Nancy Pelosi Is "Not Going to Get Into" Defending Religious Liberty?

by Tony Perkins: In a recent press conference, Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi refused to rule out engaging in religious tests for public office when looking to fill Justice Ginsburg’s vacant seat. When asked by a reporter if Article VI of the Constitution should apply to Supreme Court nominees, Pelosi gave the following reply:

“I’m not going to get into anybody’s interpretation of one thing or another,” she said. “The confirmation is the work of the Senate and I trust the judgment of our Democrats there to honor the Constitution.”

Pelosi’s unwillingness to stand up for a clear constitutional tenet reflects her party’s similar disregard for religious liberty. In recent days, as the list of leading Supreme Court candidates has narrowed, top Democrats have launched unfair and unconstitutional attacks against Amy Coney Barrett for her Catholic faith, suggesting that her beliefs may render her unfit for public office.

In a story from Yahoo News titled “Amy Coney Barrett: 5 things to know about the potential Supreme Court nominee,” two out of five points concerned Barrett’s religious beliefs and practices. Multiple outlets have run with the factually incorrect notion that Barrett’s parachurch organization, People of Praise, is an oppressive, misogynist group which inspired the religious zealots featured in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Andrew Seidel, a constitutional attorney and activist with the Freedom From Religion Foundation, stated that “There are serious and deep concerns about Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s affiliation with People of Praise,” and a viral tweet has even suggested that Barrett is opposed to the separation of church and state, despite the fact that Barrett has refuted this accusation on multiple occasions.

This past week is not the first time Barrett has been criticized for her convictions, as she faced similar attacks in 2017 prior to her confirmation to the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Among the most infamous attacks came from Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who told Barrett during a hearing that “the (Catholic) dogma lives loudly within you.”

While wildly inappropriate for a confirmation hearing, some observers thought this was the best compliment Feinstein could give Barrett. Indeed, what good is faith if it’s cabined away and irrelevant from the realities of life? Every day, people of faith strive to see their beliefs impact their neighbors, communities, and society for the better. Barrett is no different. At the same time, she has proven she will be a firm, fair-minded originalist if placed on the high court, deciding cases rather than making law.

Last night, during the Values Voter Summit, I sat down with Gayle Trotter and Bill Pascoe to discuss the impending Supreme Court nomination. Trotter, an attorney, columnist, and host of the Right in D.C. podcast, expressed her shock and disappointment that the Democrats have so clearly swallowed the idea of engaging in religious tests:

“That should be deeply insulting to all Americans. Whether you have faith or no faith, that is a core principle of our government. Under the First Amendment, under the Constitution, there is no religious test for Supreme Court justices. And apparently Senate Democrats forgot about that.”

Joining the VVS judicial panel with Trotter to discuss the Court, Bill Pascoe from Tea Party Patriots Action told me he found the attacks against Barrett “disturbing,” especially given the fact that the Left used to be “the greatest protectors of religious freedom in this country.”

Clearly, the Left is no longer interested in protecting religious freedom. Regardless of who the president nominates to the Supreme Court, conservatives must be ready to defend her against anti-religious bigotry and call out those who refuse to do the same. The intensity of a political or cultural battle is almost always in proportion to what is at stake in the outcome, and in this confirmation battle it is the constitutional rule of law in America. This will be an epic battle.
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Tony Perkins (@tperkins) is President of the Family Research Council . Article on Tony Perkins' Washington Update and written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

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Blue Lives Matter, More Deep State Corruption, Biden's Lid

by Gary Bauer, Contributing Author:: Countdown to Victory: 39 Days until Election Day!

Blue Lives Matter
"Say Her Name!" has become a mantra of the left as it attempts to exploit the tragic death of Breonna Taylor. Yet it is astonishing how little national media interest there is in the two Louisville police officers who were shot earlier this week. It's almost as if they never existed.

One officer, who is white, was shot in the hip, and thankfully managed to return to work yesterday. His name is Aubrey Gregory. The other officer, who is black, was shot in the stomach, right below his bullet-proof vest. He underwent surgery and remains in the hospital. His name is Robinson Desroches, and he joined the Louisville police force just last year.

How is it that this movement, which claims to care about black lives, has turned dozens of cities into hotbeds of anarchy? It is clearly not motivated by the concerns of black Americans, who overwhelmingly support the police.

But some radical activists within this movement couldn't care less about black police officers. If they did, they would be saying, "Remember Officer Robinson Desroches."

Some of the people saying the judicial system is racist and needs reform don't really mean that. If they did, they would be applauding Daniel Cameron, the black attorney general of Kentucky, who won his election by one of the largest margins in Kentucky history.

It is clear that if you are a black police officer or black attorney general who is doing your job and following the law, you are not really black as far as this radical movement is concerned.

So, it's not justice that they are after. No doubt there are some well-meaning protesters who are. But they are being used by powerful forces who seem intent on ripping America apart, almost as if they are trying to provoke a race war.

Sadly, there are many corporations, professional athletes, media commentators and Hollywood stars lending their prestige and power to magnify this movement that wants to destroy the country that has made them so successful. They are what the Soviets used to call "useful idiots."

They should be speaking up in defense of the police and the black attorney general of Kentucky.

Wake up, America, before it's too late!

More Deep State Corruption
The evidence of the Deep State's meddling in our elections and its corrupt attack against the presidency of Donald Trump is a national scandal bigger than Watergate!

Here's the latest revelation: Numerous FBI agents and analysts involved in the investigation of the Trump campaign took out professional liability insurance because they were so concerned about the potential illegality of their actions. We know this from newly disclosed text messages from the FBI.

On the very day CNN revealed that James Comey had briefed President-elect Trump about the existence of the Steele dossier, one agent sent this text, "[W]e all went and purchased professional liability insurance."

In the exchange, the agent notes that all the analysts and "All the folks at the Agency as well," also took out liability insurance because they were concerned that "[T]he new [attorney general] might have some questions. . . then yada yada yada . . . we all get screwed."

Additional text messages also reveal just how weak the Russian collusion case was and how much some agents regretted the FBI's actions.

There is considerable irony in all of this. The reason we know about these text messages is because Judge Emmet Sullivan refuses to sign off on the Justice Department's decision to drop the charges against Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. So, Flynn's attorneys are continuing to demand more documents, which Attorney General Barr is providing.

And there's more.

One FBI agent assigned to Robert Mueller's team, told Justice Department investigators that the case against Flynn was extraordinarily weak and that the Mueller investigation had a "get Trump attitude" because the Russia collusion investigation was a "dead end."

It is also being reported that Christopher Steele's "primary source" for the infamous dossier that propped up this hoax had previously been the subject of a counterintelligence investigation for his ties to Russian spies.

Biden's Lid
I hope this is not the case, but there seems to be something physically or mentally amiss with former Vice President Joe Biden. I don't say that with any glee. And I hope the people around him who love him will address it and get him some help.

Multiple times in recent weeks, Biden's campaign has announced what is called a "lid," which means Biden will not be doing any events that day. The frequency of these "lids" is shocking reporters who cover the campaign.

But we have all seen the many instances lately where Biden just cannot follow a line of thought and seems to be dazed and confused. He also appears at times unable to discern numbers, calling thousands "millions" and millions "billions."

For example, referring to Covid-19, Biden recently said, "It's estimated that 200 million people have died -- probably by the time I finish this talk." Anyone else would have immediately realized they had misspoken. There are only 330 million Americans. But Biden has repeatedly misstated figures related to the coronavirus.

