Many across the nation are rightfully outraged by the signing of the abortion expansion bill in New York. In response to fears that the Supreme Court may overturn Roe v. Wade, the New York legislature, and Governor Andrew Cuomo, teamed up with the abortion industry to further tighten their grip on the Empire state following the 2018 midterms.
The bottom line is that the recently signed “Reproductive Health Act” goes way beyond a simple expansion of abortion in New York. As is typical with the Left, it takes some digging to bring the true intentions of this ghastly bill to light. It turns out that existing common-sense protections for women and children are stripped away in the name of late-term abortion expansion. This bill fulfills every wish that a late-term abortionist could have, and I have no doubt it will set the stage for the next Kermit Gosnell.
The new law expands the list of medical professionals able to commit abortions (including late-term abortions) from physicians to practically any healthcare professional authorized under New York’s education law (physician assistants, nurses, nurse practitioners, and midwives, for example). This endangers women by allowing less experienced, less trained, and less qualified medical professionals to commit abortions.
The new law also removes requirements related to late-term abortions. Specifically, it repeals a requirement that abortions after 12 weeks be done in hospitals, thus increasing the likelihood that late-term abortions are done in less than safe facilities. The bill also removes a requirement that an additional physician be present in the event that an unborn child survives an abortion, as well as legal protections for born alive infants in the state’s social services law, civil rights law, and penal code. Eliminating these common-sense and popular protections for abortion survivors means that abortion survivors can be denied life-saving treatment in the moments following their live birth.
What is most disturbing is that the new law also eliminates the authority previously granted to coroners to examine the cause of death in criminal abortions. Earlier this year, Dr. Robert Rho plead guilty to criminal negligence after his actions resulted in the death of a 30-year-old woman who bled out following a botched abortion. Even more disturbing is the fact that this bill strips “personhood” out of the penal code, which means if a pregnant woman is assaulted and it results in the death of her unborn child, the perpetrator can no longer be charged with murder. By preventing coroners from investigating deaths as a result of botched abortions and assault, it is not only women’s health that is in danger, but it is a travesty of justice for the loved ones of patients who are killed by abortionists and of mothers whose unborn children are killed by an attacker.
The new year has brought a new level of desperation for the abortion lobby. They’re demonstrating a willingness to go beyond simply defending Roe v. Wade. Long gone are the days when their abortion mantra was “safe, legal, and rare.” It seems “abortion, on demand, without apology” is even giving way to a new mantra for big abortion. They now want license to strip away any and all protections meant to ensure women aren’t harmed in late-term abortions, as well as eliminate rights for abortion survivors and assault victims.
Tony Perkins’ Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.
EDITORS NOTE: This FRC column with images is republished with permission.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/012919_newyork_770x400-e1548845415510.jpg373640Family Research Councilhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFamily Research Council2019-01-30 05:50:282019-01-30 05:50:29The True Depravity of NY’s New Abortion Law
Gordon Gekko missed the mark with his famous Wall Street monologue about American capitalism. It is not greed but economic growth that is, for lack of a better word, good. Growth is right. Growth works. Growth clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Growth has marked the upward surge of mankind. And growth—you mark my words—will save that malfunctioning corporation called the USA.
This is probably pretty obvious to most Americans. Strong economic growth means more jobs and higher wages. Just take a look at the current expansion. It has only been moderate as goes the pace of growth, but it has been sustained. And month after month of a growing economy has brought down the unemployment rate to its lowest level since 1969, even as real wages continue to grow for all income levels. That’s especially true for working-class Americans. The 3.5 percent unemployment rate for Americans with only a high school diploma is the lowest since 2000. Indeed, despite all the debate about income inequality, earnings have been growing faster for those at the bottom than at the top.
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump tours a Carrier factory with Vice President-elect Mike Pence in Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S., December 1, 2016. Reuters/Mike Segar
Or look at it this way: In their research paper “Productivity and Pay: Is the link broken?” Harvard’s Anna Stansbury and Lawrence Summers find that higher productivity growth is associated with higher average and median compensation growth. The economists show that if productivity growth had been as fast from 1973 to 2016 as it was from 1949 to 1973—about twice as high—median and mean compensation would have been around 41 percent higher.
Growth Skeptics
Yet a growing number of policymakers and pundits on the left and right are questioning the primacy of growth as the key objective of national economic policy. Democrats and progressives are focused on new policies to redistribute wealth, such as Medicare for all, a federal jobs guarantee, or a universal basic income. Meanwhile, Republicans and conservatives, grappling with a president who questions the value of free trade and immigration, have grown publicly skeptical of market capitalism. “The free market has been sorting it out for a while, and America has been losing,” said Vice President Mike Pence. And they have become skeptical of the core goal of increasing economic growth.
Leading the charge among the wonks is Oren Cass, a Manhattan Institute scholar and former policy director for the 2012 Mitt Romney presidential campaign. In his new book, The Once and Future Worker, Cass writes that although “economic growth and rising material living standards are laudable goals … they by no means guarantee the health of a labor market that will meet society’s long-term needs.”
The criticisms of growth skeptics range from the ahistorical to the utopian. Of course, a fast-rising tide of economic growth does not guarantee all boats will rise at the same pace or at a pace that society deems sufficient. “Guarantee,” after all, is a strong word. Depending on the strength one attributes to it, it’s possible nothing can “guarantee” the outcome that some growth critics want: all winners, no losers, no trade-offs, no disruption. But if by guarantee we don’t mean “ensure with ironclad certainty” but only “approximate more closely than any available alternative,” economic growth remains society’s best bet. Indeed, this very urge to undervalue growth’s benefits is the surest sign that growth in America has become a victim of its own success.
G.K. Chesterton famously noted how modern types of reformers see institutions or practices and think, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the wise reply, “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away.” Institutions and policies that endure decade after decade often serve a useful purpose even if that purpose isn’t immediately apparent, and we should be cautious before shrugging them off as unimportant. Our growth-oriented economic policy is a perfect example. It brings tremendous benefits, yet we now risk taking it for granted.
And what an odd time to question the benefits. The Obama administration was much derided for its apparently self-serving claim, made in the 2013 Economic Report of the President, “that in the 21st Century, real GDP growth in the United States is likely to be permanently slower than it was in earlier eras.” But it was a perfectly reasonable baseline forecast that continues to reflect the economic consensus from Wall Street to Washington. For instance: The Federal Reserve’s long-term, real GDP forecast stands at 1.8 percent, about half the average pace from 1947 to the start of the Great Recession. And even that reduced pace of growth seems a tad too optimistic for JP Morgan, which pegs the economy’s long-term growth potential at 1.5 percent.
