How Chief of ICE Responds to Jerry Brown and Andrew Cuomo on Illegal Immigrants

The Trump administration has tripled enforcement against employers that hire illegal immigrants, an offense that could involve an array of crimes, the nation’s top immigration official says.

“Simple math, more officers in the county jail equals less officers in the community,” @ICEgov Director Thomas Homan says.

“We’ve increased worksite enforcement by over 300 percent. We’re going to continue doing that,” Thomas Homan, who is retiring as chief of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said Tuesday at the National Press Club in Washington.

“We’re not only going to continue conducting criminal investigations of employers where we have evidence of criminal behavior. We’re doing the audits and we are arresting illegal employees,” Homan said.

Homan, acting director of ICE because he has not been confirmed by the Senate, is set to retire later this month.

As yet, the Trump administration hasn’t chosen a successor, he said at the event sponsored by the Center for Immigration Studies, a pro-enforcement think tank in Washington.

Homan spoke in a question-and-answer format with Jessica Vaughan, the organization’s director of policy studies.

“It’s not just employing an illegal alien. There is tax fraud going on. Employers aren’t paying their taxes,” Homan said, adding:

Homan addressed a wide range of topics

In April, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, sent a “cease and desist” letter to ICE, asking Homan’s agency to “direct your agents operating in New York to follow the clear constitutional requirements attendant to searches and arrests.”

“If you fail to do so,” Cuomo wrote, “I will explore and pursue all available legal recourse, taking any such action that is necessary to protect the rights and safety of all New Yorkers.”

Homan responded that he is a native New Yorker and isn’t intimidated by Cuomo.

“Last year, we arrested nearly 5,000 criminal aliens off the streets of New York,” Homan said. “Rather than a cease and desist letter, a letter of thank you would be appreciated.”

The Justice Department has sued California over a sanctuary state policy that prohibits local law enforcement from assisting federal immigration officials, even by holding illegal immigrants who already are detained in county jails.

Homan responded to criticism from California Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, that officials at ICE and other federal agencies aren’t telling the truth. Homan said California law enforcement authorities oppose Senate Bill 54, the sanctuary state law.

“The California [State] Sheriffs’ Association, the governor’s own sheriffs, agree with us that SB54 prevents communications with ICE,” Homan said, “and dangerous criminals like gang members, those that assault police officers, they’re being released from jails all across California.”

If local law enforcement cooperates, he said, then ICE agents won’t need to look for criminal immigrants in the community.

“When one [ICE] officer can sit in a county jail and process 10 illegal aliens in a shift, [and] now you release those 10 aliens to the street, I’ve got to send a whole team out to try and locate one,” Homan said, adding:

Simple math: More officers in the county jail equals less officers in the community. That’s just operational reality. … Don’t tell me to prioritize criminals, but you can’t come to my county jail. It doesn’t make sense.

The ICE chief praised President Donald Trump for doing more than any of the other five presidents he worked for to protect public safety. But he expressed skepticism about the president’s willingness to make a deal with Congress on the policy known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which the Obama administration imposed by executive action.

DACA, which Trump announced he will end, allows certain illegal immigrants who were brought here illegally as children to be shielded from deportation and to obtain work permits.

Although Trump and Congress failed to reach a deal on legislating a version of policy, the president has said he is willing to support amnesty for those so-called “Dreamers” in exchange for increased enforcement, such as a border wall, and a merit-based immigration system.

Vaughan asked Homan: “Doesn’t amnesty encourage illegal immigration?”

“When you reward illegal behavior, it certainly does,” Homan replied. “If Congress chooses to pass legislation on DACA, what I’ve said many times is you can’t pass a clean DACA bill without talking about the underlying reasons for illegal immigration.”

He added that the United States must seek to stop illegal immigration first.

You’ve got to address that as part of the fix. Because if you don’t, those families coming across now will be your next DACA in 10 years. Let’s stop kicking that can down the road. If you want to do a fix on DACA, let’s talk about an overarching issue of illegal immigration, so we don’t have a DACA every 10 years. We don’t have an amnesty every 15 to 20 years. Let’s fix it.

As he prepares to exit the agency, Homan also strongly defended his agents against political attacks and name-calling.

“A lot of people want to attack ICE. I see it every day. They want to call ICE racist. They want to call us Nazis,” Homan said.

“What I want to make clear is, you can not like what we do, but don’t vilify the men and women that took an oath to enforce the law. If you don’t like what we do, then talk to your congressman and senator and tell them you don’t like the law.”

COMMENTARY BY

Portrait of Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

Dear Readers:

With the recent conservative victories related to tax cuts, the Supreme Court, and other major issues, it is easy to become complacent.

However, the liberal Left is not backing down. They are rallying supporters to advance their agenda, moving this nation further from the vision of our founding fathers.

If we are to continue to bring this nation back to our founding principles of limited government and fiscal conservatism, we need to come together as a group of likeminded conservatives.

This is the mission of The Heritage Foundation. We want to continue to develop and present conservative solutions to the nation’s toughest problems. And we cannot do this alone.

We are looking for a select few conservatives to become a Heritage Foundation member. With your membership, you’ll qualify for all associated benefits and you’ll help keep our nation great for future generations.

ACTIVATE YOUR MEMBERSHIP TODAY

Remembering the Men Who Fought and Bled on D-Day

June 6 marks the 74th anniversary of the Battle of Normandy, Operation Overlord, D-Day.

As new generations begin to emerge and the honorable men and women of the Greatest Generation continue to enter history, the memory of D-Day threatens to be lost to time.

Preserving its place in history is important for honoring those who served our country in the past, but also as a reminder to honor those who continue to serve our country today.

Operation Overlord, under the command of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, proved to be a pivotal moment in World War II and led eventually to the liberation of France and provided a leverage point for an Allied advance upon Adolf Hitler himself.

Back in the U.S., President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered a stateside address and prayer, in which he declared: “For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate.”

Some 14,000 paratroopers infiltrated and sabotaged the German defenses from behind, and naval bombardment by the USS Arkansas, USS Nevada, and USS Texas softened the defenses from the front.

Under the command of Gen. Omar Bradley, Utah Beach was stormed by the U.S. VII Corps in three waves. By the end of the day, Utah was secured, with casualties amounting to 197 from the assault and 2,500 paratroopers. But the assault on Omaha Beach proved a far greater challenge.

Critical for the German defense, Omaha demonstrated a formidability unlike its neighbor. The U.S. V Corps, led by Gen. Leonard Gerow, faced elevated terrain and a variety of fortifications. High sand flats prevented the landing craft from reaching the shore. The men got out in shoulder-deep water and waded ashore, and many died from drowning and from enemy fire.

It became one of the bloodiest beach landings of the war. Omaha, taken by late afternoon, cost about 3,000 casualties of the 43,250 men that carried out the assault. In all, the Allies suffered 4,413 fatalities at Utah and Omaha, 2,499 of whom were Americans.

The sacrifice those men gave proved the tipping point to liberate Europe. Had that operation not occurred, or failed, Europe would have remained in the hands of Nazi Germany and tyranny.

They fought not for their homeland, but for the preservation of the free world itself. That is their legacy.

We remember D-Day not just for the significance of the battle and the liberation of Europe that followed. Even more so, we remember the sacrifice given by the men who died that day, and those willing to do the same today for our country.

It is a spirit embodied by everyone who serves in our military. As Secretary of Defense James Mattis has described it, they have “a willingness to sign a blank check, payable to the American people; a blank check payable with [their] lives, to defend our revolutionary ideas enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, putting freedom above all else.”

It is upon this principle that those men sacrificed their lives and our soldiers today risk theirs.

It is upon this principle that we must fight for the preservation of liberty, be courageous when evil shows its face, and be a beacon of light when darkness approaches.

COMMENTARY BY

Matthew Ahlquist is a member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation.

Portrait of James Di Pane

James Di Pane is a research assistant in the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation.

Dear Readers:

With the recent conservative victories related to tax cuts, the Supreme Court, and other major issues, it is easy to become complacent.

However, the liberal Left is not backing down. They are rallying supporters to advance their agenda, moving this nation further from the vision of our founding fathers.

If we are to continue to bring this nation back to our founding principles of limited government and fiscal conservatism, we need to come together as a group of likeminded conservatives.

This is the mission of The Heritage Foundation. We want to continue to develop and present conservative solutions to the nation’s toughest problems. And we cannot do this alone.

We are looking for a select few conservatives to become a Heritage Foundation member. With your membership, you’ll qualify for all associated benefits and you’ll help keep our nation great for future generations.

ACTIVATE YOUR MEMBERSHIP TODAY

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of U.S. Army troops wading ashore on Omaha Beach during the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944. (Photo: CPHOM Robert F. Sargent/U.S. Coa/UPI/Newscom)

PODCAST: The Politically Incorrect Book That Debunks Climate Change Myths

Marc Morano, founding editor of the award-winning website ClimateDepot.com, recently authored “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change.” He spoke to Daily Signal Editor-in-Chief Rob Bluey about climate change myths and other facts you probably haven’t heard reported by the media. An edited transcript of their interview is below. You can also listen to it on The Daily Signal podcast.