Earlier this year, Biden said 150 million people died from gun violence. Well, between guns and covid, he's wiped out the entire country!

Most people don't know this, but Joe Biden has had two surgeries for brain aneurysms. He has repeatedly told the story about a surgeon telling him that he had less than a 50% of chance of being "completely normal."

Of course, Biden likes to tell stories about his three college degrees and a "moving but false war story."

People age in different ways, and age appears to be taking a serious toll on Joe Biden. A former White House stenographer who worked extensively with Biden during the Obama years said that the former vice president is "a different guy than he was" and "a shell of his former self."

Don't get me wrong. If you watched the Democrat debates, Biden held his own and at times showed flashes of his old self, able to repeat soundbites with some energy.

I suspect Biden will look fine during Tuesday's 90-minute presidential debate, assuming that is the only thing he does that day. But it is hard to believe that he is up to the rigors of the presidency, and we cannot afford a low-energy president.

This is not a low-energy world. Things are happening quickly. Vladimir Putin is not low energy. Xi Jinping is not low energy.

Values Voter Summit
The Values Voter Summit continues tonight at 8:00 PM ET.

American Values, my non-profit public policy organization, is a proud co-sponsor of the Values Voter Summit.

• Sen. Marsha Blackburn
• Franklin Graham
• Mark Meadows
• President Donald Trump
• And many more!

Day Of Atonement
Jews throughout the world will observe Yom Kippur at sunset this Sunday. Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the Jewish year and it is a solemn day. It is known as the Day of Atonement because it marks God's forgiveness of His chosen people for the sin of the golden calf.

Many Israelis remember the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Arab armies took advantage of the holiday to launch a surprise attack against Israel. After intense fighting throughout the month of October, Israel ultimately prevailed.

On this solemn day, please join Carol and me in praying for the peace of Jerusalem and for a peaceful Yom Kippur for our Jewish friends.
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Gary Bauer (@GaryLBauer)  is a conservative family values advocate and serves as president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families

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Tags:  Gary Bauer, American Values, Blue Lives Matter, More Deep State Corruption, Biden's Lid To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Trump Blasted For Opposing Infanticide

by Bill Donohue: Comments on reaction to President Trump’s “Born Alive” executive order.  President Trump announced this week that he will sign an executive order mandating that doctors attend to babies born alive, “no matter what the circumstances.” The proximate cause of his order is the practice of denying medical care to babies born alive as a result of a botched abortion.

The American people are overwhelmingly opposed to late-term abortions. What Trump plans to do goes beyond partial-birth abortion: His executive order is targeted at prohibiting infanticide. Astonishingly, he is being criticized in some quarters for doing so. Some maintain that infanticide is not a problem.
Dr. Kristyn Brandi is a board member of Physicians for Reproductive Health. She opposed a legislative effort earlier this year that would provide sanctions for doctors who refused to provide medical care for babies born alive following a botched abortion. “The bill maligns and vilifies providers and patients to push a false narrative about abortion later in pregnancy.”

“States can and do punish people for killing children who are born alive,” opines Florida State University law professor Mary Ziegler. Journalist Danielle Campoamor says it is a “lie” to say babies born alive after a failed abortion need protection, saying such a scenario is “incredibly unlikely.” Yet the Associated Press, which quotes critics of Trump’s proposed order, says there were “143 deaths between 2003 and 2014 involving infants born alive during attempted abortions.”

NARAL, the pro-abortion giant, even says, “The term ‘born alive’ is not a term rooted in science or reality (my italic).” Brett Samuels, writing for The Hill, says Trump’s order is a “solution to a nonexistent problem,” yet he undercuts his own position by offering a quote from Virginia Governor Ralph Northam. Northam has said that it is up to the mother to decide whether a baby born alive after a trimester abortion should receive medical care. He added that in the meantime, while she is figuring out what to do, “the infant would be kept comfortable.”

It is not just Northam who allows infanticide. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo does as well. In 2019, he removed all criminal penalties for medical personnel who intentionally allow an innocent baby to die.

Lying about infanticide is the natural progression of a mindset that justifies partial-birth abortion. Indeed, the lying became publicly known in 1997 when Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, admitted on national TV that he “lied through [his] teeth” when he “just went out there and spouted the party line” about how rare partial-birth abortion is.

All the health professionals, journalists, activists, and politicians who deny the reality of babies being born alive after a failed abortion need to tell that to Gianna Jessen. She survived an abortion. And so have many others. They should look at her in the face and say she has no business being alive.

In 1994, Mother Teresa said, “The greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion.” Now her acute observation has to be amended to include infanticide. Kudos to President Trump for opposing these barbaric acts.
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Bill Donohue (@CatholicLeague) is a sociologist and president of the Catholic League.

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5 Things to Know About Amy Coney Barrett

by Tyler O'Neil: President Donald Trump will nominate a Supreme Court justice to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Saturday. Amy Coney Barrett, a judge on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, is widely considered the frontrunner. When Trump was deliberating on whom he would nominate to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, the president said of Barrett, “I’m saving her for Ginsburg.” 

Barrett has an impressive resume and an inspiring story. She has articulated a powerful defense of originalism, the method of interpreting the Constitution according to its original public meaning.

1. Barrett’s background
Amy Coney Barrett graduated from Notre Dame Law School first in her class. She has taught there for decades — and continues to teach there while serving as a judge on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. After graduation, she clerked at the Supreme Court for Justice Antonin Scalia. As Princeton professor Robert P. George noted, even fellow clerks who disagreed with Barrett admired her intellect. Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman described her as “a brilliant lawyer.” 

As a Notre Dame graduate and professor, Barrett would break the Supreme Court law degree duopoly. All eight current justices hold degrees from one of two — and only two — law schools, Harvard and Yale.

Barrett and her husband have seven children, ranging in age from 5 to 16. They adopted two of them from Haiti. One of her sons also has “special needs.” As George wrote, “As someone who excelled as a legal scholar and reached the pinnacle of her profession as a Supreme Court Justice, Barrett would be an example to women hoping to combine a flourishing family life with a professional vocation.”

While Barrett has only served on the 7th Circuit for three years, that represents more experience than Barack Obama’s appointee, Justice Elena Kagan, who had never served as a judge prior to her nomination to the Supreme Court.

2. Judicial philosophy
Barrett may have clerked for Scalia, but is she an originalist? Last year, she spoke about her judicial philosophy at the Washington, D.C., branch of my alma mater, Hillsdale College. She rebuked the notion of a “living Constitution,” arguing that the judge’s role is not to twist the text of the Constitution to fit his or her police prescriptions but rather to interpret the law faithfully.

“If the judge is willing not to apply the law but to decide cases in a line, in accordance with personal preference rather than the law, then she’s not actually functioning as a judge at all. She’s functioning as a policymaker,” Barrett explained.

“And I would have had no interest in the job if the job was about policymaking and about making policy decisions,” the judge said. “My interest is in contributing to our tradition of judges upholding the rule of law.” 

Barrett also addressed the increasing political polarization centered on the Supreme Court.

“There’s a lot of talk these days about the courts being mere political institutions. But if we reduce the courts to mere politics, then why do we need them? We already have politicians. Courts are not arenas for politics. Courts are places where judges discharge the duty to uphold the rule of law,” she said.

Yet the judge insisted that the Supreme Court is not partisan, not divided along the lines of Republicans and Democrats.

