President Trump Defines the Big Choice for 2018

by Newt Gingrich: For Republicans to win in the upcoming midterm elections, they must understand – and make clear to the American people – that November represents a big choice election, wherein voters will decide between two competing alternative universes.

If Republicans maintain – or even grow – their majorities in the House and the Senate, America will be operating in a grassroots rebellion-conservative-Republican universe after November. That will mean President Trump’s agenda will continue (and possibly accelerate). More conservative judges will join the federal bench. Our taxes and unemployment figures will remain low, while our jobs numbers, wages, and economic growth will continue to increase. Finally, our borders will be secure, our military will be strong, and our nation will prosper through free, fair, and reciprocal trade practices.

If Democrats are able to take the House and gain seats in the Senate, we will be in the media-Left-Democratic Party universe. They will oppose every Trump-Republican plan that is proposed (and likely try to impeach the President at the first frivolous opportunity). Every day will be dominated by scandals and defined by identity politics. Nominated judges will sit in limbo as the federal caseload builds – delaying justice and fair trials for many. They will raise our taxes and reverse the economic gains of the Trump Administration – causing unemployment to rise and our economy to stagnate.

I describe this concept in-depth in a political strategy paper I wrote called The Republican Choice for 2018: Win or Lose. I wrote this paper because I truly believe every Republican candidate, campaign manager, consultant, and political committee member must understand and communicate the stakes of this election. As I explain in the paper:

“A big choice alternative universe campaign requires thinking, planning, and training to make the transition from ‘politics as usual’ to ‘politics as history.’ It is also the only path that will keep a Republican majority in the House.
“The current pattern is a war of district-by-district attrition. The consultants and professionals believe Republicans can outspend Democrats one district at a time and use traditional attack tactics to overcome them even in an unfavorable environment. This explains the number of Nancy Pelosi attack ads and the relatively few big picture, big choice ads. It also explains the constant search for personal weaknesses (DUIs, past business deals, etc.). However, in a potential wave election, this kind of district-by-district effort simply gets drowned by the national messages (see 1974, 1980, 1994, 2006, and 2010 for examples).

“Republicans must move from district-by-district attrition to a national message – and do something unexpected. Republicans need a national brand campaign, so Americans actually hear that there are more jobs than unemployed, we have the lowest level of African-American unemployment recorded, the average American family will have $2,000 more in their budgets, retirement savings have increased, wages have gone up, etc.

“In order to define a big choice, we must ensure that people believe the choice we are defining is real. Right now, there is a lack of belief in many of the accomplishments that have been made.

“We need to be defining the value proposition of the Republican Party to the electorate, so we can break from patterns of the past and propose a compelling future.”

President Trump has already intuited that this is a big choice election, and he has begun using language that defines the two universes from which voters will have to choose.

You saw several examples of this while President Trump was campaigning in Montana last week for Republican Senate candidate Matt Rosendale, who is seeking to take Democrat Jon Tester’s seat.

Most pointedly, the President defined the immigration fight in clear, big choice terms.

“This election is a choice between Democrats who want to abolish ICE, and Republicans, who want to abolish MS-13. It is very simple.”

President Trump – and every Republican – should continue thinking in these big choice alternative universe terms.

If they do not, the Left and the elite media could get the “blue wave” for which they have been fighting.
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Newt Gingrich is a former Georgia Congressman and Speaker of the U.S. House. He co-authored and was the chief architect of the "Contract with America" and a major leader in the Republican victory in the 1994 congressional elections. He is noted speaker and writer. The above commentary was shared via Gingrich Productions.

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Tags: Newt Gingrich, commentary, President Trump, Defines, Big Choice, for 2018 To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Creating the Big Choice, Better Future Campaign

by Newt Gingrich: Those who believe the elite left-wing “blue wave” theory for the 2018 elections should look at what happened in Texas on Tuesday.

In a special election runoff, Republican Pete Flores successfully flipped Texas State Senate District 19, which borders Mexico and had been in Democratic control for 139 years. Flores, a political newcomer competing against a seasoned former Democratic congressman, won in a district that is 73 percent Hispanic and African American – despite virtually all political analysts’ expectations. I am studying this election for a future op-ed, but I have been told by many Texas Republicans that Flores was able to win because he ran a big choice campaign.

Republicans everywhere should also study this Texas state special election and make the 2018 midterms a big choice election for all American voters. And with only 48 days left until November 6, they must act now.

Candidates, consultants, campaign managers – Republicans at every level – must break out of the small-ball, district-by-district campaign model and create a national message that defines a set of big choices that contrast the Republican positions and those of the Left. Otherwise, the Democrats are very likely to achieve the so-called blue wave the liberal media has been touting for months.

I outlined the need for this kind of campaign (and provided an in-depth look at how to implement it) in my recently released political strategy paper called The Republican Choice for 2018: Win or Lose, which I have shared with a number of Republicans around the country and have made available for Kindle on Amazon.

The paper is broken into four parts, but I’d like to focus on the first, critical concept that I think can help Republicans design and execute the kind of campaign we need to win in 2018 – and again in 2020.

Starting right now, Republicans need to develop a set of core big issues that create a clear vision for a better future for Americans – in completely personal terms, not platitudes. These issues (and the Republican position on them) must be broadly appealing to the vast majority of Americans.

In the paper, I discuss a set of issues that Republicans could include in this big choice election narrative – such as favoring work over welfare, paychecks over food stamps, safe and orderly immigration over dangerous borderless chaos, personal health versus bureaucratic health, and others – but I will expand on those in a future piece. In the meantime, Republicans should think critically – and listen closely to their constituents – to develop and communicate a robust set of big choices to voters over the next few weeks.

It’s critical that each of these big choices is popular. When we developed the Contract with America in 1994 we polled every policy position to be included. Every pledge in the Contract had 70 percent support from Americans – some had 80 percent support. Issues that didn’t have wide appeal, didn’t make it into the Contract. It was that simple.

Despite constant left-wing attacks and media bias, if Republicans put together a set of highly-supported, issues and policies, and contrast them vividly with the unpopular liberal Democratic positions, the American people will support Republicans.

However, it is not enough to attract support for our issues. We also must clearly express how the Democratic alternatives to our positions are personally bad for Americans. This will drive powerful wedges between the Democrats and the American people. As I explain in the paper:

“Big choice campaigns invariably describe a better future, a future worth voting and fighting for, in personal terms. (You will be better off. Your family will be better off. Your community will be better off.) At the same time, the emerging majority describes the threat that the other side presents to potentially make life worse, in similarly personal terms. These aren’t campaigns about abstract philosophy or ideology. These are campaigns about two different ways of life, with two different impacts, at personal levels. They work very hard at finding the right words and images and picking the right fights. Attacking Nancy Pelosi personally seems tactically clever, but tying her to outrageous and unacceptable policies is strategically far more powerful.

“Small choice campaigns look for petty, personal weaknesses. Big choice elections focus on big differences and describing magnets of a better future to attract the voter, while they simultaneously hammer home wedge issues to drive the opposition away from the voter. Too many Republican consultants and candidates have no faith in the American people. They run small choice campaigns because they think that voters can only understand small things.

“The great leaders have all had faith that the American people can understand a lot if it is framed in clear, direct language. This is the job of a big choice campaign.”Implementing this first key step of developing and contrasting the Republicans’ better future with the Democrats’ destructive future will make it easier to communicate the rest of the big choice campaign.

Not only will developing a suite of popular, big choice positions attract the support of the American people, but it will also help Republicans grow support within the party, build a governing coalition, and strengthen their ability to find and nurture future leaders within the GOP.

In doing so, it will be easier for Republicans to speak with the American people with one voice. This will have the added benefit of allowing us to be more effective in fighting against distortions from the elite media and assaults from the Left.

If Republicans are going to win in 2018, they must not fall into the old campaign habits of personal attacks, niche issues, relying on special interests, or skirmishing district-by-district.

Furthermore, even though the Trump-Republican-led government has brought us an incredible economy, historically low unemployment, a slew of strong judicial appointments, and many other successes, we cannot take for granted that voters will be considering these things on Election Day.

If Republicans want to continue to lead – and continue making America great for all Americans – they must give the voters big choice in November. The clock is ticking.
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Newt Gingrich is a former Georgia Congressman and Speaker of the U.S. House. He co-authored and was the chief architect of the "Contract with America" and a major leader in the Republican victory in the 1994 congressional elections. He is noted speaker and writer. The above commentary was shared via Gingrich Productions.

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Tags: Newt Gingrich, commentary, Creating, Big Choice, Better Future Campaign To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

A Texas Blueprint for A Red Wave Election in 2018

by Newt Gingrich: I have been writing a lot about the power of a big choice election in November.

This week, the Texas Republicans won a special election for a state senate district along the Mexican border. Every Republican campaign in the country should study this race carefully.

You may not have read about this GOP victory, because the liberal national media is not exactly excited to report that Republicans reclaimed a seat they had not held in 139 years. The liberal media is especially shy about reporting on a Republican victory in a district Hillary Clinton carried by 11.6 percent in the 2016 election.

From the Left’s standpoint, this victory is even more frightening because the district is 73 percent African American and Hispanic. Furthermore, at a time when people are touting gigantic Democrat voter turnout and lagging Republican participation, this special election runoff had twice as many voters as the last Texas State Senate special election runoff in February, 2015. In fact, the turnout for this race went up from 26,207 in the first round of the election to 44,487 in the runoff, according to Sam Taylor with the Texas Secretary of State’s Office. The Republicans turned out 23,576 to the Democrats’ 20,911.

Pete Flores, the Republican victor, spent 27 years as a game warden. As Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick told me, “Flores was tireless as a campaigner. He put 7,000 miles on his car during the last five weeks of the campaign.”

In many ways, the Flores all-out, personal campaigning resembled President Trump in the last weeks of the 2016 campaign. This is a good reminder to Republicans that campaigns matter, and you can’t predict who will win six weeks out from an election.

Flores had run four years earlier and lost by 20 points. Now, he is the first Hispanic Republican State Senator in Texas (yet another reason the liberal media is avoiding talking about the race). Since Flores defeated former Democratic Congressman Pete Gallego, his victory has some extra punch to it.

Lieutenant Governor Patrick said this race was a classic example of a big choice campaign. He had read my recent paper, The Republican Choice for 2018: Win or Lose, which outlines the importance of big choice campaigns over small choice campaigns and said this was a perfect example of the potential for a big choice campaign to overwhelm the media bias (a point Brooke Rollins had also made to me).

The big choices in this 17-county border district were:

Right to life versus tax-paid abortion. As devout Catholics, many Hispanic voters simply won’t vote for a liberal once they understand they are for tax-paid abortion. Of course, every Democrat who is campaigning for free government-run health care is campaigning for tax-paid abortion.

Safe borders versus dangerous gangs. As Lieutenant Governor Patrick explained, “most law-abiding Hispanics support controlling the border, stopping criminals, and keeping their community safe from gangs like MS-13.” As he pointed out, he campaigned four years ago on repealing the sanctuary city law in Texas and got about 50 percent of the Hispanic vote. Flores’s own campaign website clearly states: “Our borders must be secure, and our communities must be safe…We will make Texas borders secure and a bad place to be for criminals and gangs. We are and must remain a state where the rule of law reigns.”

Gun rights versus gun control. Many Hispanic voters strongly support the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms. They distrust and oppose liberals who want to have government control their guns.

Local rule versus centralized bureaucracy. Most Hispanic voters favor smaller government, lower taxes, and more community rather than Washington controls (or Austin controls in this case).