Obstacles to Growth
There are good reasons why the experts seem so gloomy. The most important—and, perhaps, most inescapable—is demographics. The aging of the labor force, lower birth rates, and a slowing rate of immigration suggest a slowdown in the growth of the American labor force to around 0.5 percent annually going forward—as compared with roughly 2 percent in the 1960s and 1970s. The U.S. economy expanded at a 4.1 percent annual pace during the ’60s—a decade that today’s nationalist populists look back on with great nostalgia. But growth would have been less than 3 percent if the labor force had been growing as slowly back then as it is currently.
The other big obstacle to faster growth is weak productivity, which downshifted just before the Great Recession and has yet to rebound. For the American economy to grow as fast in the future as it has overall since World War II, output per worker will need to rise sharply. Indeed, that is a big goal of the 2017 Republican-pushed corporate tax cuts. They are supposed to increase business investment and eventually productivity growth. But there are no signs either is happening yet, much to the dismay of many conservative economists. The only other hope lies beyond Washington’s tinkering: The private sector continues to innovate. Maybe Silicon Valley will eventually come to the rescue, as innovation in areas such as artificial intelligence and robotics eventually spreads throughout the non-tech economy. The history of radical technological advances, such as electrification, suggest that it can take some time before businesses figure out how to effectively employ them.
The Tangible Benefits of Growth
It can be easy to dismiss all this talk of growth rates as the abstract muttering of economists far removed from the everyday concerns of the average American. As a corrective, George Mason economist Tyler Cowen poses a useful thought experiment in his latest book, Stubborn Attachments. Imagine we redo U.S. history, he says, “but assume the country’s economy had grown one percentage point less each year between 1870 and 1990. In that scenario, the United States of 1990 would be no richer than the Mexico of 1990.”
Michael Strain, my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, makes a similar point when he writes:
Imagine the world in the year 1900. There was no air travel, no antibiotics, no iPhone, no Amazon Prime, no modern high school and no air conditioning. … Anyone who played down growth a century ago wouldn’t have known they were arguing against any of these things, because none of these growth-enabled features of modern life had been invented yet. But they would have been putting the existence of all these at risk by stifling, even marginally, the economic engine that allowed for their creation.
Sustained and solid growth is what makes these advances possible and is what separates the median American today from the median residents of the world’s developing economies. Sacrificing a tenth of a percentage point here and two-tenths there to, say, protect favored industries from foreign competition or levy punitive taxes on obscenely rich entrepreneurs may seem like a worthwhile tradeoff in the moment. But because of how growth compounds over time, in the long-term such trade-offs aren’t just unappealing but inexplicable. As the Nobel Laureate in economics Robert Lucas wrote, “Once one starts to think about [exponential growth], it is hard to think about anything else.” Marginally slowing down economic growth to achieve other policy goals might cause little harm to us, but it seems both less fair and less wise when the welfare of ensuing generations are accounted for. In Strain’s words, “What in the world of tomorrow doesn’t yet exist? We need growth in order to find the answer, both for ourselves, and for posterity.”
It is strange that intellectuals are dismissing the importance of economic growth at just the point when it is becoming harder to generate—and doubly weird after a long stretch of sluggish growth that has almost certainly played a role in the surge of populist politicians such as President Trump. And these populist leaders are pushing the sorts of policies that make a future of slow growth even more likely.
Misguided Hindsight
Trump looks back to the immediate decades after World War Two as the golden age of the American economy. His presidential campaign, for instance, made a point of promising the return of mass employment in the industrial-age industries of steel and coal. Cass, too, has pointed to those decades as an alternate model of economic growth. As he said during a recent think-tank event:
The period of time when productivity growth was really booming most in the American economy was a time when tax rates were much higher, immigration rates were much lower, there was virtually no international trade by the standards of the 1920s or today, and there was a much smaller or non-existent safety net. The idea that what we currently call the pro-growth agenda is actually what has aligned with high growth isn’t true.
That is a wrong-headed interpretation of economic history. While it is true that the so-called golden age era is known for fast economic and productivity growth, economists generally do not credit the lack of trade or immigration. Rather, notes the Congressional Budget Office in a review of research literature on the subject, “the golden age may be more accurately interpreted as the full final exploitation of an earlier burst of innovations through electrification, suburbanization, completion and increasing exploitation of the highway system, and production of consumer appliances.” In other words, huge technological advances in the 1920s and 1930s reaped benefits for decades.
Unfortunately, those productivity gains, along with American industrial superiority over its war-ravaged competitors, have created a myth about the postwar American economy—a myth that populists continue to spread. Yet Fortress America entered the 1970s ill-prepared for the inevitable global competition as the rest of the world’s advanced economies finally recovered.
Both Trump and Cass, therefore, have it backward. It wasn’t too much globalization and economic openness that undermined large swaths of the manufacturing economy, but too little. As Adrian Wooldridge of The Economist and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan write in Capitalism in America:
The 1970s was the decade when Americans finally had to grapple with the fact that it was losing its leadership in an ever widening range of industries. Though the best American companies such as General Electric and Pfizer powered ahead, a striking number treaded water. They had succeeded during the long postwar boom not because they had any particular merit, but because Europe and Japan were still recovering from World War Two and they collapsed at the first sniff of competition.
The last thing the American economy needs today is a reduction in competitive intensity, whether achieved by shielding industries with tariffs or keeping out the immigrants that help grow the workforce and provide expertise to key industries, especially technology. Nearly half of our “unicorn companies,” another name for U.S. startups worth over $1 billion dollars, were founded by immigrants. Immigrant scientists and entrepreneurs play a disproportionate role in driving the tech progress necessary for sustained productivity growth. Forty percent of Fortune 500 companies have a first- or second-generation immigrant founder. Immigrants may compete with other Americans, but they also employ them.
The Only Viable Solution
The critics of a growth-above-all approach might grant that no other national policy is better at generating material prosperity. But, they say, life requires more than mere materialism. We crave community, beauty, and a certain degree of stability. It is this objection that Harvard’s Benjamin Friedman sought to address in his 2006 book, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. True, capitalism and the creative destruction that drive it can disrupt traditional cultures or degrade the environment. And from the Old Testament to the present, men have fretted over usury’s effects on one’s soul (today we might say finance’s effects on one’s morals). But growth doesn’t only erode individual and societal morality. Besides improving material conditions, growth improves moral ones, as well.
Friedman notes how sustained growth “shapes the social, political and, ultimately, the moral character of a people” and “more often than not fosters greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness, and dedication to democracy.” Slow growth, on the other hand, leads to ugly consequences, especially if voters begin to feel it is inevitable. In times of stagnation, economic policy tilts toward dividing up a fixed pie rather than enlarging everyone’s share. It could mean a society that is less willing to entertain the benefits of international trade, more hostile toward immigration and immigrants, and more comfortable with regulating business.
