2010, Professor Foley called the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which Gohmert is challenging, “inadequate, unwieldy, and arguably unconstitutional.”

In a statement issued at the time of the filing of the lawsuit, Gohmert said:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, December 28, 2020:

With seven battleground/swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — having sent dueling slates of electors to Congress, it may come down to how Vice President Pence handles those competing votes that decides the outcome of the election.

Constitutional scholar John Yoo, author of Defender in Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power, co-authored an article in October for the Claremont Institute titled “What Happens if No One Wins?” Yoo and Robert Delahunty, a professor of law at St. Thomas University, dove deeply into constitutional history and concluded:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, December 14, 2020: 

Upon learning that the Supreme Court wouldn’t consider the lawsuit brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to challenge the election fraud perpetrated in four key battleground states, President Trump tweeted: “The Supreme Court had ZERO interest in the merits of the greatest voter fraud ever perpetrated on the United States of America.” He called it a “disgraceful miscarriage of justice.”

Paxton agreed. The justices didn’t even bother to hear any of the arguments he claimed to justify suing those four states. He angrily asked rhetorically:

If my people are harmed, which I view them as having been harmed, by the fact that other states didn’t follow their election laws and didn’t follow the Constitution, how do I address the fact that my voters are affected by a national election, that potentially was not done correctly, where there was fraud, and in that state law and federal law were not followed?

The high court issued a nonsensical explanation:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, December 10, 2020: 

Following Sunday’s rigged election, Venezuela’s Marxist dictator Nicholas Maduro called it a “great victory”:

We have recovered the National Assembly with the majority vote of the Venezuelan people. It’s a great victory without a doubt for democracy.

What’s true is that it’s a great victory for rigged elections and secures all governmental power in the hands of Maduro. Until Sunday Juan Guaido, the head of the National Assembly, was the only real political opposition to Maduro. As leader of the National Assembly, Guaido, under the terms of the country’s constitution, was declared president of the country until such time as legitimate elections could be held. Now, Guaido is out and Maduro has secured all governmental power unto himself.

Following the election, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, November 10, 2020: 

President Trump fired Secretary of Defense Mark Esper on Monday, announcing that the director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCC) will replace Esper. Tweeted the president:

I am pleased to announce that Christopher C. Miller, the highly respected Director … (unanimously confirmed by the Senate), will be Acting Secretary of Defense, effective immediately. Chris will do a great job.

As for Esper, the president said only this: “Mark Esper has been terminated. I would like to thank him for his service.”

Esper got sideways with the president back in June when the president almost fired him for publicly defying him, twice, when Esper publicly opposed the president’s suggestion that he might lean on the Insurrection Act to use the military to quell violence following the death of George Floyd.

Under the Insurrection Act of 1807,

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, October 21, 2020:  

Members of the Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., held their first worship service on Sunday since District Court Judge Trevor McFadden granted the church “injunctive relief” from D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s draconian, discriminatory, and hypocritical shutdown orders over the COVID virus.

Appropriately, the sermon was about civil government and civil disobedience, preached by Associate Pastor Bobby Jamieson.

McFadden ruled that Bowser’s “current restrictions substantially burden the Church’s exercise of religion” and so granted the church’s petition for relief.

Thirty-four Senate Republicans filed an Amicus Brief supporting the church: “The Mayor’s discrimination against houses of worship rests on a mistaken, and unconstitutional, premise that one particular exercise of free speech — a church’s desire to gather together and worship their God — is subordinate to other First Amendment-protected activities.”

Those Republicans got most of it right. The mayor’s ruling rests ultimately on a mistaken premise that the government has the right to dictate a church’s behavior. Many Christians believe this as well, drawing support for this view from Romans 13. Here’s the NIV version:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, October 13, 2020: 

Representative Doug Collins (R-Ga.) tweeted on Sunday that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “does not have the mental fitness to serve as Speaker.” He followed that up with another tweet on Monday: “Nancy Pelosi’s unwillingness to abide by the Constitution, combined with her recent actions, call into question her own mental fitness.”

On Monday he introduced a resolution to remove Pelosi from office, reviewing some of her “recent actions”: