Things have been going well for Republicans and President Trump. The Supreme Court has issued several favorable rulings, the Mueller investigation continues to go nowhere, and a Supreme Court justice announced his plans to retire, thereby opening the door for another judicial nomination.  While the stars appear to be aligning for the GOP, Republicans must stay focused, attentive, and hungry as the midterms approach. If Republicans become complacent, they will open a door that is hastily closing on the Democrats.

Complacency is dangerous and can lead to stagnation. Republicans need to press forward, to keep their eyes on the prize, and to focus on the things that matter most to Americans. Specifically, they should remind Americans of the country’s strong economy, the low unemployment rate (below 4% for first the time since 2000), better foreign relations and policy, a safer nation, solid judicial appointments, and the country’s re-emergence as a superpower around the world.

What Republicans should not do is engage in banter with the likes of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Maxine Waters. They should not participate in staged protests to score political points, encourage their followers to harass those who disagree with them, support an endless and expensive investigation that has failed to produce any evidence of wrongdoing by the president, threaten to impeach the president without proof of an impeachable offense, or threaten to block President Trump’s upcoming Supreme Court nomination before he is even named.

Recently, Chuck Schumer made his position clear regarding the upcoming Supreme Court vacancy.

Our Republican colleagues in the Senate should follow the rule they set in 2016: Not to consider a Supreme Court justice in an election year. … Millions of people are just months away from determining senators who should vote to confirm or reject the President’s nominee. And their voices deserve to be heard.

Mr. Schumer’s comparison appears to be misplaced. In 2016, Republicans decided not to consider a potential Supreme Court nominee because of the upcoming presidential election, not the midterm elections. This distinction is significant. Also, Mr. Schumer’s explicit bias against a potential conservative justice is nothing new. Specifically, in 2007, Schumer delivered a speech to the American Constitution Society, “a left-wing legal organization.”

On July 27, 2007, Schumer told his ACS audience:

How do we apply the lessons we learned from Roberts and Alito to be the next nominee, especially if – God forbid – there is another vacancy under this president? … [F]or the rest of this president’s term and if there is another Republican elected with the same selection criteria let me say this: We should reverse the presumption of confirmation. The Supreme Court is dangerously out of balance. We cannot afford to see Justice Stevens replaced by another Roberts, or Justice Ginsburg by another Alito.  Given the track record of this president and the experience of obfuscation at the hearings – with respect to the Supreme Court, at least – I will recommend to my colleagues that we should not confirm a Supreme Court nominee except in extraordinary circumstances.

This is not the only time that Mr. Schumer and Democrats have threatened to block Republican judicial nominees.  In 2006, Democrats tried to stop Justice Alito from making it to the Supreme Court by way of a Democratic-led filibuster. There are many other examples.

Considering their repeated efforts to block conservative judicial nominees, calls for Republicans to wait until after the midterms to appoint a new justice are nothing more than a delay tactic. It doesn’t really matter when this appointment takes place, because Mr. Schumer and many Democrats will likely object to any potential nominee – not because he is not qualified, but because he will likely be conservative (i.e., a strict constructionist of the Constitution).

The stars are aligning for Republicans. They must push forward and remind the American public of the successes obtained by President Trump and the Republican-led Congress to date. They should not get bogged down in smokescreens and façades, which are clear signs of desperation.

The American voters are tired of the lies. They want transparency, more money in their pockets, a strong economy, available jobs, strong leadership, and safety at home. Republicans, under President Trump, have delivered these things. This is the message they should hammer home as the midterms approach.

Mr. Hakim is a writer and a practicing attorney. His articles have been published in World Net Daily, American Thinker, the Sun-Sentinel, and other online publications.

https://thoughtfullyconservative.wordpress.com

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Several recent studies have revealed the increased number of public school and college students who are experiencing various forms of mental illness, such as depression, anxiety, attention deficit disorder, and others. A Wall Street Journal report claims as many as 25 percent in elite colleges are thus classified, and require accommodations for exam taking, seating preference, quiet private rooms, and comfort animals.

Steve Schlozman and Eliza Abdu-Glass, authors of The College Mental Health Crisis: Focus on Suicide, disclosed the thousands of suicides on college campuses each year, about two to three every day. Their emphasis is on students’ inadequate counseling, but we should ask why this generation, specifically, is so unstable and why the obvious signs have been ignored.

Is it possible to identify what could be so threatening?

Our educational system was restructured according to a radical, global, political ideology (Agenda 21) promoted by President Obama’s White House, Bill and Melinda Gates, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the Governors Association, and other supporters of a federal takeover of education for a Global Economy. Called the Common Core Standards, it was implemented by 46 states and D.C.

