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Fox News Politics: 'Low IQ individual'

The latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more Fox News politics content

‘Great Felon Ideas’: Battleground State Struggles to Apply Biden’s Election Order

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—North Carolina election officials were perplexed about how to follow President Joe Biden’s directive to expand voting among convicted felons, according to emails obtained by The Daily Signal. 

Biden’s Executive Order 14019, which put the power of federal agencies behind mobilizing voters, calls for the Justice Department to ensure that convicted felons know how to restore their voting rights. Those rules vary by state. 

State election officials were set to have a Zoom conference June 25, 2021, with White House officials on implementing the president’s order, including questions and suggestions. 

A day before the conference, Karen Bell, executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, emailed staff about what points they wanted to address. 

“The main one I can think of ideas for is about felons and voting,” Katelyn Love, general counsel for the Board of Elections replied via email, before citing the U.S. Department of Justice. “We don’t get notice from DOJ when a felon completes their sentence. This would be helpful information for us to have, so we know that the person is eligible to register again.”

Love continued: “If they don’t already, DOJ could provide information to NC felons when they start probation or when they are placed on supervised release (it’s not called parole anymore) that they are not eligible to register and vote until they complete their sentence.”

Kelly Tornow, associate counsel for North Carolina’s election board, responded: “Those are great felon ideas.”

Tornow said she was primarily concerned with enlisted U.S. service members and the Defense Department, and wrote that “the military should provide information to the service member about registering to vote.”

The Daily Signal obtained 159 pages of documents from the North Carolina State Board of Elections regarding Biden’s order on voter mobilization through a public records request. 

Critics use the term “Bidenbucks” to refer to the president’s controversial executive order, which they say is meant to use the force of government to tip the scales in elections. 

Federal agencies have coordinated with transparently left-leaning advocacy groups to implement Biden’s order. 

Further, several Republicans in Congress contend that Biden’s order on turning out the vote could violate the Antideficiency Act, a law that prohibits federal employees from obligating tax dollars not authorized by Congress. 

The lawmakers also express concern about federal agencies’ engaging in partisan political activity in violation of laws such as the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from using work time or resources for partisan political activities.

Last year, on March 13, Sarah Bolton, former policy director for North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, forwarded an email to Bell, the executive director of the state election board, who at the time was secretary-treasurer of the National Association of State Election Directors. 

The email forwarded by Bolton was about paying college students to register voters. Students are viewed as a key constituency for Democrats.

Bolton told Bell to “let me know if this might be of interest. If it is, I can connect you directly.” 

She forwarded a message from Michael Dannenberg, senior fellow for the College Promise and a consultant with the Foundation for Civic Leadership, in which he wrote:

We’re hoping Karen in her new role with the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) might consider joining, maybe even leading, a non-partisan effort to get state and local officials to urge [U.S. Education Secretary Miguel] Cardona to make clear that government entities, notably offices that NASED members lead, and non party-affiliated, non-profit 501(c)(3) organizations like the League of Women Voters can pay work study students with Federal Work Study funds for non-partisan voter registration work just as colleges now can for identical work.

Mitchell D. Brown, equal justice work fellow for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, sent an email Aug. 17, 2021, to Damon Circosta, then chairman of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, about the need to “target federal agencies and programs that we think would be good opportunities for voter registration.”

Copied on the email was Laura Williamson, then associate director of democracy at Demos, a liberal think tank that drafted Biden’s executive order. Demos also is working with several federal agencies to implement the order. 

Brown’s email included an attachment with recommendations for using federal agencies to get out the vote. They included using U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services through its naturalization ceremonies; signing up voters on Healthcare.gov; and registering voters through the interagency Transition Assistance Program and the Labor Department’s Pathways Home program.

The documents released to The Daily Signal include a May 24, 2023, email from Doug R. Hess, a political scientist and consultant with the Institute for Responsive Governing. That organization is fiscally sponsored by the liberal Arabella Advisors’ New Venture Fund, which financially backs multiple left-leaning organizations.

Hess’ email, with a memo attached, isn’t addressed directly to North Carolina, but notes that targeting Medicaid recipients for voter registration could advance the goals of Biden’s executive order. Hess wrote:

Consider this concrete example: Six states and D.C. recently adopted automatic voter registration for Medicaid. Based on my exploratory analysis, I believe these reforms may result in an impressive number of voter registration applications, perhaps far more than social service agencies have produced in the past. Federal health and program participation surveys could advance our understanding of this reform in ways that state administrative data alone cannot. Data from these surveys would also substantially benefit the growing political science literature on policy feedback and health policy. Regarding the feasibility of this proposal, this expansion would further the goals of President Biden’s Executive Order 14019—Promoting Access to Voting.

The post ‘Great Felon Ideas’: Battleground State Struggles to Apply Biden’s Election Order appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Florida and Kansas are accusing 2 people of forging signatures for petition drives

Officials accused petition circulators of forging signatures of voters to allow the No Labels party to put candidates on the Kansas ballot and to put an abortion rights measure to a vote in Florida.

Modi Hangs on to Power in India with Smaller Margin

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared victory in the 2024 election on Tuesday night, but he will enter his third term with greatly reduced parliamentary support from his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which performed well below expectations.

The post Modi Hangs on to Power in India with Smaller Margin appeared first on Breitbart.

The Many Reasons You Shouldn’t Be Afraid to Question Election Results

It’s been said that the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn’t exist.

Most of us remember the national election of 2020: The COVID-19 pandemic, sudden changes to election procedures, mysterious mail-in ballots, allegedly hacked voting systems, and legions of lawyers filing scores of lawsuits.

