Trevor Loudon will address a rally of Oathkeepers, Minutemen and Tea Partiers from Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota, Saturday, June 27, at Riverside Park, 1301 Riverside Blvd, Sioux City, Iowa.
The rally goes from 10 am to 2 pm and Loudon will be speaking towards the end of the program.
See you there!!!
By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton
It’s been an historic week and although I am not surprised by the Supreme Court decisions, they saddened me beyond belief. I have sadly come to the conclusion that many of my colleagues are correct… our Constitutional form of government is now dead and Obama’s transformative ‘change’ is all but complete.
Things are now snowballing and it is more than most Americans can take or bear. From gay marriage and the ensuing infringement on free speech and our religious rights, to enforced Obamacare, to forced wealth redistibution in our neighborhoods, to the EPA run amok… our freedoms are being absolutely nullified. States are now saying they won’t comply with the EPA on coal and who can blame them? Americans will get very dangerous when they are hungry and cold. And then there is the Iran deadline, which is this weekend. Instead of holding their feet to fire, we are actually giving Iran nuclear reactors while they shout, “Death to America!” in their parliament. Insanity is the norm now. Then there is the increased Islamic State threat on our southern border and the attacks on our power grid coming down the pike. It’s surreal and all instigated, manipulated and planned for by our government – the ultimate enemy from within.
Adding to the tyrannical frenzy of the aftermath of the mass shooting in South Carolina, evidently America is cool with censoring her own history, but wants to hang on to the likes of Nazi Germany and bloody communist regimes. Satanism is still in vogue it would seem as well… but if you are a lover of the Confederate flag, well, you should be summarily burned at the stake. Let’s not leave out Stalin or concentration camps as making the ‘cool’ list either. And it goes without saying that Che Guevara is tres chic. Prohibition of thought and our history is all the rage now. No doubt next on the censorship bandwagon… burning books and thought police. Oh, wait…
The flaming lynch mob mentality of Progressives is burning through businesses across the former land of the free. They are feeling immense pressure to conform and be politically correct. None of them seem to have a spine. This is insane. Not only are they banning all Confederate flags and calling for Civil War statues to be taken down (which is erasing American history), they are getting rid of General Lee, an orange Dodge Charger from “The Dukes of Hazzard.” Walmart and Amazon have stopped selling anything having to do with the Confederate flag, but Walmart is still selling Che Guevara shirts, as well as Castro memorabilia and Iranian flags. Apple just removed Civil War Games from their App Store. South Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama and Kentucky are all removing Confederate flags as well. It’s an all you can eat buffet of political correctness feeding a ‘get em!’ move by Progressives. Now, they want to ban Gone With The Wind. We have literally plummeted down the rabbit hole and are sipping tea with the Mad Hatter. The Constitution is now being replaced with censorship and regulation – it’s incomprehensible.
At least one good thing came out of the Supreme Court this week. During the Great Depression, the government decided that prices paid to farmers were too low and undertook to correct the problem by limiting their output. It was a fascist move then and is still one now. It is sheer theft. Marvin and Laura Horne decided not to play that game and took their beef all the way to the Supreme Court – raisin hell, so-to-speak. And they won on Monday! The feds claimed they owed $700,000 because they would not surrender 47% of their crop for over a decade to the government with no compensation. Not even the left-leaning Supremes could let that one slide.
The Raisin Administrative Committee, which operates under the supervision of the USDA, sells or gives away the raisins it takes, with the proceeds going to cover its operating costs, storage fees and promotional efforts abroad. If any money is left, the farmers get some of it. If not, they receive nada. Looks like the Road to Serfdom has been detoured on this issue, at least for now. The unconstitutional theft being imposed on farmers such as the Hornes is no more. But at least these raisin farmers can get back to raising their crops and taking care of business – liberal fascism has moved on to the next hot topic.