Work versus welfare. There is a strong work ethic in the Hispanic community, and the job-creating power of the Trump system is being admired and applauded. Currently having the lowest Hispanic unemployment rate in history is a real asset for Republicans in the 2018 campaign.

Matt Walter, the president of the Republican State Leadership Committee, noted that this was the 38th Republican special election victory in 2018 – more than the Democrats have won. This makes you wonder how big the supposed blue wave is going to be if the Democrats keep losing actual elections – when the people, rather than the media have a voice.

So, every Republican candidate, campaign, professional, and activist should look carefully at this Republican victory in Texas.

If we have the courage to make the 2018 midterm a big choice election.

If we have the courage to campaign on issues which the American people support – even if the liberal media hates them and despises us for raising them.

If we are willing to go into every neighborhood and every precinct and appeal to every American of every background.

If we are willing to challenge liberal lies and distortions head on and force the Left to admit they are not true.

If we do this at the national level in the media and the local level in each campaign.

If we pick up the big choice themes President Trump is beginning to lay out (note his recent rally speech in Montana).

Then I think election night 2018 could be an even bigger upset – with even more shocking and decisive Republican victories – than election night 2016 was.

This is the lesson of the great victory in the Texas State Senate District 19 special election. It is not based on a theory. It is based on real victories, in real elections.

Now, we must believe, act, and fight. The 2018 victory is there for the earning.
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Newt Gingrich is a former Georgia Congressman and Speaker of the U.S. House. He co-authored and was the chief architect of the "Contract with America" and a major leader in the Republican victory in the 1994 congressional elections. He is noted speaker and writer. The above commentary was shared via Gingrich Productions.

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Tags: Newt Gingrich, commentary, Texas Blueprint, Red Wave Election, 2018 To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

The Danger of the Attacks on the Electoral College

Trent England

by Trent England: Once upon a time, the Electoral College was not controversial. During the debates over ratifying the Constitution, Anti-Federalist opponents of ratification barely mentioned it. But by the mid-twentieth century, opponents of the Electoral College nearly convinced Congress to propose an amendment to scrap it. And today, more than a dozen states have joined in an attempt to hijack the Electoral College as a way to force a national popular vote for president.

What changed along the way? And does it matter? After all, the critics of the Electoral College simply want to elect the president the way we elect most other officials. Every state governor is chosen by a statewide popular vote. Why not a national popular vote for president?

Delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 asked themselves the same question, but then rejected a national popular vote along with several other possible modes of presidential election. The Virginia Plan—the first draft of what would become the new Constitution­—called for “a National Executive . . . to be chosen by the National Legislature.” When the Constitutional Convention took up the issue for the first time, near the end of its first week of debate, Roger Sherman from Connecticut supported this parliamentary system of election, arguing that the national executive should be “absolutely dependent” on the legislature. Pennsylvania’s James Wilson, on the other hand, called for a popular election. Virginia’s George Mason thought a popular election “impracticable,” but hoped Wilson would “have time to digest it into his own form.” Another delegate suggested election by the Senate alone, and then the Convention adjourned for the day.

When they reconvened the next morning, Wilson had taken Mason’s advice. He presented a plan to create districts and hold popular elections to choose electors. Those electors would then vote for the executive—in other words, an electoral college. But with many details left out, and uncertainty remaining about the nature of the executive office, Wilson’s proposal was voted down. A week later, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts proposed election by state governors. This too was voted down, and a consensus began to build. Delegates did not support the Virginia Plan’s parliamentary model because they understood that an executive selected by Congress would become subservient to Congress. A similar result, they came to see, could be expected from assigning the selection to any body of politicians.

There were other oddball proposals that sought to salvage congressional selection—for instance, to have congressmen draw lots to form a group that would then choose the executive in secret. But by July 25, it was clear to James Madison that the choice was down to two forms of popular election: “The option before us,” he said, “[is] between an appointment by Electors chosen by the people—and an immediate appointment by the people.” Madison said he preferred popular election, but he recognized two legitimate concerns. First, people would tend toward supporting candidates from their own states, giving an advantage to larger states. Second, a few areas with higher concentrations of voters might come to dominate. Madison spoke positively of the idea of an electoral college, finding that “there would be very little opportunity for cabal, or corruption” in such a system.

By August 31, the Constitution was nearly finished—except for the process of electing the president. The question was put to a committee comprised of one delegate from each of the eleven states present at the Convention. That committee, which included Madison, created the Electoral College as we know it today. They presented the plan on September 4, and it was adopted with minor changes. It is found in Article II, Section 1:Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.Federal officials were prohibited from being electors. Electors were required to cast two ballots, and were prohibited from casting both ballots for candidates from their own state. A deadlock for president would be decided by the House of Representatives, with one vote per state. Following that, in case of a deadlock for vice president, the Senate would decide. Also under the original system, the runner up became vice president.

This last provision caused misery for President John Adams in 1796, when his nemesis, Thomas Jefferson, became his vice president. Four years later it nearly robbed Jefferson of the presidency when his unscrupulous running mate, Aaron Burr, tried to parlay an accidental deadlock into his own election by the House. The Twelfth Amendment, ratified in 1804, fixed all this by requiring electors to cast separate votes for president and vice president.

And there things stand, constitutionally at least. State legislatures have used their power to direct the manner of choosing electors in various ways: appointing them directly, holding elections by district, or holding statewide elections. Today, 48 states choose their presidential electors in a statewide, winner-take-all vote. Maine and Nebraska elect one elector based on each congressional district’s vote and the remaining two based on the statewide vote.

It is easy for Americans to forget that when we vote for president, we are really voting for electors who have pledged to support the candidate we favor. Civics education is not what it used to be. Also, perhaps, the Electoral College is a victim of its own success. Most of the time, it shapes American politics in ways that are beneficial but hard to see. Its effects become news only when a candidate and his or her political party lose a hard-fought and narrowly decided election.