Rob Bluey: What prompted your interest in the issue of climate change? There’s a great photo of you in the book next to a wanted poster. How did you become such a villain to the left?

Marc Morano: I always said I was a Republican, except when it came to environmental issues. I remember not liking James Watt, the former interior secretary. I remember not liking President Ronald Reagan’s environmental policies. I always wanted to be a forest ranger as a kid growing up. I got heavily involved emotionally in watching all the documentaries about the Amazon rainforest back in the 1980s and 1990s.

It wasn’t until I started reading Dixy Lee Ray and actually hearing her talk, it was actually on Rush Limbaugh’s show, the coverage of the Rio Earth Summit, that I started to look deeper into environmental issues. What I remember her specifically saying, as a nuclear physicist, Dixy Lee Ray, that the Amazon was one of the most intact forests and this idea that it’s about to disappear was complete exaggeration and hype. I started investigating that. It actually culminated in a documentary on the Amazon rainforest.

The liberal Left continue to push their radical agenda against American values. The good news is there is a solution. Find out more >>

Global warming, when I started focusing on it, I actually started with a skeptical view and I was only able to get more and more skeptical, because I saw the same tactics being used.

The way I ended up in the wanted poster in Paris—that was the movie premier of my film “Climate Hustle” from 2015 at a Paris cinema. The environmental groups put out wanted posters of me the day of the premier. All over the city, this was literally on the main streets of Paris. So I posed with one of them in the book and you can see the picture. They called me a “climate criminal wanted for climate crimes.” This is the kind of intimidation they like to do.

Marc Morano, author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change,” in Paris. (Photo Courtesy of Marc Morano)

Bluey: Despite that intimidation, you’ve still gone on to write this book. So what prompted you to do that and what’s your goal when a reader picks it up? What do you want them to walk away with?

Morano: My goal here was to help conservatives and Republicans articulate the issue. During my time on Capitol Hill, I worked for the Senate Environment of Public Works Committee. I can’t tell you the horror stories, Rob, of being in high-level meetings, during the height of the cap-and-trade debate 2007, 2008, 2009; back when President Barack Obama was pushing this through all the way to 2010.

The staffers of very conservative Republican senators would be like, “Well, we don’t want to touch the science on this because we don’t want to be seen as against the Earth or against the environment. Let’s just solely focus on the economics.”

I remember arguing passionately. If people think we face the climate catastrophe, we’re Americans! They’re going to say we will bear any cost and overcome it. They never wanted to challenge it. So I’m trying to, and working for Sen. James Inhofe, we tried to challenge the science.

What I tried to do with this book is say it’s OK to espouse climate skepticism. The book is done for anyone from, I would say, sixth grade through highest levels of education to educate them with the top voices in science, the basic concepts, and to make it fun, informative in a talking point form.

This is a needed book because in order to fulfill President Trump’s policies, you need the scientific justification, and this book fills that gap in, as well as talks about the policy.

Bluey: The other thing the book has is a lot of great facts that I think counter what you so often hear in the media and from liberal politicians. Could you share some of them? I know you have examples right on the cover. For instance, let’s take hurricanes because we’re in the midst right now of another hurricane story. You hear this all the time—that these hurricanes are more intense, they’re happening more often because of climate change. You say, “No.”

Morano: Not only do I say “no,” but the peer-reviewed scientific literature clearly and overwhelmingly says “no.”

There is nothing unusual, particularly on extreme weather. It’s not just hurricanes. Hurricanes, floods, droughts, tornadoes, on the entire spectrum of extreme weather, we are either at stable or declining trends. And that includes droughts.

California droughts in previous centuries blew away anything we’re talking about now. Floods, no trends on 100-year, 85-year time scales. Hurricanes were much worse, many more powerful hurricanes in the 1940s and ’50s. In fact, we were in the longest period of no major hurricane category three or larger before last year’s big hurricanes hit. And even though there is this alleged record rains, in the 1960s hurricanes that hit Cuba had many more times rain and flooding events than that.

I go into that in the book about these so-called 1,000-year floods and I explain that all these extreme weather events they claim, it’s kind of like a lottery promotion scam. Where they say, “Oh, this is a 1,000-year storm hit this city, and a 1,000-year storm hit that, this is unusual.” No, there are going to be very few lottery winners. But the lottery winners there are, they highlight them. “Look, there’s a lottery winner and there’s a lottery, look the lottery winners are everywhere.” They make it seem like extreme weather is everywhere. But taken as a whole, and in the peer-reviewed literature, it’s actually on a declining trend.

Interestingly enough, cold weather is actually more extreme than warm weather. In the 1970s, they blamed tornadoes, floods, even the threat of war and increased violence on global cooling at the time. So there’s just not the science there at all, when it comes to that. And also I go through all the other myths you’ve heard about from the hottest year on record, the hottest decade.

Bluey: Let’s tackle that one because we hear this one it seems month after month—another record-breaking month. At the same time, I love the chart that The Daily Signal published of the temperature throughout history. You see the lines going up and down. Tell us what we need to know.

Morano: First of all, in the book, I interviewed geologists, I have Nobel Prize-winning scientists endorse the book. They explain that in the geologic history of the Earth, we are in the coldest 10 percent of the geologic history of the Earth. In other words, 90 percent of our Earth’s history was too warm to have ice at either pole. So we are in the 10 percent coldest. That’s No. 1.

No. 2, if you go back to the Roman warming periods during the time that Jesus Christ walked the Earth—and I show this in the peer-reviewed studies in the book, in a very reader-friendly way—we are actually now cooler than we were. So we’ve cooled since the time Jesus Christ walked the Earth. We’re actually about the same temperature or cooler since the medieval warm period, since about 900 to 1300.

First of all, you say hottest year, what time scale? Then, you jump ahead to about 1850, the end of the Little Ice Age, where the New York river, New York Harbor froze over, the Thames river was frozen, it was a brutal period, coinciding with low sun spot activity and bunch of other factors.

Suddenly, we get thermometer data. So the thermometer data comes online right at the end of the Little Ice Age. It’s very cold. All these things you hear about the glaciers retreating, most of that glacier retreat happened by 1900. Now, 80 percent of the carbon dioxide came after 1940, or after World War II in 1945. We had a huge warm spell from the 1920s into the ’30s and then, we had a cooling period from the ’50s all the way up to about the late 1970s. I go into the whole global cooling scare.

They now claim, “Oh, that never happened.” They have studies out, they claim that that was overblown, there’s only a couple scientists. I show in the book it was National Academy of Sciences, CIA, some of the same scientists warning of global cooling in the ’70s who then flipped and became global warming.

I actually feature in the book an article from the 1977 and ’78 in The New York Times, two articles. During this time, the scientists were battling it out when global cooling was morphing into a climate change, global warming.

To answer the question on the hottest year, we warm from the late ’70s to the late ’90s. Then essentially we flatlined. Essentially, there’s no statistically significant global warming. We had a thing called “the pause.” They didn’t like that, so they actually went back in the records and erased the pause. They changed the data.

Besides, even doing all that, the hottest year claims are within hundredths of a degree and that margin of error is tenths of a degree and they adjust the temperatures to within tenths of a degree without explanations. The so-called claims of the hottest year fall easily within the margin of error. That’s why it’s a political statement. It is utter nonsense from beginning to end.

It’s a fancy way of saying the temperature hasn’t changed since the ’90s. That’s where they get hottest decade on record. On record just means since the Little Ice Age ended, when we put thermometer data out and that’s what that means. If you go back further, we’ve cooled, Middle Ages, Roman warming period, and even further.

Bluey: Thank you for setting the record straight on that. One of the other things that you argue is that the left has abandoned this fact-based science and instead resorted to just dramatic fear-mongering. What do you mean?

Morano: Go back to the 19th century, Rob, to explain this. Every storm is allegedly unprecedented, we’ve never seen it, this is the new normal, so to speak. This hurricane has a name, it’s Hurricane Katrina. This hurricane has a name, it’s Hurricane Harvey. The same lines over and over. Everything is done as a tactic of fear in order to get action. This started in the 1960s with the modern environmental movement.

Particularly, I go into a little bit about Paul Ehrlich, author of “The Population Bomb.” I actually show, Rob, that they use this hysteria for the different environmental scares in the 1970s, whether it’s resource scarcity, over-population, rainforest clearing, et cetera.

They will say, “We need a global solution; we need global governance; we need wealth redistribution; we need sovereignty threatening treaty, or some kind of economic activity limiting.” No matter what environmental scare in the past that they tried to scare people with, it was the same solutions they’re proposing now.

