Obama judges have cleared the way for Trump judges to block completely all future Democrat initiatives

Like Harry Reid, the Left generally seem to be oblivious of the danger in setting a bad precedent.  They are incapable of thinking ahead. If Obama judges can regularly block Trump on shallow grounds -- see below -- Trump judges may decide in future that they can rule on frivolous grounds too. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Trump can appeal to SCOTUS for relief from lower courts but the majority of SCOTUS judges are now Trump judges too -- so would be unlikely to give Democrats any recourse.  All new legislating could grind to a halt, which would be a very good thing from a conservative viewpoint. Only Republican-sponsored legislation would get through the judiciary


Last fall, Chief Justice John Roberts asserted that “we do not have Obama judges” after President Donald Trump suggested that we did. While it is understandable that Roberts would like for the courts to be viewed as non-partisan, the fact of the matter is that President Trump is right: we do have Obama judges. We have seen that fact demonstrated as these judges have repeatedly sought to thwart the President’s agenda.

One area in which Obama judges have obstructed is immigration, and that obstruction started early in the Trump Administration. In April of 2017, William Orrick, a federal district judge in California, blocked Trump’s executive order defunding sanctuary cities. Last November, the uber-liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Administration must continue the unconstitutional Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which allows illegal immigrants who arrived as children to stay here. Two of the three judges who made the decision were Obama appointees: John Owens and Jacqueline Nguyen. (The third judge was a Clinton appointee.) That same month, Jon Tigar, a federal district judge in California, blocked Trump’s policy requiring asylum seekers to apply at ports of entry.

Three Obama judges have blocked the inclusion of a simple citizenship question in the 2020 census — even though such a question was asked in the past. These three judges are Jesse Furman, a federal district judge in New York, George Hazel, a federal district judge in Maryland, and Richard Seeborg, a federal district judge in California. In addition, earlier this week, Seeborg ruled against Trump’s policy of having asylum seekers wait in Mexico while their cases are considered by immigration courts.

Obama judges have also weighed in against Trump’s energy policies. For example, Brian Morris, a federal district judge in Montana, blocked construction of the Keystone XL pipeline last November. The Trump Administration has approved construction of the $8 billion pipeline, which would create thousands of jobs. Once complete, the pipeline could transport over 800,000 barrels of oil a day to the Gulf Coast for refining.

When not opposing pipelines, Obama judges can be expected to halt drilling. Rudolph Contreras, a federal district judge in Washington, D.C., blocked drilling on federal lands in Wyoming last month because the Administration “did not sufficiently consider climate change.” Soon thereafter, Sharon Gleason, a federal district judge in Alaska, reinstated Obama’s ban on offshore drilling in the Arctic Ocean and parts of the northern Atlantic Ocean last month.

Obama judges have also meddled in health care policy. In January, Wendy Beetlestone, a federal district judge in Pennsylvania, and Haywood Gilliam, a federal district judge in California, blocked Trump’s regulation designed to free religious businessowners from an Obamacare requirement that they pay for contraceptives that violate their beliefs.  James Boasberg, a federal district judge in Washington, D.C., has blocked two states from requiring able-bodied Medicaid recipients to work. In June of last year, Boasberg blocked Kentucky from implementing work requirements; and, last month, he blocked Arkansas’s Medicaid work requirements.

Fortunately, a little over two years into the Trump presidency, 96 judges have been confirmed, and more than 60 judicial nominees are awaiting confirmation. With the confirmation of Paul Matey to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals last month, Republican-appointed judges now make up a majority on that court, which has jurisdiction over Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Three other circuit courts are close to flipping from having a Democrat-appointed majority to having a Republican-appointed majority. Finally, not a moment too soon, Republican Senators voted last week to speed up the confirmation process for district court judges after years of Democrat Senators dragging out debate on nominees to waste time.

While these and other Obama judges seem to view it as their job to resist the duly-elected President, the good news is that Trump and Senate Republicans are making good progress at changing the composition of the courts. It’s about time.

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Democrats Still Kissing Sharpton's Ring

Several 2020 Dems showed up at Al's confab to foment racial division.

Several top Democrats flew into Manhattan over the weekend for the traditional airing of grievances at the “Reverend” Al Sharpton’s National Action Network convention. First, let’s take a moment to remember how Sharpton came to fame.

In 1987, Sharpton created the template for hate-crime hoaxes like Jussie Smollett’s when he stumped for 15-year-old Tawana Brawley in a rape case. She claimed six white men, including some police officers, raped and assaulted her. Sharpton made it into a larger tale about white racism, but a grand jury found “overwhelming evidence” that she fabricated the story. Meanwhile, Sharpton & Co. ended up being ordered to pay $345,000 for defamation of the prosecutor.