I think we all remember the aftermath in 2021, as well. Thousands of angry conservative voters traveled to Washington, D.C., and entered the Capitol to protest the certification of the election after a surprise upset led to Joe Biden becoming the president.

Then came the speculation: Did the Chinese hack voting machines to flip the vote in favor of Biden? Were countless mail-in ballots shoved into voting machines in the dead of night?

Was Joseph R. Biden really the most popular presidential candidate in United States history even after running his entire campaign from a basement in Delaware?

I’ve prosecuted election fraud cases, but I do not know the answer to any of those questions. That’s not what this article is about. It is about why you should never be afraid to question the results of an election.

‘I’m Not a Conspiracy Theorist, But … ’

Having been in the Texas Attorney General’s Election Integrity Division, I have had more than a few conversations with people who almost seem to feel guilty about talking to me about election concerns. They usually start out with the other person saying, “Well, I’m not a conspiracy theorist but …”

That additional qualifier has never surprised me, considering how many risks there are associated with questioning the results of elections.  

The moment anyone is in the vicinity of someone who claims an election was stolen, they risk becoming an “election denier.”

A few notable attorneys who filed election contests have been threatened with losing their license to practice law and even imprisonment. More than 500 of the 1,265 people who were arrested after marching on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 are—more than three years later—still awaiting trial for what may ultimately amount to a misdemeanor conviction.

The rest of us are constantly told by “experts” that there was nothing wrong with the 2020 election.

But what if those experts were wrong?

Reprimanding Fulton County

Recently, the Georgia State Elections Board voted 2-1 to reprimand Fulton County after finding significant issues with the vote tally in the 2020 presidential election. The board’s investigation concluded there had been over 140 separate violations of election laws and rules not only related to how Fulton County tallied the initial vote, but also how it conducted its recount.

It should be noted that the only vote against reprimanding Fulton County was from board member Janice Johnston and that was only because she felt the reprimand didn’t go far enough. She wanted a more comprehensive investigation conducted by the Georgia Attorney General’s Office.

Out of a plethora of issues in how the election was conducted, the investigation also found that there were more than 3,000 duplicate ballots scanned during the recount. The Georgia Secretary of State’s general counsel declared that it’s inconclusive whether or how many of the 3,000 duplicates were included in the tabulated results.

There were also more than 17,000 ballot images that are allegedly missing from the recount. 

Keep in mind that Fulton County’s initial hand recount shortly after the election awarded 1,300 additional votes to Trump, and while the current numbers would not change the outcome of the election, an open question of whether there are potentially more than 4,000 votes not properly accounted for in a swing state election that was decided by only 11,000 votes is—to say the least—problematic.

The Georgia secretary of state’s position appears to be that the initial count, the hand recount, and the machine recount are all relatively similar and therefore not a cause for alarm. When Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was asked directly about allegations of election fraud, he said, “No, the numbers are the numbers … . The numbers don’t lie.” 

That seems like a difficult conclusion to reach when his organization seems to not be sure what the numbers are.

It also somehow seems worse to imply that more than 140 violations of election laws were committed by the election administrator’s office for the state’s most populated county by incompetence rather than malfeasance.

Compare Raffensperger’s lack of enthusiasm with the efforts to remove Sidney Powell’s law license, or the criminal indictment of former President Donald Trump currently pending in Fulton County, both of which stem from the actions they took (or are alleged to have taken) in response to issues arising out of the way Fulton County ran the 2020 presidential election.

In fact, the results of Georgia’s inquiry stand in contrast to the popular talking point that Trump’s allegations were so spurious that even individuals in his own administration refuted his claims of election irregularity.

Internal Dissenters’ Willful Blindness

For example, Christopher Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of the Department of Homeland Security, who claimed on CBS’ “60 Minutes” that the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history.”  

Not only does it now seem that Krebs was wrong, but less than a month after making that statement, it was publicly reported that Krebs and his agency had been unaware of what could be one of the largest cyberattacks of our national infrastructure in history.

There was also then-Attorney General Bill Barr publicly declaring on Dec. 1, 2020, that the Department of Justice and the FBI had not uncovered evidence of “widespread voter fraud that would change the outcome of the election”—after an investigation he had called for only three weeks prior.

In Texas, after we received an allegation of election fraud, our team of investigators and attorneys—who are already familiar with Texas election law—would seek to contact the election administrator for the county the allegation originated from to obtain their records of the election. Those records were often voluminous and would take time to review.

We would then make attempts to speak to witnesses, including the voters, to determine whether there had been fraud or irregularities in the voting process. We would investigate whether those who cast suspicious ballots were qualified to vote, whether they typically voted by mail or in person, whether their vote in that election came from their listed home address or somewhere else, whether they are even aware a vote was cast in their name, and sometimes even whether they are alive or deceased.

Consider that there were 81,139 votes—in Nevada, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona, combined—which separated Trump from Biden in the election. Among those four states, there were approximately 12,883,742 total ballots cast. Neither of those numbers would include instances where ballots had been destroyed.

The time it took for Georgia to issue its findings on Fulton County alone took three years. At the time of Barr’s statement, the FBI only had a total of 13,245 special agents in the entire bureau, spread out across the United States and other parts of the world. Even if the Justice Department devoted all its resources and limited the scope of their investigations to the largest counties of those four states, it would have taken several weeks just to compile evidence, much less come to a definitive conclusion just for one of those states.

There is also the question whether Barr even wanted the Department of Justice to be involved. The U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, William McSwain, claimed that Barr told him to stand down on investigating election fraud allegations, instead ordering him to refer any complaints to the state of Pennsylvania.

While Barr disputes McSwain’s account, other witnesses testified under oath to receiving the same guidance.