In the book, I go back and show over and over that global warming is merely the latest scare they’re using to get their agenda. I show Naomi Klein, who’s an adviser to Pope Francis, who wrote “Capitalism vs. the Climate.” I interviewed her for the book. She actually says that they would be seeking the same solutions even if there was no global warming and that essentially, capitalism is incompatible with a livable climate. She actually urges people, “We need to jump on this because solving global warming will solve what we’ve been trying to achieve all along.”

They’re open about it. They use the climate scare tactics to achieve their ends. And in order to get those ends achieved, they have to hype and scare. It’s been a very effective strategy because they’ve bullied Republican politicians, who should know better, into at least submissiveness and silence and/or activism, when you come to the case with John McCain and even Mitt Romney.

Climate change activists want to have it both ways to advance their agenda, argues author Marc Morano. (Photo: Erik Mcgregor/ZUMA Press/Newscom)

Bluey: What are some of the strangest things that you’ve seen the left blame climate change on?

Morano: There’s a whole series of things. One of the things they do is they make opposite predictions. Global warming will cause more snow, less snow. More hurricanes, less hurricanes. More fog, less fog. More malaria, less malaria. I go through it all.

It’s as if you bet on the Super Bowl, and you bet both teams to win. You can go to the office the next day and say, “I did it! I won! I bet on the winning team.” First of all, they’re never wrong because they literally have opposite predictions.

The second thing is they come up with everything. Global warming will cause an increase in prostitution, bar room brawls, vehicle thefts. These are by United Nations scientists who did these studies, funded by major universities. These aren’t just some wacky claim, or some professor talking off the top of his head. They actually get funded studies to do this.

One of my favorites was in 1941, a University of Cincinnati professor said that the warmer weather we were having in the 1930s and ’40s created more docile people, which led to them being more susceptible to Hitler, Mussolini, and dictators. They actually blame the rise of Hitler on global warming at that time. Oddly enough, Hitler was saved in the bunker when Von Stauffenberg tried to kill him. Because it was a very hot day, they had to move the location of that meeting when the assassination attempt happened. They moved it to a room with a heavy table that saved Hitler. Global warming created Hitler, global warming saved Hitler.

There are so many wacky things that they’ll blame on global warming. My favorite quote is probably Michael Oppenheimer, U.N. lead scientist, former Environmental Defense Fund activist, “Anybody who eats is under threat from climate change.” That’s his summation. So there you go. It’s that combination of just about everything. If you eat, then you’re under threat of climate change, you should be worried. If you don’t eat, then you’re fine.

Even when you’re dead, you won’t escape the clutches of global warming. In the book, I show multiple examples. In one case, Peruvian mummies are decaying faster because of the humidity caused by climate change. Also, they’re worried that dead bodies in the permafrost in Siberia are melting and are going to release new pathogens. The dead walk among us because of global warming. So, even the dead are now to blame for exacerbating the problem of global warming.

Bluey: We’ve used these terms interchangeably: climate change and global warming. Can the left make up its mind on what to call it?

Morano: No, in fact, in the book, I have a lot of fun. “Global climate disruption” was John Holdren, Obama’s former science czar. He wanted to call it that. “Global weirding” is what Tom Friedman, New York Times columnist, wants to call it. They’ve come up with all these different names. “Global heating.”

Former Sen. Barbara Boxer, when I was in the Senate Environment Public Works Committee, she actually called the hearing “global warming” one time. This was when they were really trying to push climate change. Temperatures hit their peak in the late 1990s from the cooling of the 1970s. They’ve tried to push climate change because they didn’t think without that constant increase in temperature, they weren’t getting anywhere. It was getting harder to sell.

Climate change includes the extreme weather. I remember very vividly, I was in Bali, Indonesia—a $15,000 roundtrip business class flight for the U.S. Senate at a global warming hearing for the United Nations—arguing with a John McCain climate staffer about how the new argument in global warming was all going to be about extreme weather.

Therefore, climate change had to be the new moniker because global warming was too focused on temperature. They wanted to go out on every limb and this way they could blame everything from cows and transportation, airlines.

They’re trying to get every aspect of our society under global warming regulation and not just focus on temperature. Because now if you have a bad crop, if you have vehicle crash—the Department of Transportation got us funding to study how global warming could increase fatal car accidents—that’s why it has to be “climate change,” because they’re trying to go in every direction.

Bluey: How have the left’s policies, as you argue in the book, hurt the world’s poor?

Morano: That is one of the most insidious things. In the book, I feature Al Gore at a Bill Gates function, saying that Africa’s projected to have more people than China and India combined in the next century and that we need “ubiquitous fertility management.”

This is a white, wealthy Western politician saying essentially there are too many black Africans. Let’s be blunt about it. I actually quote a former Harvard professor just excoriating Al Gore for essentially racist comments. Basically singling out Africa and saying, “They’ve got to have better fertility management because we have too many Africans and we’ve got to control their population.” Now Al Gore would just say, “No, I’m thinking of only the Earth.” But what conservative politician could get away with that?

When you look at third-world development—and by the way, “third world” is a politically incorrect term; we’re supposed to say the “developing world”—they have about 1.1 billion people without running water and electricity. Essentially, what they’re trying to do with climate policy is prevent them from developing through fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels are the most abundant, cheaply available, and fastest way out of energy poverty, which means they’re the lifeline for lowering infant mortality, longer life expectancy, modern dentistry.

If you’re living in a poor nation, you’re burning dung, you’re living in a hut made of dung, you’re breathing in horrible air, the rivers are polluted from sewage. The second you get modern sewage, the second you get coal plants even or oil or even nuclear, if you’re lucky enough, everything gets radically cleaner. They’re trying to prevent it. Even the World Bank won’t allow coal plant development in countries that are in dire poverty.

These environmentalists I interviewed, one in South Africa, they travel the world from Minnesota and other places—wealthy, white Western college kids—go to Africa and essentially say, “You’re doing it right by living this primitive existence. You’re living it right. You’re Earth-friendly.”

I interviewed Jerry Brown, the California governor, at an Earth Summit in South Africa. He actually says the Earth can’t allow the rest of the world to develop like the United States and Europe because we’d need 20 more Earths to do it. In other words, they have to be managed. It’s a new form of colonialism. It’s the most insidious things. That’s a very intense chapter in the book because it’s an eye-opener for people who haven’t been following this. They are trying to limit their development.

The environmental activists—climate activists—they even have something called the U.N. Climate Fund. I interviewed a South African development activist, Leon Lowe, who’s very articulate. He just says, “The developing world needs to tell the first world to essentially go to hell if they’re going to tell them how to develop, what resources they can use of their own.”

He says, “Until London, Rotterdam, Paris, and Washington level their cities, return them to swamps and wetlands and jungles, they have no business telling the developing world how they can use the natural resources, how they can develop, what energy they can use.”

That’s the dilemma we’re facing now. They’re trying to control and manage people and keep them at a subsistence level of life. It’s the most anti-human movement of today. It’s why former Czech President Václav Klaus has said, the greatest threat we face today for human freedom is, what he says, “ambitions environmentalism from the climate movement.”

Bluey: In addition to writing the book, you run a website calledClimateDepot.com. What’s your mission? What do you strive to do there?

What I’m trying to do there is have a daily one-stop shop of all the latest climate, energy, and environmental news. In other words, I link to all the mainstream sources, but I’ll try to pick out some of the best tidbits and actually try to do reality checks all the time. I do special reports.

It’s a way for you to get your energy, climate, environment news without just having to hear the mantra of nonsense, of 97 percent of all scientists agree the Earth is doomed, we’re facing a catastrophe, we need the Paris Agreement.

I have user guides. I have special reports and I have a lot of humor to try to bring people in—to say this is not an intimidating topic. Don’t be afraid to stand up because the whole movement is designed—the environmental left has designed this to intimidate everyone into silence on this issue. If you’re against climate change, belief in climate change, catastrophic climate change, you are a dumb person. You are an idiot. You’re a rube. You’re not welcome in polite society. Even the impolite don’t want you.

Bluey: Marc, thanks so much. Again, the book is called “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change.” Thanks for writing it.

Morano: Thank you, Rob. Appreciate it, enjoyed it.

PODCAST BY

Portrait of Rob Bluey

Rob Bluey

Rob Bluey is editor-in-chief of The Daily Signal, the multimedia news organization of The Heritage Foundation. Send an email to Rob. Twitter: @RobertBluey.

Dear Readers:

With the recent conservative victories related to tax cuts, the Supreme Court, and other major issues, it is easy to become complacent.

However, the liberal Left is not backing down. They are rallying supporters to advance their agenda, moving this nation further from the vision of our founding fathers.

If we are to continue to bring this nation back to our founding principles of limited government and fiscal conservatism, we need to come together as a group of likeminded conservatives.

This is the mission of The Heritage Foundation. We want to continue to develop and present conservative solutions to the nation’s toughest problems. And we cannot do this alone.