So what are the beneficial effects of choosing our presidents through the Electoral College?

Under the Electoral College system, presidential elections are decentralized, taking place in the states. Although some see this as a flaw—U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren opposes the Electoral College expressly because she wants to increase federal power over elections—this decentralization has proven to be of great value.

For one thing, state boundaries serve a function analogous to that of watertight compartments on an ocean liner. Disputes over mistakes or fraud are contained within individual states. Illinois can recount its votes, for instance, without triggering a nationwide recount. This was an important factor in America’s messiest presidential election—which was not in 2000, but in 1876.

That year marked the first time a presidential candidate won the electoral vote while losing the popular vote. It was a time of organized suppression of black voters in the South, and there were fierce disputes over vote totals in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Each of those states sent Congress two sets of electoral vote totals, one favoring Republican Rutherford Hayes and the other Democrat Samuel Tilden. Just two days before Inauguration Day, Congress finished counting the votes—which included determining which votes to count—and declared Hayes the winner. Democrats proclaimed this “the fraud of the century,” and there is no way to be certain today—nor was there probably a way to be certain at the time—which candidate actually won. At the very least, the Electoral College contained these disputes within individual states so that Congress could endeavor to sort it out. And it is arguable that the Electoral College prevented a fraudulent result.

Four years later, the 1880 presidential election demonstrated another benefit of the Electoral College system: it can act to amplify the results of a presidential election. The popular vote margin that year was less than 10,000 votes—about one-tenth of one percent—yet Republican James Garfield won a resounding electoral victory, with 214 electoral votes to Democrat Winfield Hancock’s 155. There was no question who won, let alone any need for a recount. More recently, in 1992, the Electoral College boosted the legitimacy of Democrat Bill Clinton, who won with only 43 percent of the popular vote but received over 68 percent of the electoral vote.

But there is no doubt that the greatest benefit of the Electoral College is the powerful incentive it creates against regionalism. Here, the presidential elections of 1888 and 1892 are most instructive. In 1888, incumbent Democratic President Grover Cleveland lost reelection despite receiving a popular vote plurality. He won this plurality because he won by very large margins in the overwhelmingly Democratic South. He won Texas alone by 146,461 votes, for instance, whereas his national popular vote margin was only 94,530. Altogether he won in six southern states with margins greater than 30 percent, while only tiny Vermont delivered a victory percentage of that size for Republican Benjamin Harrison.

In other words, the Electoral College ensures that winning supermajorities in one region of the country is not sufficient to win the White House. After the Civil War, and especially after the end of Reconstruction, that meant that the Democratic Party had to appeal to interests outside the South to earn a majority in the Electoral College. And indeed, when Grover Cleveland ran again for president four years later in 1892, although he won by a smaller percentage of the popular vote, he won a resounding Electoral College majority by picking up New York, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and California in addition to winning the South.

Whether we see it or not today, the Electoral College continues to push parties and presidential candidates to build broad coalitions. Critics say that swing states get too much attention, leaving voters in so-called safe states feeling left out. But the legitimacy of a political party rests on all of those safe states—on places that the party has already won over, allowing it to reach farther out. In 2000, for instance, George W. Bush needed every state that he won—not just Florida—to become president. Of course, the Electoral College does put a premium on the states in which the parties are most evenly divided. But would it really be better if the path to the presidency primarily meant driving up the vote total in the deepest red or deepest blue states?

Also, swing states are the states most likely to have divided government. And if divided government is good for anything, it is accountability. So with the Electoral College system, when we do wind up with a razor-thin margin in an election, it is likely to happen in a state where both parties hold some power, rather than in a state controlled by one party.
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Despite these benefits of the current system, opponents of the Electoral College maintain that it is unseemly for a candidate to win without receiving the most popular votes. As Hillary Clinton put it in 2000: “In a democracy, we should respect the will of the people, and to me, that means it’s time to do away with the Electoral College.” Yet similar systems prevail around the world. In parliamentary systems, including Canada, Israel, and the United Kingdom, prime ministers are elected by the legislature. This happens in Germany and India as well, which also have presidents who are elected by something similar to an electoral college. In none of these democratic systems is the national popular vote decisive.

More to the point, in our own political tradition, what matters most about every legislative body, from our state legislatures to the House of Representatives and the Senate, is which party holds the majority. That party elects the leadership and sets the agenda. In none of these representative chambers does the aggregate popular vote determine who is in charge. What matters is winning districts or states.

Nevertheless, there is a clamor of voices calling for an end to the Electoral College. Former Attorney General Eric Holder has declared it “a vestige of the past,” and Washington Governor Jay Inslee has labeled it an “archaic relic of a bygone age.” Almost as one, the current myriad of Democratic presidential hopefuls have called for abolishing the Electoral College.

Few if any of these Democrats likely realize how similar their party’s position is to what it was in the late nineteenth century, with California representing today what the South was for their forebears. The Golden State accounted for 10.4 percent of presidential votes cast in 2016, while the southern states (from South Carolina down to Florida and across to Texas) accounted for 10.6 percent of presidential votes cast in 1888. Grover Cleveland won those southern states by nearly 39 percent, while Hillary Clinton won California by 30 percent. But rather than following Cleveland’s example of building a broader national coalition that could win in the Electoral College, today’s Democrats would rather simply change the rules.
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Anti-Electoral College amendments with bipartisan support in the 1950s and 1970s failed to receive the two-thirds votes in Congress they needed in order to be sent to the states for consideration. Likewise today, partisan amendments will not make it through Congress. Nor, if they did, could they win ratification among the states.

But there is a serious threat to the Electoral College. Until recently, it has gone mostly unnoticed, as it has made its way through various state legislatures. If it works according to its supporters’ intent, it would nullify the Electoral College by creating a de facto direct election for president.