“So I don’t think that five-four decisions or splits on courts are explicable by partisan commitments or by outcomes in particular cases. I think they’re explicable by starting points, by first-order commitments. So there are differences in ways that judges approach the enterprise of interpreting the Constitution,” Barrett explained.

“All judges think that the original meaning of the Constitution—its history, the way that it was understood by those who ratified it, who drafted it, the founding generation—all judges take that as a data point, as relevant,” she said. “Those who are committed to originalism treat it as determinative when the original meaning is discernible. Others just treat it as a data point, but one that would not necessarily control. So that will yield different outcomes in different cases.”

“Some judges approach the Constitution saying, ‘There are some constitutional commitments that we’re not going to back down from because the Constitution enshrines them. But with respect to those that the Constitution does not speak, we’re going to leave it to democratic majorities to work out.’ Others see the Constitution as having a more amorphous and evolving content and speaking to evolving values and majority—evolving values in ways that then democratic majorities don’t have the freedom to make choices,” the judge explained.

Barrett went on to cite Scalia, who “used to say that a judge who likes every result that she reaches is not a very good judge. In fact, she’s a very bad judge. The law simply does not align with a judge’s political preference or personal preference in every case.”

That sure sounds originalist to me.

3. Positions on abortion
Democrats are terrified that Trump’s replacement for Ginsburg would overturn Roe v. Wade (1973), the case in which the Supreme Court reinterpreted the Constitution, effectively amending the Constitution to include a right to abortion. Roe is bad law and should be overturned, but it is extremely important that the Court do so in a wise way. States should be able to make their own laws restricting abortion.

Barrett, a Roman Catholic, has expressed the Catholic doctrine that life begins at conception. However, she made it extremely clear that judges should rule based on the law, not their own personal religious or philosophical convictions.

Barrett has only served on the 7th Circuit for three years, but has a limited record on abortion cases.

In 2018, the court considered a challenge to an Indiana law requiring the burning or cremation of fetal remains after an abortion. The court denied a rehearing of the case and Barrett joined a dissent written by Judge Frank Easterbrook. Easterbrook addressed a separate provision of the law that had been struck down but was not at issue in the rehearing. The law banned abortions based on the race, sex, or disability of the unborn baby. Easterbrook said he doubted that the Constitution bars states from enacting laws to prevent prospective parents from “[u]sing abortion as a way to promote eugenic goals.”

Ultimately, the Supreme Court reversed the 7th Circuit’s opinion on the fetal remains law, upholding the state’s interest in mandating the proper disposal of aborted baby bodies. The justices did not weigh in on the non-discrimination policy, however.

Last year, Barrett joined a dissent when the 7th Circuit denied a rehearing in a case concerning another Indiana law. The court ruled that a law required young women to notify their parents before obtaining an abortion was unconstitutional. When the court refused to rehear the case, Barrett joined a dissent arguing that “[p]reventing a state statute from taking effect is a judicial act of extraordinary gravity in our federal structure.”

The Supreme Court later sent that case back to the lower courts in light of the ruling in June Medical Services v. Russo, which struck down a Louisiana law that requires abortionists to obtain admitting privileges at nearby hospitals.

Interestingly, Barrett’s abortion rulings have not always favored the pro-life side. Last year, she joined an opinion that upheld a Chicago ordinance barring pro-life sidewalk counselors from approaching women entering an abortion clinic. While Barrett likely sympathized with the sidewalk counselors, she upheld the law restraining them — putting the law ahead of her personal beliefs.

4. Other key cases
Barrett’s rulings in two other cases stand out.

In Kanter v. Barr (2019), she dissented when the 7th Circuit upheld the denial of gun rights from a convicted felon. The majority upheld the law denying Second Amendment rights to felons. Barrett dissented.

“Under federal law, those who’ve been convicted of a felony, any felony, lose their gun rights, so they can’t possess a gun thereafter,” Barrett explained. “So Kanter argued that he wasn’t a threat. This was his only conviction. It wasn’t a violent crime.”

She claimed it was unconstitutional to deny the man his Second Amendment rights. She did “a pretty deep dive into the history of the Second Amendment,” following the Supreme Court precedent in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008).

“That sounds kind of radical, to say felons can have firearms,” Barrett admitted. “But I think it’s because what the longstanding prohibitions were, and in fact, had been, even under federal law until more recently, was that violent felons couldn’t have firearms. … What the history showed me was that there’s been a longstanding practice of saying that those who pose a threat of violence to the community cannot have firearms.”

“Under federal law, those who’ve been convicted of a felony, any felony, lose their gun rights, so they can’t possess a gun thereafter,” Barrett explained. “So Kanter argued that he wasn’t a threat. This was his only conviction. It wasn’t a violent crime.”

She claimed it was unconstitutional to deny the man his Second Amendment rights. She did “a pretty deep dive into the history of the Second Amendment,” following the Supreme Court precedent in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008).

“That sounds kind of radical, to say felons can have firearms,” Barrett admitted. “But I think it’s because what the longstanding prohibitions were, and in fact, had been, even under federal law until more recently, was that violent felons couldn’t have firearms. … What the history showed me was that there’s been a longstanding practice of saying that those who pose a threat of violence to the community cannot have firearms.” 

Barrett also stood up for due process rights in a college Title IX sexual assault case. In Doe v. Purdue University (2019), she wrote for a three-judge panel that reinstituted an anonymous male student’s lawsuit against Purdue University. The student claimed that the university violated his due process rights and that its determination of his guilt had led to his expulsion from the Navy ROTC program, the loss of his scholarship, and the end of his plans to join the Navy.

The court ruled that he should be allowed to pursue his claim against Purdue. “Purdue’s process fell short of what even a high school must provide to a student facing a days-long suspension,” Barrett wrote.

5. “The dogma lives loudly”
During Barrett’s confirmation hearing for the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) notoriously imposed something of a religious test. “The dogma lives loudly within you,” Feinstein said, suggesting that Barrett’s religious convictions disqualified her from service on the federal bench.

After Ginsburg’s death, some on the Left have rushed to demonize Barrett. Washington Post book critic Ray Charles suggested that there was something nefarious to Barrett’s statement that she intends to pursue “the kingdom of God.” On the contrary, the “kingdom of God” is a common Christian phrase that has more to do with loving your neighbor as yourself than bringing about some kind of theocracy.

Similarly, Newsweek ran a story claiming that Barrett belonged to a secret cult-like organization that inspired Margaret Atwood’s book The Handmaid’s Tale. In truth, the pentecostal group to which Barrett belonged, People of Praise, had no connection with People of Hope, the group Atwood seized upon. Newsweek corrected the story but did not retract it.

If Trump nominates Barrett on Saturday, expect similarly baseless attacks on this nominee.
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Tyler O’Neil is the author of Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Follow him on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.

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The "Protecting Our Democracy Act"

by Mike Huckabee: Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats unveiled proposed legislation called the “Protecting Our Democracy Act,” which would severely curtail Presidential powers. Of course, they made no secret of the fact that it’s aimed specifically at President Trump, because long-term thinking is not their strong suit.

Boy, where to begin? First, the USA isn’t a democracy, it’s a representative republic, so they don’t even know what kind of government they’re a part of running. And I’ve always assumed they don’t know what the Constitution is, but it provides for three co-equal branches of the government. Congress doesn't have the power to limit the President’s powers, and if they try, he’ll either ignore them or take them to the Supreme Court, and guess how that will work out, especially a couple of months from now.