In fact, “could” is putting it mildly. The tariffs, legislative efforts to reduce immigration, and frequent threats to regulate America’s most successful companies, such as Google and Amazon, already show some of the consequences of the sluggish recovery from the Great Recession—and this from what is supposed to be America’s pro-growth party.
Growth is, and remains, good. Growth is right, staving off a zero-sum politics defined more by group conflict than productive cooperation. Growth works, improving everyone’s standard of living, if not always equally, at least steadily. Growth clarifies, exposing business to competition, and prevents industrial calcification. Growth signifies the evolutionary and upward surge of mankind, evident in everything from modern medicine to interstellar space travel. And a policy geared toward increasing economic growth—pursued attentively and unapologetically—will save the United States of America. All other national economic strategies are but pale imitations.
James Pethokoukis is a columnist and blogger at the American Enterprise Institute. Previously, he was the Washington columnist for Reuters Breakingviews, the opinion and commentary wing of Thomson Reuters.
RELATED VIDEO: Who Gets the Credit for the Booming Economy?
EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column with images is republished with permission. Image credit: Image by geralt on Pixabay.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/growth-e1548783455131.jpg384640Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2019-01-29 12:37:502019-03-06 17:52:11Only Economic Growth Will Save the United States of America
“This idea of ‘May Issue’ is offensive, and the Associated Press just unknowingly made a great case why may issue should be ruled unconstitutional.” —Grant Stinchfield
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/may-issue-nra-ila.jpg338600NRA Institute for Legislative Actionhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngNRA Institute for Legislative Action2019-01-26 20:23:192019-01-26 20:23:21VIDEO: In a Plot To Blast Trump, the AP Accidentally Exposes the Failures of “May Issue” Permits
This week, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a Second Amendment challenge to a gun control law for the first time in nearly 10 years. Arguments in the case will likely be heard during the court’s next term, which starts in October.
During the opening decade of the 21st Century, the U.S. Supreme Court issued two landmark rulings that many hoped would revitalize the Second Amendment, which had been all but read out of the Constitution by activist lower judges that favored banning or heavily restricting firearms.
District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010) made abundantly clear that the Second Amendment is a fundamental civil right and should be respected as such by the nation’s courts and public officials.
That did not happen.
Instead, the rulings seemed mainly to energize the resistance to the right to keep and bear arms both within and without the judicial system.
Billionaires turned social engineers – most notably Michael Bloomberg – created a new industry around more sophisticated and organized anti-gun efforts.
Elite universities created research departments entirely devoted to engineering empirical support for gun control and rewriting American history as it pertains the Second Amendment and gun ownership.
The same judges with their same lifetime appointments who refused to acknowledge the obvious import of the Second Amendment’s history and text refused to acknowledge the obvious import of the Heller and McDonaldopinions.
Throughout it all, the high court seemed to have turned its back on the Second Amendment, refusing review in case after case. This sometimes provoked impassioned dissents from justices who believed the Second Amendment was being treated as a “disfavored right” and a “constitutional orphan.”
Only once in all this time did the U.S. Supreme Court revisit the Second Amendment in an unsigned opinion that summarily reversed, without argument, a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court opinion that upheld the state’s ban on electrically-powered “stun guns.”
That changed on Tuesday when the high court granted review to the NRA-backed case of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. City of New York. This case concerns a challenge under the Second Amendment and other constitutional provisions to New York City regulations that effectively ban law-abiding handgun owners from traveling outside the city with their own secured and unloaded handguns.
The bizarre and unique nature of this regulation – apparently the only one of its kind in the nation – and the exceedingly thin “public safety” justification for it potentially make the case low-hanging fruit for another positive Second Amendment ruling.
But whether the Supreme Court will use the occasion to bring lower court defiance of the Second Amendment to heel or simply to rule narrowly on this particular regulation remains to be seen.
The development does, however, underscore the importance to gun owners of President Trump’s appointments to the high court, including Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brent Kavanaugh.
The latter replaced Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was considered the crucial swing vote in the Heller and McDonald cases. Yet Kennedy’s sustained commitment to a robust Second Amendment was always in question, leading to speculation that neither the court’s pro- or anti-gun blocs had the confidence to take another case.
Unlike Kennedy, however, Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are committed originalists, the same mode of judicial interpretation that the late Justice Antonin Scalia used in authoring the Heller opinion. Fidelity to that method and to the court’s opinions in Heller and McDonald are the surest guarantees we can have that the Second Amendment will get the respect it is due by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Left-leaning pundits are already issuing hysterical predictions about what this development means for gun control in the United States.
May they be right and then some.
The more sober and mature outlook, however, is a wait-and-see attitude, along with a healthy appreciation of how President Trump’s appointments to the court may finally reenergize a Second Amendment that has been neglected for too long.
Those appointments would not have happened without the steadfast work of NRA members who understand the importance of the U.S. Supreme Court as the final backstop against infringements of our Second Amendment rights. We may now be on the threshold of realizing the fruits of that labor.
EDITORS NOTE: This NRA-ILA column with images is republished with permission. The featured photo is by Sofia Sforza on Unsplash.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/sofia-sforza-90360-unsplash-1-e1548498414397.jpg427640NRA Institute for Legislative Actionhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngNRA Institute for Legislative Action2019-01-26 05:29:012019-01-26 05:29:03U.S. Supreme Court (Finally) Takes Another Second Amendment Challenge to a Gun Control Law
Airbnb, which lists more 45,000 Florida properties on its vacation rentals website, has lobbied hard to remove its “home-sharing” offerings from hotel/motel regulations and unshackle the state’s $31 billion short-term rental industry from local regulations.
Several bills, including last year’s Vacation Rental Act, gained momentum during the last two legislative sessions before falling short.
If Airbnb is to have any hope in 2019 of achieving its legislative goals in Florida, however, it must first deal with a new problem—the wrath of its new governor.
Gov. Ron DeSantis declared state of Florida employees will no longer be reimbursed for Airbnb stays while traveling and said further sanctions will be imposed if Airbnb doesn’t reverse its November decision to delist properties in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
DeSantis said Airbnb’s actions violate Florida law—House Bill 545, adopted last year—which imposes penalties, including divestment, on companies involved in the “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement” against Israel.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Photo: Facebook.
“We have a moral obligation to oppose the Airbnb policy,” DeSantis said. “It does target Jews specifically. When you target Jews for disfavored treatment, that is the essence of anti-Semitism. In Florida, as long as I’m the governor, BDS will be D.O.A.”
