Have nothing to do with the [evil] things that people do, things that belong to the darkness. Instead, bring them out to the light... [For] when all things are brought out into the light, then their true nature is clearly revealed...

-Ephesians 5:11-13

Category Archives: Crime

House Committee Reports AG Garland’s Attack on Parents Was “Manufactured”

Friday, 24 March 2023 14:17
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, March 24, 2023:  

According to the interim report released on Tuesday by the House Committee on the Judiciary and its Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, there is more than enough evidence to prove that the National School Boards Association (NSBA), working in coordination with the Biden administration, created out of whole cloth the pressing need for federal investigation of parents. Twenty-five of those parents were investigated, said the committee, but no charges were brought, indicating that the entire outrage was “manufactured” with no “legitimate basis,” according to the committee.

It was all politics, designed to intimidate parents who protested what they perceived to be major educational issues that were brought to light during the Covid-inspired lockdowns.

From the report:

From the initial set of material produced in response to the subpoenas [issued by the committee], it is apparent that the Biden Administration misused federal law-enforcement and counterterrorism resources for political purposes.

 

The Justice Department’s own documents demonstrate that there was no compelling nationwide law-enforcement justification for the Attorney General’s directive or the Department components’ execution thereof.

Instead, the weaponization of the DOJ was clearly done for political purposes:

It appears, from these documents and the information received previously, that the Administration’s actions were a political offensive meant to quell swelling discord over controversial education curricula and unpopular school board decisions.

For proof, the committee noted that after those 25 “investigations” of what the NSBA suggested might be “domestic terrorists” were completed, not a single charge of any federal crime was made against them:

According to the FBI, none of the school board-related investigations have resulted in federal arrests or charges, highlighting the political motives behind the Attorney General’s actions. The Administration’s goal seems to have been silencing the critics of its radical education policies….

The report concluded:

Internal Executive Branch documents indicate that the Biden Administration’s use of federal law-enforcement and counterterrorism resources is an example of government weaponization against American parents.

 

If the Justice Department performed any due diligence prior to the issuance of the Attorney General’s memorandum, it would have understood clearly and forcefully that federal intervention was unwarranted.

 

Because that due diligence did not occur—and the Administration acted out of political motivations rather than for law-enforcement reasons—parents around the country had FBI “assessments” opened into them.

It was a political act from start to finish. The committee repeatedly asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to rescind the weaponization letter, but he has refused to do so. Further, the White House continues to stall in responding to the committee’s demands for more background on its conversations with the NSBA prior to the inflammatory letter it sent to the White House, and the fact that just days after receiving it, Garland issued his weaponization letter.

That means that the weaponry against anyone who might be considered a “domestic terrorist” in the future remains in place.

It was the NSBA letter that ignited the flame. On Wednesday, September 19, 2021, Viola Garcia and Chip Slaven, president and CEO of the group, respectively, signed off on the letter (without, it should be noted, approval from members of the board):

America’s public schools and its education leaders are under an immediate threat. The National School Boards Association (NSBA) respectfully asks for federal law enforcement and other assistance to deal with the growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation occurring across the nation.…

 

NSBA believes immediate assistance is required….

On the following Monday, October 4, Garland issued his weaponization letter in response to the NSBA’s demand:

Today Attorney General Merrick B. Garland directed the FBI and U.S. Attorneys’ Offices to meet in the next 30 days with federal, state, Tribal, territorial and local law enforcement leaders to discuss strategies for addressing this disturbing trend.…

By this order, Garland weaponized the agencies under his command to go after American citizens who were exercising their First Amendment rights:

According to the Attorney General’s memorandum, the Justice Department will launch a series of additional efforts in the coming days designed to address the rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel.

 

Those efforts are expected to include the creation of a task force, consisting of representatives from the department’s Criminal Division, National Security Division, Civil Rights Division, the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, the FBI, the Community Relations Service and the Office of Justice Programs, to determine how federal enforcement tools can be used to prosecute these crimes, and ways to assist state, Tribal, territorial and local law enforcement where threats of violence may not constitute federal crimes.

That Garland’s letter was sent without any oversight or review by lawyers in his office was revealed by America First Legal (AFL), which obtained records showing that those lawyers were “blindsided” by the letter. Said AFL’s Vice President and General Counsel Gene Hamilton:

We have known all along that the timeline at issue — a letter to the President followed by an Attorney General memorandum within days — indicated that the underlying premise for the memorandum was … fake….

 

The report issued by the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government and the House Judiciary Committee this week confirms our assertions about the Attorney General’s memorandum.

 

And now, the records we are revealing today further show that the memo blindsided the FBI.

The House committee’s work is far from done:

The Committee’s and the Select Subcommittee’s work is not complete.

 

This oversight will continue as the Justice Department and the Education Department continue to produce responsive documents.

 

In addition, the FBI has produced only fourteen pages of documents to date in response to the Committee’s subpoena—a flagrant disregard of the serious concerns about the Bureau’s misuse of its authorities against parents.

 

There remain open questions about the development and issuance of Attorney General Garland’s memorandum—issued only five days after receipt of the NSBA’s letter to President Biden—and the coordination between the Justice Department and White House on that point.

 

There remain open questions about how the FBI quickly operationalized the Attorney General’s directive, and whether the Bureau objected to the civil liberty concerns inherent in the Attorney General’s memorandum.

 

The Committee has outstanding subpoenas for testimony from Chip Slaven and Viola Garcia, [the] senior NSBA officials who signed the letter to President Biden.

 

Until all responsive documents are produced and interviews with the necessary parties take place, the Committee and the Select Subcommittee will continue its oversight to uncover facts that will inform potential legislative reforms.

This stalling by the DOJ and Garland’s refusal to rescind the incendiary letter weaponizing his agency against American citizens exercising their First Amendment rights are all the proof one needs to know that the entire exercise was political in nature. It was designed from the start to turn off the outrage those citizens were expressing once they learned, thanks to the Covid shutdowns, just how schools were radicalizing their children.

Biden Unleashes Another Attack on the Second Amendment

Wednesday, 15 March 2023 12:35
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, March 15, 2023:  

While paying lip service to constitutional constraints, Joe Biden continued his administration’s attack on the Second Amendment. In his EO issued on Tuesday, he pushes the limits of power and he knows it: “It is the policy of my Administration,” said the White House press release, “[to] pursue every legally available … action to reduce gun violence.”

Even if his moves would provably reduce gun violence, they would still be unconstitutional under Article II, Section 1, Clause 1 of the Constitution: “The Executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America … he shall take care that the laws [passed by the legislative branch] be faithfully executed.” (Emphasis added.)

The occupant of the White House cannot, under the Constitution, create legislation. But that doesn’t deter Biden:

  1. He is asking the attorney general (AG), Merrick Garland, to “clarify [read: expand] the definition of who is engaged in the business of dealing in firearms, and thus required to become Federal firearms licensees (FFLs)….”;
  2. He is asking Garland and the secretaries of Defense(!), Homeland Security, Health and Human Services (including the surgeon general), and Education(!) to “encourage [read: expand] effective use of extreme risk protection orders (‘red flag’ laws)….”;
  3. He is asking his Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to determine “how gun manufacturers market firearms to minors [and] civilians, including through the use of military imagery”; and
  4. He is asking all major agencies in the executive branch to propose additional infringements of the Second Amendment “on how the Federal Government can better support the recovery, mental health, and other needs of survivors of gun violence, families of victims and survivors of gun violence, first responders to incidents of gun violence, and communities affected by gun violence.”

None of these moves will have any noticeable impact on “gun violence.” Expanding background checks wouldn’t have caught the 18-year-old shooter in Uvalde, Texas, because prior to the attack he had no criminal record and so wouldn’t have been flagged by the system.

The shooter who killed 11 people at a dance studio in Monterey Park, California, used a firearm that was banned in the state.

So-called red flag laws already infringe on the Fourth Amendment rights of citizens by denying them due process. And there’s precious little hard evidence to show that their enforcement has measurably reduced gun violence.

Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA), took Biden to task over his latest effort to infringe on precious rights enjoyed by law-abiding gun owners — Biden’s primary target:

Joe Biden is trying to sell this new gun control scheme the way he’s always done, by promising less violent crime and safer neighborhoods, but this plan isn’t going to accomplish either goal, and he knows it.

 

This sleight-of-hand maneuver simply makes it more difficult for law-abiding citizens to purchase firearms, while creating the impression gun dealers are crooks and the industry is unregulated.

 

This is just another chapter in Joe Biden’s war on gun rights. It is a diversion to the Democrat failure to keep Americans safe from violent criminals who are released without bail and are free to prey on us all.

He added:

So, Biden wants the Defense Department to buy more guns; he will blame crime on gun dealers and tell gun makers how to market their products. But he won’t tell the Justice Department to crack down on recidivist criminals; he’s not asking the courts to lock up armed felons; and he’s continuing to treat the Second Amendment as a second-class right.

 

Biden has always had an anti-gun agenda and on this important constitutional issue, he has never let the courts, public opinion or the Bill of Rights get in his way.

This is textbook Joe Biden. Talk tough, mak

e it appear he’s doing something about crime when he really isn’t, and ultimately just continue penalizing law-abiding gun owners for crimes they didn’t commit.

 

The only people who will be any safer are the criminals who ignore gun control laws already.

Do note that a careful reading of the entire EO issued Tuesday reveals nothing about a tactic that actually would reduce gun violence committed by violent criminals: pressure Soros-backed state and local attorneys general to enforce existing laws to keep convicted felons off the streets.