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, or NPV, takes advantage of the flexibility granted to state legislatures in the Constitution: “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors.” The original intent of this was to allow state legislators to determine how best to represent their state in presidential elections. The electors represent the state—not just the legislature—even though the latter has power to direct the manner of appointment. By contrast, NPV supporters argue that this power allows state legislatures to ignore their state’s voters and appoint electors based on the national popular vote. This is what the compact would require states to do.

Of course, no state would do this unilaterally, so NPV has a “trigger”: it only takes effect if adopted by enough states to control 270 electoral votes—in other words, a majority that would control the outcome of presidential elections. So far, 14 states and the District of Columbia have signed on, with a total of 189 electoral votes.

Until this year, every state that had joined NPV was heavily Democratic: California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. The NPV campaign has struggled to win other Democratic states: Delaware only adopted it this year and it still has not passed in Oregon (though it may soon). Following the 2018 election, Democrats came into control of both the legislatures and the governorships in the purple states of Colorado and New Mexico, which have subsequently joined NPV.

NPV would have the same effect as abolishing the Electoral College. Fraud in one state would affect every state, and the only way to deal with it would be to give more power to the federal government. Elections that are especially close would require nationwide recounts. Candidates could win based on intense support from a narrow region or from big cities. NPV also carries its own unique risks: despite its name, the plan cannot actually create a national popular vote. Each state would still—at least for the time being—run its own elections. This means a patchwork of rules for everything from which candidates are on the ballot to how disputes are settled. NPV would also reward states with lax election laws—the higher the turnout, legal or not, the more power for that state. Finally, each NPV state would certify its own “national” vote total. But what would happen when there are charges of skullduggery? Would states really trust, with no power to verify, other state’s returns?

Uncertainty and litigation would likely follow. In fact, NPV is probably unconstitutional. For one thing, it ignores the Article I, Section 10 requirement that interstate compacts receive congressional consent. There is also the fact that the structure of the Electoral College clause of the Constitution implies there is some limit on the power of state legislatures to ignore the will of their state’s people.

One danger of all these attacks on the Electoral College is, of course, that we lose the state-by-state system designed by the Framers and its protections against regionalism and fraud. This would alter our politics in some obvious ways—shifting power toward urban centers, for example—but also in ways we cannot know in advance. Would an increase in presidents who win by small pluralities lead to a rise of splinter parties and spoiler candidates? Would fears of election fraud in places like Chicago and Broward County lead to demands for greater federal control over elections?

The more fundamental danger is that these attacks undermine the Constitution as a whole. Arguments that the Constitution is outmoded and that democracy is an end in itself are arguments that can just as easily be turned against any of the constitutional checks and balances that have preserved free government in America for well over two centuries. The measure of our fundamental law is not whether it actualizes the general will—that was the point of the French Revolution, not the American. The measure of our Constitution is whether it is effective at encouraging just, stable, and free government—government that protects the rights of its citizens.

The Electoral College is effective at doing this. We need to preserve it, and we need to help our fellow Americans understand why it matters.
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Trent England (@trentengland) is executive vice president and the David and Ann Brown Distinguished Fellow at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, where he also directs the Save Our States project. The above was adapted from a speech delivered on April 30, 2019, at Hillsdale College’s (@Hillsdale) Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C.

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Tags: Trent England, danger of attacks, electoral college, adapted speech, Hillsdale College To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Democrats Using Trump Hatred to Seduce the Educated and Affluent into Supporting Class Suicide

by Steve McCann: In the 2018 midterm elections the Democrats reclaimed the House of Representatives, ushering in Nancy Pelosi as Speaker. This transfer of control eventuated not only in the de facto takeover of the House by the radical arm of the Party, but the callous disregard of any potential long-term damage to the nation as Pelosi and company left no stone unturned to either impeach Donald Trump or irrevocably marginalize his presidency, as well as malign those that voted for him.

One myopic and narcissistic voter demographic group was primarily responsible for this outcome in 2018 and they are poised to permanently empower the Marxist/socialists in the 2020 election.

In the 2018 election college graduates accounted for 43% of all voters as surveyed in exit polls. Overall 56% voted Democrat and 42% Republican. White college graduates, who accounted for nearly 80% of the college vote, voted 52% Democrat versus 47% Republican. While 53% of white male college graduates voted Republican, 60% of their white female counterparts voted for the Democrats and Nancy Pelosi. This was a large enough margin to flip numerous suburban House seats into the Democrat column. By comparison, in 2016 only 51% of white female college graduates voted for Hillary Clinton.

These same exit polls reveal that the primary motivation of the anti-Trump college educated vote, in particular the female vote, was not policy oriented but the belief that Donald Trump was not honest or trustworthy, that he was lacking any ethics and devoid of the right temperament to be president.

These social elites had fully embraced the incessant drumbeat of the faux Russian collusion and never-ending and often fabricated character assassination. In their insulated world where they isolate themselves socially, live pretentiously and are concerned with appearances and being part of the in-crowd (which is irreversibly anti-Trump), bothering to inform themselves or speak out about the Democratic Party agenda could potentially cause them to lose their status.

This same stratagem is being repeated again in 2020. The Democrats are once more pulling out all the stops to the hoodwink this voting bloc by having them again focus on the shiny object in the distance instead of their nominee, Joe Biden, and their Marxist/socialist agenda drafted by Bernie Sanders and his merry band of revolutionaries.

The shiny object: Donald Trump’s supposed incompetence, lack of character, civility and sophistication as well as his ill-mannered reliance on social media. To further cement this portrait the constant repetition of any fabrication, fake news or fallacious accusation is permissible, and necessary, in order to rid the nation of the worst reprobate in American history.