DeSantis issued his comments during a press conference at the Jewish Federation of South Palm Beach County in Boca Raton.
He said the State Board of Administration will determine if Airbnb’s West Bank policy warrants further sanctions from the state.
The board—comprised of DeSantis, Attorney General Ashley Moody, and Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis—oversees investments of the state’s pension program.
Airbnb is a private company “but they are trying to be publicly-traded and they are trying to do an initial public offering,” DeSantis said. “That would not be good if you’re already on Florida’s hit list before you’ve even gotten off the ground.”
DeSantis also instructed Moody to determine if the policy violates the civil rights of any Floridian Jews who own property in the West Bank.
Other states will follow Florida’s lead, he said. “That will end up getting [Airbnb] where they need to be. But you know what they say, if you can’t make them see the light, make them feel the heat.”
Airbnb responded in a statement that it “unequivocally rejected” the “BDS movement” against Israel and that it has “worked with the Florida State Board of Administration on this matter” and will continue to do so.
Its decision to delist about 200 properties in “the settlements in the West Bank” is not unique to Israel, the company said.
“Airbnb has previously prevented hosts from accepting reservations in other lands with unique dynamics, including Crimea—where the decision impacted more than 4,000 listings,” according to the statement.
Earlier Tuesday, Airbnb reported short-term rentals offered through its digital platform drew 4.5 million guests to Florida and generated more than $810 million in rental income for hosts in 2018.
The company will release how much it will pay in state and local bed taxes in February. Last year, it remitted $33 million to the state and $12.7 million to counties it has tax collection contracts with, including $3.3 million to Miami-Dade, $1.9 million to Broward, $1.9 million to Pinellas, and $1.8 million to Orange counties.
Ten Florida counties saw at least 100,000 Airbnb guests and at least $22 million in Airbnb rental revenues in 2018, according to the company’s report.
The Vacation Rental Act—Senate Bill 1400 and House Bill 773—proposed removing short-term vacation rentals from hotel and motel regulations, and establishing a uniform inspection program conducted by the state’s Department of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR).
SB 1400 passed the Senate Regulated Industries Committee, but never made it out the chamber’s appropriations and community affairs committees for a floor vote. HB 773 also never made it out of committee. Similar 2017 bills shared the same fates.
As of Tuesday, a 2019 iteration of the Vacation Rental Act had not been filed.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/governor-ron-desantis-us-embassy-jerusalem-e1548159192167.jpg503639Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2019-01-22 07:15:462019-01-22 07:17:37Florida Governor DeSantis Sanctions Airbnb for West Bank Policy
President Donald Trump offered to expand amnesty for certain young illegal immigrants in exchange for money to pay for a border barrier as a compromise to end the partial government shutdown.
“This is a commonsense compromise both parties should embrace,” Trump said Saturday in a nationally televised speech from the White House.
Democratic leaders have already said they would oppose the Trump compromise, so the partial shutdown of 25 percent of the federal government will likely continue for a while.
“The radical left can never control our borders. I will never let it happen. Walls are not immoral,” the president continued during the speech. “In fact, they are the opposite of immoral, because they will save many lives and stop drugs from pouring into our country.”
During the remarks, Trump laid out a plan that would include the $5.7 billion he requested for construction of additional 230 miles of a steel border wall.
His offer to Democrats is three years of relief for recipients of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and another three-year extension for those for whom DACA protection is about to expire. DACA recipients are illegal immigrants brought to the United States by their parents.
Trump talked about the crimes, murder, drugs, and rape that result from illegal immigration, as well as the humanitarian crisis among migrants traveling to reach the United States.
“It’s got to end now. These are not talking points, these are the heartbreaking realities that are hurting innocent, precious human beings every single day on both sides of the border,” Trump said. “As a candidate for president, I promised I would fix this crisis, and I intend to keep that promise.”
Trump’s remarks come as another migrant caravan from Central America is moving toward the U.S. southern border. It also came moments after he spoke to an Oval Office naturalization ceremony that was held for legal immigrants that became citizens on Saturday.
Trump said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., will bring the proposal up for a vote next week.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., issued a statement opposing the Trump proposal before the president delivered the speech. However, she said the House would vote on its own counter proposal in the next week that did not include a wall—or DACA—to reopen the government.
Trump framed the wall as a reasonable project.
“This is not a 2,000-mile concrete structure from sea to sea,” the president said. “These are steel barriers in high-priority locations.”
Trump deserves credit for trying to security the border, but his proposed compromise is not the best way forward, said James Carafano, vice president for national security and foreign policy at The Heritage Foundation.
“Amnesty encourages further illegal immigration, incentivizes the tragedy of human trafficking, and undermines our citizens’ confidence in the rule of law,” Carafano said in a statement. “Amnesty should not be part of any border security deal, especially given that many who today oppose a wall have publicly supported and even voted for physical barriers in the recent past.”
Trump’s proposal also includes $800 million for humanitarian assistance at the border, $805 million for drug detection technology to help secure our ports of entry, 2,750 new border agents and law enforcement professionals, and 75 new immigration judges to handle the backlog of almost 900,000 cases.
“It is unlikely that any one of these provisions alone would pass the House, and taken together, they are a non-starter,” Pelosi said in her statement. “For one thing, this proposal does not include the permanent solution for the Dreamers and TPS [Temporary Protected Status] recipients that our country needs and supports.”
Pelosi said Democrats support increasing the number of immigration judges and new technology to stop drugs and weapons from coming across the border.
“Next week, Democrats will pass a package of six bills agreed to by House and Senate negotiators and other legislation to re-open government so that we can fully negotiate on border security proposals.” Pelosi said.
The government partial shutdown continues. There are approximately 800,000 non-essential personnel who have been furloughed due to the shutdown. The Washington Post chart below lists the percentage of individuals by department who have been furloughed.
A growing chorus of alarmist voices decries the rising economic inequality in the Western world, especially in the United States. Surprisingly enough, the same mainstream analysts complain about the anemic growth of labor productivity without seeing the correct link between the two.
[ … ]
For the United States, the failed economic policy is the exponential growth of government intervention in the economy in the 20th century, which stifled entrepreneurship and capital accumulation. This is obvious in the rise of both government spending that redistributes away economic resources from their originators and the amount of regulatory burden.
The U.S. Congress and previous presidents have allowed government intervention to expand exponentially.
President Trump recognized that it is government intervention at every level (the swamp) that harms economic growth. Regulations by tens of thousands of un-elected government bureaucrats have keep America from being great.