Biden’s true agenda is revealed once again. His target isn’t the criminals committing the violence, but the law-abiding gun owners whose ownership of firearms prevents the federal government from becoming totally tyrannical.

Deputy DA under Soros-backed George Gascon Awarded $1.5 Million in Retaliation Lawsuit

Tuesday, 07 March 2023 15:12
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, March 7, 2023:  

Deputy District Attorney Shawn Randolph, a 35-year veteran prosecutor in Los Angeles County, was awarded $1.5 million in civil damages on Monday in her retaliation lawsuit against her boss, DA George Gascon.

This is the first case to go to trial, and there are nearly 20 other similar lawsuits pending. A previous retaliation lawsuit was settled out of court for more than a million dollars.

Even the far-left Los Angeles Times admitted that the award doesn’t bode well for Gascon, who has survived two recall efforts:

The verdict does not bode well for Gascón, who testified at the two-week trial and faces similar lawsuits from prosecutors who say they were reassigned or passed up for promotions after speaking out against his progressive policies.

 

A number of people are suing Gascón, including Victoria Adams, his former chief of staff, and Deputy Dist. Atty. Maria Ramirez, who testified against him at Randolph’s trial.

The other lawsuits pending from prosecutors claim that Gascon retaliated against them when they raised objections about his “reform” policies by disparaging them and demoting them to dead-end positions. The vice president of the union representing prosecutors, Eric Giddal, celebrated the award:

We all know what George Gascón thinks about public servants.

 

He has called lifelong public servants “internal terrorists.” And he treated them as such.

 

He silenced their voices, he engaged in petty and vindictive acts of retaliation, and rewarded political loyalty instead of competency and professionalism.

 

Far worse, he did so at the expense of public safety. Today, jurors spoke out against Gascón’s incompetence and condemned his illegal machinations.

Gascon’s former chief of staff Victoria Adams filed a retaliation lawsuit in December, claiming she was demoted for challenging the legality of a number of Gascon’s policies upon his taking office. They included eliminating cash bail, a ban on the prosecution of juveniles as adults, and sentencing “enhancements” for crimes involving a firearm or defendants with previous felony convictions. He also instituted a policy of not seeking the death penalty even for the most horrific crimes of violence.

The case of a man claiming to be a woman serves as just one example of how Gascon’s “reforms” turned out. Hannah (James) Tubbs sexually assaulted a 10-year-old-girl in a restroom when he was just under age 18. He wasn’t charged with the crime until a DNA match when he was 26. Gascon charged him as a juvenile and obtained just a two-year sentence in a “youth” facility for his crime.

John Lewin, another prosecutor who was demoted for challenging Gascon, celebrated the court’s decision to award damages to Randolph:

When George Gascon tried to implement policies that are not only illegal, but which have resulted in the deaths and victimization of an untold number of innocent citizens, Shawn risked her career and her reputation to do what was right.

 

George Gascon is derelict in his responsibility as District Attorney, and is a scourge to the community at large. This is the beginning of the end for him! His horrible reign of terror will not last past the next election!

George Santos Being Investigated by House Ethics Committee

Friday, 03 March 2023 13:03
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, March 3, 2023:  

When George Santos (R-N.Y.) is removed from the House of Representatives, he will be remembered for this one thing: the fact that his lies, falsehoods, crimes, and generally turning his entire resume into a complete fabrication will have set a new standard. It will exceed those of another George — George W. Plunkitt, a Tammany Hall pol who openly practiced what he called “honest graft” and is best known for bragging about it. Plunkitt defended his actions by declaring that while in office, “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.”

Plunkitt would be embarrassed by the extent to which Santos has taken his “opportunities” and by the fact that he not only won an election with them, but remains in office as this is being written.

The House Ethics Committee announced that on last Tuesday it created a subcommittee specifically to look into Santos’ long list of criminal actions. That list is so long that it assures that members of the subcommittee will likely spend the rest of their two-year terms looking into it. Said the committee:

Investigative Subcommittee shall have jurisdiction to determine whether Representative George Santos may have: engaged in unlawful activity with respect to his 2022 congressional campaign; failed to properly disclose required information on statements filed with the House; violated federal conflict of interest laws in connection with his role in a firm providing fiduciary services; and/or engaged in sexual misconduct towards an individual seeking employment in his congressional office.

This just barely scratches the surface of the depth of corruption they are likely to find.

Santos has no shame. When pressed on a few of his fibs and fabrications, he said, “I’ve been a terrible liar on those subjects, and what I tried to convey to the American people.… I ran in 2020 for the same exact seat for Congress, and I got away with it then.”

Vanity Fair, the left-wing magazine that loves to excoriate Republicans for their misdeeds both real and imagined, tried unsuccessfully to condense Republican Representative George Santos’ long list of deceits and prevarications into a single paragraph:

In addition to lies about his work history, educational background, grandparents, mother, being Jewish, having multiple employees who died in the Pulse nightclub shooting and about a million other things, there are significant questions about the source(s) of Santos’s campaign funds. For one thing, despite being evicted on more than one occasion, he apparently had $700,000 to freely lend. Meanwhile, a relative whose name was marked down next to a donation of $5,800 said they have no idea where that money came from.

On the other hand, New York magazine’s Intelligencer had no such desire. It took the opposite approach. In 11 pages of single-spaced paragraphs it reported the following. Santos

Lied about where he went to high school…

And college….

He never worked on Wall Street….

Where did the $700,000 come from?….

He lied about founding an animal charity….

He … swindled a disabled vet whose dog was dying….

Did he rip off an Amish dog breeder with a bad check?….

What’s the deal with his marriage(s)?…

It’s unclear if his mother’s death was related to 9/11….

His grandmother was definitely not a Holocaust victim….

And he did not have employees who died in the Pulse (nightclub) shooting….

Is he Jewish or “Jew-ish”?…

Was he a drag queen in Brazil?…

Was he a Broadway producer?…

Was he really a journalist in Brazil?…

Did his campaign deliberately repeatedly illegally charge donors on their credit cards?…

Was he the target of an “assassination” in December?…

Wikipedia was happy to expand the list of Santos’ falsifications, including these summaries:

There is no known record of Santos ever having attended any college or university, despite his claims that he attended the toney Horace Mann School, Baruch College, and New York University.

His aliases include Anthony Abrovsky and Anthony Devolder, names he fabricated as part of his efforts to dupe investors and donors to his cause.

His claim of employment at Citigroup overlapped with his employment as a Disk Network customer service representative.

His claim that he and his family owned 13 rental properties in New York when in fact neither he nor they owned any.

His claims that he was robbed when there is no evidence provided either by New York police or surveillance cameras at the alleged scenes.

His claims that he was worth millions when he has actually broke, behind on his rent, and in the process of being evicted.

His scam of overreporting campaign expenses in such a way that they didn’t need to be reported.

The more than 20 letters his campaign received from the Federal Election Commission about “problems” with his disclosures.

Contributions to his campaign by people who didn’t exist.

His Brazilian check fraud charges that remain open from 2013.

His 29 unpaid traffic tickets in New York and another six in Florida.

Another George — George Carlin — explained why the Ten Commandments aren’t posted in a courthouse:

The real reason that we can’t have the Ten Commandments in a courthouse: you cannot post “Thou shall not steal,” “Thou shall not commit adultery,” “Thou shall not lie,” in a building full of lawyers, judges, and politicians: it creates a hostile work environment.

Until he is ousted, Santos certainly must feel right at home.

Note: Santos is simultaneously being investigated by U.S., New York state, and Nassau County authorities over his fabrications, distortions, and fictions.

Former Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney Accepts Temporary Professorship at UVA

Thursday, 02 March 2023 14:13
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, March 2, 2023:  

Liz Cheney, overwhelmingly rejected by Wyoming Republicans last summer, has accepted a temporary teaching position at the University of Virginia (UVA). It’s a one-year gig, with options to renew.

Her intense hatred of Donald Trump led her to destroy her career as a politician in the Cowboy State. In November 2021, the Wyoming GOP Central Committee voted to no longer recognize her as a member of the party.

She had previously been removed from her position as chair of the House Republican Conference in May 2021, and in February 2022 the Republican National Committee overwhelmingly voted to censure her for taking part in her investigation of the so-called January 6 riot or insurrection.

Her continued scorching of former President Donald Trump led to her resounding defeat in the Republican primary in August, when she garnered less than 30 percent of the vote.

She was rewarded a political plum for her continued vitriolic attacks on Trump by Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who invited Cheney to co-chair the faux January 6 committee.

Now out of office, Cheney will continue her attacks on Trump and his supporters as a professor on the far-left campus of UVA. In her concession speech, she made it clear what her life’s mission would be:

This fight is not over — it may take many years. For anyone wondering about my own future, let me say this: I will do everything in my power to make sure Donald Trump is never again near the Oval Office.

In case anyone still wasn’t clear about her intentions, she reiterated her life’s mission on NBC’s Today show last August:

I believe that Donald Trump continues to pose a very great threat and risk to our republic. And I think that defeating him is going to require a broad and united front of Republicans, Democrats and independents, and that’s what I intend to be part of.…

 

I am absolutely going to continue this battle. It’s the most important thing I’ve ever been involved in, and I think it’s certainly the most important thing — challenge — that our nation has faced in recent history, and maybe since the Civil War. And it’s one that we must win.