At least it’s a relief to know that for all the public gasbagging they did about this, they’re not actually dumb enough to vote on it and send it to the Senate, which they know would stomp it like a cockroach. Like virtually everything else the Democrats have done since taking over the House in 2018, it’s an empty piece of political theater designed solely to smear President Trump. Wouldn’t it have been nice if they’d taken the time and energy they wasted on this political mudball and instead put it into working with Trump and the Senate to pass another coronavirus relief bill? This is what Americans who are hurting from the shutdowns get for Halloween instead: a trick instead of a treat.

No Gas-Powered Cars In California California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order that sales of gas-powered cars will be banned in the state by 2035. Why didn’t he cut out the middleman and just order the climate to stop changing?

Put aside the fact that by 2035, Newsom will have been out of office for at least eight and hopefully 12 years. For those of us who are so old we remember when Jimmy Kimmel was funny, this grandiose order elicits an amusing sense of déjà vu.

For decades now, California’s liberal politicians have been belching out laws and policies, orders and incentives, all to try to force all the state’s residents into electric cars. Their utter cluelessness about how markets work have doomed all these efforts to humiliating failure. They’ve mandated that a certain percentage of cars sold had to be electric by a certain time, and forgot that first, consumers had to want to buy them. They’ve mandated that a certain number of EVs had to be on every car lot, which forced makers and dealers to waste space with cars that gathered dust as consumers purchased SUVs. They’ve offered rebates, carpool lanes and other incentives to try to bribe people to buy them.

They previously used their imagined godlike powers to declare that there would be 5 million EVs on the road in California by the end of the last decade. They reached 11% of that goal.

The fact is, Californians didn’t want electric cars. They do a LOT of driving, and they get stuck in loooooong traffic jams on overcrowded freeways (another reason to thank their liberal politicians), and they don’t want to be in a car that might die if they turn on the A/C and then have to find an outlet to charge it for hours just to get home.

As technology improved, electric cars became a bit more popular among a certain small subset of the market (in some circles, “EV” stands for “Electric Virtue-Signaler”), but they’re still impractical for the majority of drivers.

Newsom claims that by 2035, EVs will be superior to gas-powered cars. Maybe, maybe not. But will California’s politicians be superior to today’s, who can’t even provide enough juice to keep people from having to swelter in their homes with no lights or air conditioning? If not, what are they going to plug all those electric cars into?

James Taylor, president of the Heartland Foundation, called Newsom’s order a “classic example of politicians seeking short-term political gain by imposing impossible requirements on future residents and politicians.” He said they’d actually create an ecological catastrophe: to generate enough “green power” (which the state’s leftist leaders also are mandating), thousands of square miles of land would have to be clear-cut to install windmills and solar panels. Taylor added, “On the other hand, it will leave fewer forests for Newsom to mismanage and turn into overgrown fire hazards.”

Personally, my theory is that this is a plot by California liberals to stick every resident with an electric car and no electricity to charge it with, making it impossible for them to flee to Texas.

Not A New Story, And Not Surprising Actress Alyssa Milano, a Twitter leftwing activist and proponent of defunding the police, made embarrassing headlines after she reportedly called 911 about an “armed gunman” in black clothing on her property (she later claimed a neighbor called 911, but admitted her husband made a follow-up call to police.) She lives in an 8,000-square-foot, $2.5 million home in a gated community in an upscale area north of L.A.

The call elicited a massive police response, including a K-9 unit and a helicopter. They determined that the “armed gunman” was a teenager shooting at squirrels with an air rifle.

Milano praised the police, but blamed “rightwing trolls” for “targeting” her with ridicule, which you must admit would be extremely hard to resist doing.

Let it be known, though, that I am not singling her out for mockery. She did the right thing in calling the police. I think that by now, we should have all learned that if you see a young person in black clothing carrying what appears to be a rifle, the police should definitely be called in to deal with the situation in whatever numbers are needed. If that had happened in Portland, Minneapolis, Seattle, etc., a lot of black neighborhoods and businesses might not be smoking ruins today.

I also don’t think it’s fair to single her out for hypocrisy for denouncing the police while expecting them to pull out all the stops to protect her. In that regard, she’s simply like virtually every liberal celebrity in Hollywood, like the ones who want to defund the police and ban you from owning a gun to protect your family while they’re protected by armed bodyguards and battalions of cops at awards shows.

And it’s not even a new story. Back on June 2nd, I wrote about a certain former NBA and ESPN star who was tweeting “Burn it all down” about the Minneapolis riots, and just one day later, frantically tweeting about some “animals” trying to get into his gated community, then expressing relief when the cops showed up and repelled them.

But I will ask this: what’s with all these liberal celebrities living in “gated communities”? I thought walls were useless for providing security.

What We Need To See More Of From The Democrats When I write negative commentary about Democrats, I hope my readers know that I’m using that as a shorthand term to refer to certain current party leaders and office holders whom I believe are taking the country and their party in a very dangerous and radical direction. I’m not referring to working class Americans who have traditionally voted Democrat, many of whom are alarmed at the direction their party is heading. I’m also not referring to all Democrat politicians.

For instance, while Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and I might disagree on a number of issues, I find her to be a rare example of an open-minded liberal who’s willing to reach out and find common ground, as you can see in this interview with her from last weekend’s episode of “Huckabee” on TBN.

Of course, that refusal to treat anyone who disagrees with her as a monster and a pariah could be why she was the only presidential candidate who won delegates and still wasn’t asked to speak at the Democratic Convention.

Another rare Democrat is West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who scolded his fellow Democrats for attacking Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s Catholic religious faith just because she’s rumored to be a potential Trump SCOTUS nominee.

On Fox News, Manchin gave them a much-needed lesson about something fundamental to the American system:

“I’m Catholic, OK. And religion should not enter into it. It sure doesn’t with me…The freedom of religion is one of the basic rights we all have as an American citizen. Whether you’re Catholic, whether you’re Protestant, whether you’re Jewish, evangelical, whatever it may be, God bless you. You worship who you want and you worship how you want. You worship the same God. All of us do.”

That actually sounds like something you’d read here!

So in case you think I’m just being a political partisan when I criticize Democrats, remember that I’ve always said I think it’s good for America to have a robust two-party system. But that requires both sides to respect the free exchange of ideas and everyone’s right to hold their own views, even if you disagree with them. I might even be saying many more nice things about Democratic leaders if they’d have the guts to stand up and strongly denounce mob rule, character assassination and the attempt to influence elections by making threats.
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Who's Violating Norms These Days?

by Michael Barone: Norms, we are told, matter. Violating norms, recklessly disregarding norms -- these are charges on which President Donald Trump is often arraigned in the court of public opinion.

The indictment starts with his annoying habit of inventing insulting nicknames for his opponents and critics. You can add to the list as you will and perhaps come up with enough names for a 700-plus-word newspaper column.

But Trump hasn't been the only one disregarding norms of late. Consider the question of whether and when the president and Senate should fill the Supreme Court seat vacated by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The historic precedent is clear, as set out by National Review's Dan McLaughlin. When a vacancy occurs in a presidential year and the opposition party has a majority in the Senate, the president can nominate, but the nominee almost always isn't confirmed.

There have been 10 such vacancies in the history of the republic. Presidents made pre-Election Day nominations in six cases, but only one nominee was confirmed before the election. That was back in 1888.