Sharpton is a philandering tax cheat and racial con artist who’s made a fortune extorting businesses and individuals over concocted racism, all while hosting radio and TV shows, and even advising Barack Obama in the White House.

In short, he exemplifies the person Booker T. Washington decried, when he wrote in 1911, “There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”

Yet 2020 Democrats are still kissing his ring. Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Beto O'Rourke, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, Julian Castro, Andrew Yang, and Pete Buttigieg all showed up for Sharpton’s confab.

Frontrunner Sanders declared, “It gives me no pleasure to tell you that we have a president today who is a racist, who is a sexist, who is a homophobe, who is a xenophobe, and who is a religious bigot. I wish I did not have to say that. But that is the damn truth. … During Donald Trump’s presidency we have seen a sharp rise in hate crimes and that rise comes as this country continues to be plagued by institutional racism and racial inequality.”

Warren peddled another hoax about the supposedly “stolen” gubernatorial election in Georgia and Republican election fraud in general: “Massive voter suppression prevented Stacey Abrams from becoming the rightful governor of Georgia. … They know that if all the votes are counted, we’ll win every time.” Democrats want certain constituents to believe that every Republican victory is due to fraud.

Socialist heartthrob Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez urged Democrats to pursue an “agenda of reparations” to go along with other unearned giveaways to win votes.

All in all, the Democrat remarks were befitting an event put on by a charlatan like Sharpton. They claim to be for unity when all they do is sow division.

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Democrats have a lot to be worried about

And lying may not get them out of it

“I think spying did occur.” That’s Attorney General William Barr’s bombshell assessment of allegations the government was conducting surveillance of the Trump campaign.

Democratic senators were taken aback by Barr’s testimony before the Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. They asked him to clarify his statement. Barr didn’t backtrack. “The question is whether it was adequately predicated,” Barr said, adding, “I have an obligation to make sure that government power is not abused.”

Democrats desperately want to keep the media narrative on the Mueller report. By obsessing over when, how and how much of the testimony behind it will be released, Democrats are trying to divert attention from an issue of far greater significance.

 “Congress is usually very concerned with intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies staying in their proper lane,” Barr stated matter-of-factly.

There are now serious questions about whether intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies were “staying in their proper lane.”

These are some of the questions Barr wants answers to:

Exactly how did the Russia hoax begin?

Who first claimed that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin?

Who ordered confidential informants contact members of the Trump campaign?

Did Halper — or other informants — provide the FBI with the pretext for a counterintelligence investigation and the wiretapping of a presidential campaign?

What other Americans were targets of electronic surveillance? Sen. Lindsey Graham has asked, “of the 1,950 [electronic surveillance information] collections on American citizens, how many of them involved presidential candidates, members of Congress from either party and if these conversations were unmasked, who made the request?”

Did people in the Obama administration listen in to these conversations? Was there a politicizing of the intelligence gathering processes?

There are serious concerns that the Russia collusion investigation is the result of misconduct at the highest levels of the FBI and Department of Justice.

House Intelligence Committee ranking member Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) is preparing to send eight criminal referrals to the Department of Justice concerning alleged misconduct from “Watergate wannabes” during the Trump-Russia investigation, including leaks of “highly classified material” and conspiracies to lie to Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court.

There’s the matter of confidential informant Stefan Halper, who contacted Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos. Halper has a history of working with intelligence agencies and infiltrating presidential campaigns.

There’s the matter of the Steele dossier, the opposition research document of unverified information (and disinformation) from Russian intelligence sources.

The dossier was paid for by the Clinton campaign, laundered through Obama State Department officials who gave it a thin sheen of veracity, and forwarded to the FBI. The FBI used that dossier to obtain warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court to wiretap the Trump campaign.

There’s the matter of the FBI using its counter-intelligence division to leak derogatory information that falsely implicated President Trump in the Russia collusion story.

There’s the matter of the wiretapping of American citizens whose identities were publicly revealed.

The special counsel did not investigate any of this. But Barr will.

The attorney general brought up the surveillance of Martin Luther King and antiwar groups in the Vietnam war era. “The generation I grew up in, which is the Vietnam War period, people were all concerned about spying on anti-war people and so forth by the government,” he said.

The misconduct by high-level officials at the Department of Justice and the FBI alleged in the Russia hoax are right out of the dirty tricks playbook the FBI and intelligence agencies used in the 1960s and 70s.