She’ll be using her new soapbox at UVA to continue her fight against Trump:

I am delighted to be joining the UVA Center for Politics as a Professor of Practice. Preserving our constitutional republic is the most important work of our time, and our nation’s young people will play a crucial role in this effort….

 

There are many threats facing our system of government and I hope my work with the Center for Politics and the broader community at the University of Virginia will contribute to finding lasting solutions that not only preserve but strengthen our democracy.

Her boss, Larry Sabato, who is the founder and director of UVA’s Center for Politics, sees Trump as the enemy of “our democracy” as well, calling him the “worst” president in the history of the United States.

This fits, of course, as Sabato’s belief system reflects his past work as a Democratic operative after having obtained degrees in government and politics at Princeton and attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Rejoicing at Cheney’s arrival he said:

With democracy under fire in this country … Liz Cheney serves as a model of political courage and leadership. Liz will send a compelling message to students about integrity. She’s a true profile in courage, and she was willing to pay the price for her principles – and democracy itself.

As students of the Constitution know, the Founders didn’t create a “democracy.” Indeed, they did everything they could to keep the constitutional republic they were creating from becoming one.

In any case, the voters aren’t buying the lie. In the six polls taken last month concerning the 2024 presidential race among Republicans, Cheney didn’t even register in four of them, while in the other two she garnered an infinitesimal two percent.

She remains clearly an outsider, barking at the back door of the present front-runner, Donald Trump, who is between 15 and 30 points ahead of his nearest likely opponent in 2024, Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis.

Nevertheless, in her fevered hatred of Trump, Cheney has decided that keeping him out of the Oval Office for a second term is her hill to die on.

Supreme Court to Take Another Swing at Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Tuesday, 28 February 2023 15:11
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, February 28, 2023:  

Like the Energizer Bunny, Senator Elizabeth Warren’s brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), “keeps going and going.” On Monday the Supreme Court announced it will take at the CFPB, this time looking at how it’s being illegally funded by the Federal Reserve.

The CFPB, created by language buried in the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 in response to the financial crisis of 2008, was designed by Senator Warren to avoid any manner of restraint: It would operate independently of Congress or the president, and would be funded by the Federal Reserve, where the agency’s 1,600 employees are located.

Efforts to rein in the rogue bureau, or abolish it altogether, have failed. It continues to harass any private company of sufficient size to catch its attention: banks, credit unions, securities firms, payday lenders, mortgage-servicing companies, foreclosure-relief services, debt collectors, and others.

It violates the separation of powers doctrine upon which the American Republic is based. It writes its own rules, it enforces its own rules, and punishes those companies which it finds has violated those rules. And, as mentioned above, it gets its funding not from Congress, but from the Federal Reserve.

Sometimes the fines the CFPB levies are in the millions of dollars. In fact, the bureau boasted that it had “extracted nearly $12 billion” in fines and “refunds” from the financial services sector of the U.S. economy in its first six years of operation.

In 2013, the House Financial Services Committee criticized the bureau, citing its lack of transparency and accountability. A lawsuit filed that same year claimed that “CFPB’s structure insulates it from political accountability and internal checks and balances in violation of the United States Constitution.”

In 2016, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, while on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, wrote:

The director of the CFPB possesses more unilateral authority — that is, authority to take action on one’s own, subject to no check — than any single commissioner or board member in any other independent agency in the U.S. government.

 

The CFPB’s concentration of enormous executive power in a single, unaccountable, unchecked director not only departs from settled historical practice, but also poses a far greater risk of arbitrary decision-making and abuse of power, and a far greater threat to individual liberty, than does a multi-member independent agency.

And still the Bunny keeps going and going…

However, in October, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a lawsuit brought by the Community Financial Services Association of America (CFSAA) on behalf of its many members injured by the agency that its funding mechanism is unconstitutional. The appeal will be heard by the high court this fall, with its ruling expected in June 2024.

Noted Christian Vergonis, the lawyer for the CFSSA:

The CFPB’s self-funding mechanism lacks any contemporary or historical precedent, improperly shields the agency from congressional oversight and accountability, and unconstitutionally strips Congress of its power of the purse under the Appropriations Clause of the Constitution.

The law firm McGlinchy Stafford predicts a substantial disruption if the high court cuts the agency’s funding legs out from underneath it. It could not only end the agency’s operation altogether, but also render inoperative those rules and regulations it imposed while operating illegally. The firm said:

If all regulations that the CFPB has adopted for the last eleven years are thrown out, all that certainty and all those market expectations disappear and [would be] replaced by confusion and uncertainty.

The agency itself said such an outcome would create the proverbial “parade of horribles,” including “undermining any and all rules amended or promulgated by the CFPB, [and would call] into question any enforcement actions it has taken.”

That would be called freedom! The market would adjust quickly, breathing the clean air of liberty from oppression by a rogue agency bent on applying its own rules according to its own agenda without any oversight or limitation.

May the Supreme Court finally seize the opportunity to pull the plug on the CFPB!

Missouri AG Moves to Expel Soros-backed Attorney, Calling Her a “Usurper”

Friday, 24 February 2023 14:21
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, February 24, 2023:  

Time ran out on George Soros-backed St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner at noon on Thursday. Missouri’s Attorney General Andrew Bailey gave her until 12 noon to resign or he would file a petition to remove her.

At 12:01 p.m. yesterday, he filed.

Gardner is a prime example of what George Soros wants: a compliant attorney with little respect for the law, the Constitution, or her oath of office, and who instead is committed to overthrowing the existing judicial system, claiming it to be unfair, biased, and prejudiced against black people. The people of St. Louis bought the lie in 2016, and repeated the error in 2020 when they voted overwhelmingly to keep her in office, giving her 74 percent of the vote.

St. Louis citizens have been paying the price ever since. Under fire from all sides, including some Democrats, Gardner has racked up multiple examples of injustice at DiscoverTheNetworks, and a long list at the leftist-friendly Wikipedia.

Bailey filed a “petition in quo warranto,” which is used to challenge Gardner’s right to hold her office. The petition opens with the most recent and perhaps most egregious example, that of Janae Edmonson. That story begins:

Janae Edmonson, a teenage athlete, was walking back to her hotel in downtown St. Louis on Saturday, February 18. Ms. Edmonson, who was in town for a volleyball tournament, had just verbally committed to play sports for a college in Tennessee.

 

As Ms. Edmonson and her family walked down the sidewalk, a speeding car driven by Daniel Riley crashed into another car and struck Ms. Edmonson, severing one of her legs and maiming the other.

 

Her father, thanks to his quick thinking and military service, applied two belts as tourniquets as he watched the life drain from her face.

 

Thankfully, Ms. Edmonson survived, although both of her legs were amputated.

The petition failed to mention that Janae is an outstanding student-athlete at Smyrna High School in Tennessee. She is a member of the National Honor Society, plays a number of sports, and plays the violin in the school’s music program, all the while double-enrolling in college courses.

And just who is this Daniel Riley? He was out on bail, thanks to Gardner’s “enlightened” view of law enforcement in The Gateway City. From the petition:

Daniel Riley never should have been driving that car. In 2020, the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office charged Riley with First Degree Robbery and Armed Criminal Action for stealing a firearm from [a] victim at gunpoint.

 

The Circuit Attorney [Gardner] dismissed and refiled that case on July 18, 2022, but not before Riley—who was out on bond—earned 54 separate violations for failing to comply with the pre-trial bond conditions.

 

After the Circuit Attorney refiled the case, Riley earned 50 more violations. The Circuit Attorney never filed a motion to revoke Riley’s bond. [Emphasis in original.]

For this reason alone Gardner should be reprimanded severely. The petition continued:

Ms. Edmonson’s injuries are the direct result of years of willful neglect from Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner. As the Circuit Attorney, [Gardner] is morally, ethically, and legally responsible for the conduct of her office.

But the history of her malfeasance goes back to the very beginning of her position, starting in 2016:

For years, the Circuit Attorney’s Office has failed to prosecute cases to resolution, has failed to inform and confer with victims, and has failed to even review and file cases submitted by the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department.

[Gardner] has, therefore, forfeited her office.

The blame for Edmonson’s injuries is squarely on Gardner:

[Gardner] willfully neglected her official duty or knowingly or willfully failed or refused to timely move to revoke bond and prosecute Riley, and as a result, Riley was not in custody on February 18, 2023, when he drove his car into Ms. Edmonson, resulting in the loss of both of her legs.

 

On September 4, 2020, [Gardner’s] office charged Riley with First Degree Robbery and Armed Criminal Action for stealing a firearm from a victim at gunpoint.

 

Between September 4, 2020, and February 18, 2023, Riley earned at least 94 bond violations for his misconduct, and [Gardner’s] office dismissed and refiled the criminal charges against Riley because the State “was not ready to proceed.”

The petition reviews another example of her malfeasance:

Over the course of about three months, and concluding on July 14, 2021, [Gardner] repeatedly failed to fulfill her discovery obligations and failed to appear in court and to prosecute the charges that had been brought against the defendant in State of Missouri v. Brandon Campbell … resulting in the dismissal of the charges, which included a charge of murder in the first degree.

 

The trial court found that [Gardner’s]  office failed to appear despite having been served with an order to show cause.

It gets worse. The petition notes that in Gardner’s determination not to prosecute, she “has a backlog of at least 3,000 cases that she has failed to review for charges, including some number of violent crimes.”