Given the current shutdown and the growing realization that its impact on individual Americans has been negligible, gives the Trump administration a golden opportunity to “trim the fat.”
Fewer government bureaucrats means greater productivity and income equality.
Two goals of Making America Great Again and Keeping America Great!
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/joshua-j-cotten-1111201-unsplash-1-e1547991684389.jpg406640Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2019-01-20 08:42:092019-01-21 19:52:45How To Drain The Swamp: Fire All ‘Non-Essential’ Government Personnel
“Despite the evidence showing that [anti-gunners’] number-one legislative priority doesn’t work, they’re still pushing it. Why? Because it polls well. They’re looking for a public-relations victory, not a public-safety victory.” —Cam Edwards
EDITORS NOTE: This NRA-ILA column with video and images is republished with permission. The feature photo is by Sofia Sforza on Unsplash.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/sofia-sforza-90360-unsplash-e1547550434964.jpg427640NRA Institute for Legislative Actionhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngNRA Institute for Legislative Action2019-01-15 06:07:262019-01-15 06:07:27The Push for Universal Background Checks Is Nothing More Than a Worthless PR Stunt
We have seen a generation of gun-grabbers rise and fall. The new generation of gun-grabbers are pushing for the same tired and baseless policies that won’t so much as inconvenience criminals. We understand the emotional response to violence and the desire to “do something.”
But that “something” has to be the right thing, a policy that will be effective on the target population and is backed by sound evidence. To design a policy that will stop criminals from getting guns, the first step should be to find out where criminals get guns.
Fortunately, the Bureau of Justice Statistics within the Office of Justice Programs at the Department of Justice just this week released a report that provides this very information. The report is the “Source and Use of Firearms Involved in Crimes: Survey of Prison Inmates, 2016” and its findings are quite clear.
More than one in five prisoners in state or federal prisons (20.8%) possessed or used a firearm during their crime; 18.4% had or used a handgun.
A plurality – 43.2% – got their guns off the street or on the underground market which does not include gun shows, flea markets, or private sales. The underground market only includes “markets for stolen goods, middlemen for stolen goods, criminals or criminal enterprises, or individuals or groups involved in sales of illegal drugs.”
About ten percent (10.1%) acquired the gun from a retail source. This includes 8.2% whom acquired it from a licensed dealer at a retail source. Just under 7% bought the firearm under their own name and then at least 6.7% underwent a background check; we say “at least” because some number of prisoners are unaware if a check was conducted. The remaining 3.3% includes people who may not be aware they were submitted to a check because, for many people, the check is completed instantly. As you know, federal law requires firearms dealers to conduct background checks.
A quarter (25.3%) of prisoners acquired the firearm they had at the time of their crime from an individual; 14.5% of these bought, traded, borrowed, or rented the gun from a family member or friend. The other 10.8% were given the firearm as a gift or it was purchased for the prisoner.
That sounds like it likely includes straw purchases, which are a federal crime.
Theft was not uncommon, at 6.4%, though not as common as anti-gun organizations would have you believe.
The remaining 17.4% cited some other source; 6.9% found it at the scene of the crime or it was the victim’s, 4.6% say the gun was brought by someone else, and 5.9% from “other” sources. This last category is a catch-all, including sources that are different from all of the other sources listed in the report. It is important to note that none of the types of “other” sources had enough responses to warrant their own category.
In other words, there weren’t enough prisoners saying they bought a gun online or from a stranger to categorize these straw-man arguments into categories. Some quick, back of the envelope math shows that just under 5,200 prisoners surveyed reported having a gun during their criminal offense.
How would so-called universal background checks impact any of these categories?
First, you have to rule out the retail purchases because most already underwent a background check. You would also have to concede that those who obtained the firearm from a family member or friend wouldn’t be affected, because of the exemptions in so-called universal background checks laws for family members and… well, come on. If someone is going to give a known criminal a gun, then they’re not going to change their minds because of a law. It’s already a crime to knowingly give a gun to a prohibited person.
Sellers on the underground market aren’t going to start running background checks because they are, themselves, criminals. Burglars won’t stop burgling to get a background check run on the firearms they’re stealing.
Criminals who somehow manage find a gun at the scene of the crime through no action of their own wouldn’t be affected by a background check.
So, please, tell us: which source of firearms for criminals will dry up under so-called universal background checks?
Unless drug dealers and purveyors of stolen goods set up shop with clipboards, log books, and internet access to run background checks, criminals will still have a source of illegal guns.
EDITORS NOTE: This column with images by NRA-ILA is republished with permission.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/background-check-nraila-e1547285596651.jpg360640NRA Institute for Legislative Actionhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngNRA Institute for Legislative Action2019-01-12 04:34:122019-01-12 04:37:59Background Checks: No Impact on Criminals
Mainstream economists are overlooking a key connection.
A growing chorus of alarmist voices decries the rising economic inequality in the Western world, especially in the United States. Surprisingly enough, the same mainstream analysts complain about the anemic growth of labor productivity without seeing the correct link between the two.
Data shows a strong correlation between labor productivity and economic inequality (the two charts below). From the end of the Second World War until the mid-1970s, labor productivity grew at a robust rate of almost 3 percent per annum (p.a.), while income inequality declined. Afterward, both trends reversed—labor productivity slowed to below 2 percent growth p.a. on average and has almost stagnated since the Great Recession, while both wealth and income inequality expanded steadily.
The Role of Capital Accumulation in Economic Growth
What common factor could explain the two divergent trends that the mainstream analysts seem to overlook? In the 1940s, Mises was impressed by the ”miraculous” rise in the standards of living of American wage earners, which had been going on for more than two centuries. For him, the answer was straightforward: capital accumulation is the driving force behind both labor productivity and standards of living convergence.
Building on Mises’s work, Rothbard explained in detail what capital accumulation requires: (i) new capital investment that lengthens the structure of production and (ii) technological progress that overcomes the diminishing returns accompanying the increase in the supply of capital goods. However, Mises also warned that depletion of the capital stock would hamper capital accumulation and labor productivity. Unfortunately, mainstream analysts and the United States seem to have forgotten this valuable lesson.
In terms of technological progress, the US has maintained its world leadership during past decades. It ranks second in the world to Switzerland in terms of both innovation and business sophistication, spends more for Research & Innovation than the OECD or EU on average relative to GDP, and makes up the majority of the top 25 universities in the world. Moreover, it has issued the same amount of patents over the last three decades compared with the previous 150 years.
In terms of capital stock, the picture is completely different. According to estimates of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the stock of private non-residential assets per worker has increased in real terms at about 1 percent p.a. from 1947 to 2009 and stagnated since the Great Recession (left chart below). However, BEA’s alleged sustained pace of capital growth seems hard to reconcile with the falling private investment and savings since the mid-1970s (right chart below).