We are looking for a select few conservatives to become a Heritage Foundation member. With your membership, you’ll qualify for all associated benefits and you’ll help keep our nation great for future generations.

ACTIVATE YOUR MEMBERSHIP TODAY

100 Years Ago, U.S. Marines Helped Turn the Tide of World War I

Americans rightly remember the Americans who stormed the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944, to liberate Europe, but we also should commemorate the Americans who, 100 years ago, fought in another fierce battle in France that began on June 6—the Battle of Belleau Wood.

It was one of the most brutal battles the Marines ever fought as they confronted the vicious technology of modern warfare. But when it was over, they had won a battle that would turn the tide of World War I in favor of the Allies and lead to eventual victory over Germany.

When the Americans entered the war in April 1917, the Allies were in desperate straits. The Russian Revolution caused the withdrawal of Russia from the war, and the collapse of the Italian army left the French and the British holding up their weak partner, Italy.

The Germans were able to reinforce the Western front with 50 divisions, where millions of young men in the Allied forces had been slaughtered in the trenches and killing fields of northern France. Most historians say the Americans arrived just in time.

In the spring of 1918, the Germans launched their largest offensive since 1914, pushing back the British while the French virtually collapsed. German forces drove through the French army to within 45 miles of Paris, causing the French government to make plans to evacuate the city.

When the Allies were able to launch a counterattack, they ordered the U.S. Marines to attack at Belleau Wood, an area of open fields and 200 acres of deep woods where four German divisions were well dug in and equipped with modern artillery, trench mortars, heavy machine guns, and poison gas. But capturing Belleau Wood was key to turning back the German advance.

The 5th and 6th Marine Regiments were given the job. As they moved into position, the leathernecks passed fleeing French troops who yelled at them to retreat from the advancing German forces. Marine Capt. Lloyd Williams, in the best tradition of the Corps, yelled back, “Retreat? Hell, we just got here.”

The fight for Belleau Wood was violent, bloody, and ferocious from the very beginning, when the Marines had to cross a wheat field against relentless German machine gun fire with almost no artillery support.

One of the noncommissioned officers who led the Marines was one of the most famous in the history of the Corps—Sgt. Major Daniel Joseph “Dan” Daly.

The words Daly yelled at his men as they started the battle are carved in stone at the Marine Corps museum outside Quantico, Virginia: “Come on you sons of b—–s, do you want to live forever?”

Daly already had won two Congressional Medals of Honor—one for helping defend the American consulate in what is now known as Beijing during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, and another in Haiti in 1915.

He would be awarded the Navy Cross for his actions at Belleau Wood, where more than 1,000 Marines were killed the first day as they charged into a hailstorm of bullets and steel to try to get across that wheat field.

When the Marines finally got to the woods, they found them honey-combed with German machine gun nests. The Marines engaged in hand-to-hand fighting with their rifles, pistols, hand grenades, and bayonets. They fought day and night without being relieved, often without water and rations, to the point of exhaustion, while the Germans remained well supplied, with new troops constantly being brought up from the rear to reinforce the German positions.

The Marines fought in those woods for three weeks to defeat the Germans and lost another 1,000 dead and 8,000 injured. It was the bloodiest battle in their history, quite different from the types of fights they previously had engaged in against forces such as the Barbary pirates or guerillas in the Philippines, the Caribbean, and the Americas.

More Marines were killed and wounded in that one engagement than in all the prior battles combined since their founding—a 55 percent casualty rate. It was a foretaste of the kinds of battles the Marines would fight in the next war—the Pacific campaign of World War II on islands such as Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal.

Among the Congressional Medals of Honor awarded at Belleau Woods, one was to Gunnery Sgt. F. Stockham, who gave his gas mask to a wounded Marine during a German gas attack. Stockham died a few days later from the effects of the gas.

The ferocity of the Marines at Belleau Woods caused the Germans to name them “Teufel Hunden,” the Hounds from Hell or the Devil Dogs, a moniker that the Marines adopted.

According to H.W. Crocker III, in his history of the American military, “Don’t Tread on Me,” German military intelligence was so impressed with the “bravery and dash” of the Marines that they likened them to a “storm troop,” which to the German military, was the highest possible praise. The “qualities of the men individually may be described as remarkable” said the Germans, with the words of one prisoner that was captured as “characteristic—‘WE KILL OR WE GET KILLED.’”

At Belleau Wood, the Marines had gone up against the most professional fighting force in the world and the best divisions of the German army—and won. Gen. Black Jack Pershing, the leader of the American Expeditionary Force, was so impressed by the tenacity of the Marines at Belleau Wood that he was quoted as saying, “The deadliest weapon in the world is a United States Marine and his rifle.”

The defeat of the Germans at Belleau Wood helped end the German offensive and led directly to the end of the “War to End All Wars.” The French actually renamed Belleau Wood the “Bois de la Brigade de Marine”—“The Wood of the Marine Brigade.”

The 5th and 6th Marine Regiments received the Croix de Guerre, the French medal for bravery. In fact, they won that award two more times, the only units in the American Expeditionary Force to do so.

So, as we remember the sacrifices of the many men who fought on D-Day on June 6, 1944, let’s not forget the Devil Dogs who 100 years ago on June 6 gave the Germans a lesson in Marine Corps bravery, fearlessness, and sheer determination that helped end one of the bloodiest wars in human history.

Semper Fi.

COMMENTARY BY

Portrait of Hans von Spakovsky

Hans von Spakovsky is an authority on a wide range of issues—including civil rights, civil justice, the First Amendment, immigration, the rule of law and government reform—as a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and manager of the think tank’s Election Law Reform Initiative. Read his research. Twitter: .

Dear Readers:

With the recent conservative victories related to tax cuts, the Supreme Court, and other major issues, it is easy to become complacent.

However, the liberal Left is not backing down. They are rallying supporters to advance their agenda, moving this nation further from the vision of our founding fathers.

If we are to continue to bring this nation back to our founding principles of limited government and fiscal conservatism, we need to come together as a group of likeminded conservatives.

This is the mission of The Heritage Foundation. We want to continue to develop and present conservative solutions to the nation’s toughest problems. And we cannot do this alone.

We are looking for a select few conservatives to become a Heritage Foundation member. With your membership, you’ll qualify for all associated benefits and you’ll help keep our nation great for future generations.

ACTIVATE YOUR MEMBERSHIP TODAY

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of American Marines fighting German soldiers in the Battle of Belleau Wood in 1918. (Photo: Everett Collection/Newscom)

Guns Haven’t Changed in America. People Have.

Having enjoyed my 82nd birthday, I am part of a group of about 50 million Americans who are 65 years of age or older.

Those who are 90 or older were in school during the 1930s. My age cohort was in school during the 1940s. Baby boomers approaching their 70s were in school during the 1950s and early ’60s.

Try this question to any one of those 50 million Americans who are 65 or older: Do you recall any discussions about the need to hire armed guards to protect students and teachers against school shootings? Do you remember school policemen patrolling the hallways? How many students were shot to death during the time you were in school?

For me and those other Americans 65 or older, when we were in school, a conversation about hiring armed guards and having police patrol hallways would have been seen as lunacy. There was no reason.

What’s the difference between yesteryear and today?

The logic of the argument for those calling for stricter gun control laws, in the wake of recent school shootings, is that something has happened to guns. Guns have behaved more poorly and become evil. Guns themselves are the problem.

The job for those of us who are 65 or older is to relay the fact that guns were more available and less controlled in years past, when there was far less mayhem. Something else is the problem.

Guns haven’t changed. People have changed. Behavior that is accepted from today’s young people was not accepted yesteryear.

For those of us who are 65 or older, assaults on teachers were not routine as they are in some cities. For example, in Baltimore, an average of four teachers and staff members were assaulted each school day in 2010, and more than 300 school staff members filed workers’ compensation claims in a year because of injuries received through assaults or altercations on the job.

In Philadelphia, 690 teachers were assaulted in 2010, and in a five-year period, 4,000 were. In that city’s schools, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer, “on an average day 25 students, teachers, or other staff members were beaten, robbed, sexually assaulted, or victims of other violent crimes. That doesn’t even include thousands more who are extorted, threatened, or bullied in a school year.”

Yale University legal scholar John Lott argues that gun accessibility in our country has never been as restricted as it is now. Lott reports that until the 1960s, New York City public high schools had shooting clubs. Students carried their rifles to school on the subway in the morning and then turned them over to their homeroom teacher or a gym teacher—and that was mainly to keep them centrally stored and out of the way. Rifles were retrieved after school for target practice.

Virginia’s rural areas had a long tradition of high school students going hunting in the morning before school, and they sometimes stored their guns in the trunks of their cars during the school day, parked on the school grounds.

During earlier periods, people could simply walk into a hardware store and buy a rifle. Buying a rifle or pistol through a mail-order catalog—such as Sears, Roebuck & Co.’s—was easy. Often, a 12th or 14th birthday present was a shiny new .22-caliber rifle, given to a boy by his father.