In another example, Gardner refused even to file charges in a B&E (breaking and entering) case until a video of the incident appeared on TikTok! She and her office, now staffed with lawyers of a similar stripe, have refused to prosecute cases brought by the St. Louis Police Department:

For instance, police referred charges on a case where a family was terrorized in their home by a woman who was attempting to break in.…

 

According to news reports, [Gardner] failed to review the case until the victims gained notoriety on TikTok by [posting] video footage of the woman attempting to break into their home.

All of which, according to the petition, means that Gardner “has forfeited her office and is a usurper who must be removed from office.”

Evidence of her destruction of the judicial and law-enforcement system in St. Louis appears everywhere. In 2019, for example, St. Louis police filed 7,045 felony cases with her office, but she prosecuted only 1,641 of them. She claimed that police hadn’t provided her office with “enough evidence” to prosecute them.

The turnover rate of attorneys in her office is atrocious, with their replacements suffering from the same liberal mindset and thus being incapable and unwilling to bring charges in even the most egregious (i.e., first degree murder) cases.

And those they do file, they deliberately delay by using the grand jury process, resulting in an average wait between filing and trial of more than 340 days. Even after the state’s Supreme Court saw what she was doing and modified the rule to greatly shorten that wait time, Gardner ignored the new rule.

She was also involved in prosecuting Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple who protected their property during the George Floyd riots by displaying firearms. The judge in that case saw what she was doing and disqualified her from continuing, writing that it was “a criminal prosecution for political purposes.”

All of Gardner’s behavior is according to the Soros script. He has funded her election and reelection campaigns with hundreds of thousands of dollars through various political action committees — and the crime rate in St. Louis has skyrocketed. The 264 homicides the city recorded in 2020 was more than 36 percent higher than the year before. Neighborhood Scout reports that property crime in St. Louis is more than four times the national average, while the murder rate is more than eight times the national average! The service puts St. Louis at the very bottom of its crime index.

More Proof the FBI Is Being Weaponized Against American Citizens

Monday, 13 February 2023 21:03
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, February 13, 2023:  

On Thursday, former FBI agent Nicole Parker, an 11-year veteran of the agency before she quit four months ago, testified before the House Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government.

She quit because the agency has now become a weapon pointed at innocent Americans:

For me, distancing myself from egregious mistakes, immoral behavior, politically charged actions taken by a small but destructive few FBI employees became exhausting.… [I] no longer felt [that I was] the type of agent the FBI valued.

Her testimony came just a day after another former agent released a document that the Richmond, Virginia, office of the FBI had generated urging field agents to infiltrate the Catholic church looking for terrorists.

Kyle Seraphin, a former FBI special agent, federal whistleblower, and USAF veteran, posted a copy of the report dated January 23, 2023, regarding “Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology.” The report referred to “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics” (RTCs) and expressed “high confidence” that agents can mitigate their terrorist objectives by infiltrating local Catholic churches.

And where did the FBI get such information? Wrote Seraphin:

The attached appendices refer to a number of articles and the out-of-FBI-policy Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) at the end of the document.

 

For example, Appendix D is a direct copy of the SPLC list of “Radical Traditional Catholicism Hate Groups,” including the web address accessed. The SPLC appears to be a source for the intelligence analyst’s beliefs that RTCs exist and that they are anti-Semitic. The SPLC description for this “hate group” states RTCs “may make up the largest single group of serious anti-semites in America.”

Seraphin didn’t spend any ink excoriating the SPLC for its anti-Christian, anti-traditional values or anti-American bias. He didn’t have to. Readers can go to DiscoverTheNetworks.org and find dozens of pages of examples of its bias, along with connections to 56 hard-core left-wing individuals intent on destroying American culture and turning the nation into a socialist nightmare.

All of which is well known to the FBI, which formally disassociated itself from the outfit back in 2014. But that hasn’t changed how propagandists at the top of the agency obtain their “information.”

Seraphin gives the agency just a tap on the wrist:

Poorly sourced and highly speculative intelligence products [such as this report] lead to opening badly articulated … investigations into Americans in violation of their God-given, First Amendment-protected civil liberties.

He’s right about one thing: the agency’s poor intelligence products can and will lead to grievous infringements of those rights unless the agency is reined in, reorganized, or eliminated altogether:

Opening the door to associating white supremacists with traditional religious practices based on common Christian positions on abortion and the LGBTQ political agendas is a dangerous step. Such investigations can easily lead to the same analysis of Radical Traditional Baptists, Radical Traditional Lutherans, and Radical Traditional Evangelicals. [Emphasis added.]

 

The FBI is forbidden from opening cases or publishing products based solely on First Amendment-protected activities. By tolerating the publishing of intelligence products as shoddy as this, they are crossing a line many Americans will find themselves on the wrong side of for the first time in history.

 

This is what a politicalized FBI looks like; it should not be tolerated if Americans expect to enjoy the protections of our Bill of Rights.

Another former FBI agent, this one the former chief of FBI intelligence, Kevin Brock, weighed in on the perfidy:

[The report] is lazy, it is absurdly speculative, it provides no evidence for its thesis, and it relies exclusively on sources known to be aligned with the political left, such as the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center, Salon, and the Atlantic, that have been known to be habitually critical of the Catholic Church. That’s not intelligence analysis. It’s parroting.

When the FBI discovered that Seraphin had leaked the incriminating report, it backtracked immediately, saying that it was only distributed in-house and not meant for public consumption, and that, once found out, the agency brass declared it inoperative. The walk-back language is remarkable for its dissemblance and deceit:

While our standard practice is to not comment on specific intelligence products, this particular field office product — disseminated only within the FBI — regarding racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism does not meet the exacting standards of the FBI….

 

The FBI is committed to sound analytic tradecraft and to investigating and preventing acts of violence and other crimes while upholding the constitutional rights of all Americans and will never conduct investigative activities or open an investigation based solely on First Amendment protected activity.

Happily for the security of the American people, more than two dozen FBI whistleblowers have emerged in recent months alleging FBI bias in cases ranging from the Hunter Biden corruption scandal, to claims that parents attending school board meetings are terrorists, to faux claims surrounding President Trump and Russia.

Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.), a member of the House committee who heard Nicole Parker’s testimony last week, said that that testimony adds to the increasing body of evidence that the FBI has habitually and intentionally overstepped its bounds, engaging in promoting cancel culture, encouraging censorship on Twitter, treating parents at school board meetings as domestic terrorists, and on and on:

When the FBI is being tasked to go after parents who have expressed concerns at their local school boards about what their children are being taught, and labeled a domestic terrorist … that’s a problem.

 

When you have the FBI and the administration and agencies coordinating with Big Tech, essentially pressuring a private company to do their bidding in deplatforming, censoring, or silencing dissenting voices, that’s a problem….

Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and whistleblowers like Parker, Seraphin, and Brock are shining that light at the core of the problem: the very top brass at the FBI.

Florida Retaliates Against Disney, Plans to Pull Its Independent Status

Thursday, 09 February 2023 16:32
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, February 9, 2023:  

When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed House Bill 1557 into law last year — Parental Rights in Education — it evoked an eruption from The Walt Disney Company. This week, in special session, Florida’s Legislature is slated to pass a bill removing the virtually independent status of Disney World in Orlando and turning control of its 25,000-acre development over to a board appointed by the governor.

Last year Disney challenged DeSantis and the state’s Legislature directly for passing the parental rights bill. Former Disney CEO Bob Chapek issued this statement:

Florida’s HB 1557, also known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, should never have been passed and should never have been signed into law.

 

Our goal as a company is for this law to be repealed by the legislature or struck down by the courts, and we remain committed to support the national and state organizations working to achieve that.

 

We are dedicated to standing up for the rights and safety of LGBTQ+ members of the Disney family, as well as the LGBTQ+ community in Florida and across the country.

This naturally outraged DeSantis and those legislators who overwhelming supported the new law. The statement from Disney reflected how far the corporate entertainment giant had moved from being “family friendly” to being a propaganda transmission belt for radical cultural change.

HB 1557 is simplicity itself. It prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity to students in kindergarten through third grade. It also requires schools to keep parents informed of healthcare services provided, and allows parents to pre-approve any questionnaires or health screenings on their children beforehand.

Yesterday DeSantis spoke to reporters about the bill about to be passed:

Disney is going to pay its fair share of taxes and Disney is going to honor [its] debt….

 

This is now going to be controlled by the state of Florida. So, there’s a new sheriff in town.

A statement from the governor’s office explained:

Until Governor DeSantis acted, The Walt Disney Company maintained sole control over the [Reedy Creek Improvement] District.

 

This power amounted to an unaccountable Corporate Kingdom.

The statement added that the new legislation would permanently eliminate Disney’s self-governing status and in its stead impose a “state-controlled, term-limited board” with its members being appointed by the governor.

It also made clear that Disney’s main office, located in Burbank, California, wouldn’t be able to meddle in Florida’s Disney World’s affairs:

[The bill] provides no control of the district to the leftist local government in Orange County, which threatened to leverage the situation to raise local taxes.

That leftist Orange County had already turned Disney into a transmission belt for leftist agendas. As the New York Post noted:

In a sinister cartoon airing on Disney+ called “The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder,” the characters proclaim, “Slaves built this country, and we the descendants of slaves in America have earned reparations for their suffering and continue to earn reparations every moment we spend submerged in [the] systemic prejudice, racism and white supremacy that America was founded with and still has not atoned for.”