Then there was the ultimate betrayal by Justice Roberts and the ruling in favor of Obamacare this week. The ruling stomped all over state’s rights and bent over backwards to reinterpret the Obamacare statute in favor of federal exchanges. “The somersaults of statutory interpretation they [the Justices of the Supreme Court] have performed …will be cited by litigants endlessly, to the confusion of honest jurisprudence,” concludes Justice Antonin Scalia in his dissent, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito. “And the cases will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites.”
“So it rewrites the law to make tax credits available everywhere,” he dissents. “We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.” The Court’s interpretation is “absurd,” Justice Scalia opined. And right he is. Scalia is a brilliant legal mind and he is horrified by the Leftist turn of the court. This must tear his soul apart. This was simply a political power play and one has to wonder, as I have before, if Chief Roberts has skeletons in his closet that are being used to sway his opinion.
This partisan ruling will have wide-ranging, catastrophic ramifications for America. The majority opinion states that “The combination of no tax credits and an ineffective coverage requirement could well push a State’s individual insurance market into a death spiral.” And it inevitably will. Which in turn, will usher in single-payer healthcare. It’s coming.
“It is implausible that Congress meant the Act to operate in this manner,” Justice John Roberts writes for the majority. Really? Because it looks entirely plausible to me. In fact, choreographed.
Justice Scalia notes that these Justices are “presuppos[ing] the availability of tax credits on both federal and state Exchanges.” In layman terms, that means that federal tax credits that have already been given to millions of people must continue. Along with the tax credits will come higher premiums, crappier healthcare, death panels, higher deductibles and part-time employment as the national norm.
This is tyranny and what you are seeing here is the dissolution of the three branches of constitutional government we are based upon. We now have one executive behemoth branch that is drunk with power and careening out of control, right on schedule.
Ted Cruz’s statement on the Supreme Court’s ruling:
“Today’s decision in King v. Burwell is judicial activism, plain and simple. For the second time in just a few years, a handful of unelected judges has rewritten the text of Obamacare in order to impose this failed law on millions of Americans. The first time, the Court ignored federal law and magically transformed a statutory ‘penalty’ into a ‘tax.’ Today, these robed Houdinis transmogrified a ‘federal exchange’ into an exchange ‘established by the State.’
“As Justice Scalia rightfully put it, ‘Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is ‘established by the State.” He also said, ‘We should start calling this law SCOTUSCare’ – I agree.
“If this were a bankruptcy case, or any other case of ordinary statutory interpretation, the result would have been 9-0, with the Court unanimously reversing the Obama administration’s illegal actions. But instead, politics intervened.
“For nakedly political reasons, the Supreme Court willfully ignored the words that Congress wrote, and instead read into the law their preferred policy outcome. These judges have joined with President Obama in harming millions of Americans. Unelected judges have once again become legislators, and bad ones at that. They are lawless, and they hide their prevarication in legalese. Our government was designed to be one of laws, not of men, and this transparent distortion is disgraceful.
“At the same time, crocodile tears are flooding our nation’s capital today over the Supreme Court’s decision to illegally rewrite Obamacare, which has been a disaster since its inception. But one day of faux outrage from the Washington Cartel won’t fool the millions of courageous conservatives across our country. They know the Republican leadership in Washington is quietly celebrating the Court’s decision. If they believe this issue is now settled so they don’t have to address it, they are sorely mistaken.
“Every GOP candidate for the Republican nomination should know that this decision makes the 2016 election a referendum on the full repeal of Obamacare.
“I have made repeal of this disastrous law a top priority since the first day I arrived in the Senate and have made its repeal central to my campaign. Any candidate not willing to do the same—and campaign on it every day—should step aside.
“The Court adopted the IRS’s blatantly unlawful reading of the statute to make subsidies available to individuals on federal exchanges, when Congress expressly provided the opposite.
“After today’s ruling, Obamacare will now be responsible for imposing illegal taxes on more than 11 million individuals and for burdening hundreds of thousands of businesses with illegal penalties on their workers, killing jobs, and further slowing economic growth. President Obama’s health care law remains deeply unpopular and is harming countless Americans by increasing costs and worsening the quality of care.