Meanwhile as the mainstream media is successfully manipulating potential voters to be single-mindedly focused on Trump, the party hierarchy is feverishly formulating the execution of their plans for:

• The abolishment of the suburbs. Which would be accomplished by forcing an end to single-family zoning and housing as well as the indiscriminate building of low-income housing wherever the federal government chooses. Thus, the federal takeover, transformation and urbanization of the suburbs.
• The abolition of cash bail nationwide. As part of their plans to further hamstring and defund the police as well as dramatically reduce the prison population, the Democrats want to eliminate cash bail and immediately release back onto the streets all accused of a crime. A program that has been a disaster in New York and other Democrat run cities.
• A determination to achieve carbon free electricity generation nationwide within 15 years by installing 500 million solar panels ($2 Trillion) and underwriting community solar energy systems throughout the country ($2 Trillion). As well as the rejoining and abiding by the unattainable and exorbitantly expensive objectives of the Paris Climate Agreement, regardless of the potentially catastrophic economic and social disruption to the nation.
• The Democrats are committed to granting citizenship for 11 - 22 million illegal immigrants, expanding sanctuary centers, dramatically limiting the ability of ICE to deport criminal aliens and increasing legal immigration.
• Biden and the Democrats are all in on nationwide voting by mail and not just in 2020 but permanently.
• The Democrats are planning on implementing the largest increase in personal and corporate taxes in history as well as a new carbon tax on all Americans.

Because of Biden’s incestuous relationship with China, the Chinese will no longer be hindered in what will certainly be a triumphant crusade for global hegemony. They will also return to being the unquestioned supplier of choice to a penitent United States. More important than these radical policy issues, is the reality that once the Democrat party establishment allied themselves with the Marxists masquerading as “Democratic Socialists” and became willing apologists for their twin militant arms Antifa and Black Lives Matter, they lost all leverage.

The Party, if it wins in 2020, will be incapable of thwarting the inevitable extreme ultimatums and policy demands of the radical left as the party leaders will cower and surrender in the face of any threat of orchestrated violence and aggression.

The irony in the litany of proposals and policy pronouncements by Biden and the Democrats is that virtually each and every one will have an extraordinarily disparate impact on the college educated, suburban dwelling, upper middle-class voting bloc. Additionally, if the Democrats gain control of the White House and Congress, it is not just the fundamental transformation of the country that is the ultimate objective of the Marxists/socialists, but the absolute marginalization of this same faction because of their current influence, wealth and lifestyle.

This nation’s foremost living economist and philosopher, Thomas Sowell, recently opined that if Biden and the radical left win the 2020 election that event could well be the point of no return for the United States. The ultimate decision as to the future of the country will, in all likelihood, be in the hands of the self-absorbed college educated, suburban dwelling voters come November 3, 2020.

Some unsolicited advice for these voters and the American citizenry from someone who has been there. I can attest that when a nation goes past the point of no return there is but one road back and it is strewn with corpses and cities in unfathomable ruin.
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Steve McCann writes at the American Thinker.

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‘I’m Black, I’m Supposed to Be a Democrat’: 2 Women Explain Why They Veered Right

The Bill Walton Show

by Bill Walton: Bill Walton recently welcomed Star Parker and Winsome Sears to his video podcast for a discussion of why so many black Americans continue to vote for the failed liberal agenda. Here is a transcript of their conversation, edited mostly only for style and clarity.

Bill Walton: Welcome to “The Bill Walton Show.” Race just seems to dominate so much of our political debate in the United States. Today, I want to explore and learn about the past, present, and future state of black America. Who has the better policy answers, conservatives or liberals or libertarians? What’s been the impact of Donald Trump’s presidency? With me to talk this through are two courageous women in the battle for religious freedom, economic freedom, and individual liberty.

Star Parker is the founder and president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education. CURE’s mission is to fight poverty and restore dignity through messages of faith, freedom, and personal responsibility. An author of several books, she is a regular commentator on national television and radio and is a nationally syndicated columnist. Star has a bachelor’s degree in marketing and international business from Woodbury University, and has received numerous awards and commendations for her work on public policy issues.

Winsome Earle Sears was born in Jamaica and came to the United States when she was 6 years of age. Raised in New York City, she enlisted in the United States Marine Corps at the age of 19, and became a U.S. citizen one year later. She was the first black Republican woman and first female veteran elected to the Virginia General Assembly. She is a graduate of Old Dominion University, with a B.A. in English and economics. Welcome.

Star Parker: Thank you.

Walton: Star, let’s start with you. Before we dig into the specifics, how did you come to believe what you believe?

Parker: Well, I came to believe what I believe by reading a proverb a day. I was believing the lies of the left for a very long time. I believed all that we even hear today, that my problems were somebody else’s fault. That America was racist and I shouldn’t mainstream. That I was poor because others were wealthy.

In buying all of these lies, I got very lost in my decision-making. So very early in life, [I] was engaged in criminal activity and drug activity and sexual activity and abortion activity and welfare activity, and then God saved me. Some gentlemen introduced me to the Lord and I changed my life. I went to school, I got a degree, I started a business. After the ’92 Los Angeles riots destroyed my business, I began to focus on social policy, and that’s how I came to run my organization, Urban CURE, today.

But if you ask, “How did you shape those views beyond just the personal responsibility that comes from knowing the Scripture and figuring out how to live through a daily proverb?” I started a business. That’s when I understood how extensive government is in the affairs of someone who just wants to buy an apple and sell it for enough to buy another one, and another one and another one. And [I] started being encroached by all types of three letters, from the IRS to the you-name-it. The disability, the environmental protection, a long list of all of [these] alphabets too.

Walton: Well, yeah, George McGovern became a conservative after he started a bed and breakfast.

Parker: Yes, exactly, you start finding out that, “Wait a minute, what has happened to our great country?” I think that’s what shaped my economic views. But what has shaped my philosophy and what drives me and my organization is my born-again experience.

Winsome Sears: Amen.

Walton: Winsome?

Sears: Well, I am a Marine and I had had my last child, my husband and I, and we were living in California at the time. It was right around the time of the election and George Bush Sr., he was running, he was a candidate and I was still a Democrat. I’m black …

Walton: This would have been ’88?