Disney also put money ahead of principle in protecting its relationship with the communists presently running China. It has billions invested in a number of theme parks in that country and caters to its leadership.

For example, in 2022, Disney removed an episode of The Simpsons from its streaming platform in Hong Kong. This particular episode mentioned “forced labor camps” in China and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, which the communists want to continue to suppress.

DeSantis is very well aware of Disney’s proclivity to get into bed with the communists in China. In March 2022, when Disney first announced its intention to repeal Florida’s parental rights law, he said:

… you have companies like … Disney that are going to say and criticize parents’ rights — they’re going to criticize the fact that we don’t want transgenderism in kindergarten and first grade classrooms.

 

If that’s the hill they’re going to die on, then how do they possibly explain lining their pockets with their relationship with the Communist Party of China?

 

Because that’s what they do, and they make a fortune, and they don’t say a word about the really brutal practices that you see over there at the hands of the CCP [the Chinese Communist Party].

DeSantis and the Florida Legislature are to be commended for bringing a modicum of common sense back to a world seemingly intent on destroying itself — and for providing a warning to other companies seeking to overstep their bounds in attempting to influence the culture in deadly ways.

Seattle Crime Report: “Defund the Police” Comes Home to Roost

Wednesday, 08 February 2023 15:09
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, February 8, 2023:  

Without saying so out loud, the latest Crime Report published by the Seattle Police Department (SPD) reveals the natural consequences of the Marxist-backed “defund the police” initiative.

Following the death of George Floyd in May 2020, Seattle suffered from Marxist thugs and revolutionaries who instigated riots, protests, and lootings. In 2021, Seattle’s City Council cut the budget of the SPD by 17 percent — one-sixth — setting in motion the inevitable rise in crime.

The Crime Report revealed that “reported crime for 2021 was at an all-time high. 2022 totals have now exceeded that with 49,577 reported violent and property crimes.” It added that “Aggravated Assault and Motor Vehicle Theft were significantly high in 2022 when compared to a five-year weighted average.”

Specifically:

  1. Gun violence reached an 11-year high in 2022;
  2. Motor vehicle theft reached a 15-year high in 2022;
  3. A total of 7,753 individuals were arrested in 2022, an 18-percent (1,174) increase over 2021;
  4. More than 20 percent of those individuals were arrested at least twice in 2022; and
  5. The average response time for police in 2022 was more than 10 minutes.

The SPD has lost 525 officers since 2020, bringing the department down from just over 1,400 officers in 2019, to under 900 at present.

Hosea 8:7 from the English Standard Version of the Holy Bible says: “For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” The damage done by the failed “defund the police” movement will last for years. Senator John Thune (R-S.D.) put it well:

Defunding the police is a terrible idea. Some of the cities that cut their own police funding are even recognizing the mistake they’ve made and seeking to restore funding they cut.

 

Unfortunately, the problem won’t necessarily be fixed that easily. Because the “defund the police” movement has not just resulted in smaller police budgets, it has also resulted in lower police morale, leading to a wave of police retirements and resignations.

Thune puts the blame where it belongs:

Democrats bear a substantial amount of responsibility for this situation. Far too many of them actively supported the “defund the police” movement and encouraged resentment toward law enforcement.

 

It is disgraceful that anti-police rhetoric has become such an accepted part of our national conversation — and has been winked at or endorsed by so many Democrat leaders. We owe our police officers much better.

Thune does see a ray of light, however:

If any good can come out of all this violence and heartbreak, I hope it’s [an] increased recognition of how essential police officers are to keeping our communities safe and a rejection of any idea of defunding the police.

Bishop Calls Out Biden for His “Fake Catholicism”

Wednesday, 01 February 2023 16:24
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, February 1, 2023:  

Days after the chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities asked Congress to pass a bill prohibiting taxpayer funding for abortions, Joe Biden was asked about it:

Reporter: Catholic bishops are demanding that federal tax dollars not fund abortions.

Biden: No, they are not all doing that, nor is the Pope.

Bishop Joseph Strickland of the Catholic Diocese of Tyler, Texas, immediately tweeted: “Mr. Biden can’t be allowed to twist the words of Pope Francis in this way.… It is time to denounce Biden’s fake Catholicism.”

It’s long past time. Biden, the master flip-flopper, was, once-upon-a-time, back in 2012, a “pro-life Democrat.”

But that was then. Now, he’s all-in for abortion “under any circumstances.” And he’s all-in for ending the Hyde Amendment that prohibits Congress from funding abortions.

Back in July, Pope Francis made his church’s position on abortion clear: “A month after conception, the DNA of the fetus is already there and the organs are aligned. There is human life.”

And then Francis added a question directed to Biden, a self-proclaimed “devout Catholic”: “Is it just to eliminate a human life?”

The question was rhetorical. Said Francis: “I leave it to [Biden’s] conscience, and [request] that he speak to his bishop, his pastor, his parish priest, about that incoherence.”

National Public Radio (NPR) exposed the conflict just days after Biden was inaugurated, posing the issue: “Biden Is Catholic. He Also Supports Abortion Rights.”

One knows that Biden is a “devout Catholic” because his first press secretary, Jen Psaki, said so. At Biden’s very first press conference she was asked point blank about Biden’s abortion policies. Here is her response:

I will just take the opportunity to remind all of you that he is a devout Catholic, and somebody who attends church regularly. He started his day attending church with his family this morning.

The Most Reverend Jose Gomez, archbishop of Los Angeles and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, was far more enlightening. In his statement following Biden’s inauguration, he reminded his readers:

The bishops and Catholic faithful carry out Christ’s commandment to love God and love our neighbors by working for an America that protects human dignity, expands equality and opportunities for every person, and is open-hearted towards the suffering and weak. (Emphasis added)

And Gomez certainly expected Biden, as a “devout Catholic,” to be willing and open to “engage” with him on the touchy topic of abortion:

It will be refreshing to engage with a President who clearly understands, in a deep and personal way, the importance of religious faith and institutions.

 

Mr. Biden’s piety and personal story, his moving witness to how his faith as brought him solace in times of darkness and tragedy, his longstanding commitment to the Gospel’s priority for the poor — all of this I find hopeful and inspiring.

But, Gomez warned:

We cannot stay silent when nearly a million unborn lives are being cast aside in our country year after year through abortion….

I must point out that our new President has pledged to pursue certain policies that would advance moral evils and threaten human life and dignity, most seriously in the areas of abortion, contraception, marriage, and gender.

He added that those policies, as they are enacted, would affect all human beings, especially Catholics who hold that life is precious, dear, and a gift from God: “Of deep concern is the liberty of the Church and the freedom of believers to live according to their consciences.”

As Biden’s mental and physical health continues to deteriorate, the time gets nearer that he will learn his final destiny. As Jesus’ Apostle John wrote in Revelation 21:8:

But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.

Colorado Baker Targeted Again by Anti-Christian Left

Monday, 30 January 2023 12:38
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, January 30, 2023:  

In its ruling in another lawsuit against Colorado baker Jack Phillips, the Colorado Court of Appeals last Thursday said its decision wasn’t biased against him just because he is a Christian:

These proceedings were not marked by any hostility toward Masterpiece [his bakery design business] or Phillips, or by a desire to punish or target them based on their religious views.

Of course they weren’t. Ignore the fact that two of the three judges ruling unanimously against Phillips had been appointed by far-left Governor Jared Polis, who is “married” to a man, and the third by Governor John Hickenlooper who, while a senator, racked up a treasonous Freedom Index score of 5 out of 100. This reflects Hickenlooper’s complete and utter disregard for any constitutional limitations on governmental power, especially in the realm of free speech and the free exercise of religion.

The entire lawsuit was a setup from the beginning.

Following a modest victory for the baker in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (where the Supreme Court decided in June 2018 that the “civil rights” commission had so grievously expressed its anti-Christian and anti-religious zeal that they ruled, 7-2, against the commission and in favor of Phillips), a queer lawyer from Denver asked Phillips to make a cake celebrating his transition from a man to a woman. He wanted Phillips to create a custom-designed cake that would be pink (female) on the inside and (blue) male on the outside.

The call was made the very same day that the high court agreed to hear Phillips’ case. And just to make sure that Phillips — and every other Christian wishing to enjoy his First Amendment rights — got the message, the queer mouthpiece for the commission called back to ask Phillips to make another cake depicting Satan smoking marijuana. The man/woman interposer said he/she wanted to “correct the errors of [Phillips’] thinking.”

The attorney filed a complaint with the commission, which was prepared to go after Phillips again until the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) informed them that if they did, the ADF was prepared, once again, to defend Phillips.

When the commission decided to back away and settle (details undisclosed), the queer attorney filed suit in state court. The state court ruled against Phillips (surprise!), declaring that “the act of baking a pink cake with blue frosting does not constitute protected speech under the First Amendment.”

In its press release following the state court’s ruling against Phillips, the ADF announced that it will appeal once again to the high court. This time the high court will have a second chance to rule in favor of Phillips’ First Amendment right, which they avoided in their earlier ruling.

The ADF is also defending Denver business owner and website designer Lorie Smith, owner of 303 Creative, over the same issue. That issue, according to the ADF, is whether elected government officials or unelected bureaucrats, as is the case with Colorado’s civil rights commission, have the power to inhibit individuals’ God-given rights to worship Him as they so desire and run their businesses accordingly.