In December 2020 an “irate” Bill Barr called investigators looking into Jesse Morgan’s claim of hundreds of thousands of completed mail-in ballots hauled across state lines to “STAND DOWN”

“‘I told you you need to stand down on this.’

“[He was] agitated, to say the least.” pic.twitter.com/orzqQFL245

— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) April 4, 2024

So, when Barr said he had not seen evidence sufficient to conclude that fraud would have changed the results of the election, it seems that is exactly what he meant. He hadn’t seen fraud that would change the outcome. That would be difficult to find for someone unfamiliar with election fraud—and not interested in looking for it.

So-Called Fact-Checkers’ Echo Chamber

Nevertheless, Barr’s statements are a common talking point for media “fact-checkers,” who are adamant that election fraud is a myth.  

Take for example how fact-checkers handled allegations of Jesse Morgan. Morgan was a post office contractor who claimed that 288,000 pre-filled ballots had been shipped into the state of Pennsylvania in trailer that somehow mysteriously vanished after being delivered to a post office.

As a former prosecutor, the fact that the investigation by the U.S. Postal Service and the FBI only concluded that Morgan’s claims could not be corroborated, while Morgan himself was never charged with making a false statement to a federal agent seems to me to mean that the investigation was inconclusive. That is, neither confirming, nor denying his account.

If that’s the case, then we are left with the notion there is no security camera footage, records, manifests, receipts or explanation for a missing post-office trailer allegedly containing 288,000 ballots that was left inside a secured post-office motor pool, or that it was just a shoddy investigation.

That didn’t stop the Dispatch and PolitiFact from concluding that Morgan’s allegations were false in their entirety based on the aforementioned sound bite from Barr, and the Postal Service’s largely redacted report.

More dubious fact-checks come from The New York Times. It fact-checked 15 separate statements from Trump about the 2020 election. In the interest of brevity, I’d like to go summarize what I personally took from just a few:

  • Trump claimed surprise ballot dumps changed the outcome of the election overnight. The Times fact-checked this as false, because there were just a lot of mail-in ballots that took a long time to count.
  • Trump claimed mail-in ballots were a corrupt system. Times fact-checkers concluded this was false, because experts say voter fraud is rare.
  • Trump claimed the recount in Georgia was meaningless because there was no signature verification. The Times concluded this was also false, before oddly explaining how signatures cannot be verified during recounts because ballots are separated from the carrier envelope that contains the voter’s identifying information.
  • Trump claimed the Pennsylvania secretary of state and the state Supreme Court abolished signature verification requirements for mail-in ballots. The Times said this was misleading, because the Pennsylvania State Election Code never required signature verification in the first place.
  • Trump claimed that in Georgia only 0.5% of ballots were rejected in 2020 compared with 5.77% in 2016. The Times said that was also misleading, because the Massachusetts Institute of Technology believes the 5% total increase in accepted ballots was likely just due to the addition of a curing mechanism for Georgia mail-in ballots.

Other popular rebuttals stem from the 2020 election contests. The 2020 general election was easily the most litigated in my lifetime. According to some news outlets, Trump and Republicans filed over 60 election challenges, losing almost all of them.

The results of the 2020 election cases always seem to be the easy way out of any debate over the election results. Why wouldn’t they be? The judges found there was no election fraud. Case closed.

Except they kind of didn’t.

Democratic Operatives and the ‘Steele Dossier’

For background, a large bulk of the work against the 2020 presidential election contests was done by the law firm of Marc Elias. Formerly of Perkins-Coie, Elias is notably famous (or infamous) for his involvement with the entirely debunked opposition research against Trump known as the Steele Dossier. Ironically, Elias also thinks Russians intervened in the 2016 election to defeat Hillary Rodham Clinton.

In addition to being at the forefront of litigating election lawsuits on behalf of Democrats, Elias’ law firm also seeks “favorable advisory opinions” from the Federal Election Commission on behalf of Democratic candidates. They are unashamedly pro-Democrat, and to put it mildly, they are very committed to what they do.

Elias’ win record speaks for itself, and I’m not discounting his firm’s successes, but the 2020 general election was an easy playing field. In election contests, “the tie goes to the runner,” and all he and his team have to do to win is make sure that none of the allegations of fraud in any of the election contests are considered sufficient to warrant discounting the results.

This was made all the easier because judges have a hard time with any case involving an election.

Legal Timeliness and Standing

Take for example Trump v. Biden, where the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled Trump’s suit was barred by the legal doctrine of laches. That is to say that Trump’s allegations were reasonable, but the case had been brought too late for courts to act.

To quote the court, “the time to challenge election policies such as these is not after all ballots have been cast and the votes tallied.”

Essentially, a candidate shouldn’t wait to get cheated out of an election before they sue over it.

A similar result occurred in Kistner v. Simon in Minnesota. In that case, the petitioners filed their lawsuit within days of the postelection review, but the court concluded two claims were barred as they should have been brought before the election, and for the third claim, the court found the petitioners failed to provide service to the other county officials required by Minnesota election laws.

In Arizona’s Ward v. Jackson, the Arizona Supreme Court classified instances where a “duplicate ballot did not accurately reflect the voter’s apparent intent as reflected in the original ballot” as a mere error, and held that it did not believe there were enough of these “errors” to overturn the results of the election.

Also stated by the court: “Where an election is contested on the ground of illegal voting, the contestant has the burden of showing sufficient illegal votes were cast to change the result.” It is not enough to prove there was fraud, you must prove there was enough fraud to change the outcome.