Presidents whose parties had Senate majorities selected nominees in election years 19 times, and 17 of those nominees were confirmed. One of the two rejections came in 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson's nominee for chief justice, Abe Fortas, was blocked by a bipartisan filibuster.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell thus was following precedent when he blocked consideration of Barack Obama's nominee to fill Antonin Scalia's seat; he is also following precedent by promising a floor vote on Trump's nominee to fill Ginsburg's.

It is Democrats who are inconsistent here. If you think a president's nominee is entitled to a vote from an opposition Senate, then, a fortiori, you think she's entitled to a vote from his own party's Senate.

You may not think such flip-flopping violates a norm. But Democrats' threats to pack the Supreme Court with additional justices if they win the presidency and a Senate majority certainly does. 

The Supreme Court has had nine justices since 1869. After his landslide reelection, President Franklin Roosevelt tried to add up to six more in 1937. That was soundly rejected, even though his Democrats had a 76-16 majority in the Senate and a 334-88 majority in the House.

Another assault on institutional norms is Democrats' proposal to admit Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico as new states, though neither meets long-established requirements for new statehood, as I argued in The Washington Examiner last week.

A third is to somehow abolish the Electoral College on the grounds that it and the Senate are unfairly tilted in favor of Republicans. But, currently, each party holds 10 of the 20 Senate seats in the 10 largest-population states and 10 of the 20 Senate seats in the 10 smallest-population states. Not much of a tilt!

Similarly, any Electoral College tilt to Republicans is of short duration. In both 2004 and 2012, incumbent presidents were reelected with 51% of the popular vote. But that netted Democrat Barack Obama some 332 electoral votes and Republican George W. Bush only 286.

Hillary Clinton's edge in popular votes came from California. That's because, since 2000, for the first time since 1820, our largest-population state is voting far out of line with the national average.

That puts the party favored there at a disadvantage, just as a party whose votes are heavily clustered in relatively few congressional or legislative districts is at a disadvantage compared with a party whose votes are more evenly spread around.

Democrats can try to compensate for this by changing or evading the Constitution, but amendments must be approved by 38 state legislatures -- and 50 if they eliminate states' equal representation in the Senate.

A more practical and speedy response, and one that doesn't violate norms, is to modify your political positions and rhetoric. It may satisfy liberals' pride to pile up votes in California and the coastal Northeast by denouncing deplorables in the flyover states. But it's also feasible to win more votes there.

It was done in the 1990s. Bill Clinton twice carried nine of the 10 states touching on the Mississippi River, carrying their electoral votes 95-7. In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost eight of 10, 65-30.

Meanwhile, Brookings scholar Shadi Hamid in The Atlantic forecasts that if Trump wins, Democrats "will be unwilling, even unable, to accept the result ... resulting in more of the social unrest and street battles that cities including Portland, Oregon, and Seattle have seen in recent months." Doesn't post-election violence violate norms?
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Michael Barone is a Senior Political Analyst for the Washington Examiner and a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel  and co-author of The Almanac of American Politics Shared by Rasmussen Reports.

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All the Chips Are on the Table Now

by Patrick J. Buchanan: On the court issue, Democrats are exhibiting something akin to panic. They are warning that if a conservative jurist like Barrett is confirmed, Democrats may retaliate by “packing” the Supreme Court — increasing the number of justices from nine to 11 and installing two new liberals — if they win the presidency and Senate.

“As everyone knows, I made it clear that my first choice for the Supreme Court will make history as the first African American woman justice.”

So Joe Biden promised. Since the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, however, Biden has refused to produce a list of Black female judges and scholars whom he would consider for the now-vacant seat.

What is his problem?

Donald Trump had no such reluctance. In 2016, he listed a slew of candidates from among whom he promised to pick his justices. True to his word, Trump elevated federal appellate court judges Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

Since the Kavanaugh confirmation, Judge Amy Coney Barrett has been openly discussed as a potential Trump choice to succeed liberal icon Ginsburg. Why is Biden so reluctant to reveal some highly qualified Black female judges? His refusal suggests that the kind of high court judges that America wants is not the liberals’ issue. It is Trump’s issue.

The president will announce his choice Saturday, after the mourning period for Ginsburg is over. Mitch McConnell’s Senate is expected to confirm the new justice in late October.

With the court’s ideological balance at stake, the battle from now to Nov. 3 is thus for all the marbles: control of the House, the Senate, the presidency and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Rarely has there been an election in which the stakes were so high, the ideological gulf so great and the outcome in such doubt.

The polls show Biden ahead, but Democrats are visibly nervous. Of greatest concern — the possibility that, Tuesday night, Biden, in the first debate, with his verbal and mental lapses occurring frequently now, could kick it all away in front of millions of voters.

On the court issue, Democrats are exhibiting something akin to panic. They are warning that if a conservative jurist like Barrett is confirmed, Democrats may retaliate by “packing” the Supreme Court — increasing the number of justices from nine to 11 and installing two new liberals — if they win the presidency and Senate.

If a Scalia constitutionalist is nominated and confirmed this year, says Sen. Chuck Schumer, “nothing is off the table next year.”

Other Democrats are threatening to pack the Senate by granting statehood to D.C. and Puerto Rico. This would add four new Democratic Senators and formally convert the United States into a bilingual nation.

Nancy Pelosi has threatened a new impeachment of the president if he appoints a new justice to fill Ginsburg’s seat. Yet, this is what Article II of the Constitution directs Trump to do.

Activists are talking about “burning down” the system, and given what we have witnessed in Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis and Louisville, the BLM crowd and its media camp followers should be taken seriously.

Should Democrats win the Senate and White House, they will face one obstacle to imposing the Biden-Bernie-Socialist-AOC agenda on the nation. Only the filibuster, the ability of a Senate minority, through extended debate, to delay, and occasionally frustrate, the will of the majority, would stand in the way of their turning their radical agenda into law, as LBJ did with his massive majorities in 1965.

This is no idle threat. Even Barack Obama is calling for abolition of the filibuster, stripping a Republican Senate minority of its last weapon of resistance in the world’s greatest deliberative body.

Another danger facing the GOP is its demographic demise if it fails to control immigration.

Currently, white folks, who produce the vast majority of GOP votes, are 60% of the nation. The Black population is 12-13%, Hispanics 18%, Asian Americans 7%.

The GOP demographic crisis: The white population is steadily diminishing as a share of the electorate. Hispanics and Asians, who vote 2-1 Democratic in presidential elections, are the fastest-growing minorities and are being fed by the largest streams of migration.

A few years hence, the GOP will face the fate it failed to avert in California. Once the Golden State was Nixon and Reagan country, as those two Republicans carried California on all seven presidential tickets on which they ran from 1952 to 1984.

Moreover, former red states such as Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona are now swing states, and Texas is trending that way.

Democrats, too, have a white folks problem.

At the party’s apex are Speaker Pelosi and Majority Whip Steny Hoyer, both octogenarian white folks. Senate Minority leader Schumer and Minority Whip Dick Durbin are white septuagenarians.

Presidential nominee Joe Biden is a 77-year-old white man who would be older than our oldest president, Ronald Reagan, was the day he left office.

The last white man appointed to the Supreme Court by a Democratic president was Stephen Breyer back in 1994. At 82, he is now the oldest justice serving.