The ADF, with all due respect, misses the point. The anti-religion, anti-Christian Left doesn’t care whether Phillips makes a blue and pink cake, or whether Lorie Smith designs a website celebrating an event that violates her religious beliefs. What they do care deeply about is that the message is delivered: Thou shalt not express Christian beliefs in the public square. Anyone who does so will be subjected to the same torments of hell being visited upon Phillips and Smith.

WH Press Secretary Repeats Lie That the Clinton Assault Weapons Ban Reduced Gun Violence

Wednesday, 25 January 2023 20:58
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, January 25, 2023:  

Like clockwork following the California shootings, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre once again rolled out the canard that the Clinton-era assault weapons ban (the “Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act”) measurably reduced gun violence and therefore, by implication, it should be reinstated:

The last time we had an assault weapons ban on the books [1994-2003], thanks to the President [Biden was a senator then] and Senator [Dianne] Feinstein’s [D-Calif.] leadership, mass shootings actually went down.

She failed to note that the attackers in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay used pistols and not rifles to commit their mayhem.

Biden himself repeated the lie back in March 2021 following another mass shooting:

We can ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines in this country once again.

 

I got that done when I was a senator. It passed. It was law for the longest time, and it brought down these mass killings. We should do it again.

In 2004 Christopher Koper, then a research criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania, issued his third and final report on the results of the ban on gun violence and mass shootings. The document, “Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003,” is available to the public and can be accessed here.

Said Koper:

We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence….

 

What we found in these studies was that the ban had mixed effects in reducing crimes with the banned weaponry … as a result, the ban did not appear to affect gun violence during the time it was in effect.

Koper warned that if the Clinton ban were reenacted, the reduction in gun violence would likely be too small to measure:

Should it be renewed, the ban might reduce gunshot victimizations. This effect is likely to be small at best and possibly too small for reliable measurement.

He concluded:

By most estimates, AWs [automatic weapons] were used in less than 6% of gun crimes even before the ban.

 

[Our research] suggests that the ban’s impact on gun violence is likely to be small.

Since Koper’s study was completed in 2004, any gradual reduction in gun violence that could be reliably traced to the ban’s impact would certainly have been noted in subsequent studies.

There have been none. But the lie that the ban reduced gun violence continues to be mouthed by politicians eager to remove firearms from private owners.

Matt Gaetz Moves to Abolish the ATF

Thursday, 19 January 2023 16:26
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, January 19, 2023:  

To Representative Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), the move last Friday by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to require citizens owning pistol braces to register them with the government was the “final straw.” On Tuesday, he rolled out a bill to abolish the rogue agency altogether.

The bill is one page long: “A Bill to abolish the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.… The [agency] is hereby abolished.”

Would that this would be so simple!

In June 2021, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene proposed the same thing but gave the agency six months to move its responsibilities to the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI). Her bill included:

  • Repealing all ATF regulations issued after August 1, 2020;
  • Rescinding all hiring authority for the agency;
  • Publishing a list of all the weapons it had confiscated, and then selling them to licensed firearms dealers via a public auction;
  • Putting those proceeds into a fund for Border Patrol agents killed in the line of duty as a result of one of its botched operations, Operation Fast and Furious; and
  • Using any remaining funds to fund grants to states to establish firearm safety programs.

In 2014 Representative James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) had offered a similar bill, but with some of its operations being handed off to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) rather than the FBI.

When Gaetz rolled out his bill to abolish the ATF, he said:

The continued existence of the ATF is increasingly unwarranted based on the actions they’re taking to convert otherwise law-abiding people into felons. My bill would abolish the ATF.

 

If that doesn’t work, we’re going to try defunding the ATF.

 

If that doesn’t work, we’re going to target the individual bureaucrats at the top of the ATF who have exceeded their authority in rulemaking. And if that doesn’t work, we’re going to take a meat cleaver to the statutes that the ATF believes broadly authorize their actions.

When Representative Greene presented her bill back in 2021, she said the Biden administration was using the agency to harass lawful gun owners:

Joe Biden and the radical, anti-gun Democrats want to unleash the ATF on law-abiding gun owners across America, attacking our God-given Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

 

The ATF’s ongoing, unconstitutional attacks on the Second Amendment must end.

And, when Representative Sensenbrenner proposed abolishing the ATF, he also minced no words:

The ATF is a largely duplicative, scandal-ridden agency that lacks a clear mission.…

 

It is plagued by backlogs, funding gaps, hiring challenges and a lack of leadership.

 

For decades it has been branded by high-profile failures. There is also significant overlap with other agencies.

While neither of these last two bills saw the light of day (as will likely be the outcome of Gaetz’ effort), the history of the ATF shows it to be corrupt to the core. Sam Jacobs, in an article published by the Libertarian Institute in 2020, took 19 pages to review just a few of the agency’s egregious and illegal operations.

They included:

  • A review of the agency by a Senate subcommittee back in the 1980s that concluded: “Based upon these hearings, it is apparent that ATF enforcement tactics … are constitutionally, legally, and practically reprehensible”;
  • Its Siege at Ruby Ridge;
  • Its Siege at Waco, Texas;
  • Its expanded powers granted after 9/11;
  • Its harassment of gun-show buyers and sellers in Richmond, Virginia;
  • Its “baiting” of innocent Hmong refugees in Laos;
  • Its entrapment of mentally disabled teenagers;
  • What the agency actually does with all those Form 4473s gun buyers must complete to purchase a firearm;
  • What the agency does with its slush fund generated from its illegal sales of cigarettes; and
  • How it punishes whistleblowers inside the agency when they bring to light some of the agency’s illegal activities.

For readers who may be unfamiliar with some of these illegal overreaches, the source is here. Upon reading, they may agree with Gaetz, Greene, and Sensenbrenner: The time to abolish this rogue agency is long past due.

15 States Try to Rein In Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Wednesday, 18 January 2023 21:12
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, January 18, 2023:  

In the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in 2010, creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Ever since then, victims of the CFPB have tried again and again to find a court that would shut it down.

A brainchild of far-left Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), CFPB was designed from the start to avoid constitutional limitations. It is housed inside the Eccles Building in Washington, D.C., along with the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. It isn’t funded by Congress, but by the Federal Reserve, and, although part of the Executive Branch, there is virtually no congressional or executive oversight of the agency.

It writes its own rules, finds who violates them, and then punishes them, sometimes with outrageous fines that threaten their very existence.

In a lawsuit filed by Connecticut attorney Kimberly Pisinski in July 2013, Pisinski alleged that the “CFPB’s structure insulates it from political accountability and internal checks and balances in violation of the United States Constitution. Unbridled from constitutionally-required accountability, CFPB has engaged in ultra vires [“beyond the powers”] and abusive practices, including attempts to regulate the practice of law … attempts to collect attorney-client protected material and overreaching demands for, and mining of, personal financial information of American citizens, which has prompted a Government Accountability Office investigation.”

Her case was dismissed by a D.C. federal court a few months later.

In Seila Law v. CFPB, filed in 2018, the sole proprietor for a law firm that got caught in the CFPB’s web filed suit against the agency. After losing appeal after appeal, the case finally went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in June 2020 that the agency could continue its unconstitutional operations.

This is the issue raised by Seila:

The appropriations issue that Seila Law noted has now come to a head. In [its decision] the Fifth Circuit correctly held that the CFPB’s unprecedented funding scheme impermissibly shifts Congress’s power of the purse to the Bureau.

 

But that decision is at odds with one from the D.C. Circuit, which saw no constitutional problem with “the CFPB’s budgetary set-up.”

 

So now much of the country’s financial industry sits in a state of regulatory limbo, wondering whether the CFPB can continue as a going concern without congressional intervention.

 

Meanwhile, the Bureau insists that it will “continue to carry out its vital work” without apparent change — even though a federal appellate court has told the Bureau it must change.

In Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. All American Check Cashing, Inc., another agency victim fought back and lost in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Fifteen states, including Texas, have filed a request with the Supreme Court that it take another look at the rogue agency. In their writ of certiorari, the states claim that since the agency is operating with funds from the Federal Reserve and not appropriated by Congress, as required under the Constitutions’ appropriations clause, it is operating illegally.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton joined the 15 states’ request:

The CFPB is a largely autonomous entity that has imposed a number of damaging regulations on American businesses.

 

While the CFPB’s constitutionality has been challenged on several fronts, the nature of this case revolves around the entity’s funding mechanism.

 

CFPB is not funded through the congressional appropriations process. Instead, it derives its funding from the Federal Reserve and may receive up to 12 percent of the Federal Reserve’s annual operating expenses, which amounts to several billion dollars.

 

This funding structure allows the CFPB to act as an unaccountable regulator in violation of the Appropriations Clause of the Constitution.

So, there it is: Warren’s totalitarian brainchild has virtually unlimited funding to wreak havoc on America’s financial industry, with no congressional oversight. It recombines the three elements of government that the Founders separated in order to keep that government from becoming tyrannical. Texas and the other states are hoping that this time is a charm — that the high court will take the case, uncover the agency’s unconstitutional structure and funding, and declare it illegal.

Delaware Gun Owners Sue State Over Magazine Ban

Monday, 16 January 2023 16:26
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, January 16, 2023:  

Two law-abiding gun owners, along with two pro-Second Amendment groups, filed suit last week in Delaware, challenging the state’s ban on “large capacity magazines.” The law being challenged was signed into law just seven days after the Supreme Court ruled in Bruen that such laws must now be justified by demonstrating that they are “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

The challenged law, SB 6, makes it a crime to purchase, receive, possess, transfer, sell, offer to sell, or manufacture any magazine that can hold more than 17 rounds of ammunition.