Sears: Yes. I’m black, I’m supposed to be a Democrat. It rhymes, OK. The whole family’s full of Democrats, so what am I? I am what I am. [Mike] Dukakis, his commercial came on and he said, “I’m going to expand welfare. I’m going to make sure that this, that, the other, we’re going to give you money and we’re going to… ” I thought, “But if that happens, my folks, they’re just going to be living on what they get. There’s nothing to propel them.” Then he said, “For abortion, I’m going to make sure abortion is this and legal and expanded and do this and public monies and public…” I had just had my baby and I thought, “Well, I don’t believe that.”

Then right behind him came George Bush Sr. with his commercial, and he said, “If all you have is welfare, is what the government gives you, you will never have anything to pass onto your children.” Then he said, “As for abortion, I’m going to try and make it less and less and less.” Then I said, “Oh my God, I’m a Republican.”

The next thing was, “How am I going to tell my family?” Because it’s almost as if I was changing my religion. It was a shock to me and I think to many black people; they really are Republicans because we are the most conservative, really, group. It’s just a matter of me getting in there and people like Star and everybody else getting in and saying, “Let us be who we want to be. You don’t get to tell me how to run my politics and I don’t get to tell you either. Just let us be free.”


Walton: Well, still, you must get a lot of pushback. We talked about before we came on the air [that] you’re a minority within a minority and you’re really stepping out of line when it comes to believing what you believe. I’m sure you’ve taken a fair amount of heat.

Parker: I didn’t have to deal with it that much, because I didn’t come from a political family. If anyone in my family even voted, nobody knew. We’ve been a very eclectic family rooted in the South, and we’ve had family reunions forever.

We’ve learned how to not discuss those things and not care if somebody did differ in them. In not discussing them … I didn’t even register to vote, until after that particular election. I don’t think I registered to vote or even knew to vote until Bush Sr. was running.

Walton: There’s a media portrayal. How many blacks are conservative, do you think?

Parker: Look, the polls have been showing forever that a third of African Americans say publicly that they’re evangelical and conservative. A third. This has been 25 years. This is Republicans’ fault they don’t have more.

Sears: I know it.

Parker: And in fact, this recent poll says 22% agree with the Republican Party, 22% say absolutely out of their mouth that they are conservatives. But only 8% vote Republican.

Walton: That was the 2016 number for Trump?

Sears: Yeah, for Trump.

Parker: Yeah. So that 8%–there’s 14% [more] out there that just you have to ask for the order.

Sears: Well, let me tell you, I remember when President Obama was, well, it was the [2008] election, either he or John McCain. And I had a person call me and [this was a] very prominent Ph.D., won’t say any more. But he said, “Winsome, you’re going to have to vote for Obama.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Because I know he’s going to wreck the country with his economic policies and some of his social policies, but I don’t [think] I’ll ever get a chance to vote for another black man in my lifetime.”

This is a person with a Ph.D. who knows better, and yet he’s voting on color. I know that no one ever knocked on my door to ask me for my vote, for my opinion. I haven’t lived in per se a black neighborhood, but I lived always in mostly liberal areas. They just assumed they had me, and so nobody ever knocked on my door to ask, “What do you think about –?”

Nobody. Republicans never came because, I guess, they figured it’s going to take too many election cycles to win me and Democrats never came because “We already got her.” We’ve got to go find new blood. That’s why I say, and I’ve said, I want to be like you, Bill, when I grow up. I want to have what you have. I go to the polling station, for instance, and they see me and some will hand me [a flyer] and some won’t because they can’t …

Walton: Republicans don’t waste their flyer.

Sears: Right, and Democrats don’t want to waste their flyer either.

Walton: Either. We got you.

Sears: I get nothing, but everybody assumes. I walk into that polling station and it angers me every single time that people assume I’m a Democrat. I want what you have, I don’t know if you’re libertarian, Green Party, Reform Party, Democrat, a Republican, I don’t know who you are.

I have to come and get you, I have to win you, I have to tell you my ideas. I have to talk with you, I have to discuss, debate. But nobody does that with people who look like me. Well, Star, they will because you’re so famous. But …

Parker: I think it depends on the state you live in, because I don’t know that that reality is through the country. But it perhaps is a reality in some states. I do think that when we break it down, in particular, today, what is going on in America, there’s a window of opportunity to get more black votes to go to the Republican Party, if that’s the goal.

Some people, their goal is to keep the Republican Party as a conservative party rooted in its principles. The reason that that opportunity is now is because we’ve tried it the other ways for a long time. When you think about the uniqueness of African American heritage in this country, you can appreciate why it’s been such a challenge for us to focus time and attention and resources on figuring out how to get ideas and information discussed in this community.

A legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and a welfare state has had some consequences. One of those consequences is there’s a disproportionate number of African Americans that work for government. When you think about the expansion of government, especially, in the welfare state, only 20 cents on $1 actually reaches the household. You’re talking about $900 billion of antipoverty money that’s basically the pot for bureaucrats, and bureaucrats are black. You have a dilemma with the black middle class, with the black upper class, because this is a community of people who have government in their lives when it comes to economics. A lot of people vote their economic interests, not their race.

Sears: Well, we can talk about, for example, my election [in 2001]. It was a double whammy for me because when I was recruited, I wasn’t really well known in the community. But I felt that this was a calling. I prayed about it. I had gone up to … let me tell you how uninformed I was. You said that you hadn’t registered to vote and you hadn’t voted; I didn’t even know that in order to be, say you were part of the Republican Party, you had to be a member.

I didn’t become a member of the Republican Party until the day that I was asked to run. I had to make the case of why I was a Republican to my local Republican Party. I just assumed if you voted Republican you were. Anyway, I went up to vote for Mark Earley for [Virginia] governor at the time. He was running against, he would have been running against Mark Warner, who is now senator, but this was for the governorship.