“I remain fully committed to the repeal of Obamacare—every single word of it. And, in 2017, we will do exactly that.”
This is why I support Ted Cruz – he stands for something and isn’t afraid to walk the walk. And the Left fears and hates him for it.
Next, in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project, Inc., the Supreme Court found in favor of Obama’s wealth redistribution in communities. Now, the government can decide who lives where and they can literally bribe community leaders into doing ‘gentrified’ slum housing just about anywhere. This will socially and demographically engineer America. It will force people to live among criminals and others they are trying to stay away from. It will cause crime to skyrocket and property values to plummet. The regulatory groundwork is now laid for substantial redistribution of tax dollars. Gradually cities will effectively swallow up their surrounding municipalities, with merged school districts and forced redistribution of public spending working together to kill the appeal of the suburbs. This is Agenda 21 and it is now nationally sanctioned. This is also aimed at manipulating the voter demographic to ensure a Marxist will stay in power indefinitely.
But, I saved the worst for last… in another 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage nationally, following on the heels of Mexico doing the same thing last week. Funny, I don’t remember marriage of any sort being mentioned in the Constitution or as being seen as ‘a right.’ This decision will literally touch every aspect of our lives. It’s not just the act of non-traditional marriage; it’s all that it entails.
The Left will use this ruling to try and destroy religious freedom of all forms of worship, except for Islam. It won’t just be the refusal by Christian pastors and priests to consecrate homosexual unions… it will go far beyond that. If you go to a church that preaches biblical principles and traditional marriage, that could cost you your job. Children in all schools will be subjected to gender theories and all forms of sexual preferences – everything from homosexuality, to pedophilia, to polygamy, to incest, to bestiality and on it goes. This is what the liberal Progressives want – the destruction of all morality, faith and the family unit. It is the very bedrock of communism come to life in America. This ruling on gay marriage was the equivalent of a legalistic Pandora’s Box. It’s already occurring in the military – ministers are being court-martialed or rotated out because of their Christian faith. And of course, you are seeing it playing out with wedding chapels, bakeries, florists and photographers.
It will also be used as a weapon to silence free speech. It’s already happening. Witness the editorial board of PennLive/The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, PA who is taking a hardcore stance against those who disagree with the Supreme Court ruling to legalize gay marriage:
As a result of Friday’s ruling, PennLive/The Patriot-News will no longer accept, nor will it print, op-Eds and letters to the editor in opposition to same-sex marriage.
And that will happen as well on the airwaves and on the Internet. Blogs, such as mine, who support traditional marriage will be censored, fined or banned. Prison is also a possibility.
As my friend, Bookworm Room, so astutely put it, we have an incredibly dangerous clash of constitutional rights looming and I wouldn’t place odds on our side winning at this point. Businesses and schools will get slammed and litigated to death over this.
Justice Antonin Scalia nailed it:
The opinion is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic. It is one thing for separate concurring or dissenting opinions to contain extravagances, even silly extravagances, of thought and expression; it is something else for the official opinion of the Court to do so. Of course the opinion’s showy profundities are often profoundly incoherent. “The nature of marriage is that, through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms, such as expression, intimacy, and spirituality.”23 (Really? Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality [whatever that means] were freedoms? …
And just as Bookie quoted it, I will quote my friend James Simpson on gay marriage – because it goes to the heart of the matter:
The Left uses “rights” agendas to wrap itself in the mantle of righteousness and seize the moral high ground, tactically putting us on the defense in the process. But they couldn’t care less about the actual issue except in its ability to facilitate their path to power.
The agenda is never the agenda for the Left. And this is especially true for gay marriage. Homosexual marriage is a Trojan horse tactic. The true agenda is to establish the primacy of homosexual rights over the First Amendment’s guarantee of the free exercise of religion. Our nation was founded on this principle, and the gay marriage movement seeks to destroy it.