In Donald J. Trump for President v. Way, the New Jersey federal district court declined to hear a challenge to the New Jersey governor’s executive order No. 177, which directed the state to send mail-in ballots to all registered voters and extended ballot counting to all ballots received up to 48 hours after the polls closed on Election Day.

After the suit was filed, the Democrat-controlled state legislature passed a bill codifying the governor’s decree, thereby making it law. One of the bill’s co-sponsors allegedly claimed that the bill’s purpose was to “undermine the Trump campaign’s lawsuit.”

Changing the Rules in the Middle of the Game

The court’s ruling in that case was that it would defer to the state on whether to suddenly change election rules in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sidney Powell’s suit in Wisconsin, Feehan v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, was dismissed after the court ruled a Wisconsin voter and potential elector lacked standing to contest the election process in Wisconsin. The federal District Court of the Middle District of Pennsylvania came to the same conclusion in Donald J. Trump for President Inc. v. Boockvar. The result was the same in Nevada in Donald J. Trump for President Inc. v. Cegavske.

Also from Nevada is my favorite postelection opinion by far, Law, et al. v. Whitmer, et. al. In that case, the judge stated that he considered witness declarations—typically statements submitted under the penalty of perjury—to be “hearsay of little or no evidentiary value,” citing that per Nevada’s election code, election contests “shall be tried and submitted so far as may be possible upon depositions … .”

At the time of this suit, America was still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic and many courts were not even permitting contested hearings out of fear that several people in an enclosed space listening to live testimony could spread the virus.

That prohibition often extended to requests to take someone’s deposition, which was a hurdle I ran into in some of my own cases. Before reading this opinion, I would have thought that “so far as may be possible” under those circumstances would be broad enough to increase the viability of sworn statements to be presented as evidence. I would have been wrong.

Considering the court’s order only gave the contestants from Nov. 17 to Dec. 3 to gather their evidence and granted only 15 depositions to both sides, it’s not clear what evidence the judge expected them to be able to marshal.

I’m not insinuating there was bias, but it feels that way, reading the 10 paragraphs devoted to just bolstering the credibility of the defense expert compared to the five paragraphs the judge spends on the why he felt the entirety of the evidence presented by the other side was inadequate.

Procedural vs. Evidentiary Reasons

The bottom line is, a significant number of the election challenges brought in 2020 appear to have been thrown out for procedural reasons, rather than evidentiary ones. In the few cases where election fraud was discussed, the courts seemed to consistently hold that those bringing the case hadn’t shown enough fraud.  Just don’t tell the fact-checkers at Reuters that.

Going into the election of 2024, it’s not even clear who will be able to successfully contest a national election. Neither voters nor electors appear to have standing to contest an election in their own state, and at least a state attorney general and House Representatives do not have standing to challenge elections in other states. 

Those who do make it past the standing requirement only have weeks to depose as many witnesses as it takes to prove that enough fraudulent ballots were counted to change the result of the election.

If you’re unfamiliar with an election case, that could potentially mean finding thousands of fraudulent ballots in less time than it would take to contest a speeding ticket. Good luck with that. 

The silver lining in all of this is that a byproduct of the controversies surrounding the 2020 presidential election is that we are at least talking about it. And the public outcry has been substantial.

Once a niche topic, election integrity is now at the forefront of public discourse, and several states—including Georgia—are engaged in massive undertakings to identify vulnerabilities in their electoral process and have already taken steps to pass new laws seeking to prevent election integrity issues.  

When Texas ran into hurdles with its high criminal court declaring it was unconstitutional for Attorney General Ken Paxton to unilaterally prosecute election fraud, the voters responded by voting out three of the eight justices who signed on to the opinion, and they were the only three up for reelection.

I do not know what happened in 2020, and I don’t know what’s going to happen in 2024. But I do know election fraud exists, and it has been around for a long time. So long as there are ways to cheat the system to obtain power, there will be people seeking to take advantage of them.

I also know that behind every successful election challenge, investigation, prosecution, and legislation are individuals courageous enough to come forward and question the results when something seems off.

That courage is becoming less and less rare after 2020, and it will be a force to be reckoned with in 2024.

That’s why I encourage everyone to never be afraid to question the results of an election when they see something suspicious, and act on those suspicions.  

Maybe you win, maybe you lose, but the only way it will change is if you’re not afraid to talk about it.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

The post The Many Reasons You Shouldn’t Be Afraid to Question Election Results appeared first on The Daily Signal.

America Is Under Attack

The United States of America, a few years short of its 250th birthday, is at war.

This is not a war with Russia or China. It is not an amorphous war on terror or a war on drugs. This is a war from within. It is an unconventional war. It is a systems-level attack on the foundations of this nation. It is an insidious, sophisticated attack built on decades of a sustained, strategic decay of our nation’s infrastructure: our legal system, our election system, our culture, our commonality, our civic intelligence, and our institutions.

This is not an insurrection, a series of race riots, or even a police riot at a protest over a stolen election.

It will be the last war in which the United States participates if it’s not won by Americans.

You are not living in the same country you were born in.

Right now, a president, who record numbers of Americans don’t think even won the last election—and for good reason—has ordered the legal, intelligence, and law enforcement services of this country to arrest and detain his chief political rival. It is the product of a sustained, nearly decade-long covert and overt operation using every tool at the government’s disposal and their command of the propaganda machine of the legacy media to destroy Donald J. Trump.

Joe Biden is not the head of this lynching, however. He is a senile patsy serving as a prop figurehead. Even on his best day, he could not have orchestrated and overseen this project. His very presence as the source of authority from which the domestic terrorists draw their appeal to legitimacy is proof positive of the enemy’s success in overtaking the apparatuses of governmental power. Joe Biden is merely the tragic comedy illustration of how much real power the enemy has taken. That he can be the puppet shows how little effort needs to be expended to fake legitimacy for this takedown operation.