Methodological Shortcomings
In addition, the BEA methodology presents some serious shortcomings. Except for cars, BEA uses the “perpetual inventory method” to estimate fixed assets. According to it, the value of the capital stock is indirectly estimated as the sum of past investment flows minus the estimated depreciation. It means that all past investments are considered sound by default, which is certainly not the case nowadays when recurrent booms and busts cause significant volumes of malinvestments. Other question marks relate to the accurate estimation of depreciation rates in the face of rapid technological progress and the use of GDP deflators as their accuracy is unreliable, especially with regard to real estate investment.
All these considerations have led not only us but also the Federal Reserve Board (FRB) to suspect that BEA’s estimates of the US capital stock are overvalued. It is intriguing that the FRB adjusts the BEA estimates downward, especially with regard to real estate assets— “structures” in BEA’s jargon when it uses them as input for the calculation of the capital stock in manufacturing. As a result, there is a substantial difference between BEA and FRB estimates of the evolution of the volume of manufacturing capital stock from 1952 to 2016, in particular for the real estate component (left chart below). Therefore, we tried to recalculate the BEA estimate of the total stock of private non-residential capital per employee by extrapolating the difference between the two manufacturing indexes coming from BEA and FRB (right chart below).
The new results suggest that the real stock of capital per worker grew in a clear and sustained manner only until the end of the 1970s and fell afterward until the trough of the Great Recession. The recalculated capital stock is more consistent with the observed declines in investment and productivity since the mid-1970s and also confirms Mises’s prediction that wrong policies would lead to capital consumption.
Economic Consequences of Big Government
For the United States, the failed economic policy is the exponential growth of government intervention in the economy in the 20th century, which stifled entrepreneurship and capital accumulation. This is obvious in the rise of both government spending that redistributes away economic resources from their originators (left chart below) and the amount of regulatory burden (right chart below). Another key factor taking a toll on capital endowment is inflation, which gained traction following the de facto abolishment of the gold standard in 1971.
Most importantly, inflationary policies trigger boom-bust cycles via the artificial lowering of interest rates below their free-market level. In a recent article on the business cycle, Salerno emphasizes that “overconsumption” and “malinvestment” are the two salient marks of the boom—not “overinvestment,” as wrongly understood by some mainstream critics. It is no surprise that the capital stock per worker dropped during the business cycles that have occurred regularly since the 1970s and that culminated in the Great Recession. The illusion of the boom fuels not only capital consumption but also the polarization of wealth and incomes in the society. The fiduciary credit expansion fuels an increase in asset prices, most commonly on stock exchanges and in real estate (charts below).
Although starting from a limited number of transactions, all owners calculate their net worth with the newly inflated asset prices, boosting the value of household assets in excess of liabilities. As a result, the rich appear to get even richer in an economy on steroids. This explains why both the US national wealth has grown much faster than national income since the end of the 1970s (left chart below), and the number of wealthy people increased significantly (right chart below).
The rising inequality since the 1970s has been fueled by both the decline in labor productivity and monetary expansion inflating asset prices. Both are perverse effects of government interventionist policies, which led to a gradual erosion of the US capital stock per employee. This is the correct linkage between inequality and productivity as explained by Mises and other Austrian School economists.
People have different skills and preferences, so the free market does not lead to a complete equalization of incomes and wealth. Nevertheless, it does ensure the proper allocation of capital to increase labor productivity and satisfy the most urgent needs of consumers. As a result, the gap between the well-off and the poor is not only gradually diminishing but also gets less significant in terms of consumption. Eventually, the disadvantage of wealth inequality becomes mostly a psychological one. As long as the capitalist consumes only a fraction of his wealth and invests the rest into productive businesses, the real beneficiary of the increase in labor productivity is the poorer part of society.
Dr. Mihai Macovei is an associated researcher at the Ludwig von Mises Institute Romania and works for an international organization in Brussels, Belgium.
EDITORS NOTE: This column with images by FEE is republished with permission.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/econgrowth-e1547237696222.jpg370640Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2019-01-11 15:15:072019-01-11 15:50:35Slowing Productivity and Rising Inequality Have a Common Driver: Government Intervention
Some are, but maybe not your local friendly, helpful health professional!
You can bet the drug industry and the Medicare fraudsters were happy to see Sessions out as Attorney General
A little over six months ago, then Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a major federal crackdown on doctors, pharmacists and other health providers for fueling the opioid crisis and using your Medicare and Medicaid dollars to line their pockets.
Here is a bit of one story about Sessions’ announcement.
Federal agencies on Thursday announced charges in what Attorney General Jeff Sessions called “the largest health care fraud takedown in American history,” an investigation into over $2 billion in alleged fraud by doctors, pharmacists, and nurses.
Many of the allegations centered on illegitimate opioid prescriptions. The Justice Department charged 162 defendants, including 76 doctors, for their roles dispensing opioids and narcotics, the result of investigations spanning 30 state Medicaid programs and numerous enforcement agencies.
[….]
“Some of our most trusted medical officials, professionals, look at their patients, vulnerable people suffering from addiction, and they see dollar signs,” Sessions said.
The alleged fraud and false billings collectively accounted for 13 million illegal opioid dosages, the Justice Department said, and also included 23 pharmacists and 19 nurses.
The Department of Health and Human Services also announced that since July 2017, it has excluded over 2,700 individuals and 587 providers from Medicare and Medicaid “for conduct related to opioid diversion and abuse” — including 67 doctors, 402 nurses, and 40 pharmacy services.
Here are a couple of more recent cases of Pharmacy fraud
Don’t miss my post from last week about Pharmacist Haytham “Tom” Fakihin Dearborn, Michigan.
Florida Fraudster
From a Justice Department Press release in December, here.
The owner of a Miami, Florida-area pharmacy who caused Medicare to pay more than $8.4 million over a six-year period for prescription drugs that were never provided to beneficiaries was sentenced today to 87 months in prison.
[….]
Antonio Perez Jr., 48, of Miami Beach, Florida, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Federico A. Moreno of the Southern District of Florida, who also ordered Perez to pay $8,415,824 in restitution and to forfeit the same amount. Perez was ordered to forfeit four Miami-area properties worth approximately $700,000 and multiple bank accounts totaling over $250,000. Perez previously pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit health care fraud.
[….]
During the course of the scheme, Medicare paid Valles Pharmacy Discount over $32 million, of which at least $8.4 million was for prescription drugs that Valles Pharmacy never purchased and never provided to Medicare beneficiaries, Perez admitted.