Consider that Annise Parker, the lesbian mayor of Houston, Texas, demanded to review pastors’ church sermons before public outrage forced her to back off. We have already seen how small businesses have been singled out and attacked for refusing to provide certain services to gays.
What is less known is that these gay couples are frequently part of the movement. They deliberately seek out businesses known for their Christian owners. They deliberately demand a service they know in advance will be refused. When the inevitable happens they use it as pretext to destroy the business and savage its owners. Doesn’t it amaze you how quickly legal groups immediately materialize to assist in the attack? The fact that they got unexpected push back through a spontaneous crowd sourcing campaign to support one pizza shop will not dissuade them from future efforts. If gay marriage is adopted, their current bullying behavior will look like child’s play compared to what’s coming.
This is a highly organized, nationwide campaign of vilification against Christians. But even Christians are not the ultimate target. If the First Amendment can be challenged this way; if a certain group’s “rights” can trump the U.S. Constitution, and if the Supreme Court can actually issue an edict making it so, then the entire Constitution has become meaningless. This is the Left’s true agenda and it always has been. This is the Cultural Marxists’ endgame. The issue is not the issue. The issue for them has always been destroying our country to impose socialism — with them in charge, of course. In order to do that they have to strip America of its culture, its traditions, and most importantly, the most important law of the land, the U.S. Constitution.
Persecution and tyranny are upon us. Now is the time for Christians and Constitutionalists to come together and make a stand. We are being persecuted and forced to go against all we believe in. I for one will stand and I will definitely not comply. Neither will the Black Robe Regiment. This will reverberate across all of our society, our laws and our lives. Soon, Americans will find that standing on their Christian beliefs will cost them their jobs, their families and maybe their lives. Marxism has swept global leadership and they are in the process of bringing their boots down on our necks. If the government enforces this blatant violation of free speech and religion here in the US, they will have to take us to jail. Americans will not comply.
I agree with Justice Scalia that this ruling is a threat to democracy and to the Republic itself. This decision effectively puts the State (the federal government) above the individual and this was never what our founding fathers intended. In fact, they warned us against this. The Supreme Court has turned activist, legislating from the bench, instead of being supreme judges of the land as they were so assigned. As JoshuaPundit puts it, what principles do you stand for? Just what are you willing to compromise on? It’s time to take a stand and choose a side. It was a nice Constitutional Republic while it lasted… now it’s time to reboot and fight. I hear a third party calling.
Hat Tip: BB
By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media
The Supreme Court bent over backwards today in an attempt to save Obamacare from its own tortured language by reinterpreting the statute, making the plain phrase “Exchange established by the state” signify both the state and federal exchanges. The mainstream media, in turn, are triumphal, having helped sway the final decision.
We have repeatedly written about The New York Times’ biased reporting regarding the King v. Burwell case and Obamacare in general. Today, the Times’ Editorial Board came out and said what Americans already knew, having read many of this paper’s farcical health care columns masquerading as reporting. The Times condemned the plaintiffs as having spearheaded a “blatantly political effort to destroy the Affordable Care Act,” called the case an “ideological farce dressed in a specious legal argument,” and claimed “the court should never have taken review of it to begin with.”
“The somersaults of statutory interpretation they [the Justices of the Supreme Court] have performed …will be cited by litigants endlessly, to the confusion of honest jurisprudence,” concludes Justice Antonin Scalia in his dissent, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito. “And the cases will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites.”
“So it rewrites the law to make tax credits available everywhere,” he dissents. “We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.” The Court’s interpretation is “absurd,” Justice Scalia writes.
I agree with these three Justices that the majority’s Supreme Court decision today seemed more focused on reinterpreting the law to the point of incoherence in order to save the administration’s favored project than it was on a fair interpretation of the intent of the law.
This was, no doubt, a politically influenced decision. Perhaps the media’s full court press preserving the illusion of Obamacare’s successes against all evidence helped to sway the Justices. Or, maybe, given the court’s prior decision on the individual mandate, the Justices had already made up their minds and were looking for a pretext.