The days of white liberals dominating the rising party of America’s people of color may be over this decade.
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Patrick Buchanan (@PatrickBuchanan) is currently a blogger, conservative columnist, political analyst, chairman of The American Cause foundation and an editor of The American Conservative. He has been a senior adviser to three Presidents, a two-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, and was the presidential nominee of the Reform Party in 2000.

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Trump Surges, Biden Hides

by Robert Romano: Former Vice President Joe Biden must believe he is safely in the lead against President Donald Trump in the 2020 election, as his campaign took the day off on Sept. 24 with no appearances by either Biden or his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) — the ninth such break this month alone.

Does Biden think he can win without aggressively campaigning?

Biden could be making the same mistake Hillary Clinton made in 2016, when a complacent Democratic machine watched Trump shock the world by winning in the Rust Belt state of Michigan — where Trafalgar Group shows President Trump still leading Biden in its latest poll conducted Sept. 20-Sept. 22, 46.7 percent to 46 percent.

Trafalgar chief pollster Robert Cahaly called it a “razor thin Trump lead” in the state in a tweet, with the first presidential debate still ahead on Sept. 29.

Meanwhile, in Florida, the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted Sept. 15-Sept. 20, finds President Trump has jumped to a four-point lead among likely voters, 51 percent to 47 percent, with the President getting a major boost on the economy.

In the ABC News/Washington Post poll in Florida, Trump leads Biden on trust on handling the economy, 52 percent to 41 percent.

Which, is little wonder with labor markets recovering so rapidly from their April lows amid the COVID-19 state-led lockdowns — a record 13.8 million jobs have been recovered since then according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ household survey.

And in the past month, the Department of Labor reports an unadjusted 1.5 million more Americans have come off of unemployment benefits, which will most certainly show another huge jobs gain in the employment report due out the first week of October — the last such monthly report before the election.

As the data continues to pour in, President Trump will have a compelling story to tell about how his administration fought to save lives in the pandemic, and now is moving to successfully and safely reopen the economy.

In the meantime, Rasmussen Reports’ latest daily presidential tracking poll shows President Trump with a 52 percent approval rating — with the past month showing the highest ratings of his presidency coming out of the party nominating conventions.

Adding to Democratic apprehension about Florida, the Republican Party is experiencing a surge in voter registration with a record 58,000 newly registered voters in the state in the month of August alone — reducing the Democrats’ traditional registration advantage. The secret to the campaign’s success? Door-knocking. While Democrats continue to run a virtual campaign fearful of the pandemic, Republicans are depending on in-person tactics and showing real success with its voter registration uptick.

That’s called momentum.

Taken together with the strong showing by the incumbent in daily tracking and the rapidly recovering economy, the battleground state polls in Florida and Michigan have got to be worrying for the Biden campaign.

It calls into question the risky strategy of the Biden campaign of locking up their candidate, cutting down the number of appearances and riskiest of all, depending on mail-in balloting to get over the top. Turnout could be a real problem for the challenger.

A couple months ago the Biden campaign was assured by national polls it was leading by double digits and coasting to an easy victory in November, not unlike in 2016, when the Clinton campaign assumed it was safely ahead.

So much for that. Now Biden appears to be trailing in the crucial states of Florida and Michigan with more than a month to go.

Here, the President’s reelection campaign is showing not only resilience, but dominance, as the energetic Trump steps up his campaign appearances, bringing his case for four more years to the American people.

Now, as the nation’s attention turns toward the debates, the question will be whether Biden can build enthusiasm for his campaign — or remind the country why he’s been hiding in his basement this whole time.
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Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government.

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Presidential

. . . Looking at sleepy Joe Biden and the ever so energetic Trump, It’s a clear choice who’s more presidential.
Editorial Caroon by AF "Tony" Branco

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Sweet Grape Victory of 2020

by Paul Jacob, Contributing Author: Raise a long-stemmed glass to the wineries of Minnesota. And to the Institute for Justice, which fought for their rights in court.

Minnesota wine makers may now make wine with whatever grapes they like! They may make wines that were illegal for them to make before.

Early in September, a federal judge struck down a 1980 Minnesota law which prevented Minnesota wineries from crushing grapes into wine unless most of the grapes being used had been grown in Minnesota. Winemakers were thus thwarted from producing popular varietals requiring grapes that can’t be grown in the state. Temporary exemptions from the law were possible but could not be counted on.

Judge Wilhelmina Wright’s ruling may well inspire challenges to similar prohibitions in other states. You know you’re a fifth of the way into the twenty-first century when dramatic modernistic advancements like letting wineries buy whatever grapes they wish have become possible.

You may be thinking: “Huh? I had no idea that wine makers in Minnesota were not allowed to buy grapes from other states. That’s painfully stupid!”

Of course, that is probably not the opinion of the proponents of the law. At least some Minnesota grape growers no doubt believe that persuading lawmakers to block out-of-state grapes was a smart move.

But is it really so very wise to hobble business competitors for the sake of short-term advantages regardless of the long-term costs to the freedom — not to mention the palates — of all?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Paul Jacob (@Common_Sense_PJ) is author of Common Sense which provides daily commentary about the issues impacting America and about the citizens who are doing something about them. He is also President of the Liberty Initiative Fund (LIFe) as well as Citizens in Charge Foundation. Jacob is a contributing author on the ARRA News Service.

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Time to Hold the PLO Accountable for its Crimes

by Caroline Glick: Earlier this month, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government announced that PLO Executive Committee Chairman Saeb Erekat has been hired as a senior fellow for the school’s Future of Diplomacy Project for the 2020-2021 school year.

This week, former senior Justice Department official, attorney Neal Sher sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General William Barr and Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf asking that Erekat be denied a visa to the United States.

Sher noted that Erekat’s long record of supporting terrorism as a senior PLO official includes numerous acts of inciting, facilitating and soliciting terrorism. According to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Act, Sher argued, Erekat is legally barred from setting foot on U.S. soil.

The timing of Sher’s letter was noteworthy.

Twenty years ago this week, the PLO’s Palestinian Authority launched its terror war against Israel. It was two months after Erekat’s longtime boss PLO chief and PA Chairman Yassir Arafat rejected Israel’s offer of peace and Palestinian statehood at the Camp David peace summit.

Arafat called the terror war “the al-Aqsa Intifada.” The name sent a signal to the Islamic world that the Palestinians were the advance guards of the global jihad.

Despite the PA’s acts of slaughter and incitement, despite its complete abrogation of all of its commitments to live at peace with Israel, and its embrace of the global jihad, no one disavowed the PA. Israel continued to seek peace through appeasement. Washington continued to treat PA leaders as credible peacemakers even as they oversaw the massacre of hundreds of innocent Israelis. So did the wider international community.

Then prime minister Ehud Barak learned neither from Arafat’s cold shoulder at Camp David nor from the terror offensive he launched in September. Barak continued to beg Arafat for peace even as the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv grew red with the blood of Israelis. At Taba, Barak’s negotiators made even more lavish offers for Israeli surrenders of land for peace than the offer he made at Camp David.

And the death toll continued to rise.

Three months after the Palestinians began their war of jihad, then president Bill Clinton announced his “vision for peace.” Clinton’s “vision” included the first official American endorsement of Palestinian statehood.

Even after the administrations changed in Washington and Jerusalem the Bush administration and the Sharon government maintained their slavish devotion to the fiction that the PLO was Israel’s peace partner.

When, after the September 11, 2001 then president George W. Bush declared war on “global terrorism,” he made a carve out for Palestinian terrorism. Two months later, his secretary of state Colin Powell declared that the administration supported Palestinian statehood.