The owner of Akhtamar Pharmacy will be sentenced in February.
California case
Also in December a federal jury found Pharmacist Tamar Tatarian, 39, of Pasadena, California guilty of a Medicare fraud scheme after she billed Medicare $1.3 million for drugs she never purchased or distributed.
You will be interested to see that she was one of those caught in Sessions’ big sweep earlier this year.
Tatarian, the owner of Akhtamar Pharmacy, will be sentenced next month.
Secret decoder ring at work! Tatarian must be Armenian. See the Legend of Akhtamar. My reference to Secret decoder ring comes from Ann Coulter’s ‘Adios America’ where she rightly points out that readers of news stories about crooks and criminals must search for clues about where the alleged perp might come from and how he/she got in to the country.
Exception! See yesterday’s postabout the Russians ripping off Washington staters! There the reporter actually says where those arrested were from.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/rawpixel-600792-unsplash-e1547078600198.jpg391640Ann Corcoranhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngAnn Corcoran2019-01-09 19:03:402019-01-09 19:03:41Is your Neighborhood Pharmacist a Crook?
Just now when I was tweeting about how everyone should be calling their members of Congress and Senators today (even the Dems!) to demand they fund the President’s wall, I noted that my top tweet of the last month was one about a Chinese sex trafficking ring operating in New Hampshire and Maine.
The poor young girls were brought to the US on tourist visas and literally held prisoner by their Chinese pimps.
MANCHESTER — Two homes in the city — one in a middle-class neighborhood — were used as houses of prostitution in a sex trafficking ring that involved as many as two dozen Chinese women under the control of a Concord couple, federal prosecutors said Friday.
Police raid house of prostitution
Neighbors of 87 Harrington Ave. — on a quiet residential street within earshot of Our Lady of the Cedars Church — said they had been complaining for two years about the operation. On Thursday, Manchester police and sheriff deputies used battering rams on the door and took away at least one Asian woman.
“Merry Christmas. For two years we’ve been waiting. Now our kids can come out and play,” said a woman who lived across the street who did not want to be identified.
[….]
….federal officials in Maine announced the indictment of a Concord couple and charged them with running the sex ring spanning Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. Other sites of prostitution listed included hotels in Dover, Portsmouth and Kittery, where Portsmouth Naval Shipyard is located.
Multiple locations in the Portland, Maine area were also cited.
Sou Chao Li and Derong Maio, both 37, are each charged with one count of conspiracy to engage in interstate transportation and travel for prostitution; two counts of sex trafficking by fraud and coercion; and five counts of interstate transportation for prostitution. Li also is charged with possessing a victim’s passport as part of the sex trafficking scheme.
[….]
Neighbors of the Harrington Avenue home, nearly all of whom did not want to be identified, said they have been enduring traffic all hours of the day and night for years. They said middle-aged white men typically, many in SUVs and pickups, drive to the neighborhood, park on the street, enter the house and leave after 10 or 15 minutes. Some would wait in the car while another man was in the house.
“Sometimes they’d show up at my door,” one neighbor said. “I’d say ‘you guys looking for STDs? Go next door.’” [STD=Sexually Transmitted Diseases].
There is much more to the story, click here to read it all.
Here is what I want to know, did no one who reviews tourist visas from China notice any trend? We never hear about the details of that process. Was there fraud going on at the US Embassy in China?
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/gabrielle-cole-779089-unsplash.jpg368636Ann Corcoranhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngAnn Corcoran2019-01-09 08:40:522019-01-10 07:35:27New Hampshire: Chinese Prostitution Ring Busted by Feds
Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen recently announced a significant policy change to stop illegal immigration.
After years of catch and release, loopholes, and poor enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security is moving to plug the holes in the U.S. immigration system, and especially the loopholes that surround the asylum system.
One of the most serious problems the U.S. faces in its immigration system is that when illegal immigrants cross the border, they can claim asylum in order to avoid quick deportation. This is an especially common tactic with illegal immigrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
Less than 10 percent of these individuals, however, will end up qualifying for asylum.
But asylum often isn’t the real objective: Those who manage to pass through the initial screening are often released into the U.S. This is made worse by various loopholes such as the Flores settlement and the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which require unaccompanied children and adults with children to be released.
The result is that many “asylum seekers” will simply disappear, many not even bothering to apply for asylum after being released.
Congress should have closed this dangerous pathway for the illegal immigration of children years ago, but instead, asylum claims and the illegal immigration of children from Central America has ballooned. The U.S. currently has an asylum backlog of over 786,000 pending cases, which serves neither U.S. interests nor those of asylum-seekers with legitimate claims.
So, the administration searched its existing legal authority for ways to stop this phenomenon and found a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows the government to return aliens to Mexico while they await their immigration court hearing.
By ending catch and release and replacing it with “catch and return,” Homeland Security is ending one of the major incentives driving illegal immigration.
As the administration pursues this protocol, Mexico has said it will provide humanitarian visas, work authorizations, and other protections to those waiting in Mexico. This partnership with Mexico is a critical piece of the solution and one that the Trump administration should be commended for reaching.
This action also closely follows the recommendations of Heritage Foundation analysts for fixing the broken immigration system. Heritage research has recommended that Congress adjust the asylum process to move asylum processing to consulates in Mexico. This way, the U.S. does not have to detain asylum-seekers and none are released into the U.S. until they have proven their asylum claims are valid.
And on this note, Congress still should close these loopholes and fix the asylum system. This order will likely be challenged in the courts, and the only sure way to lastingly reform our broken asylum system is with legislation. Congress must do its job if the U.S. is ever going to really fix the problems in its immigration system.
In the meantime, the new asylum policy is welcome news.
David Inserra specializes in cyber and homeland security policy, including protection of critical infrastructure, as policy analyst in The Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies. Read his research. Twitter: @dr_inserra.
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EDITORS NOTE: This column with images by The Daily Signal is republished with permission. Daily Signal photo: Kevin Dietsch/CNP/AdMedia/Newscom.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/NielsenTrumpMtg-1250x650-e1546687187919.jpg368640The Daily Signalhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Signal2019-01-05 06:23:062019-03-07 06:12:27Trump’s New Asylum Policy Will Help Block Illegal Immigration
Good news for the voters in California and across the country.
We have signed a settlement agreement with the State of California and the County of Los Angeles under which they will begin the process of removing from their voter registration rolls as many as 1.5 million inactive registered names that may be invalid.
These removals are required by the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), a federal law requiring the removal of inactive registrations from the voter rolls after two general federal elections (encompassing from 2 to 4 years). Inactive voter registrations belong, for the most part, to voters who have moved to another county or state or have passed away.