This latest decision on federal subsidies was wrong for the nation and it ignores the plain language of the law. Obamacare is a disastrous policy with harmful nationwide impacts.
The majority opinion states that “The combination of no tax credits and an ineffective coverage requirement could well push a State’s individual insurance market into a death spiral.”
“It is implausible that Congress meant the Act to operate in this manner,” Justice John Roberts writes for the majority.
Justice Scalia notes that these Justices are “presuppos[ing] the availability of tax credits on both federal and state Exchanges.”
In other words, because federal tax credits have already been given to millions of people, they must continue. President Obama now asserts that this ruling was a “historic and emphatic declaration that the law has now been ‘woven into the fabric of America.’”
What has been woven into the fabric of our country is higher premiums, less quality health care, higher deductibles and a program—Obamacare—that discourages companies from offering full-time employment.
Yet the mainstream media and President Obama have united to promote the illusory and nonexistent successes of this law despite the weight of the evidence, even to the point of recently ignoring new revelations regarding MIT professor Jonathan Gruber’s role in this debacle.
Then-Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE) played a key role in ensuring that those four words, “established by the state,” were deliberately written into the law in order to assure his vote. There was no drafting error, as the media maintains.
USA Today’s David Jackson reports today that “GOP candidates” are “maintaining” their “attacks” on this abomination of a health care law. “In a sense, Thursday’s ruling means little if anything for the health care law or the politics surrounding it,” he reports.
“Democratic lawmakers said the decision should persuade Republicans to give up what they called a quixotic quest to repeal the health care law,” reports Jackson.
As the primaries heat up, the real questions for Republicans are:
If there is a silver lining for Republicans and conservatives, it’s that they don’t now have to come up with a plan to fix, and keep funding, the federal subsidies for people in states without their own exchanges, while the Democrats and the media join together to demand that the GOP do something to protect those people, as they would have had the court decided otherwise.
The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for this week’s Watcher’s Council match up.
A republic, if you can keep it. – Benjamin Frankin
What is euphemistically called government-corporate ‘partnership’ is just government coercion, political favoritism, collectivist industrial policy, and old-fashioned federal boondoggles nicely wrapped up in a bright-colored ribbon. It doesn’t work. – Ronald Reagan
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is argument of tyrants. It is the creed of slaves. – William Pitt, in the House of Commons November 18, 1783
This week’s winning essay, Joshuapundit’s The Time For Changing Is Now, was my reaction to the Republican leadership’s betrayal of the party’s conservative base to push through ObamaTrade… and my reflection on what this and similar betrayals mean.
Here’s a slice:
The Republican leadership today managed to threaten or bribe enough GOP congressmen to pass something most Americans overwhelmingly did not want passed – ‘Fast Track’ authority, the TPA for President Obama on his top secret trade bill that mostly isn’t one.
The vote was 218-208, with 28 Democrats voting for it.
The fast track authority for President Obama was originally paired with another bill called the TAA, a bogus welfare crumb for all the American workers whom will lose their jobs thanks to Obama’s secret trade bill. The combination legislation was voted down last week, but the TPA fast track was shoved through on its own and now goes to the Senate.The GOP leadership has promised to put the TAA provision, which expires in September to a separate vote, which the GOP leaders have promised will be nearly simultaneous.
Oh, I’m sure it will be…after the rest of the secret trade bill gets passed. And of course, as RINO Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan, the Republican Gruppenführer for Obama’s trade agenda tells us, the peasants like you and I will find out what’s in it when it’s passed, since on a need to know basis, we’re not even on the list.
Neither is most of congress, since the administration our president told us would be “the most transparent in history’ is anything but. Only a handful have actually seen it, because it’s locked in a secret room and no one is allowed to take notes or photograph any of it. Based on Wikileaks and a few things Senator Jeff Sessions has said, it’s pretty easy to extrapolate why Barack Obama wants this so bad, and very little of it is actually concerned about trade.