The founder and executive vice president of the Second Amendment Foundation (one of the two groups contesting the law), Alan Gottlieb, said the new law “literally criminalizes one of the most common and important means by which Delaware citizens can exercise their right of self-defense. In effect, SB 6 makes self-defense a potential criminal act, and that must not be allowed to stand.”

Delaware, the home state of Joe Biden, is under the virtual control of the Democratic Party: The governor’s office, all statewide executive offices, large majorities in both state houses, and all seats for the state in the U.S. Congress are held by anti-gun Democrats. Predictably, rather than celebrate the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bruen, the party thumbed its nose at the decision, implementing (for the first time in the state’s history) a ban on so-called high-capacity magazines.

The law, which became effective the moment the state’s Democrat Governor John Carney signed it on June 30, immediately criminalized every law-abiding gun owner in the state who owns such a “large capacity” magazine. All such owners must immediately turn over to a law-enforcement agency the offending magazines or face criminal charges: for a first offense, a $100 fine; for a second offense, six months in jail and a $1,150 fine; for additional offenses, up to five years in jail.

The lawsuit used logic, common sense, historical tradition, and the language from both the Second and 14th Amendments to make its case against Kathy Jennings, the Democrat attorney general for the state:

  1. The AR-15 rifle, many of which come from the factory with magazines of 17 rounds or more, is owned by nearly 25 million Americans;
  2. There are, as a result, some 44 million AR-15s owned by those Americans;
  3. Those semi-automatic rifles “are very rarely used in the commission of crimes,” according to the lawsuit: “mass shootings represent an extremely small subset of all violent crime committed with a gun, and mass shootings involving firearms that feature magazines holding more than 17 rounds are an even smaller subset still”;
  4. There is “no convincing empirical evidence that a state magazine ban will have any impact at all on mass shootings”;
  5. There is “no historical tradition” for prohibiting the possession of such magazines … “indeed, until [this ban] was put in place, Delaware did not restrict possessing, purchasing, manufacturing, transferring, or selling standard capacity magazines, and no such laws existed anywhere in the United States before the 1990s”;
  6. “Firearms capable of firing multiple rounds without reloading were well known to the founding generation”; and
  7. Violent criminals “will not be meaningfully constrained by Delaware’s Ban … it will not be difficult for violent criminals to acquire them through illegal sales or importation despite Delaware’s Ban.”

Hopefully all of this will be persuasive to the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, where the suit was filed last week. But for the Democrats, such expressions of logic, common sense, and historical tradition, not to mention the aforementioned amendments to the U.S. Constitution, mean nothing.

Final ATF Rule Turns Pistols Into Rifles to Be Regulated Under National Firearms Act

Monday, 16 January 2023 16:23
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, January 16, 2023:  

Back in 2012, the ATF (the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) ruled that pistol stabilizing braces didn’t turn pistols into short-barreled rifles, and therefore they were exempt from inclusion under the 1934 National Firearms Act (NFA). The NFA is a national registry of certain firearms and accessories such as machine guns, suppressors, short-barreled rifles (barrel less than 16″) and short-barreled shotguns (barrel less than 18″). Possessing an NFA item without jumping through the proper hoops, including registration and the payment of a $200 fee for a “tax stamp,” is a felony subjecting one to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Many see the NFA as a precursor to a national registry of all privately owned firearms.

On Friday, Attorney General Merrick Garland signed a “final rule” stating that any firearm that uses a pistol brace will be “considered a ‘rifle’ or ‘firearm’ subject to regulation under the NFA.”

Garland rolled out the canard that the agency’s primary concern is public safety:

Keeping our communities safe from gun violence is among the Department’s highest priorities.

 

Almost a century ago, Congress determined that short-barreled rifles must be subject to heightened requirements. Today’s rule makes clear that firearm manufacturers, dealers, and individuals cannot evade these important public safety protections simply by adding accessories to pistols that transform them into short-barreled rifles.

To clarify: The ATF has little interest in keeping communities safe when it moves to disarm law-abiding citizens, or impose such onerous regulations that they effect the same end. Instead, it has from the beginning been a tool to enact gun control.

The National Firearms Act was passed in 1934 following Al Capone’s reign of terror in Chicago. While citizens were out of work and struggling just to keep food on the table during the Great Depression, the Roosevelt administration saw its chance to infringe on the Second Amendment. It passed muster with the Supreme Court, and has been a thorn in the side of law-abiding gun owners ever since.

A pistol-stabilizing brace is simply a device that, while similar in appearance to a rifle buttstock, is designed to be strapped on to the shooting arm of the user, allowing disabled people to more comfortably fire a rifle-style gun with one arm. Of course, it can also be used to shoulder-fire the weapon as a rifle. Since the ATF’s 2012 ruling that this device does not turn a firearm with a stabilizing brace and a barrel less than 16″ into a short-barreled rifle subject to the NFA, sales have skyrocketed. Estimates are that some 40 million such braces exist in the country.

That 2012 ruling has now been overturned.

ATF Director Steven Dettelbach, a hard-core anti-gun operative who previously served under Barack Obama as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Ohio, rejoiced in the rule change:

This rule enhances public safety and prevents people from circumventing the laws Congress passed almost a century ago.

 

Certain so-called stabilizing braces are designed to just attach to pistols, essentially converting them into short-barreled rifles to be fired from the shoulder.

 

Therefore, they must be treated in the same way under the [NFA] statute.

When the rule change was first proposed there was pushback — major pushback. There were nearly a quarter of a million negative public comments made on the ATF website. There is a bill called “Stop Harassing Owners of Rifles Today Act (SHORT Act) introduced by Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) that would remove short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, and certain other weapons from the NFA.

Said Marshall, “My bill is the only way to ensure the Constitutional rights of gun owners are protected against the ATF’s reckless abuse of the NFA to justify its pistol brace rule.”

Marshall’s bill, of course, won’t see the light of day in the anti-gun, Democrat-controlled Senate.

There was also a letter from the Senate Republican Caucus to AG Garland demanding that he withdraw the rule:

The way the proposed rule is written makes clear that ATF intends to bring the most common uses of the most widely possessed stabilizing braces within the purview of the NFA. Doing so would turn millions of law-abiding Americans into criminals overnight, and would constitute the largest executive branch-imposed gun registration and confiscation scheme in American history.

Of course. That is the whole point. Garland, Dettelbach, and the agency ignored all of this pushback and moved ahead with their grievous infringement of the Second Amendment anyway.

Some can take heart over the decision last week by the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Cargill v. Garland. An initial lawsuit against another ATF proposed rule change had been tossed at the district level. On appeal, a panel at the Fifth Circuit agreed. But an en banc rehearing at the First Circuit ruled against the lower court and the panel, stating,

a plain reading of the statutory language, paired with close consideration of the mechanics of a semi-automatic firearm, reveals that a bump stock is excluded from the technical definition of ‘machinegun’ set forth in the Gun Control Act and National Firearms Act.

A bump stock is not a pistol brace, but the breach by the infringement by the ATF is the same. From the Cargill ruling:

A bump stock is a firearm attachment that allows a shooter to harness the natural recoil of a semi-automatic weapon to quickly re-engage the trigger after firing, enabling him to shoot at an increased rate of speed.

 

When ATF first considered the type of bump stocks at issue here, it understood that they were not machineguns. ATF maintained this position for over a decade, issuing many interpretation letters to that effect to members of the public.

 

But ATF reversed its longstanding position in 2018, subjecting anyone who possessed a bump stock to criminal liability.

Michael Cargill gave up his bump stocks to the ATF and then sued the agency:

Appellant Michael Cargill surrendered several bump stocks to the Government following publication of the regulation at issue.

 

He now challenges the legality of that regulation, arguing that a bump stock does not fall within the definition of “machinegun” as set forth in federal law, and thus that ATF lacked the authority to issue a regulation purporting to define the term as such.

 

Cargill is correct. A plain reading of the statutory language, paired with close consideration of the mechanics of a semi-automatic firearm, reveals that a bump stock is excluded from the technical definition of “machinegun” set forth in the Gun Control Act and National Firearms Act….

 

The Final Rule promulgated by the ATF violates the APA [the federal statute that governs how federal agencies propose and establish rules such as this]. We therefore REVERSE the judgment of the district court and REMAND [return] with instructions to enter judgment for Cargill.

Pro-Second Amendment groups are busy crafting a similar lawsuit, hoping that the precedent set by the Fifth Circuit (which encompasses Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas) will extend to pistol braces as well.

ATF Keeping Permanent Records of Gun Owners

Friday, 06 January 2023 16:27
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This article appeared online at  TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, January 6, 2023:  

The latest report from the FBI on its background checks reveals that Barack Obama is no longer “the best gun salesman in America,” as CNN’s Aaron Smith claimed back in 2016. At that time background checks had soared from 14 million in 2009 (Obama’s first year in office) to nearly 28 million in 2016 (his last year in office).

The title “best gun salesman in America” then fell to President Donald Trump: during his four years in office (2017 to 2020) background checks averaged nearly 30 million annually.

The mantle now rests on the shoulders of the present White House resident: in Biden’s first two years, background checks averaged more than 35 million a year.

This is no doubt partly due to concerns ordinary citizens have over protecting themselves from increasing gun violence, especially in cities and states run by anti-gun Democrats who have more concern for criminals than their victims.