As the enemy actually utilizes the power of the systems that it has corrupted, the professional organizational apparatus of the opposition party meekly and pathetically appeals to those same structures for its salvation. Such weak acts are playacting. The con is based on a fundamental miscalculation that the American people believe such acts constitute a legitimate effort to protect and save this country.

In no place is this more clear that in the halls of the United States Congress. Take, for example, the one institution in which the American people are alleged to have access to actual power right now: the House of Representatives. The 2022 midterm elections, once billed as an incoming “Red Wave,” were supposedly an opportunity for Americans to provide a check on the lawless occupation of the U.S. government.

Instead, the enemy was unfazed. They had fundamentally changed the structure of the U.S. government two short years before, in 2020, in a way that protected their power. The election system itself had been conquered with illegitimate changes to the very way in which people are meant to realize the promises of a constitutional republic.

The election system, much like the legal system, is no longer a neutral instrument. In 2020, there was a dramatic and hostile transformation of the election system from a voting system into a contest of one party’s political machinery and its ability to distribute and collect unaccountable mail-in ballots.

Only one side has a machine. The professional Right—the politicians and their consultants—fails to understand that the rules changes themselves were designed to ensure a permanent advantage to the Left. The best knockoff imitation of the Left’s illegal voting operation on the Right only gives legitimacy to this new government structure where ballots are collected instead of votes to select our leaders.

The professional Right was willfully clueless about this point on the night of the midterm elections. In fact, the vipers instead used it to support the Left and its attack on Trump.

I sat in my living room watching Fox News on the evening of the midterms and watched talking head after talking head attempt to spin the results as a referendum on the man who wasn’t even on the ballot. And just like that, the 2024 Republican Primary was off in full swing. The result was Trump-hating Republicans paying parasitic consultants and pollsters hundreds of millions of dollars to distract and detract resources and protection away from Trump.

The professional Right on Capitol Hill has been spectacularly useless in its ability to protect America from the damage being wrought by the Left. It has settled into a pretzeled rhetorical defense of Trump while leaving every resource on the table that could be used to protect this country, like withholding funding and releasing an avalanche of actually enforced subpoenas.

While the Jan. 6 committee proved the damage that such committees could cause, this recent Congress also has proved their uselessness. Take, for example, the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government and its chairman, Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. That subcommittee was the pound of flesh extracted for Kevin McCarthy to become speaker of the House and was supposed to be a supercharged committee aimed at de-weaponizing the attacks on Trump and all Americans.

It has been none of that. As I write this, the subcommittee is on pace at the end of this Congress to return nearly two-thirds of the $15 million supplemental budget it was given. Members are literally “tipping” the Biden administration for election interference while pretending to be fighting it in their cable news appearances and their fundraising letters.

Part of the problem is that the elected Right is too busy fighting itself to fight the Left. The biggest fight comes from a class of elected politicians trying to resist the fundamental transformation of the conservative movement that Trump created. They are content to give lip service to “America First” appeals if it means that they can get back to the business of funding foreign wars and serving as lobbyists for special interests.

And House members are still fighting over who gets to be in charge of this mess. Any limitation that Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has politically imposed on himself to gain the support of the furthest Left elements of the Republican caucus has also been accepted by Jordan, who is desirous of Johnson’s job. That kind of capitulation does not create the type of environment in which a hard-charging legal process and investigations can be conducted—elements that are critical to see any positive results out of the weaponization subcommittee.

Perhaps the only bright spot is the work of House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., and his staff. Unlike his counterparts, Comer’s team has meticulously proved the corruption of the Biden family with ample evidence, to include the literal receipts.

Legacy media and establishment politicians will never give him the credit he deserves. But the truth can be seen in the data. Since Comer got to work, poll after poll shows that a majority of Americans now accept that the Bidens engaged in corrupt activity.

So, what the hell do we do about all of this? We do everything at the same time—now.

Congress must immediately hire a congressional special counsel and equip that individual with all constitutional authority to do the job. In other words, the weaponization subcommittee should give its unused budget to someone else. This work includes a record-setting number of forced depositions and subpoenas backed by the enforcement authority of holding people in contempt of Congress. And no more requiring votes for every minor investigative change. Have one vote now and let the special counsel get to work. And nothing done by the special counsel gets referred to Biden’s Department of Justice. Instead, it is delivered to relevant state and local prosecutors for action.

On the election, we must first admit that the 2024 election has already been interfered with in a substantial and incurable way. The basic demographics of this country have been altered by an illegal invasion of illegal aliens organized by Biden. Simultaneously, every reasonable preventive mechanism to keep them from voting is forcefully opposed by the Regime. The basic fundamental structure of flooding the country with unaccountable mail-in-ballots exists.

The Right has made incremental and positive gains in some areas, only to be outdone by a matter of degrees because of the Left’s control of the basic election machinery. The country is flooded with propaganda from regime media, creating conspiracies to try to keep Trump off the campaign trail and out of office by subjecting him to a series of kangaroo court cases—and finally, a conviction. There is no chance of a free and fair election. That ship has sailed. The only question is if we will have a certifiable election.

What can happen is that Trump can win by a margin bigger than the other side’s capacity for cheating. Every step must be taken to mitigate the ability of the Left to illegitimately alter the election. This includes mass litigation, of course, but also immediate overt action by state and local officials to protect the integrity of their elections.

