Rush to Subvert Electoral College Hits Roadblock

Democrats in Maine and Nevada decline to join the National Popular Vote initiative.   

Ever since the 2017 inauguration, we’ve known leftists would do whatever they could to bring down Donald Trump’s presidency. Indeed, while most of the nation waited breathlessly for Robert Mueller to announce the results of his two-year, $30-million investigation into the now-debunked Trump/Russia collusion conspiracy, Democrats were working on a backup plan to keep future Republican nominees from ever setting foot into the White House.

Their plan is known as the National Popular Vote, an interstate compact that would essentially make the Electoral College null and void. In its early stages, the campaign didn’t garner much attention. But now that we’re facing the real possibility of ending the Electoral College, people seem to be waking up to this sleight-of-hand attempt to undermine the Constitution and ensure one-party rule in perpetuity.

The campaign had been picking up steam. Had. Recently, both Maine and Nevada dealt setbacks to the initiative, with Maine’s state House rejecting it in bipartisan fashion and Nevada Democrat Gov. Steve Sisolak vetoing his state’s measure. He even explained what many Americans already know to be true: The NPV compact would “diminish the role of smaller states like Nevada in national electoral contests and force Nevada’s electors to side with whoever wins the nationwide popular vote, rather than the candidate Nevadans choose.”

Still, as the editors at The Wall Street Journal write, “Fourteen states so far, along with the District of Columbia, have joined a compact to bypass the Electoral College by pledging their presidential electors to whichever candidate wins more ballots nationally.”

In other words, if the candidate your state chooses on Election Day falls short by one vote in the national tally, all of his electoral votes go to his opponent.

Even worse, the system would open up the floodgates to increased voter fraud and would do violence to both the wisdom of the Founders and the “one person, one vote” goal that Democrats talk about ad nauseam.

The initiative is misleading and subversive.

Tara Ross writes at The Daily Signal, “National Popular Vote’s compact would radically change the presidential election system, even as it pretends to leave America’s current state-based Electoral College untouched. National Popular Vote must be laughing all the way to the bank. It relies on the state-based aspects of the system when convenient, but then switches to reliance on a national tally when that’s convenient.”

Ross asks us to “consider what is happening on another front: California legislators are working to prevent President Donald Trump from appearing on their state ballot in 2020. Assuming Trump is the Republican nominee, how could he possibly win the national popular vote when he will be unable to win even a single vote from the largest state in the Union?”

Democrats who pride themselves on defending voting rights are essentially seeking to steal the votes from millions of Americans in order to support the popular-vote winner. And while no system is perfect, the Electoral College ensures that presidents represent the interests of a broad section of the American population, not merely the views of people living in big cities or on the coasts.

Under NPV, future candidates for president would never again set foot in Nevada, Iowa, New Mexico, or any other state between New York and California. After all, why go on the stump in 30 small states when all one needs is California, New York, and a few other big states to siphon the votes away from the rest of the citizenry?

Think about it: Under NPV, a candidate could theoretically lose 39 states and still win the presidency. That’s what founding father James Madison called “the tyranny of the majority.”

Undeterred, Oregon moved one step closer to becoming the 15th state to pass the national popular vote bill by sending it to the Democrat governor for a rubber stamp. This would bring the tally to 196 of the 270 votes needed to put the NPV into effect.

But there’s still a glimmer of hope that we can save the Electoral College. Nathaniel Rakich writes at FiveThirtyEight, “The compact could encounter other obstacles. Republicans could recapture full control of one (or more) of the states in the compact and repeal the National Popular Vote law. And if the compact began to look like it was really going to take effect, opponents would likely sue and claim that it is unconstitutional. So despite its successes in 2019, the National Popular Vote interstate compact remains a highly uncertain proposition in the long term.”

For now, it looks like the Electoral College will remain in place for the 2020 presidential election. After that, all bets are off. Progressives have chipped away at the Constitution for more than a century, but now they’re taking a sledgehammer to its foundation.

If thoughtful legislators don’t rise up to stop NPV from taking effect now, we may never have the means to stop it in the future.

SOURCE 

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Barr Asking Questions the Media Don't Want Asked
   
“I’m amused,” Attorney General William Barr told CBS News’ Jan Crawford, “by these people who make a living by disclosing classified information, including the names of intelligence operatives, wringing their hands about whether I’m going to be responsible in protecting intelligence sources and methods.”

He went on after further questions: “Well, the media reaction is strange. Normally the media would be interested in letting the sunshine in and finding out what the truth is. And usually the media doesn’t care that much about protecting intelligence sources and methods. But I do, and I will.”