While we were deluged with Hillary Clinton’s oft-uttered phrase, “no child left behind,” David Coleman, the architect of the controversial, experimental (experimenting on our children!) curriculum, was executing an equal-outcome system, thereby eliminating the motivation and ambition of equal opportunity for individual excellence and achievement, each to his/her own interests and abilities. And, since all schools – public, private, parochial, home schools – were subject to the same textbooks and tests, and the governors handsomely rewarded, the Standards were assumed almost nationwide.

Result: the students have become guinea pigs to a seemingly untested Standard – with a specific purpose.

Flawed textbooks frustrate students

Seriously flawed mathematics and science standards, put into practice by mathematically- and scientifically-illiterate state boards of education, are frustrating, limiting, and damaging to the children who experience distress despite their efforts. Creative classic literature has been replaced by depressing, sexualized dystopian novels that oppress the spirit and exceed the children’s maturity level. Maria Calamia, licensed clinical social worker and psychotherapist, reported 200 to 300 percent more children experiencing serious stress and trauma due to the new curricula, citing numerous incidents of the better students’ crying, bedwetting, self-mutilating, and experiencing nightmares at their new mediocrity.

Non-fiction, informational texts and historical documents of a leftist agenda were also introduced, guaranteed to not only indoctrinate, but also to increase boredom and lessen interest and reading ability, with one report showing that 700,000 graduates per year cannot read their own diplomas. In 2016, more than 40 percent of four-year-college students (two million) did not earn their degree and dropped out; and only 26 percent of two-year students will earn their degree.

Result: frustrations, inabilities, inadequacies, distress, youthful hopes dashed; a generation betrayed, unable to cope and function independently in society.

Isolating students from close friendships

Parents were powerless to defy the system as they saw their children dealing with lessons of sexual deviancy that inspire change to their very natures, secular progressivism and Islamic indoctrination, and diminished coverage of Judeo-Christian values, American and European history. Having already been deprived of best friends, a buddy, a confidant, the troubled students are in the untenable position of being isolated at the same time that they are being molded to conform to a group-think mentality.

Result: psychological disconnectedness and susceptibility to neuroses.

Academia’s adoption of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States provides a leftist focus on the exploitation of the majority by the “elite white population.” White privilege has become the accusation du jour, creating a dangerous intolerance for whites, America’s foundational documents and principles. Several private schools nationwide have begun segregating their white students, encoding them to believe they have unfairly benefited from their whiteness at the expense of other races; students of color are receiving praise and rewards, not for excellence, but for their skin. Harvard is now being sued by Students for Fair Admissions for its nonacceptance of qualified Asians and white males, the same kind of discrimination and stereotyping used to disqualify Jewish applicants in the 1920s and 1930s. Additionally, white teachers are being challenged about their own cultural competence.

Result: divisiveness, a pervading but undefinable burden of guilt leading to the losses of pride, belief system, and self-assurance.

Intersectionality: politics of strife

The comparatively new concept, called “Intersectionality,” has been introduced. A student may claim victimhood, anger, blame, and failure on the basis of skin color, gender, religion, country of origin, heritage, and any combination or number thereof for more status.

Academia and the Left have now bestowed on every race, religion, heritage, and sexual orientation the psychological reasons for injury to their self-esteem, to stir hatred toward others or inwardly toward themselves. Whites have been classified as the enemy to the degree that white students are riddled with guilt and white educators are being singled out as “troublesome” and unqualified to teach students of another color.

Result: inadequacies on several levels, conflict and confusion from the clash between reality and new indoctrination.

If that were not enough, where parents rebelled against the schools, the schools may now institute Jeb Bush’s new kind of depersonalized training, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, that keeps the students at their computers, sans accommodations for higher or lower achievers or interaction with teachers and peers. Conversation, analysis and discussion are deterred, leading to group-think and loss of emotional ties, and the graduates earn watered-down degrees with little labor-market value.

Result: loneliness, joblessness, idleness, depression.

With best friendships discouraged and sexual differences devalued, textbooks teach that promiscuity is acceptable, that biological sex is meaningless and fluid, and that sex change is plausible.

Result: loss of identity from gender destruction.

The proverbial floor is being pulled out from under these children who are experiencing increased seclusion, fears and anxieties, without a friend or parental support system. The young and vulnerable are defenseless against the multi-pronged attacks issued by their teachers and professors. So, can anyone wonder that the suicide rate has increased, doubled for boys and tripled for girls?

Result: escape by self-destruction.

The unfolding civil war in America is a “Rainbow Conspiracy” of immigrants, Islamists, stoners, and New Agers to overwhelm the conservative coalition, take Congress in 2018, and impeach President Trump. Equally shocking, Colorado’s pro-pot RINO Senator Cory Gardner is refusing to support conservative candidates through the National Republican Senatorial Committee. This is a repeat of the Rainbow Nation South African strategy of forcing whites to flee or die.