And part is due to the virtual explosion in concealed carry permits, now estimated at more than 20 million. As more and more states are allowing concealed carry, the number of citizens applying for permits is increasing exponentially.

However, there is one number from the FBI report that is particularly unsettling: Since 1998, when the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) was launched to begin infringing on law-abiding citizens’ Second Amendment rights, there have been 443 million background checks!

How many of those background checks remain in the hands of the ATF — the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — in spite of laws prohibiting the government from keeping any such registry or database?

It turns out that there isn’t just one database keeping permanent records of gun owners applying for permission to purchase a firearm. There are five:

  • There is the Multiple Sale Reports database, a permanent registration database of all purchasers buying more than one firearm at a time. There are millions of permanent records here.
  • There is the Suspect Guns database, a permanent record of all firearms “suspected” of being used for criminal purposes.
  • There is the Traced Guns database, another permanent record, this one of all gun traces ordered by law enforcement across the country. There are millions of such traces in this database.
  • There is the Theft Guns database, a permanent record of firearms that are reported stolen to the ATF. This is in addition to similar database maintained by the FBI, which keeps its own registry of lost, stolen, or missing firearms.
  • And then there’s the Big One: the Out of Business Records database. When a gun dealer closes his business, all of his records are turned over to the ATF, including the hated Form 4473, which includes all the personal information the ATF would need to eventually find and confiscate those weapons from their rightful owners. The ATF reports that this is the largest database it has, with “several hundred million” records since the NICS was begun in 1998.

Millions of Americans think they are simply exercising their Second Amendment right by purchasing guns, while in fact they are giving their personal, private information to a government that increasingly reveals its intentions to one day confiscate them.

Virtually Unknown Lawsuit Challenging 2020 Election to Be Considered by Supreme Court Tomorrow

Thursday, 05 January 2023 19:22
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, January 5, 2023: 

One lawsuit has slipped through the net cast around any challenging of the results of the 2020 presidential election: Brunson v. Adams. The Supreme Court has decided to consider whether it merits a full hearing. The decision, which takes place tomorrow, needs four of the nine justices to move the lawsuit to a formal hearing of the complaint.

If they turn it down, it will be just one more failed effort to consider fully and completely the questioned validity of that election. But if it moves to a hearing, and if the high court then rules in favor of Brunson, the shock waves and reverberations will be felt across the nation.

The lawsuit isn’t about the election, it’s about Congress’ unwillingness to investigate claims that it was fraudulent. From the complaint:

A rigged election is an attack against the U.S. Constitution, especially against the equal protection clause of 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

 

Despite the claims of evidence that the November 3, 2020, U.S. Presidential general election was fraudulent, affecting the President of the United States, the Vice President of the United States and members of the United States Congress … Defendants intentionally voted against investigating the claimed evidence and conspired to cover up the “evidence” to fraudulently have Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. (“Biden”) inaugurated as President and Kamala Harris (“Harris”) inaugurated as Vice President.

The 388 defendants named in the lawsuit include not only Biden, Harris, and former Vice President Mike Pence, but also every member of Congress, both House and Senate, who voted against that investigation.

They had their chance. Immediately following the election Texas Sen. Ted Cruz presented a resolution to delay certification and take 10 days to investigate the claims of election fraud made by more than 100 members of Congress about the election:

The most direct precedent on this question arose in 1877, following serious allegations of fraud and illegal conduct in the Hayes-Tilden presidential race. Specifically, the elections in three states-Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina-were alleged to have been conducted illegally.

 

In 1877, Congress did not ignore those allegations, nor did the media simply dismiss those raising them as radicals trying to undermine democracy. Instead, Congress appointed an Electoral Commission-consisting of five Senators, five House Members, and five Supreme Court Justices-to consider and resolve the disputed returns.

 

We should follow that precedent.

He then presented the resolution:

Congress should immediately appoint an Electoral Commission, with full investigatory and fact-finding authority, to conduct an emergency 10-day audit of the election returns in the disputed states.

 

Once completed, individual states would evaluate the Commission’s findings and could convene a special legislative session to certify a change in their vote, if needed.…

 

We intend to vote on January 6 to reject the electors from disputed states as not “regularly given” and “lawfully certified” (the statutory requisite), unless and until that emergency 10-day audit is completed.

Even though 139 of the 221 House Republicans and eight of the 51 Senate Republicans voted for Cruz’s resolution, it wasn’t enough to carry the day and Cruz’s resolution was defeated.

This roused the ire of the Brunson brothers of Utah: Loy, Raland, Deron, and Gaynor. Loy filed one complaint, which “got stuck in the Federal Court,” according to the brothers, so Raland filed an identical one in Utah’s 2nd District Court.

When that one “got stuck” as well, Raland (with some outside assistance) filed an emergency complaint under Rule 11, which enabled it to bypass the 10th Circuit Court (where it got stuck) and allowed it to go directly to the Supreme Court.

The complaint isn’t about the alleged fraudulent election:

Is this about a rigged election? No. It’s about the members of Congress who voted against the investigation, thereby thwarting the investigation.

 

Was this a clear violation of their oath [of office]? Yes.

Tim Canova, a constitutional scholar and professor at Nova Southeastern University, spelled out the consequences if the high court agrees to hear Brunson’s emergency appeal:

The fact that the Brunson case has made it to the Court’s docket suggests profound concerns about a lawless Jan. 6 congressional committee, politicized federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies and major constitutional violations intended to overthrow an elected government by manipulating the outcome of the presidential election.…

 

Supreme Court justices may well see these approaching storm clouds and conclude that the Court’s intervention is necessary to prevent larger civil unrest resulting from constitutional violations that are undermining public trust and confidence in the outcomes of both the 2020 and 2022 elections.

 

The Brunson lawsuit does not claim the election was stolen, merely that a large majority of Congress, by failing to investigate such serious allegations of election rigging and breaches of national security, violated their oaths to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic — an oath also taken by Supreme Court justices and members of the U.S. military.

What Brunson is asking for makes this case extraordinary. It is asking the high court, if it finds all 388 defendants guilty, to remove them from office.

Said Canova: “It seems astounding that the Court would [decide] to wade into such waters two years to the day after the Congressional vote to install Joe Biden as President. But these are not normal times.”

For the record, this is the oath of office taken by the 388 defendants in Brunson v. Adams:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

New York Judge Rules State’s Red Flag Law Unconstitutional

Wednesday, 04 January 2023 20:49
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, January 4, 2023:  

Justice Thomas Moran of the Supreme Court of Monroe County, New York, part of the state’s Seventh Judicial District, ruled in late December that the state’s red flag law, aka Extreme Risk Protection Order law, or ERPO, is unconstitutional.

He relied on the recent Supreme Court ruling in Bruen that any law infringing on a citizen’s rights under the Second Amendment meet a very strict standard: “The government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

The state’s ERPO law didn’t meet that standard, and Judge Moran tossed it:

[The law’s] goal of removing weapons from the otherwise lawful possession of them by their owners, without adequate constitutional safeguards, cannot be condoned by this Court.

 

While some may advocate that “the ends justify the means” in support of [the law], where those means violate a fundamental right under our Bill of Rights to achieve their ends, then the law, on [its] face, cannot stand.

 

Therefore, the “Temporary Extreme Risk Protection Order” (TERPO) and “Extreme Risk Protection Order” (ERPO) are deemed to be unconstitutional by this Court.… It cannot be stated clearly enough that the Second Amendment is not a second class right, nor should it ever be treated as such. [Emphasis in original.]

In reviewing the ruling, legal firm Tilem & Associates said, “This particular case highlights everything [that is] wrong with Red Flag laws,” adding:

The Petitioner who filed for the Extreme Risk Protection Order was the estranged boy friend of the Respondent who was a licensed gun owner in New York State.

 

He alleged that his ex-girlfriend was a danger to herself and others and obtained a Temporary Extreme Risk Protection Order.

The boyfriend cited instances dating back to 2020 to bolster his case. What the boyfriend failed to note, however, was that he himself was under a restraining order from his ex-girlfriend. So it was retaliation, pure and simple.

Which is what makes red flag laws so dangerous. Under New York’s law, and most of those in other states, anyone with a grievance can file a complaint. If granted, the “respondent” — the victim — will find police at his/her door to confiscate his/her firearms.

As the Tilem law firm notes, “extreme risk protections have become very popular in anti-gun states [like New York] and are a way for government officials to take away the Second Amendment rights of individuals who have not committed any crime.” (Emphasis added.)

The attorney representing the ex-girlfriend, Daniel Strollo, called such laws a “a very quick and easy mechanism to deprive somebody of their fundamental Second Amendment rights.”

The problem with the law, according to Strollo, is that

You have people who are essentially not medical professionals expressing medical opinions that result in the deprivation of rights.

 

And you have a procedure that essentially allows somebody to lose those rights without ever having gone in front of a judge.

All of which violates the Fourth Amendment as well as the Second:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The Liberal Gun Club (which claims to “provide a pro-Second Amendment voice for left-of-center gun owners”) assured its members that the ruling by Justice Moran is likely to be appealed.

Moran’s ruling was welcomed by “right-of-center” gun owners, who correctly fear that red flag laws, if upheld, could be turned into “gun confiscation” laws applying to anyone owning a gun.

Many of the articles on Light from the Right first appeared on either The New American or the McAlvany Intelligence Advisor.
Copyright © 2021 Bob Adelmann