These facts of our history should confront us with a question: With greater accessibility to guns in the past, why wasn’t there the kind of violence we see today, when there is much more restricted access to guns?

There’s another aspect of our response to mayhem. When a murderer uses a bomb, truck, or car to kill people, we don’t blame the bomb, truck, or car. We don’t call for control over the instrument of death. We seem to fully recognize that such objects are inanimate and incapable of acting on their own. We blame the perpetrator.

However, when the murder is done using a gun, we do call for control over the inanimate instrument of death—the gun. I smell a hidden anti-gun agenda.

COMMENTARY BY

Portrait of Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams is a columnist for The Daily Signal and a professor of economics at George Mason University. Twitter: .

Dear Readers

With the recent conservative victories related to tax cuts, the Supreme Court, and other major issues, it is easy to become complacent.

However, the liberal Left is not backing down. They are rallying supporters to advance their agenda, moving this nation further from the vision of our founding fathers.

If we are to continue to bring this nation back to our founding principles of limited government and fiscal conservatism, we need to come together as a group of likeminded conservatives.

This is the mission of The Heritage Foundation. We want to continue to develop and present conservative solutions to the nation’s toughest problems. And we cannot do this alone.

We are looking for a select few conservatives to become a Heritage Foundation member. With your membership, you’ll qualify for all associated benefits and you’ll help keep our nation great for future generations.

ACTIVATE YOUR MEMBERSHIP TODAY

School Board Fights to Preserve Bathroom Policy After Judge OKs Trans Student’s Lawsuit

A Virginia public school district will pursue an appeal after a federal judge ruled that a transgender student can challenge the district’s bathroom access policies under federal civil rights law and the Constitution.

Gloucester County Public Schools asked U.S. District Court Judge Arenda Wright Allen to allow its appeal on Friday. Allen’s late May decision allowing the student to bring a case against the district was not a final judgement, meaning the district must secure Allen’s approval before filing an appeal.

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Though appellate review before final judgement is limited to a narrow range of issues, lawyers for the district argue it is appropriate here, because the appeals court’s decision will essentially determine the outcome of the case.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which represents the plaintiff, consented to the motion. If Allen agrees, the case will proceed to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

“We think the vast majority of courts have already ruled that these sorts of discriminatory polices violate [federal and constitutional protections],” ACLU lawyer Joshua Block told The Associated Press. “And we’re confident the 4th Circuit would agree.”

Allen denied the district’s motion to dismiss on May 22, finding the student can sue the system for violating the Constitution’s equal protection guarantees and Title IX, which forbids sex discrimination in education.

The case was occasioned when a transgender student named Gavin Grimm began using the men’s restroom at his public high school. Grimm is a trans man. District policy provides that trans students must use the bathroom corresponding to their birth gender or an alternative all-sex bathroom.

Grimm’s case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016, but the justices punted on the dispute after the Trump administration withdrew Obama-era guidance that advised public schools that Title IX requires administrators to allow students access to the bathrooms of their choice.

RELATED ARTICLE: “BDSM” the next LGBT push on society. Depraved, dangerous behaviors are now taking place at major hotels across America. 

EDITORS NOTE: Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities for this original content, email licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org. The featured image of Gavin Grimm attending the Time 100 Gala in New York City on April 25, 2017 is by by Steven Ferdman. [Photo via Newscom]

Black to Basics on School Shootings

There isn’t a good person alive who wouldn’t do everything in their power to stop the horror story that keeps playing out in our nation’s schools. It shouldn’t matter what political party you subscribe to, how much money you make, or where you’re from, everyone wants the shootings that have snuffed out hundreds of innocent lives to end. But, the reality is, until we have an honest conversation about our culture and what’s driving our young people to do this, it won’t. An honest conversation was exactly what Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.) was trying to have during a meeting with local pastors last week. Unfortunately for Diane, who’s running for governor in Tennessee, her opponents just couldn’t resist the opportunity to take her quotes out of context and turn an opportunity for sincere dialogue into a cheap political headline.

Like a lot of conservatives, Diane knows that there’s no magic solution to the violence that’s sweeping through society. Our children aren’t picking up guns and killing their classmates because there’s a Second Amendment. There’s been a Second Amendment for almost 230 years — and commonplace shootings have only been around the last 20. As Dr. Ben Carson once said, the heart of the matter is the heart. Gun control only deals with one aspect of that. Until we’re willing to address the motivation for the violence, Americans won’t change anything. There has to be a moral component – an agreement that, somewhere along the way, our society lost its way.

“We have devalued life in this country,” Lt. Governor Dan Patrick said after the Parkland shooting. “We threw God out of school… We have families that are broken apart, no fathers at home. We have incredible heinous violence as a game, two hours a day in front of their eyes. And we stand here and we wonder why this happens to certain students.” Rep. Black couldn’t agree more. She, like so many Americans, thinks a big part of the problem starts at home. “As a nurse, I look at the root cause…I think it’s a deterioration of family. They don’t have that good support system. And where are they looking? They’re looking for something… maybe on the internet, maybe something in a small group of friends. And they’re going in the wrong direction.” She made the connection with violent movies, and the steady desensitizing that’s taking place with America’s young people. And it isn’t just violence, Diane went on, but pervasiveness of all kinds.

“Pornography. It’s available — it’s available on the shelf when you walk in the grocery store. Yeah, you have to reach up to get it, but there’s pornography there. All of this is available without parental guidance. And I think that is a big part of the root cause that we see so many young people that have mental illness get caught in these places.”

“Every one of those school shootings go back to looking at that child, and their friends can actually pinpoint a time where they saw a change in their behavior.”

“So I believe mental illness is something we’ve got to address. We’ve got to address the family.”

Almost immediately, some liberals ran to their keyboards and started tapping out columns, suggesting that Diane Black was blaming school shootings on pornography. Obviously, that’s a distortion of what she said. Pornography is just another example of the damaging influences that have somehow become morally acceptable in this culture. With the advent of technology, violence, sex, profanity, contempt, ridicule, bullying – it’s all at our fingertips. And worse, at our children’s.

Thirty years ago, every teenager wasn’t walking around with a smartphone that let them download every vile and grotesque thing on command. If you think pornography isn’t one of the contributors to violence, then you haven’t read the data. The link between crimes like sexual assault and porn is there, whether the media wants to admit it or not. Our friends at Fight the New Drug make a pretty compelling case that, like so many other addictions, pornography is mentally numbing.

“‘… [T]he FBI’s own statistics show that pornography is found at 80 percent of the scenes of violent sex crimes, or in the homes of the perpetrators.’ Now we think that’s kind of tough to ignore, while those who promote porn think this is easy to overlook… We’re not saying consuming porn will automatically make someone a serial rapist. Even so, looking at the raw data, porn is connected with sexual violence.”

Still unconvinced? Read this astonishing piece in the New York Times about what teenagers are learning from online porn, including how to rough up your sex partner. “‘It gets in your head,” Q. said about the harsh treatment of the actresses in these videos. ‘If this girl wants it, then maybe the majority of girls want it.'” “As one suburban high school senior boy told me recently, ‘I’ve never seen a girl in porn who doesn’t look like she’s having a good time.'” Maggie Jones, who did every parent in America a public service by publishing this feature, points out that Indiana University did a national survey of teenagers, and around one-sixth of boys admitted to sex acts like choking a partner. And yet we think that violence won’t translate into other aggressive behavior? Or worse, we don’t understand that devaluing or disrespecting other people gradually chips away at human decency — or dignity?

Pornography didn’t kill those 17 bright, promising futures in Parkland. No one, including Diane Black, is suggesting that. What we are suggesting is that these are the slow burns of the cultural crisis that’s destroying us.

Josh McDowell delivered a powerful talk on the impact of pornography at our Watchmen on the Wall conference last month. If you haven’t watched it, please do so.


Tony Perkins’ Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.


RELATED ARTICLE: At SCOTUS, a Make or Bake Moment

At SCOTUS, a Make or Bake Moment

It doesn’t seem that long ago when I sat down with CBS’s “Face the Nation” and told a very surprised Bob Schieffer about the battle for religious freedom that was raging. Like many people, he seemed astonished to hear that any American — let alone the wedding industry — would be punished for their mainstream views on marriage. “I must say this is under my radar. I haven’t — I haven’t heard this.” Today, almost three full years into Obergefell, nearly everyone has heard their stories. And this morning, in the same court that created the mess of same-sex marriage, at least one of them has a happy ending.

For Jack Phillips, the national nightmare of June 26, 2015 came long after his own personal one. It would be two years until five justices on the Supreme Court empowered themselves to redefine an institution as old as civilization itself. Even then, the war for the freedom of dozens of bakers, florists, and wedding photographers had already begun. His own chapter in the broader drama started like so many others already had. Two men walked into his bakery and tried to order a custom cake for their same-sex wedding reception. As he had done before, Jack politely explained that as a Christian, he didn’t make cakes for activities that violate his conscience. Halloween, for instance. Divorce parties, for another. And yes, same-sex marriages.