In 2007 and 2008, Bush’s secretary of state Condoleezza Rice devoted near manic efforts to achieving a peace deal between Israel and the PA. Her favored method for achieving progress was not to compel the PA to end its support for terrorism and Israel’s destruction. It was to pressure Israel to make concessions to the PA.

In 2008, then Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert made Arafat’s heir Mahmoud Abbas an offer of peace even more generous than Barak’s offer at Taba. And like Arafat before him, Abbas didn’t even bother to acknowledge Olmert’s offer. Instead, he stepped up his political war against Israel and expanded the PA’s financial support for terrorists.

Throughout his eight years in office Barak Obama made supporting the Palestinians and their unrelenting war against Israel his highest goal. His method for advancing it was applying unrelenting pressure on Israel and showering it with abuse, threats and condemnations.

The PA, needless to say, returned the favor by spurning Obama’s peace plan.

What stood behind this delusional response to Palestinian aggression? Why did the U.S. and Israel continue to lavish the PA with financial, political and military support instead of blackballing it and shutting it down?

The main reason was because for the past generation, the establishment view of the Middle East was that there could be no resolution of the Arab world’s conflict with Israel until the Palestinian conflict with Israel was resolved. And the way to resolve that conflict wasn’t by forcing the Palestinians to choose leaders that supported coexistence with Israel. It was by forcing Israel to appease the PLO through land surrenders. In other words, the idea that all the who’s who from Washington to Paris, to Berlin to Tel Aviv ascribed to was that Israel was the side that needed to change for there to be peace – not the Palestinians.

Among the Israelis – who were the direct victims of Palestinian aggression — the majority of the public realized by 2000 that the peace process with the PLO was fake and that Israel needed to disavow it and set out on a new course. But despite the ever-rising casualty count and the unprecedented campaign of delegitimization led by the PLO and joined by the EU and the UN against Israel, Israel maintained its allegiance to the phony peace process and continued to support its enemy and phony peace partner because two powerful constituencies insisted on it.

The Israeli left, including the media, and Israel’s security brass refused to accept the implications of the PLO’s command of the terror war. They would not reconcile themselves to the reality literally exploding all around them, that the PLO and its PA were Israel’s enemy, not its peace partner because they couldn’t imagine a situation in which the Palestinian cities and villages run by the PA would be run by anyone else.

There were many reasons for this willful delusion. Some feared Palestinian demography. Some were driven by hatred of the Israeli right. Many – from the far left to the IDF General Staff to the top echelons of the Israel Security Agency to the Foreign Ministry — were simply unable to admit that they had been mistaken in their support for the peace process with the PLO. For these reasons and others, Israel’s security establishment and political left refused to get their heads around the basic fact that even if there was no good alternative to the PLO-run PA, that didn’t make the PLO-run PA a viable alternative. The PLO-run PA is a hostile, corrupt, corrupting and dangerous enemy. And it will never, ever change.

Mahmoud Abbas regularly threatened to shut down the PA unless he received further billions of dollars in funding from the EU and the U.S. and tax revenues from Israel. Abbas felt comfortable repeating his threat because he knew that he was the irreplaceable man and that his regime was the irreplaceable regime. Without them, after all, the “experts” from Brussels to Boston to Haifa insisted, there could never be peace anywhere in the Middle East. Obviously, the world powers had to continue propping up the PA. Obviously, the IDF General Staff had to insist that Israel’s tax authority continue collecting taxes for the PA and transferring the revenues to Abbas’s bank account.

The peace agreements Israel signed with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain last week at the White House, and the Arab League’s rejection of the PLO’s demand to condemn the deals demonstrate the idiocy of the notion that the Palestinians are now, or ever have been the key to Middle East peace. Far from being the key to peace, the PLO is irrelevant to peace. The moment the leaders of the UAE and Bahrain decided that making peace with Israel served their interests, they made peace with Israel. The Arab League’s refusal to condemn them points to the depth and breadth of support for relations with Israel among Arab leaders.

This brings us back to Sher’s letter about Erekat. There is no question that Erekat has played a key role in facilitating Palestinian terrorism for more than a quarter century. As recently as June he falsely accused Israel of “executing” an innocent Palestinian. Erekat’s cousin Ahmad Erakat was killed by Israeli forces at a checkpoint south of Jerusalem after he tried to kill them by ramming them with his vehicle. His terrorist act was captured on film.

Erekat’s most notorious and successful effort to spread blood libels against Israel occurred in the wake of the bloody battle in Jenin during Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002. Jenin had been the terror capital of Judea and Samaria. In March 2002, numerous suicide bombers were deployed to Israeli population centers from the city.

In the course of the battle, IDF reservists fought terrorists everywhere. All the buildings in the area had been boobytrapped. 23 IDF soldiers were killed. 53 Palestinians, most of whom were armed terrorists were also killed.

But just as Erekat portrayed his would-be killer cousin as a martyr so he misrepresented the battle in Jenin. In the wake of the battle he appeared on CNN three times and accused Israel of massacring more than 500 innocent Palestinian men, women and children. He likened the battle to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the Israelis to Nazis and the Palestinian terrorists to Jewish Holocaust victims.

A few months after President Donald Trump entered office, Erekat received a lung transplant in the U.S. America’s lifesaving hospitality didn’t provoke any gratitude, or even politeness from Erekat, however. Since recuperating, Erekat has repeatedly condemned and insulted Trump and his senior advisors Jared Kushner, Ambassador David Friedman, former chief negotiator Jason Greenblatt and former Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley. He wrote an oped in the New York Times insisting that the U.S. has no right to mediate negotiations between Israel and the PLO.

Despite his long and bloody record of lies, and incitement and facilitation of terrorism, Erekat has never been called to account for his actions, much less paid a price for them. Now, perhaps, when it is clear to all that the PLO is irrelevant to peace, the time has finally arrived when he and his PLO colleagues will be treated like the malign terrorists and liars that they are and have always been.

Sher is right. There is no reason to grant Erekat a U.S. visa so he can come to Harvard and share his blood libels and his incitement of terrorism with American students.

And there is no reason to stop with him. America and Israel should both end the joke of PLO moderation. There is no reason for Israel to continue collecting taxes for the PA or transferring the revenues to the PA, which exists to eliminate the Jewish state. There is no reason for the Israeli government to shield the PA from law suits from terror victims. All the taxes that Israel has collected for the PA rightly belong to the 15,000 Israeli families that have been shattered by its terrorist aggression.

The PLO era officially began at the White House on September 13, 1993. It officially ended at the White House on September 15, 2020. It is time for Israel, the U.S. and the rest of the world to recognize this truth and act accordingly.
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Caroline Glick is the Senior Contributing Editor of Israel Hayom and the Director of the David Horowitz Freedom Center's Israel Security Project. For more information on Ms. Glick's work, visit carolineglick.com.

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Democrats Want Trump Not to Nominate Ginsburg’s Successor. Cue the Laughter!

by Larry Elder: Consider this mind experiment. It is September 2016. Democrats control the United States Senate, 54-44, with two independents who caucus with the Democrats. In the upcoming election, 24 Democratic seats are in play, versus 10 Republican seats. Therefore, the Democrats’ continued control over the Senate is anything but a foregone conclusion. The same, of course, is true about the presidency.