According to the draft provisions,a brand new, unelected international bureaucracy is to be formed, in which America would have the same vote as Qatar. Countries could be barred from trying to control where their citizens’ personal data is held or whether it’s accessible from outside the country.
The Healthcare Annex, according to WikiLeaks, “seeks to regulate state schemes for medicines and medical devices. It forces healthcare authorities to give big pharmaceutical companies more information about national decisions on public access to medicine, and grants corporations greater powers to challenge decisions they perceive as harmful to their interests.”
In other words, congress would no longer have sole authority to over reforming MediCare and of course, ObamaCare. And the FDA would be subject to this international bureaucracy that’s being set up as well.
Immigration is a big part of this too. U.S. laws, what remains of them, would now be subject to this international agreement. It calls for special fast tracking of visas that essentially would turn ICE into a rubber stamp. If this passes, look for thousands of American jobs to be replaced by foreigners at vastly lower wages and benefits as fast as corporate America can process the paperwork. And it allows much easier fast tracking of corporate off shoring of American jobs, putting Americans in competition with workers happy to receive less than a dollar an hour in countries like Vietnam.
Of course, there are also provisions to steal billions of dollars from America’s tax payers in the name of global warming as well, while driving utility costs sky high.
Even more shocking, TPA gives congress no leeway on changing any of this. No amendments are allowed, simply a yes or no vote.
Overall, it’s a great plan to finish bankrupting America’s middle class and subject our sovereignty to the ‘international community.’ No wonder this president wanted it so bad and worked so hard to push it through. None of this was possible without the fast track TPA authority. And a GOP majority House just gave it to him.
Here’s Louie Golmert (R-TX), one of the House’s honest men, trying to stem the tide (H/T The Noisy Room and The Right Planet):
So did Senator Jeff Sessions, who is one of the few congress members who has actually seen the proposed trade bill locked in that secret room:
“It is essential that there be no misunderstanding: fast-track preapproves the formation of not only the unprecedentedly large Trans-Pacific Partnership, but an unlimited number of such agreements over the next six years,” Sessions said. “Those pacts include three of the most ambitious ever contemplated. After TPP comes the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the United States and the European Union, followed by the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), seeking as one its goals labor mobility among more than 50 nations. Together, these three international compacts encompass three-fourths of the world’s GDP. Including the nations whose membership is being courted for after enactment, the countries involved would encompass nearly 90 percent of global GDP. Yet, through fast-track, Congress will have authorized the President to ink these deals before a page of them has been made public. Then, the Executive sends Congress ‘implementing’ legislation to change U.S. law—legislation which cannot be amended, cannot be filibustered, and will not be subjected to the Constitutional requirement for a two-thirds treaty vote.”
“According to the European Commission, the TiSA agreement—which most House and Senate members did not know about when they voted—will follow in the footsteps of the WTO’s Trade in Services Provisions, which has already inhibited the U.S. from making needed immigration changes,” Sessions said. “The European Commission says the EU ‘wants as many countries as possible to join the agreement.’ We have already seen how the EU has curtailed sovereignty in Europe; we do not want to follow in its footsteps.”
With regard to TPP, Sessions warned that America has “never seen” anything like it before—and that it’ll force the United States into a version of the European Union he calls “a new Pacific Union.”
“This nation has never seen an agreement that compares to the TPP, which forms a new Pacific Union,” Sessions said. “This is far more than a trade agreement, but creates a self-governing and self-perpetuating Commission with extraordinary implications for American workers and American sovereignty. Such a historic international regulatory Commission should never be fast-tracked, and should never be put on a path to passage until every word has been publicly scrutinized, every question answered, and every last power understood by Congress and the American people.”
This is still going to be bounced back and forth between the Senate and the House, but the fix is likely in for this colossal betrayal. We’re being told that this ‘free trade bill’ will benefit American workers. It will not. Actually, it will cost many of them their livelihoods as visas for foreign workers to replace them at cheaper wages are rubber-stamped. One more time – this isn’t primarily a trade agreement at all.