“Everyone is welcome in my shop,” he tried to explain in an op-ed for the Washington Post, “be it homeless folks (many of whom I’ve befriended over coffee, cookies and conversation), the two men who are suing me, or anyone else who finds their way in. The God that I serve, whose arms are open to all, expects that of me, and it is my joy to obey Him. But creating a cake that celebrates a view of marriage in conflict with my faith is not something that I can do.”

The men sued — and in a case that took five years to resolve, the justices finally gave Jack his freedom back. In a 7-2 ruling, the Supreme Court agreed: Colorado’s treatment of Masterpiece Cakes was “inconsistent with the state’s obligation of religious neutrality.” “The government, consistent with the Constitution’s guarantee of free exercise, cannot impose regulations that are hostile to the religious beliefs of affected citizens and cannot act in a manner that passes judgment upon or presupposes the illegitimacy of religious beliefs and practices,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote on behalf of the court.” The Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in its obvious contempt for Jack’s beliefs, “was neither tolerant nor respectful of his religious beliefs.” The judgment, they concluded, “is reversed.”

For the Phillipses, who suffered through a half-decade of harassment, business losses, death threats, and everything else from the extreme Left’s playbook, the outcome was worth the wait. “It’s hard to believe that the government punished me for operating my business consistent with my beliefs about marriage. That isn’t freedom or tolerance,” he said. “I’m so thankful to the U.S. Supreme Court for this ruling.” Although the ruling was limited to Jack’s case, it’s an incredible victory — not just for the Phillipses, but for America’s long-cherished freedom to believe.

No one — and certainly no American — should be forced to compromise their views just because they’re unpopular with the government entity in charge. The newest member of the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, touched on this in his own concurrence. “… No bureaucratic judgment condemning a sincerely held religious belief as ‘irrational’ or ‘offensive’ will ever survive strict scrutiny under the First Amendment.” In this country, he writes, “the place of secular officials isn’t to sit in judgment of religious beliefs, but only to protect their free exercise… Popular religious views are easy enough to defend. It is in protecting unpopular religious beliefs that we prove this country’s commitment to serving as a refuge for religious freedom.”

Like us, Justice Clarence Thomas knew this crisis was coming. “In Obergefell, I warned that the Court’s decision would ‘inevitabl[y]… come into conflict’ with religious liberty, ‘as individuals . . . are confronted with demands to partic­ipate in and endorse civil marriages between same-sex couples.’ This case proves that the conflict has already emerged. Because the Court’s decision vindicates Phillips’ right to free exercise, it seems that religious liberty has lived to fight another day. But, in future cases, the free­dom of speech could be essential to preventing Obergefell from being used to ‘stamp out every vestige of dissent’ and ‘vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy.’ If that freedom is to maintain its vitality, reasoning like the Colorado Court of Appeals’ must be rejected.”

The time is coming — and soon — when the court will have to wade into the bigger clash between religious liberty and same-sex marriage. When it does, let’s hope it agrees with the majority of Americans, who understand that — regardless of what you think about marriage — no one should be forced to violate revealed and established biblical truth. “Now that the decision has arrived, I can see the sun once again,” Jack wrote in an emotional response today. How much longer until dozens of other Christians can see theirs?

For more analysis on the Masterpiece ruling, check out this post from FRC’s Travis Weber.


Tony Perkins’ Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.


RELATED ARTICLE: Black to Basics on School Shootings

The Racism of Government Family Planning

New proposed changes in regulations from the Department of Health and Human Services will close the door on using funds from its Title X family planning program for abortion.

HHS’ Office of Population Affairs, which administers this program, is a poster child for ill-conceived government policy. How is it, in our nation that cherishes the ideals of human freedom and dignity, that we’re funding government bureaucrats to advise low-income citizens—almost a quarter of these “clients” are black—about how many children they should bring into this world and when?

Despite explicit language in the legislation that created the Title X family program in 1970 prohibiting funding “programs in which abortion is a method of family planning,” this directive has been effectively ignored.

HHS reports that 4 million individuals are getting services through this program. However, 1.6 million of them, 40 percent, according to the Guttmacher Institute, are receiving these services at Planned Parenthood clinics.

Given the millions that Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, spends on lobbying and political contributions, its success in keeping the faucet of federal funding of its activities open comes as no surprise.

But now the Trump administration is stepping up to enforce the law, with the positive additional benefit of protecting human life. You might say that our president understands that building a culture of life is a vital part of making America “great again.”

The new HHS order requires complete financial and physical separation of Title X funds from abortion activity. No Title X funds can be used for abortion. And abortions cannot be performed in any facility in which programs being funded by Title X are taking place.

Although Title X counselors will be prohibited from discussing abortion as a family planning measure, they can discuss it when a woman has already decided it’s what she wants. Then they can provide a list of abortion providers.

But as we think about this, let’s consider the bigger question. What is the federal government doing in the family planning business anyway?

The Office of Population Affairs describes, among the activities of its “Family Planning Mission,” offering guidance “to assist individuals in determining the number and spacing of their children.”

Given that this family planning guidance is targeted to low-income Americans, who happen to be disproportionately black, let’s consider what has happened to the black family since the Office of Population Affairs first began.

The budget of the Title X family planning program in 1971 was $6 million. Today, it is $286 million dollars, an increase of fiftyfold. What have we gotten?

In 1970, 38 percent of black babies were born to unwed mothers. Today it is more than 70 percent.

In 1960, 10 years before the program started, 2 percent of black children lived with an unmarried parent. By 2008, 41 percent did.

In 1960, 61 percent of blacks over the age of 18 were married. By 2008, 32 percent were.

I would suggest that government “family planning” is really an insidious, pernicious kind of racism. It’s not about improving the quality of life, but rather it is about discouraging black women, and other poor women, from having children and encouraging them to abort their pregnancies.

The collateral damage has been the collapse of the black family.

This important new HHS proposed rule will take care of the abortion issue.

But we need a broader initiative to get rid of the damaging and wasteful government “family planning” business.

The nation would be better served, particularly at a time of trillion-dollar deficits, to return the $286 million spent on Title X programs to taxpayers.

Black women should be getting their “family planning” guidance from their pastor, not from government bureaucrats.

Star Parker is an author and president of CURE, Center for Urban Renewal and Education. Contact her at www.urbancure.org. To find out more about Star Parker and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

COMMENTARY BY

Portrait of Star Parker

Star Parker is a columnist for The Daily Signal and president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education. Twitter: .

Dear Readers:

With the recent conservative victories related to tax cuts, the Supreme Court, and other major issues, it is easy to become complacent.

However, the liberal Left is not backing down. They are rallying supporters to advance their agenda, moving this nation further from the vision of our founding fathers.

If we are to continue to bring this nation back to our founding principles of limited government and fiscal conservatism, we need to come together as a group of likeminded conservatives.

This is the mission of The Heritage Foundation. We want to continue to develop and present conservative solutions to the nation’s toughest problems. And we cannot do this alone.

We are looking for a select few conservatives to become a Heritage Foundation member. With your membership, you’ll qualify for all associated benefits and you’ll help keep our nation great for future generations.

ACTIVATE YOUR MEMBERSHIP TODAY

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is by  Resolution Productions Blend Images/Newscom.

1 Year After Trump’s Approval, Where Keystone XL, Dakota Pipelines Stand

It’s been a little more than a year since President Donald Trump approved the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines amid concerns the projects would destroy the environment.

Trump signed an executive order in January 2017, approving both pipelines as activists claimed they would desecrate the land. Keystone XL is getting bogged down in regulatory morass, but the so-called DAPL is humming along, producing hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil per day.

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Former President Barack Obama rejected DAPL before leaving office in 2016 and blocked Keystone XL in early 2015, claiming the Canadian line was unnecessary and hurt the U.S.’ credibility as a climate crusader. Trump overturned both orders, giving DAPL immediate approval and XL permission once local entities okay construction on the Keystone extension.

DAPL, which crosses underneath the Missouri River in North Dakota, began pumping oil in May 2017 and has caused oil production in North Dakota to skyrocket—reaching nearly 1.2 million barrels of crude oil produced per day in October.

The state also reported 60 active drilling rigs in April—more than double the number that were operational in May 2016. North Dakota launched 14,450 producing wells, the highest on record.

Officials also anticipate as much as $250 million in additional revenues during the 2018 budget term, surpassing the state treasury’s expectations. Increased energy production provided significant tax revenues for the state, with North Dakota’s Legacy Fund surpassing $5 billion in May. Oil production from DAPL was the catalyst for the improved fortunes, officials believe.