Los Angeles County has over 10 million residents, more than the populations of 41 of the 50 United States. California is America’s largest state, with almost 40 million residents.
We filed a 2017 federal lawsuit to force the cleanup of voter rolls (Judicial Watch, Inc., et al. v. Dean C. Logan, et al. (No. 2:17-cv-08948)). We sued on our own behalf and on behalf of Wolfgang Kupka, Rhue Guyant, Jerry Griffin, and Delores M. Mars, who are lawfully registered voters in Los Angeles County. We were joined by Election Integrity Project California, Inc., a public interest group that has long been involved in monitoring California’s voter rolls.
In our lawsuit, we alleged:
Los Angeles County has more voter registrations on its voter rolls than it has citizens who are old enough to register. Specifically, according to data provided to and published by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, Los Angeles County has a registration rate of 112 percent of its adult citizen population.
The entire State of California has a registration rate of about 101 percent of its age-eligible citizenry.
Eleven of California’s 58 counties have registration rates exceeding 100 percent of the age-eligible citizenry.
The lawsuit confirmed that Los Angeles County has on its rolls more than 1.5 million potentially ineligible voters. This means that more than one out of every five LA County registrations likely belongs to a voter who has moved or is deceased. We noted: “Los Angeles County has the highest number of inactive registrations of any single county in the country.”
Our lawsuit also uncovered that neither the State of California nor Los Angeles County had been removing inactive voters from the voter registration rolls for the past 20 years. The Supreme Court affirmed last year in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Inst., 138 S. Ct. 1833 (2018) that the NVRA “makes this removal mandatory.”
The new settlement agreement, filed with U.S. District Court Judge Manuel L. Real, requires all of the 1.5 million potentially ineligible registrants to be notified and asked to respond. If there is no response, those names are to be removed as required by the NVRA. California Secretary of State Padilla also agrees to update the State’s online NVRA manual to make clear that ineligible names must be removed and to notify each California county that they are obligated to do this. This should lead to cleaner voter rolls statewide.
Prior to this settlement agreement, we estimated that based on comparisons of national census data to voter-roll information, there were 3.5 million more names on various county voter rolls than there were citizens of voting age. This settlement could cut this number in half.
Judicial Watch Attorney Robert Popper is the director of our Election Integrity Project and led our legal team in this litigation. We were assisted in this case by Charles H. Bell Jr., of Bell, McAndrews & Hiltachk, LLP; and H. Christopher Coates of Law Office of H. Christopher Coates.
This is only the third statewide settlement achieved by private plaintiffs under the NVRA – and we were the plaintiff in each of those cases. The other statewide settlements are with Ohio (in 2014) and with Kentucky (2018), which agreed to a court-ordered consent decree.
You can take pride in knowing that we are the national leader in enforcing the list maintenance provisions of the NVRA. In addition to settlement agreements with Ohio and a win in Kentucky, we have filed a successful NVRA lawsuit against Indiana, causing it to voluntarily clean up its voting rolls, and we have an ongoing lawsuit with the State of Maryland.
We helped the State of Ohio successfully defend their settlement agreement before the Supreme Court. In North Carolina, we supported implementation of the state’s election integrity reform laws, filing amicus briefs in the Supreme Court in March 2017. And, in April 2018, we filed an amicus brief in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in support of Alabama’s voter ID law. In Georgia, we filed an amicus brief in support of Secretary Brian Kemp’s list maintenance process against a lawsuit by left-wing groups. We won when the Supreme Court ruled in Ohio’s favor.
This settlement vindicates our groundbreaking lawsuits to clean up state voter rolls to help ensure cleaner elections. We are thrilled with this historic settlement, which will set a nationwide precedent to ensure that states take reasonable steps to ensure that dead and other ineligible voters are removed from the rolls.
EDITORS NOTE: This column by Judicial Watch, with video and images, is republished with permission.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/judicial-watch-logo-1.jpg359640Judicial Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJudicial Watch2019-01-04 20:05:352019-01-04 20:10:03California and Los Angeles County to Remove 1.5 Million Inactive Voters from Voter Rolls
In our prior installments of “Sunday Thoughts,” we saw a few examples of authoritarian opinions by the courts that have been used to support the leftist contention that the “wall of separation between church and state” ought to be insurmountable. But alternative conclusions to those expressed in Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptist Church exist; ones that could just as easily have been adopted by the court.
Chief Justice John Marshall, the most prolific jurist in American jurisprudence wrote, “The American population. . . is entirely Christian, and with us, Christianity and religion are identified. It would be strange indeed, if with such a people, our institution did not presuppose Christianity.” This phrase, delivered in ex parte fashion, just like Jefferson’s, and delivered by one of the great participants in the nation’s creation could have very easily employed by the various Supreme Courts to support a more Christian-based interpretation of the First Amendment’s establishment clause.
Justice Joseph Story, one of the early members of the Supreme Court and amongst its strongest strict-constructionists said, “My own private judgment has long been (and every day’s experience more and more confirms me in it) that government can not long exist without an alliance with religion to some extent; and that Christianity is indispensable to the true interests and solid foundations of free government.”
And then, there is John Adams, our nation’s second president, a member of the Constitutional Convention and signer of the Declaration of Independence who famously wrote, “Statesmen my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand. . . The only foundation of a free Constitution, is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People, in a great Measure, than they have it now, they may change their Rulers, and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty. (suspension points included by Adams)
Based on these authoritative precedents, courts could have easily crafted phrases vastly different from “a wall of separation of church and states” to guide their rulings. With equal intellectual credibility, they could have said, “American governance presupposes Christianity” (based on Marshall); “Christianity stands as indispensable to the true interests and solid foundations of a free government” (based on Story); and “no lasting liberty can exist without moral and religious virtue” (based on Adams). Had they done so, America would be a much different nation, one where children still prayed, or stood silently and respectfully while others did, and adults publicly and comfortably revered the many blessings mercifully given to them by their Creator.
The fact that twentieth century jurists did not select these equally valid, but pro-religion guidelines reveal their secularist agenda, an agenda that has sought ready refuge in the chambers of our nation’s courts. If our aim is truly to restore our nation’s moral standing, if we want to buttress families and faith advocates, then it is fundamentally important that we remove that bastion of safety from the secularist and force them to defend their views in the public square and within the legislative branches of government. As we have previously written, a legislative override provision in our Constitution is the only way to rid secularism of its asylum.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/tom-archer-323614-unsplash-e1546387535480.jpg380640Dr. Julio Gonzalezhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Julio Gonzalez2019-01-01 19:06:012019-01-01 19:06:03It Didn’t Have To Be A Wall Of Separation.