I just heard Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) trying to sell it that way on one of the talk shows, saying we didn’t have trade agreement with Japan, or China, or a number of other countries. Well and good senator. What’s wrong with the normal process of sending diplomats to negotiate them on a per country basis and submitting them to congress for approval as we’ve done in the past?
Or is it just that your corporate donors want it done this way, in stealth and secrecy? Because it isn’t going to benefit the American economy so much as milk it dry for the benefit of the well connected…and of course, their servile toadies in congress.
So once again, we’re faced with outright betrayal. Virtually everything the Republican Party campaigned on in 2010 and especially in 2014 was an outright lie. Instead of being ‘pulled out root and branch’ as Mitch McConnell told voters in 2014 in Kentucky, ObamaCare is being funded by congress and the GOP establishment is already plotting to save it in case the Supreme Court declares it unconstitutional, which it always was.
President Obama’s amnesty of illegal aliens by executive order? In spite of all the rhetoric, that’s being funded too. We essentially have no borders anymore, or any standards whatsoever on whom we let stay here.
Shutting down President Obama’s appointments of radical judges and federal appointees at offices like the FCC? Or his radical new racialist attorney general? Using the nuclear option, the way Harry Reid did to stop over 200 bills the house passed from even going to committee? Nothing. The GOP’s congressional leaders have made sure that President Obama has gotten whatever he wanted.
Barack Obama’s EPA war on coal? Same story.
And forget about congress using the power of the purse to compel the release of documents and the testimony of those involved in major scandals like Benghazi, the IRS targeting political opponents or the Clinton Foundation’s dealings.
I have speculated on these pages that with all the warrentless NSA spying and data collection going on, it’s quite possible this president has something juicy on key Republicans like McConnell and Boehner. Or it may be they’re simply being paid off in one way or another.
In the end, it really doesn’t matter. What does is the realization of this foul betrayal and to look at Tolstoy’s eternal question; what then must we do?
Much more and an update at the link.
In our non-Council category, the winners were Gillespie & Welch at Reason.com’s Hit and Run Blog with How Government Stifled Reason’s Free Speech submitted by Rhymes With Right.
This is an excellent complement to this week’s winning Council essay because it concerns government overreach and tyranny. Do read it.
Here are this week’s full results. Only The Right Planet was unable to vote this week, but was not subject to the usual 2/3 vote penalty for not voting:
Council Winners:
Non-Council Winners:
See you next week!
Make sure to tune in every Monday for the Watcher’s Forum and every Tuesday morning, when we reveal the weeks’ nominees for Weasel of the Week!
And remember, every Wednesday, the Council has its weekly contest with the members nominating two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council. The votes are cast by the Council and the results are posted on Friday morning.
It’s a weekly magazine of some of the best stuff written in the blogosphere and you won’t want to miss it… or any of the other fantabulous Watcher’s Council content.
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Chief Justice John Roberts today joined Anthony Kennedy and all the Supreme Court Democrats in upholding Obama’s unconstitutional, deceptive, and indescribably destructive healthcare law. Today’s decision in King v. Burwell declares that even though the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) specifically required individuals to enroll through state exchanges to obtain subsidies, enrolling directly through the federal government is essentially the same thing. This decision once again displays the Supreme Court’s willingness to ignore the clear intent of law in order to achieve a politically desired result. For Roberts it has written into stone an unmistakable pattern.
Roberts’ first betrayal was his mind-bending decision to call Obamacare a legitimate tax, whereas Obama had defended the law on the basis that it wasn’t a tax. An article in Republic magazine aptly described Roberts’ first betrayal:
‘Because the Constitution permits such a tax, it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness,’ wrote Roberts, deploying the tactical disingenuousness such people always display whenever they ratify a federal power grab. This feigned humility was used to cloak an unambiguous lie: The measure Roberts describes is a direct un-apportioned tax, which, as we’ve seen, is explicitly forbidden by the Constitution.