The project would not have seen completion were it not for Trump’s intervention. American Indian groups and environmentalists initially helped prod Obama into nixing the $3.8 billion pipeline. Members of Standing Rock Sioux, for example, believed the multibillion-dollar pipeline risked poisoning the tribe’s water supply and treading on sacred land, despite assessments concluding the DAPL was safe and largely avoided sensitive areas.

Activists ramped-up their anti-DAPL crusade shortly after Trump was elected. Two environmentalists with a long history of engaging in eco-terrorism were arrested in July 2017 for allegedly using blowtorches to burn heavy equipment on the pipeline route in North Iowa.

Keystone XL has seen similar reactions but has not yet received the go-ahead to begin construction.

TransCanada has dealt with years of delays and stonewalling. The Calgary-based company was relatively unknown until it proposed extending Canada’s oil pipeline system TransCanada projects. Keystone’s extension, which is expected to cost around $8 billion, will transport up to 830,000 barrels of crude a day from Alberta through Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska.

Keystone XL has also been bogged down in significant legal quagmires. Friends of the Earth, Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Sierra Club, among others, initiated a lawsuit in March 2017, claiming Trump’s approval was unlawful. Their case is being held in the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana.

But things could be looking up for TransCanada. The company already received enough commitments from oil companies to extend the pipeline, it announced in January. TransCanada believes work on the controversial project could begin in 2019.

TransCanada still needs easements from landowners in Nebraska and must secure water-crossing permits from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and land rights and construction approvals from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

EDITORS NOTE: Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities for this original content, email licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

PODCAST: The Legal Grounds on Which Jack Phillips Won Supreme Court Case

The Heritage Foundation’s Emilie Kao joins us to discuss the Supreme Court ruling Monday on the case of Jack Phillips, a Christian baker who refused to make a cake for a same-sex wedding. Plus: Bill Clinton gets defensive about Monica Lewinsky and the #MeToo movement.

COMMENTARY BY

BREAKING: Jack Phillips Wins His Case

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor today of Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colorado, who declined to bake a custom cake to celebrate a same-sex wedding because of his religious beliefs.

Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission is a historic case involving religious liberty, LGBT rights, and the First Amendment.

In the 7-2 ruling, the high court said the Colorado Commission of Civil Rights, which had ruled against Phillips, demonstrated “clear and impermissible hostility” toward the baker and cake artist’s Christian belief that marriage is the union of one man and one woman.

“The Civil Rights Commission’s treatment of his case has some elements of a clear and impermissible hostility toward the sincere religious beliefs that motivated [Phillips’] objection,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy in the majority opinion.

As The Daily Signal previously reported, in 2014 Colorado Civil Rights Commissioner Diann Rice compared Phillips’ not making a cake to slavery and the Holocaust. Rice apparently didn’t know that Phillips’ father fought in World War II and was part of a group that helped liberate Buchenwald concentration camp.

“For her to compare not making a cake to the Holocaust, knowing what my dad went through, is ludicrous, and personally offensive,” Phillips, 62, told The Daily Signal.

“This is a big win for the religious liberty of all Americans,” says Ryan Anderson, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation. “The Court held that the state of Colorado was ‘neither tolerant nor respectful’ of Jack Phillips’s beliefs about marriage. But as the Court also noted ‘religious and philosophical objections to gay marriage are protected views and in some instances protected forms of expression.’”

“Americans should be free to live their lives, including at work, in accordance with their belief that marriage unites husband and wife. Congress and the states should make this crystal clear by passing legislation, such as the First Amendment Defense Act, which explicitly prevents the type of government intolerance that took place in Colorado,” Anderson added.

This story is breaking and will be updated.

COLUMN BY

Portrait of Kelsey Harkness

Kelsey Harkness

Kelsey Harkness is a senior news producer at The Daily Signal and co-host of “Problematic Women,” a podcast and Facebook Live show. Send an email to Kelsey. Twitter: @kelseyjharkness.

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Dear Readers:

With the recent conservative victories related to tax cuts, the Supreme Court, and other major issues, it is easy to become complacent.

However, the liberal Left is not backing down. They are rallying supporters to advance their agenda, moving this nation further from the vision of our founding fathers.

If we are to continue to bring this nation back to our founding principles of limited government and fiscal conservatism, we need to come together as a group of likeminded conservatives.

This is the mission of The Heritage Foundation. We want to continue to develop and present conservative solutions to the nation’s toughest problems. And we cannot do this alone.

We are looking for a select few conservatives to become a Heritage Foundation member. With your membership, you’ll qualify for all associated benefits and you’ll help keep our nation great for future generations.

ACTIVATE YOUR MEMBERSHIP TODA

TSA Ignores Feckless Congress, Bullies States In Power Grab

By KrisAnne Hall

The Transportation Security Administration is now standing virtually alone, above the law, above Congress and above the Constitution.

It is ignoring the law which created it and bullying any airports that attempt to deploy a private security force — which they are allowed to do under the law — with the threat of creating an effective “no-fly zone” at that airport. It is bullying states such as Texas that try to ban pat-downs.

In reality, there is absolutely no oversight or accountability of the TSA, now a rights-threatening monster created by a Congress intent on looking the other way.

wrote recently about the secret list that the TSA has created to identify any passengers who have offended TSA agents. Congress is not privy to this secret list, or apparently that it even existed. Congress is not establishing the policies that get someone on the list, nor have they established that people are noticed and a procedure created to petition to be removed. This is a purely arbitrary power resting in the hands of individual, unaccountable agents.

But this not a new dynamic. For the TSA and Congress, it is actually a designed one.

Most Americans do not know that the very congressional act that created the TSA, also established that airports could replace federal TSA agents with private security two years after the law was enacted. However, in January 2011, when more than 16 airports had tried to opt out, TSA refused to leave these airports and the director of the TSA put a “freeze” on the airports’ ability to opt out, violating the very Act that created the TSA.

When the TSA violated this Act with their policies and actions, Congress didn’t step up and remind them of the existing law. Instead, Congress passed a new law, HR 658, reasserting the “right” of the airports to opt out of TSA screeners and required the TSA to notify all airports of this “right.” Yet, in a questionable move, Congress also then gave the Secretary of Homeland Security, the directing agency over the TSA, the authority to approve or deny an airport’s “request” to transfer to private security screening.

In summary, Congress told the airports they had a “right” to opt out of federal screening and then put the TSA in charge of approving or denying this “right.” If the TSA has the authority to approve or deny their own employment, then the airports do not possess a right to transfer to private screening, they merely possess a privilege granted by those they wish to remove.

Would that not mean that by all form and function, our airports are now occupied through force by the federal government? That, by definition, is despotism.

Unfortunately, this point is proven by the fact that in 2011, Texas lawmakers attempted to pass a law outlawing TSA pat downs. The FAA responded immediately by threatening to turn Texas into a de facto “No Fly Zone” if the law was signed. Of course, Texas backed down. If the federal government can deny a State’s right to internally govern itself, this is a violation of the delegation of Constitutional powers expressly enumerated and a violation of the reserved powers of the States expressly identified in the 10thAmendment.

There is no constitutional authority for the TSA to exist, much less wield unchecked power within the states. This unconstitutional agency was created by Congress through the pretense of “national security” and it is failing miserably.

According to James Bovard in the Los Angeles Times,

“the Department of Homeland Security concluded last year that TSA officers and equipment had failed to detect mock threats roughly 80% of the time. In Minneapolis, an undercover team succeeded in smuggling weapons and mock bombs past airport screeners 95% of the time. An earlier DHS investigation found the TSA utterly unable to detect weapons, fake explosives and other contraband, regardless of how extensive it’s pat-downs were.”

Americans have been deceived into trading their essential liberties for a completely non-existent security. We have a private or state option that would likely be more effective and one that could more closely be overseen through the states.

Congress has created this monster. They have made TSA above check and balance, above the law and Congress, and above the Constitution itself: not only the 4th Amendment, but also the 1st Amendment, 6th Amendment, 7th Amendment, 8th Amendment, and 10th Amendment. It is time for the American people to stand up to Congress, the DHS, and the TSA and assert our Right to keep ourselves “secure.”

It is time Americans replace this ineffective, intrusive and secretive unchecked system with one that follows the law and the Constitution, and where the States protect the internal security of the people while the feds are limited to the specifically enumerated powers.

ABOUT KRISANNE HALL

KrisAnne Hall is a former biochemist, Russian linguist for the U.S. Army, and former prosecutor for the State of Florida. KrisAnne also practiced First Amendment Law for a prominent Florida non-profit Law firm. KrisAnne now travels the country teaching the foundational principles of Liberty and our Constitutional Republic. She is the author of 6 books on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and has an internationally popular radio and television show. Her books and classes have been featured on C-SPAN TV. KrisAnne can be found at www.KrisAnneHall.com. Get the book “Sovereign Duty” to learn what the designers of our Constitution wanted Americans to do when their federal government became bloated and out of control. Find this book on Amazon, Barns & Noble, Wal-Mart, and many other merchants.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on The Revolutionary Act.