One area to immediately begin with is kneecapping Biden’s ongoing efforts to use the whole-of-federal-government approach he has created as his get-out-the-vote operation, where agencies that deal with members of the public who most likely lean Democratic are used to help them register to vote. States have the ability to kick this activity out of their jurisdictions.

Members of the general public need to demand the change they wish to see. There is a war happening right now, and only one side is fighting it. The other side maintains its limited hold on power by providing rhetorical mentions of Americans’ concerns but in every real sense, does nothing to fix them.

Politicians on both sides are able to survive in this political landscape by the entrenched power of party politics, obscene amounts of money in politics, and the support of the dying power of traditional media, who—in a search for content—is willing to provide pomp and circumstance to the doldrums of fundraising letter-sending and low-budget government hearings.

We don’t have to live this way. There is still time to turn the ship around. The real damage is made permanent if the Left is able to finalize its takeover of the election and judicial systems in a way that makes elections and prosecutions pro forma. That day could come very soon, but for now, it is not today, and there is still time to fight.

The post America Is Under Attack appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Fox News Politics: Trump Guilty!

The latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more Fox News politics content

Exclusive -- Sen. J.D. Vance: De Niro’s Biden Appearance Outside Trump Trial ‘Mask Off Moment for Biden Regime’ Similar to Hillary’s Deplorables Attack

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), a leading possible contender for former President Donald Trump’s running mate, answered several key questions from Breitbart News for this exclusive question-and-answer written interview about Hollywood star Robert De Niro’s appearance at the behest of Democrat President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign outside the Manhattan courthouse where Trump is being tried.

The post Exclusive — Sen. J.D. Vance: De Niro’s Biden Appearance Outside Trump Trial ‘Mask Off Moment for Biden Regime’ Similar to Hillary’s Deplorables Attack appeared first on Breitbart.

Supreme Court Rebuffs Claim of Partisan South Carolina Redistricting as Race Bias

Four years after the 2020 census and the redistricting that occurred across the nation, the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday held that a lower court in South Carolina failed to distinguish between political and racial motivations by that state’s Republican-controlled Legislature when lawmakers made slight revisions in the boundary lines of the state’s seven congressional districts to improve GOP election prospects in one in particular, the 1st Congressional District. 

That was a very important holding, because it pushed back on a recurring tactic now being used by Democrats to attack redistricting plans that disadvantage their party politically; namely, falsely claiming that partisan redistricting is tantamount to racial discrimination that violates the Voting Rights Act.

And if you can believe it, this entire case that went all the way to the highest court in the land was over a district in which the Legislature increased the projected Republican vote by 1.36% to 54.39% and the black voting-age population from 16.56% to 16.72%.

No, really. 

The NAACP, which acts as an arm of the Democratic Party, made a federal case out of a change in voting percentages of 1.36% and 0.16%!

In Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, joined by five of his colleagues, concluding that the district court’s finding that race dominated the design of the 1st District was clearly erroneous. 

South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District had been a reliably Republican district until a Democrat, Joe Cunningham, was barely elected in 2018 with just 50.7% of the vote.  Republican Nancy Mace took the district back in the 2020 election by another slim margin, just 50.6% of the vote.

Republicans in the state Legislature issued guidance after the 2020 census explaining that they would follow “traditional districting principles, such as respect for contiguity and incumbent protection.” However, they “also made it clear that [they] would aim to create a stronger Republican tilt in District 1.” 

The GOP-dominated Legislature maintained and protected incumbent Democratic Rep. James Clyburn, who has represented the single majority-minority congressional district in South Carolina since 1993, the 6th, because, as Republican state Sen. George “Chip” Campsen said, Clyburn “has more influence with the Biden administration perhaps than anyone in the nation.” 

The Supreme Court reiterated that courts must distinguish between partisan and racial motivations in redistricting since, as the court previously held in 2019 in Rucho v. Common Cause, partisan motivations are not justiciable in federal court, while racial motivations may be unconstitutional if they were a predominant factor in the redistricting.

The majority chastised the lower court for only paying “lip service” to the rules the court has set out for evaluating this issue in a redistricting case.

In fact, the district court’s “misguided approach infected” that court’s findings, which “were clearly erroneous under the appropriate legal standard.”  In other words, the lower court committed clear error because it failed to disentangle race from politics.

Moreover, Alito wrote, the NAACP did not provide any direct evidence of a racial gerrymander by state legislators and the NAACP’s circumstantial evidence was very weak.

Instead, the NAACP relied on deeply flawed reports by four “experts” who ignored traditional districting criteria such as geographical constraints and the Legislature’s partisan interests in strengthening Republican districts.

The NAACP also failed to offer a single alternative map to show that the Legislature’s partisan goal could be achieved while raising the black voting population in the challenged district, a requirement that the Supreme Court has laid out in previous redistricting cases.

The NAACP separately claimed that the slight change in the percentage of GOP voters in District 1 diluted the vote of black residents, violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.  But the majority found that the district court made the same mistakes in evaluating the vote-dilution claims that it made in evaluating the first claim.

That is, the NAACP failed to show that the state’s redistricting plan had the purpose and effect of diluting the minority vote. In light of these errors, the Supreme Court reversed the lower court decision and remanded the case for further proceedings.

It is probably no surprise that the three liberal justices disagreed.

In a dissent that was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Elena Kagan urged the court not to second-guess the district court’s factual findings on whether partisanship or race was the predominant factor in the redistricting process by the state Legislature.

In her view, the court should have given the district court’s view of events “significant deference” and upheld it as long as it is “plausible.”

At the end of his majority opinion, Alito criticized that  dissent, concluding that none of the points raised by Kagan was “valid.”  That includes her bald assertion—with no evidence to back it up—that the legislators must have used racial data, rather than political data because, the dissenters claim, racial data “is more accurate than political data in predicting future votes” and not using racial data would have required the “self-restraint of a monk.”