To refresh the memory of amnesiac Democrats, that playbook can be found in the final Senate Intelligence Committee’s report, “Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Book Two, Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans.”

What the committee wrote in 1976 is relevant today. “The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs … Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable. Unsavory and vicious tactics have been employed” (page 5).

If we go down the list of “unsavory and vicious tactics” employed in the Russia hoax we find them detailed in the Senate report.

Informants infiltrating and framing enemies? Check.

“The most pervasive surveillance technique has been the informant … used against peaceful, law-abiding groups” (page 13). The pretext of looking for hostile foreign actors triggered investigations of Americans “engaged in lawful political activity [who] have been subjected to informant coverage and intelligence scrutiny.” (pages 175-176)

Compiling dossiers on enemies? Check.

Every president from FDR to Nixon used the FBI to dig up dirt on political enemies, including journalists (page 227), Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders.

Leak derogatory information to the media to manipulate public opinion and the political process? Check.

The FBI “affected the processes by which American citizens make decisions. … it distorted and exaggerated facts, made use of the mass media, and attacked [those] … it considered threats” (page 226).

As Barr told senators, congressional Democrats used to be concerned about abuses by our security agencies.

Now Democrats are guilty of perpetrating one of those abuses: “Intelligence investigations … continued for excessively long periods in efforts to prove negatives.” (pages 180 -182)

When the FBI found no evidence a key advisor to Martin Luther King was a communist sympathizer, “Using a theory of ‘guilty until proven innocent,’ FBI headquarters directed that the investigation continue.”

Having failed to find any evidence of collusion or obstruction, Congressional Democrats are more determined than ever to pursue open-ended investigations to prove a negative.

My suggestion to Democrats: While you’re waiting for Barr to deliver the Mueller report to you, read the Senate Select Committee’s report from 1976.

That will show you what you should be worried about.

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Stacey Abrams Is Running on Stirring Up Racial Hostility

Speaking to a progressive group in Washington, Abrams declared that she won in 2018.  That has to come as news to everyone considering she was in Washington instead of the Governor’s Mansion last week.

Abrams then claimed that “black people faced hour-long lines — up to 4 hours — waiting to cast their ballots.” Her implication was that white voters did not face long lines.  Abrams has repeated done this since her loss.  In fact, white voters faced the same long lines as black voters.  The problems on Election Day transcended racial lines and had nothing to do with racial discrimination.

Abrams went on to clearly suggest the system was stacked against black voters and Republicans were doing it intentionally.  I have no doubt a lot of Democrats truly believe that.  The problem is this is a grievance fueled by distortions, misrepresentations, and lies.  It is Abrams’ path to 2022.  She intends to keep people as divided as possible with racial grievances.  If the state burns down in racial hostility, she will gladly serve as Governor of the ashes.

In fact, the pattern here is pretty interesting.  Of the 53,000 voters who got held up in the system for verifying voter registrations, 14,000 came from voter registration drives that Abrams conducted prior to the 2018 election.  Those registration forms were held because of wrong addresses, social security information, or other bad data.  Most importantly, the people supposedly affected have never come forward to fix their forms, which raises all sorts of questions about their legitimacy.

The voter lines on Election Day happened in counties controlled by Democrats.  Local government are responsible for conducting elections in Georgia and those counties failed to invest in new voting machines.  Republicans did not cause those long lines.  Additionally, some machines were secured in a federal facility as evidence in a federal court case filed by Democrats.  Even the laws Abrams complained about were laws enacted by Democrats in the late nineties.  Some of the Democrats who voted for those laws are still in the state legislature and Abrams herself made no effort to scrap those laws when she was in the legislature.

The pattern is actually pretty interesting.  Abrams, outside groups supporting Abrams, and Democrat officials created problems that caused long lines, delays in voter registration, purging of voter rolls, and rejection of absentee ballots.  Republicans, like Brian Kemp, simply complied with laws enacted by Democrats.  Once the problems occurred, Abrams and her acolytes then screamed loudly that Republicans were suppressing the vote in racially discriminatory manners.  It is no different than Wile E. Coyote complaining about falling in a hole he himself created to capture the Road Runner.

If Republicans had the audacity to raise these grievances, the media would have a field day with the hypocrisy.  But Abrams came close in 2018, closer than Beto O’Rourke against Ted Cruz in Texas.  So now Abrams is capitalizing on white liberal reporters’ guilt over failing to pay attention to her in 2018.  Those reporters who get outraged by the President exploiting grievances are giving her a pass.

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