Now imagine that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas suddenly dies some 50 days before the election, providing President Barack Obama with an opportunity to dramatically redirect the court by replacing a “conservative” justice with a “progressive.”

But NPR’s Supreme Court reporter, Nina Totenberg, reports that, on Thomas’ deathbed, he told a family member, “My fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.” Citing “the principle of fairness,” Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell requests that Obama not submit a successor nominee and that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer not hold confirmation hearings until after the election.

Cue the laughter.

This sounds like a story once told about actor Spencer Tracy. Asked why his name received top billing for “Adam’s Rib” over his frequent co-star, Katharine Hepburn, Tracy replied, “This is a movie, not a (expletive deleted) lifeboat.” This is the Supreme Court, not a suggestion box.

Now, in reality, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg just died. The notion that Democrats, if they controlled the White House and the Senate, would not seek to immediately replace her before the election is absolutely, positively hysterical. This is a party whose Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, stood on the floor in the Senate in the thick of Obama’s 2012 race for reelection and knowingly, falsely accused Republican opponent Mitt Romney of not paying taxes for a decade. After retiring from the Senate, Reid admitted he lied. Asked whether he regretted lying about Romney, Reid said, “Well … Romney didn’t win, did he?”

In 2013, Democrats controlled the Senate, and they ended use of the filibuster, a practice allowed for 100 years for purposes of confirmation hearings on all executive branch nominees and for most judicial nominees. At the time, McConnell warned: “The majority leader promised, he promised over and over again, that he wouldn’t break the rules of the Senate in order to change them. If you want to play games and set yet another precedent that you’ll no doubt come to regret, I say to my friends on the other side of the aisle, you’ll regret this — and you may regret it a lot sooner than you think.”

True, in 2016, when Justice Antonin Scalia died, Senate Majority Leader McConnell never gave Obama’s nominee a hearing. Some Republicans pointed to the so-called (Joe) Biden rule that supposedly says Supreme Court nominations should not be considered during a presidential campaign year. But Biden quickly denied such a rule: “So now I hear all this talk about the Biden rule. It’s frankly ridiculous. There is no Biden rule. It doesn’t exist. There’s only one rule I ever followed on the Judiciary Committee; that was the Constitution’s clear rule of advice and consent. Article 2 of the Constitution clearly states, whenever there is a vacancy in one of the courts created by the Constitution itself, the Supreme Court of the United States, the president shall — not may — the president shall appoint someone to fill the vacancy with the advice and consent of the United States Senate. And advice and consent includes consulting and voting.”

Is there any doubt, had the Democrats controlled the 2016 Senate, this movie turns out differently? Consider the pep talk then-CNN political analyst Roland Martin gave Obama, frustrated over Republican attempts to block his appellate court nominees. In a 2010 article titled “Time for Obama To Go ‘Gangsta’ on GOP,” Martin offered the following advice:

“For me, I’m sick and tired of Democrats having power and being unwilling to use it. I’ve always respected Republicans when they had power because they were willing to use it and maybe apologize later. …

“President (Obama) needs to show his toughness and just do it. Forget the threats. The actions … will continue if President Obama allows them to run roughshod over him. When you’re the top dog, you do what you have to do to govern. …

“Obama’

s critics keep blasting him for Chicago-style politics. So, fine. Channel your inner Al Capone and go gangsta against your foes. Let ’em know that if they aren’t with you, they are against you, and will pay the price.”

Finally, here is Ginsburg in 2016 on whether a Supreme Court vacancy should be filled during an election year: “That’s their job. There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the president stops being president in his last year.” A few months later, she said, “Eight is not a good number for a collegial body that sometimes disagrees.”

We agree. Let’s grant her that wish.
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Larry Elder (@larryelder) is a best-selling author and radio talk-show host, an American lawyer, writer and radio and television personality who is also known as the "Sage From South Central." To find out more about Larry Elder. Visit his website at LarryElder.com for list of other articles.

The Attacks on Judge Barrett's Faith Are Despicable and Must be Condemned

by Tony Perkins: With President Trump scheduled to announce his Supreme Court nominee by the end of the week, the Left's opposition playbook for the prospective nominee is being opened for all to see. One of the leading contenders for the court vacancy is Amy Coney Barrett, currently serving as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. She is a favorite among many religious conservatives, and given the growing attacks on religious expression, fervently desire to put a strong originalist justice on the court. Barrett has been attacked by the Left not only for her position on judicial interpretation but for something far more personal -- and protected -- under that same Constitution: her Christian, specifically Catholic, faith.

For starters, Newsweek published a factually incorrect article titled "How Charismatic Catholic Groups Like Amy Coney Barrett's People of Praise Inspired 'The Handmaid's Tale'" connecting People of Praise to Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale. An ABC News article on the topic quoted Andrew Seidel, an activist with the Freedom from Religion Foundation, who doubled down in the smear campaign against Barrett: "There are serious and deep concerns about Judge Amy Coney Barrett's affiliation with People of Praise . . ."

Article VI of the Constitution clearly forbids disqualifying someone from serving in public office due to their religious convictions, where it reads that "No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." This pesky little line from our Constitution, however, hasn't stopped the Left from attacking Barrett. During a now-infamous 2017 hearing, the committee's ranking Democrat, Senator Dianne Feinstein, told Barrett that "The dogma lives loudly within you, and that's of concern."

Barrett shot down the accusation that her faith would dictate her decisions as a judge. "I see no conflict between having a sincerely held faith and duties as a judge," she said. "I would never impose my own personal convictions upon the law."

Judge Barrett clearly understands her duty will be to decide the cases before her. In her own words, "I think one of the great traditions in this country is that judges participate in the law, participate in the decision of cases and rule even when they disagree with the outcome."

Another one of the great traditions in this country is the right to freely live out one's faith; religious liberty is the very first right enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution.

Anti-Christian bigotry is no new phenomenon on the radical Left, but it has become more and more pervasive in recent years as the Christian faith has been pushed out of public life. Contrary to those busy smearing her, Judge Barrett would make an excellent Supreme Court Justice due to her intellect, disposition, ability, and proven commitment to the Constitution of the United States. These qualities should determine whether she is qualified for the position -- not what the Left is now focused on.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who will preside over the confirmation hearing, echoed this sentiment last night at the Values Voters Summit when he told me: "People of faith, your faith may be subject to a lot of questioning. It's OK to be a religious conservative. It's OK to be on the Supreme Court if you're a religious conservative. There's nothing wrong with that. I'm sure the person nominated will apply the law to the facts and put their personal beliefs aside. We're not going to tolerate a country where you're punished for your faith."

"Religious differences abound in America," Graham said, "but I am very much aware of the fact that if it's somebody of faith and they attack the person for being faithful," he is prepared for a "fight."

Graham went on to assure us that he "will make sure the nominee is tested but not abused," at the upcoming hearing, "if Democrats try to destroy this conservative nominee, they do so at their own peril."

Senator Ben Sasse (R-Nebr.), another member of the Judiciary Committee, echoed Graham's defense, calling the campaigns against Barrett's faith "ugly smears" that reflect "anti-Catholic bigotry."

Exactly right. People of all faiths should stand together against the Left when it attacks a woman as accomplished as Amy Coney Barrett for the simple fact of her Catholic religious beliefs. Last time I checked, being Christian and Catholic is not a crime. It must not become one on our watch.
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Tony Perkins (@tperkins) is President of the Family Research Council . Article on Tony Perkins' Washington Update and written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

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