But as Alito pointed out, “this jaded view is inconsistent with our case law’s long-standing instruction that the ‘good faith of [the] state Legislature must be presumed’ in redistricting cases.”  That is particularly true since “the political data, unlike the racial data that the dissent prefers, took into account voter turnout.”

Alito concluded by saying that “there is no substance to the dissent’s attacks.”

The South Carolina opinion serves as a warning shot across the bows of district court judges who presume bad faith on the part of state legislators and who fail to distinguish between political motivations and racial motivations in the redistricting process.

The Voting Rights Act prohibits racial discrimination in voting, not partisanship, and its provisions should not be abused to achieve political goals.

The post Supreme Court Rebuffs Claim of Partisan South Carolina Redistricting as Race Bias appeared first on The Daily Signal.

We need to SAVE our elections from abuse and here’s how

The presidential election is drawing ever closer and Americans need to find ways to secure our voting so that non-citizens can't abuse the process. Here's how to SAVE our elections.

Trump vows to commute prison sentence of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht

Former President Trump on Saturday vowed to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the online drug-selling site Silk Road in an effort to win the Libertarian vote.

MAGA

  A funny thing happened in 2015.    A real estate estate mogul from NYC with a huge ego matched by a huge mouth decided to run for President of the United States.  By itself that’s just a blurb in the news, the kind usually followed a few weeks later with an update that the celebrity has ‘suspended’ his campaign and quit the race.  Certainly that’s what the field of candidates expected in the race to follow Obama with a Republican POTUS. Instead, Donald Trump built on modest support and his name, and soon became a contender for the GOP

69% of Elites Want to Restrict Voting to College Graduates Only

New polling from Scott Rasmussen reveals that America’s elite 1%—those with high incomes, urban residences, and postgraduate degrees—are significantly out of step with the rest of the country on a range of issues.

It’s a troubling trend for America, and it doesn’t bode well for our future considering the elite 1% occupy many of the leadership roles in our cultural, educational, and government institutions.

There’s perhaps no statistic more shocking than the 69% of politically obsessed elites who think it would be better if only people with college degrees could vote. By comparison, just 15% of all voters hold that view. (Rasmussen defines “politically obsessed” as elites who talk about politics every day.)

Rasmussen’s latest survey, conducted by RMG Research, asked other questions ranging from government censorship to gun ownership. On nearly every issue, there’s a wide gulf between the ruling class and everyday Americans.

You can learn more about work on the elite 1% by tuning into “The Scott Rasmussen Show,” which airs Sunday at 10 a.m. ET on Merit Street Media.

In the meantime, listen to our full interview on “The Daily Signal Podcast” or read an edited transcript below.

Rob Bluey: What are the headlines coming out of your latest research?

Scott Rasmussen: As a reminder, the last time we talked about how the politically obsessed elites think the American people have too much individual freedom and people in this elite world really trust the federal government.

What we did this time is began to ask some of these same groups, the elite 1 % and the politically obsessed, what do they think America looks like?

Perhaps the funniest finding of all is we ask the question, “Do most Americans agree with you on most important issues?” Now, if we ask voters, about half say, “Yeah, I think most people agree with me.” Among the politically obsessed elites, 82% of that group thinks that most Americans agree with them on most issues. It’s not even close to true, but they’re looking in a mirror. They see what they want to see.

Source: RMG Research

What’s scary about that, if you think about it in context of the administrative state, if these people believe that their views are representative of America, it justifies them cheating a little bit or bending the rules because they can say, “We’re fighting for the American people.” In fact, they’re fighting against the American people.

Bluey: Are there particular policy issues where you see that playing out more so than others? For instance, one that comes to mind is climate change.

Rasmussen: It’s actually harder to find places where the American people are with the elite. You mentioned climate change. About 2 out of 3 of this politically obsessed elite think that most voters are willing to pay $250 a year or more to fight climate change.

When we do polling to ask people how much they’re willing to pay—in terms of taxes or higher prices—about half say they’re not willing to pay anything, and 72% say nothing more than $100.

If you think about that in a policy sense, these influencers believe the American people are willing to pay something they’re not, and that’s why they can support some different policy ideas.

Source: RMG Research

But look, it’s starts with a very basic thing: 71% of the politically obsessed elites think most Americans trust the federal government most of the time. That has not been true for 50 years. It’s been a half century since people tended to trust the government that much. Today, only 22% of voters voiced that much trust in government.

That is one of the core distinctions. If you trust the federal government, you trust the regulatory apparatus a lot more. You trust other rules and regulations, and voters just aren’t there.

Bluey: Another area that you polled had to do with social media. What did you find when you surveyed the elite 1% on that particular topic?

Rasmussen: Everybody, whether you’re in the elite or not, has some concern about disinformation and fake news. Where the difference comes is what to do about it.

Among most voters, they say that having the government decide what is misinformation and fake news is a bigger threat than the fake news itself. Among the elites, they say just the opposite.

Should the federal government be allowed to censor social media posts? Among all voters, 16% say yes. Among the politically obsessed elites, just over 50 % say, “Of course, we should have the right to censor social media.” Fundamentally different views.

Source: RMG Research

The views of the elite 1% amount to a rejection of America’s founding ideals. Even on something as simple as, “Does the federal government listen too much or not enough to the American people?” Overwhelmingly, voters say the government is not listening to us and the elites are saying it’s listening too much.

Bluey: There seems to be a wide discrepancy of views when it comes to who should vote and who should have a say in our country’s future. That number to me was one that stood out and was quite alarming.