His next was almost certainly throwing in with the Court’s leftists on gay rights – ignoring the clear state’s rights issue involved by voting not to hear five cases that defended traditional marriage as a state’s right. “Almost certainly” because a decision to hear the cases required only four in agreement and votes are taken in secret. Scalia, Thomas and Alito were likely willing to hear the cases. Where was the fourth vote?
Now Roberts has done all possible to seal this country’s fate by once again siding with Obama. In today’s decision, dissenting Justice Antonin Scalia wrote of its mind-numbing idiocy (see pp. 27 – 29):
“The Court holds that when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act says ‘Exchange established by the State’ it means ‘Exchange established by the State or the Federal Government.’ That is of course quite absurd, and the Court’s 21 pages of explanation make it no less so… Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is ‘established by the State’… Under all the usual rules of interpretation, in short, the Government should lose this case. But normal rules of interpretation seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present Court: The Affordable Care Act must be saved.”
Kennedy is usually considered the swing vote, but would have been hard put to defy Roberts. The chief justice’s siding with the Left gave Kennedy free rein to exercise his naturally squishy tendencies. Roberts will almost certainly side again with the homosexual rights activists against the Constitution’s First Amendment protecting freedom of religion. As described earlier, the upcoming gay rights decision is not about gay rights at all. If successful it will declare the rights of one pressure group, homosexuals, superior to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution – a decision that will render the Constitution essentially irrelevant. Make no mistake: this has been the Left’s target all along, and the destruction of our Constitution will spell danger for all Americans, including gays. Liberal idiots, however, never get it.
The only remaining question is whether Roberts was a stealth appointment, i.e. a pretend conservative who revealed his true colors when it really counted, or if he was somehow compromised by this evil administration. The truth will likely never be known but is probably irrelevant anyway, as this man has repeatedly and unmistakably signaled his determination to betray those who appointed him, his political party and his country.
What a national disgrace.
Read more at Constitution.com
At least one American Senator is willing to speak truth to power.
Republican presidential contender Ted Cruz attacked Chief Justice John Roberts and other members of the Supreme Court in unusually harsh terms Thursday, referring to them as “rogue justices” and “robed Houdinis” after a 6-3 decision to uphold President Barack Obama’s health care law.
Cruz, a Texas senator, did not mention any current high court members by name in remarks on the Senate floor. But his speech included a thinly veiled reference to Roberts, part of the court majority that upheld tax credits that defray the cost of coverage for lower-income individuals nationwide.
“These justices are not behaving as umpires calling balls and strikes. They have joined a team,” the Texas lawmaker said.
At his Senate confirmation hearing a decade ago, Roberts said, “I will remember that it’s my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.”
Cruz also said the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist — whom Roberts succeeded — “would be filled with sorrow at what has become of the Supreme Court of the United States.”
…He said the decision was “judicial activism, plain and simple,” and said the court spoke for “nakedly political reasons … They are lawless, and they hide their prevarication in legalese.”
While Cruz did not explain his reference to “robed Houdinis,” Harry Houdini was an early 20th-century magician who specialized in escaping from jails, straitjackets, coffins and other seemingly inescapable surroundings…
During its original framing, the Constitution was intended to represent a straitjacket on the federal government.
The bounds have been slipped. The American Republic is no more.
Read more at Ted Cruz.
By: Cliff Kincaid
America’s Survival
Professor Gerald Horne, the black scholar who revealed Obama’s personal relationship with Communist Party operative Frank Marshall Davis, is speaking in detail on the record. Professor Horne says that while the relationship is noteworthy and should have been uncovered by the press, there is no evidence that Davis turned Obama “into some sort of Manchurian candidate.” Horne also discusses the Charleston massacre, the killer’s alleged international connections, the history of slavery in the U.S., and whether we need a new Congressional panel to investigate extremism in America, including the Communist Party.
In Memoriam
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