You don’t have to have been “in the business” for Barr’s nearly 50 years to understand what he means. Just flash back 13 years to June 2006 and read The New York Times’ revelations about the Swift bank procedures.

The Belgian-based Swift manages foreign currency transfers, and after 9/11, the CIA and Treasury conducted data searches to spot — and, ultimately, stop — terrorist financing. The Times’ story conceded that this program was successful in obstructing terrorist activity, and it identified no abuses.

Top administration officials pleaded with The Times not to publish the story, and then-President George W. Bush said the publication was “disgraceful.” Times editor Bill Keller’s justification was that “the administration’s” — not the government’s but the administration’s — “extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data … is a matter of public interest.”

In other words, The Times didn’t care much about weakening America’s fight against terrorism by disclosing classified information and revealing intelligence sources and methods. It was more interested in letting the sunshine in on a program that, to the best of its knowledge, had infringed no one’s rights.

Some called for prosecution of The Times for violating the Espionage Act of 1917, which criminalizes the publication of classified information, signed by then-President Woodrow Wilson two months after the U.S. entered World War I. But as then-Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out in his 1998 book “Secrecy: The American Experience,” the Espionage Act is overbroad, and government tends to overclassify information, including even newspaper articles.

Accordingly, successive administrations up to and including George W. Bush’s have declined to prosecute news media for publishing stories, including leaks of classified information, that seem clearly forbidden by the words of Wilson’s Espionage Act.

Abandoning that precedent, perhaps surprisingly, was the administration of Barack Obama. He described himself as “a strong believer in the First Amendment” and dismissed “stories about us cracking down on whistleblowers or whatnot” as “a really small sample.”

Actually, they were an unprecedentedly large number. As James Risen, co-byliner on The Times’ original Swift story, wrote in December 2016, the Obama administration “has prosecuted nine cases involving whistleblowers and leakers, compared with only three by all previous administrations combined.”

Obama’s Justice Department subpoenaed Associated Press phone records — of AP trunk lines and 30 separate phones. It identified Fox News reporter James Rosen as a “co-conspirator” in an Espionage leak case. The supposedly liberal and pro-First Amendment Obama administration was actively pursuing what the Columbia Journalism Review called “a massive intrusion into newsgathering operations.”

It’s true that Obama did not emit as many tart words for the press in his eight years as president as Donald Trump has in his two and a half. But it’s also true that Trump has come nowhere near to challenging Obama’s record as the president most inclined to sic law enforcement on the press since Woodrow Wilson himself. Liberal Democrats aren’t necessarily the best friends of press freedom.

Nor are they, it seems, friends of a citizen’s right to privacy or a candidate’s right to seek public office without government surveillance. In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, when Barr made the point that the government “spying” had occurred on the Trump campaign, Democrats and the press expressed horror. You’re not supposed to say “spying,” apparently, even though Democrats and media like The Times have routinely used it as a conveniently short and understandable synonym for surveillance.

As Barr told Crawford, spying is appropriate if it’s “adequately predicated” — and it’s unclear whether the spying on the Trump campaign was. Certainly, the use of the partisan and unverified Steele dossier is not adequate.

Barr is old enough to remember when liberals did not take government legal or intelligence agencies’ word that spying on an administration’s opponents was justified and did not attack those who questioned it as unpatriotic.

He may be amused that such doings are self-righteously justified today, but it’s good that he’s willing to ask questions most of the media don’t want asked, to determine how the Obama law enforcement and intelligence agencies set about spying on the opposite party’s presidential campaign.

SOURCE 

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Backflip Biden
   
After two days of intense criticism, Joseph R. Biden Jr. reversed himself Thursday night on one of the issues most important to Democratic voters, saying he no longer supports a measure that bans federal funding for most abortions.

As recently as Wednesday, Mr. Biden’s campaign had said he supported the measure, known as the Hyde Amendment. His decision to change positions illustrates the intense pressure he faces as the presumed front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president.

[What is the Hyde Amendment? Here’s a look at what it does, and why the politics have shifted.]

His turnaround was abrupt, particularly because Mr. Biden has grappled for decades with his views on abortion rights. While he has said he supports Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that made abortion legal nationwide, he has opposed members of his own party on a number of abortion measures, ascribing his reluctance to his Roman Catholic faith.

In a speech at a gala hosted by the Democratic National Committee in Atlanta on Thursday night, Mr. Biden credited the change, in part, to recent efforts by Republicans to roll back abortion access in states including Georgia and across the country — especially in the South — calling them “extreme laws.”

SOURCE 

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Lies are normal for the Left

Joe Biden has claimed for DECADES that he marched during the civil rights movement.

And while this claim has been disputed ever since he first made it in 1987…he’s still making it. Even though he was told not to by his own people.