Rasmussen: Absolutely alarming.

We asked a question that seemed to me to be absurd, Would it be better if only people with a college degree were allowed to vote?”

Appropriately, most Americans just soundly reject that idea. But among the elites, they heavily believe this country would be better off if all those deplorables who didn’t go to college weren’t allowed to vote.

Bluey: And one issue where there’s also quite a big disparity is gun ownership. How do the elite view guns?

Rasmussen: Consistently for decades, voters say they want to live in a community where guns are allowed. Sometimes it’s in the low 60s, sometimes after a horrific shooting event, it moves down to the low 50s, but consistently a majority of Americans can support that.

Among the elite 1 % that politically obsessed portion of it, about 70% of them say, “No, we want to live where guns are outlawed.” And 76% of them want to ban the private ownership of guns.

If you are in that politically obsessed elite and you believe strongly that we should ban guns, and if you believe that most American people want to live in a community where guns are outlawed, then you take an almost religious fervor to the fight to ban guns because you can convince yourself that you’re fighting on behalf of the public. And once again, you’re actually fighting against what the American people are looking for.

Bluey: Do you feel that the elite 1 % are more out of touch in 2024 than maybe they were in past generations?

Rasmussen: First, I don’t have data from past generations, so I can’t make a clear assessment on that. But I think it’s probably a little bit different.

There have always been elites. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were clearly elites of their era, but they also had a commitment to something larger than themselves. Thomas Jefferson, in writing the Declaration of Independence, said he was just articulating what the American people were feeling. At the same time, Alexander Hamilton said, “We need to establish a monarchy.” If you actually read his plan, it’s horrific.

So there have always been some people and elites who kind of rejected the founding ideals, who rejected the concepts of the Declaration of Independence.

>>> ‘Most Terrifying Poll Result I’ve Ever Seen’: Scott Rasmussen Surveys America’s Elite 1%

What’s changed in the last couple of generations are two things.

No. 1, we’re a little bit more sorted geographically. Members of the elite aren’t encountering non-elites on a regular basis. It’s not just that we live in gated communities or separate areas. Public transportation has been replaced by Uber. There’s not a lot of contact with people who aren’t like you.

The second part is there has been the rise of what a lot of people view as the global elite, where people begin to see others from other countries as more like them than they do their own countrymen.

Bluey: The use of pronouns has become quite pronounced in a lot of corporate settings, even in our federal government. There are some departments and agencies that now include them in email signatures and things of that nature. Is there a difference of how elites view pronouns vs. the rest of America?

Rasmussen: Let’s start with the fact that most Americans don’t even know what you’re talking about when you’re expressing your preferred pronouns. Only about 1 out of 10 voters has ever introduced themselves in that manner.

When they hear talk of it, it seems very foreign. But among the politically obsessed elite, about 60%, have introduced themselves expressing their preferred pronouns. And it’s hard to overstate the cultural difference at that point.

If you’re in this elite world—if you’re in the elite schools or many agencies of the federal government—it is absolutely normal and an everyday occurrence that you meet somebody and they tell you not only their name and their position, but their preferred pronouns. In the rest of America, that just doesn’t happen.

Source: RMG Research

When you get into discussions about misgendering somebody, there are regulations being pushed right now that would require employers to punish somebody for misgendering—for not using somebody’s preferred pronouns. Only 9% of voters think that’s a fireable offense, but even more than that, they don’t even know what the discussion is about.

This is where that glaring gap between the elites and most Americans is quite visible. It is the cultural world they’re in, whether we’re talking about guns, or climate change policies, or preferred pronouns, or even the topic of should biological males be allowed to play in women’s sports.

Among the politically obsessed elite, 41% say they should. Now, that’s not a majority, but essentially, the politically obsessed elite is evenly divided on this question, whereas to most Americans, it’s ridiculous. Of course, biological males have a physical advantage. Of course, it is dangerous to let biological males into the women’s locker room. But the elite is having a discussion about it. That is out of step with the country. It is dangerous.

It’s fine to have different views. We all live on our own bubbles. Your bubble is a little different than mine, but probably has some overlap. But you have to be able to look outside your bubble and see what the rest of the country is doing.

If you’re in this elite world, you have enormous influence and you think your views are reflecting the public at large, that’s a really dangerous combination.

Bluey: One of the most notable examples of the last decade is when Donald Trump was elected president. It seemed that the elites were in shock. What might happen if Trump is victorious in November and how might they react?

Rasmussen: On Election Day 2016, most of the conversation was Hillary Clinton is up by three in the polls, but there’s a margin of error, she’ll probably win by six. There was a shock. They couldn’t believe it. They couldn’t imagine what was happening. And because in their mind, Hillary Clinton was the ideally prepared person.

Looking ahead to this year, first thing I will tell you is if the election is at all close, the way the last nine elections have been in, whichever team loses, they’ll believe the election was stolen. If Donald Trump wins, we will hear an awful lot about how he stole the election from these elites.

But something else is happening that’s playing a part in the election. It’s a distorted view of the public.

When we see the campus protests about the Palestinian situation, 62% of the elites have a favorable opinion. They think it’s great what these protesters are doing. Most voters don’t. Only 24% of voters support the protesters.

That leaves the pundits to misread the way a situation has played out. In fact, since the campus protest started, support for Israel has gone up—not what some of the protesters might have hoped for.

A lot of the elites are misreading the dynamics going on right now. About 80 % of the elite 1% approve of the way Joe Biden is doing his job.

Source: RMG Research

The post 69% of Elites Want to Restrict Voting to College Graduates Only appeared first on The Daily Signal.

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