Congressman Ron DeSantis Endorses School Board Term Limits in Florida

In an exclusive op-ed for U.S. Term Limits, Congressman and gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis has endorsed eight-year term limits for all school board members in Florida. DeSantis is widely known as a champion of “drain the swamp” policies in Washington, including term limits.

In the Op-Ed, DeSantis writes:

“In our oft-divided political climate, it’s vital to pursue reforms that bring people together and restore power to citizens— even when those ideas won’t win friends among the permanent political class.

I’ve found that no issue unifies like term limits. The people of Florida, regardless of party affiliation, have reached the same verdict Benjamin Franklin did centuries ago: rotation-in-office is the lifeblood of our republic. No elected office, whether federal or local, is ever better off when run by career politicians.

That’s why I support eight-year term limits for all school board members. I am confident this proposal would bring new energy and ideas to school boards, which too often suffer from the same untamed incumbency that paralyzes Congress.”

The full op-ed is available HERE.

Since his election to Congress in 2012, DeSantis has led the fight on congressional term limits. He is the lead sponsor of House Joint Resolution 6, which proposes a constitutional amendment limiting House members to three terms and Senators to two. DeSantis has also helped secure support from President Trump for this amendment.

In Congress there is no stronger advocate for term limits than Ron DeSantis. We are encouraged by Ron’s support for draining the Florida swamp as well as the one in Washington.

School board term limits will appear as Amendment Eight on the fall ballot.

ABOUT CONGRESSMAN RON DESANTIS

Congressman Ron DeSantis represents Florida’s 6th District in the U.S. House of Representatives. He is a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy Reserves and a candidate for Governor of Florida in 2018.

THE B-1 ‘FRANKEN-VISA’ NIGHTMARE: The little-known visa program that is sabotaging American workers.

It is important to give credit where credit is due.  I have not been alone in voicing frustration over how the mainstream media rarely, if ever, provides accurate coverage about immigration-related issues.  Today we will focus on an example of solid journalism.

On July 31, 2017, CBS News posted an important and hard-hitting investigative news report titled, “Made in America: How the U.S. Auto Industry Was Built with Foreign Labor.” A YouTube video of the report was aired by CBS News under the title, “Foreign workers being used to build auto plants in the U.S.”  It is a video that I urge you to watch.

The CBS News report caught the attention of Paul Mitchell, a member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, who, on May 16, 2018, issued a press release to announce a roundtable discussion into visa fraud that was predicated on the CBS News report.

Immigration fraud was identified, by the 9/11 Commission as the key entry and embedding tactic for terrorists who sought to carry out deadly terror attacks in the United States.  This concern served as the prediction for my recently published booklet, “Immigration Fraud: Lies That Kill.”

Immigration fraud not only costs lives but American livelihoods.

This is the brief press release:

“It’s important that we identify, examine, and fight the fraudulent use of visas by employers. Specific visas are designed for specific purposes, and when companies abuse or deceive the visa system, they hurt American workers and the American economy, as well as the foreign workers they hire under fraudulent pretenses. This morning’s roundtable was a good start to shining a light on visa fraud so the relevant government agencies can take effective steps to enforce our laws.”

Background

  • In July 2017, CBS News released an investigative report providing compelling evidence that certain foreign automobile manufacturers are hiring subcontractors who intentionally employ workers admitted under “B-1 in lieu of H-1B” visas to bypass foreign labor laws and increase company revenue. The report further alleges these workers were paid substantially less than American workers would have been paid performing the same jobs.
  • Today, Rep. Mitchell hosted the Departments of State, Labor and Homeland Security to learn more about what options are appropriate for hiring foreign workers, as well as what efforts are underway to identify, investigate and mitigate the fraudulent use of visas by foreign employers and employees. While the issue of securing the U.S./Mexican border against illegal (un-inspected) entry into the United States figures prominently in the news, nearly half of all illegal aliens did not run our borders thereby entering the U.S. without inspection, but were admitted into the United States and then, in one way or another, went on to violate the terms of their respective admissions as stipulated by the various visas they used to enter the United States.

The State Department provides a Directory of Visa Categories.

Nonimmigrant visa holders are admitted for a limited period of time, depending on the category of visa they used to enter the United States.  Many of these visas prohibit these aliens from being gainfully employed in the U.S.

Most politicians and pundits say that such illegal aliens, who violate their terms of admission, simply “overstayed” their authorized period of admission.

However, while nonimmigrant aliens who fail to depart from the United States before their temporary authorized period of admission expires are indeed illegally present and subject to removal, this violation by itself has little real-world consequence for America and Americans.

What is seldom discussed is that most such “status violators” violate other provisions of their lawful admission and this does profoundly impact our nation and our fellow Americans.  In point of fact, many of these illegal aliens also work illegally.  This not only displaces American and lawful immigrant workers and may result in wage suppression or even wage reduction, but also hammers the U.S. economy as these aliens wire tens of billions of dollars out of the U.S. economy to their home countries.

Often these illegal aliens sought visas and entry into the United States fully intent on violating our immigration laws from the outset, but concealed their ultimate goals from the Department of State consular officials who granted them their visas and the CBP (Customs and Border Protection) who interviewed them when they applied for admission.  False statements and the concealment of material facts, and/or the creation of false and misleading evidence in support of their lies to obtain visas and gain entry into the United States constitutes fraud, a serious crime.

Such was the case where these hundreds of European construction workers are concerned.

A partnership exists between the Department of State and the elements of the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) that enforce and administer the immigration laws.  The State Department is responsible for issuing visas to aliens and CBP inspectors have the authority to admit aliens into the United States and are guided by the provisions of Title 8, United States Code, Section 1182 which enumerates the categories of aliens who are to be excluded.

The CBS News report focused on the B-1/B-2 visa and a supposed hybrid visa known as the B-1 in lieu of H-1B visa.  I have come to refer to this hybrid visa as a Franken-visa because it is a monstrosity that has no legal underpinning and in my judgment, undermines the integrity of the visa process and suborns fraud and malfeasance, hurting American workers.

A B-2 visa generally permits the bearer to remain in the U.S. for up to six months.  The B-1 visa is a business visa that permits the alien to conduct business in the United States and attend training sessions and conferences, review corporate procedures in the United States and carry out other such functions.  However, they are not authorized to be gainfully employed in the United States.  Typically an alien entering the U.S. for business purposes is issued a B-1/B-2 visas so that after they complete the business that brought them to the U.S. they may spend some time as tourists.

The USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) website provides an explanation of the B-1 Visa.

The State Department’s consular officers who issue visas, are supposed to be a part of the process to keep aliens, who are likely to violate the terms of their visas, from receiving those visas in the first place.  These consular officers are supposed to be on the “same page” as the CBP inspectors who make the decision at America’s ports of entry as to whether or not to admit those aliens.

Now it would appear that not only are consular officials not on the same page as CBP inspectors, but are apparently not even reading from the same play book. And once again, America and Americans are paying the price.

The number of controversial H-1B visas that are issued each year are limited by a CAP.  The B-1 in lieu of H-1B visas are not capped and these visas, unlike virtually all other visas are not based on an underlying law.  Visas categories are established by law, not a hunch or a desire to play favorites for those with political clout.

Representative Mitchell’s press release noted that the predication for that Congressional roundtable discussion was a CBS News investigative report that had been broadcast in July 2017 that disclosed how European automakers got huge tax breaks to build brand new factories to manufacture their cars in the U.S., but used European labor to construct those factories.

The European automakers hired agencies such as the German contractor Eisenmann which then outsourced the hiring process to other subcontractors who then gamed the visa process, thereby committing apparent visa fraud that brought thousands of Eastern European construction workers to the United States with B-1/B-2 visas.

These workers were paid approximately ten dollars per hour while it was estimated that American tradesman would command wages of between $45 and $50 per hour.

CBS News explained how these workers were hired:

When a carmaker like Mercedes wants to expand its plant, they hire a contractor, like the German corporation, Eisenmann, to build parts of it. Eisenmann then subcontracts smaller companies to build parts of the plant and some of those companies hire labor from Eastern Europe.

It is a common practice for a company to hire contractors and subcontractors to hire workers.

Here, however, it was shown how many of these foreign workers were coached by those contractors to lie to the consular officers who interviewed them when they applied for their visas and how to lie to the CBP inspectors at ports of entry.

At least one of the companies justified its hiring practices by noting how the B-1 in lieu of H-1B visas made what they did legal.  Of course this is not true, but nevertheless an in-depth investigation must be conducted to determine how and why this visa category was created in the first place.

Clearly ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) needs many more agents to ramp up investigations of worksite immigration violations.  This would be consistent with President Trump’s plan to put Americans first.

Immigration law violations are not “victimless crimes.”

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in FrontPage Magazine.

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