“When I marched in the civil rights movement, I did not march with a 12-point program,” Biden told a New Hampshire audience in 1987. “I marched with tens of thousands of others to change attitudes. And we changed attitudes.”

Nope, he didn’t.

Jake Tapper reminded his panel of what the New York Times had previously reported: “More than once, advisers had gently reminded Mr. Biden of the problem with this formulation: He had not actually marched during the civil rights movement. And more than once, Mr. Biden assured them he understood — and kept telling the story anyway.”

“That is really, really weird,” Tapper followed up with an awkward chuckle.

CNN Senior White House correspondent Jeff Zeleny replied: “When he gets very comfortable out on the stump speaking and other things, he has tended to embellish. He has tended to, you know, make things sound slightly rosier than they are.”

Yeeeeah. They’re taking it SO easy on him. He’s not embellishing. Biden is peddling a repeatedly disproven lie.

SOURCE 

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Who You Callin' Fascist?

R. Emmett Tyrrell
   
For over two years now, a peculiar combination of the media and the Democrats has been goading Donald Trump, always to painful effect — painful for both sides in this vituperative battle but particularly painful to the media and the Democrats. Not much good has come of it.

The media and the Democrats vilify Trump as a Hitler, a fascist, a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe and so forth. What is more, they do not approve of his hair. Interestingly, they do not disparage him as a Stalin, a Castro or a communist. Why do they not dip into their arsenal of dread phraseology to call him a Stalinist, a Castro or a communist? Is it because they still see these comrades as the good guys? Do they perceive communists as liberals without the red tape? What Henry Wallace once called liberals in a hurry.

Do the media and the Democrats harbor some lingering respect for these historic friends of the working class? Are they somewhat smitten by the bilge of the left? Do they even understand the term “fascist”? What would Sen. Chuck Schumer or Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi describe as Trump’s fascist traits? His songs? His martial music? What is his daily uniform? All I see is Donald’s sober business suit, always worn with a tie, a white shirt and wingtip shoes. How does this uniform differ from that of Schumer?

What is all this talk of fascism? Fascism generally features politicians who favor one-party dictatorship above democracy. Fascism favors a glorified sense of nationalism, often of race over the individual. In governance it favors centralized government and is heavily militaristic. Actually, when you compare fascism with communism, it is pretty much the same thing, though the German and Italian fascists always were smarter dressers, and their guns usually worked better. The communists even caught up with German racism eventually. Both the Germans and the Russians were anti-Semites.

What is more, now that the latest edition of Democrat is coming out as a socialist I guess they have all the more reason to stay clear of calling Trump a communist or a Stalin or a Castro. These Democrats are at least Stalinists in the economic sense, and they can always adopt the one-partyism and militarism later.

Yet to return to my original point about the effect these coarse terms are having on the public discourse, particularly for the media and the Democrats: All the media and the Democrats achieve, it seems to me, is enraging Trump, who resorts to his Twitter account and fires off a volley that leaves the media and the Democrats the worse for wear. The fact is that Trump is better at it than they are, and he usually amuses. The media and the Democrats never do. Hitler was not funny. Nor was communism. Donald’s “fake news” has caught on, and everyone knows who authored the term, along with “Crooked Hillary” and “Pocahontas” and “Crazy Bernie” and all the rest.

When the race really gets under way, what will Trump make of poor old Joe Biden, the gaffable one (I shall take credit for that one)? Biden was caught red-handed, as they say, filching from a speech by Neil Kinnock of Britain’s Labour Party. Kinnock is not even an American. Already Trump has dispatched Beto O'Rourke with his notice of the former congressman’s “hand movement.” “Is he crazy?” Trump said. He had only a few hours to come up with that one. Well done, Donald! Beto has yet to recover. There will be two dozen more Democratic candidates who bite the dust before Trump finishes off the final Democratic candidate. Will the candidate be the one from South Bend, or is there another would-be John F. Kennedy out there? It is going to be vastly amusing.

As I say, it is destructive language from both sides, but from one side it is at least amusing. I noticed this when I first met Trump in 2013. He is very entertaining. I can well imagine him, long after he is out of office, relaxing with friends and watching old tapes of himself up against the Republican gang in 2016, and then against Hillary, agelastic Hillary. She thought she could beat him, and after she lost she plotted with her friends in the intelligence community to run him out of office. She, a life-long liberal, threw in with certain chieftains of the FBI and the CIA (and presumably others) to turn these institutions against the American people in an election. They were the kind of liberals who were always haranguing us against the police power of the state. But they were the first in American history to turn the intelligence community against us. Clinton has been a malign force in American politics since her early days. I am glad she turned her back on Goldwaterism.

These next months will be interesting.

SOURCE 

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