I didn’t get to vote because I wasn’t registered anywhere. To make a long story short, OK, I was given the ask: “Winsome, we’d like you to run.” So prayed about it, which is what drives me more than anything because I know no one is greater than God and so he’s in control at all times.

I got to go back to Jamaica and my children got to go back to Jamaica. Just because I’m black, it didn’t mean anything; as an immigrant, I had to deal with that. Then I had to deal with the fact that ‘You’re black and you’re for the Republicans and they don’t like us,” etc., etc. No policy, just what they keep hearing.

I would have little grandmothers sneak up behind me and just whisper, brush against me and say, “I’m voting for you.” But these are grandmas, they’re not supposed to be afraid to let people know who they are. This is what we do to each other in my community, unfortunately, and it’s still happening.

Walton: There is a phenomenon that the Republicans can be pretty clueless. Republicans make assumptions that they’re not going to win the black vote. One of you referred to something called the “Star Trek solution” that Republicans have.

Sears: Oh, that would be me.

Walton: OK.

Sears: Yeah, that’s an organization where we think we can just fly in and get things done. But you’ve got to make relationships, you’ve got to win hearts. I’ve said before some of the things that we can do as Republicans–we love education, right? We want everybody to be part of the taxpaying members of society who need education for that.

What do we do? I say go to the local Boys and Girls Club. They are around, they help poverty-stricken single mothers, whatever it is, and buy some computers and let them know the Republican Party did that. Then maybe sponsor the T-shirts for midnight basketball. I’m just, this is a very …

Walton: Be part of the community. Just be …

Sears: Be part of the community. And I’ll tell you why, because come election time, the Democrats are going to come around and they’re going to say, “Those are Republicans, they’re bad, they’re bad.”

That’s when it comes to fruition, because the folks at the Boys and Girls Club and the parents will say, “Which Republicans are you talking about? Because the Republicans I know, you see those computers, they bought them. The Republicans that I know, you remember, our basketball tournament, the T-shirts, they bought them. Which Republicans are you talking about?”

Walton: Before we dig into the policies, which I think are material and part of the reasons why you are for Republicans, you both talked about faith. How important is faith to you coming to where you are and believing what you believe about what’s right and wrong?

Parker: Well, I think it’s absolutely important and not just for myself, personally, but for public policy. I think that that’s what the founders saw and knew very well and expressed often, that you can’t self-govern without God. It was important to have a moral people.

I think that that’s where we’ve lost ourselves as a nation. The more heavy the hand of government is, the less religion you have. If you look in any and almost every socialist country, there’s no coexistence between God and government. That’s what’s the big struggle today. The cultural war rooted in this determination that the left wants to do abortion is what started the cultural war. But where we are today is just fundamental–who’s going to do this.

Walton: You really can’t have a functioning democracy unless you’ve got a common moral foundation.

Parker: Well, you’ve got to …

Walton: And that’s where we’ve drifted apart.

Parker: … and then that’s where you say where do you get that as well. That’s where libertarians miss it, you’ve got say where.

Walton: Libertarians miss that.

Parker: Yeah, where are you? If you make it up as you go along, then you’re no better than the liberal because that’s what they want–situational ethics.

Walton: I don’t think people understand that–libertarians, and I am one, but I’m a recovering libertarian–you got to have a fabric of society, civil society, church, faith, family, all those sorts of things or you can’t have an economy.

Parker: You can’t have an economy; it’s the same coin and you just have two sides of that coin. What really fascinates me about libertarianism–and I’ve had these heated discussions that you’ve had not just with myself, but with my friends–is de Tocqueville. Their hero in all of this said, like, “I had to find the secret and I found it when I went into their churches.”

It’s just they’re inseparable. If you don’t self-govern and root it in a Judeo-Christian ethic, why do you believe what you believe? Then you will open the door for moral chaos, which then opens the door for a totalitarian state.

Sears: I have noticed that many times when I read the Bible, the Lord will say to the people he has chosen, “Don’t be afraid, be strong and courageous.” I think it’s because we will be afraid to take stands. But if we understand that he controls everything, then we’re fine.

It is why I can do what I do. It is why I’m generally not afraid. When I do get afraid, it’s because I keep forgetting he will never leave me, he will never abandon me. That’s the second thing he always says when he tells the people to not to be afraid.

I’m reading about David. You think about David. David killed Goliath. [He] fought lions and bears, and that’s why he said he knew that he could fight Goliath too. And yet David spit on himself and everything else and acted like a madman when he was confronted with a king who could have killed him. He forgot this God that he served was a mighty God and could help him. We don’t remember that part about David, we just remember the giant slayer, but he’s man like everybody else.

God is important to me, and it was one of the reasons that really brought me to the Republican Party because I understood how we came to be. And that there were a certain number of folks who said, “We will not vote for a president who supports slavery, it’s just not going to happen.” They were willing to lose everything, and they did. They lost the elections until we got Abraham Lincoln.

This is my home, but I’ve always said even after when I was elected [in 2001], I’m a Christian first and a Republican second. I don’t want to hear about your economic policies and how you’re going to build a country if we have to kill babies along the way. It’s just not going to work.

Walton: Star, you’ve talked about the three wars that were started in the ’60s.

Parker: Right, they bring us to the place where people elected Donald Trump.

Walton: Exactly, the thing was where things have been. How did it get this way, where we are? Where we think we should take it?

Parker: Right. Well, if you think about the values coming out of the–they call them the greatest generation. They were intact when people understood faith and family. They understood the boundaries of government and why we were existing and why we were growing.

But there was a war in the ’60s. The baby boom generation got off track. The first war we had was a war on religion, where we did scrub our schools from any reference of God. During that same body of time, we had a war on marriage, where the feminists just didn’t like their station in life and decided that they were going to work through public policy to change that current reality …

Then we had a war on poverty that basically said, “Don’t think about any natural consequences that come from these decisions you’re now making without religion and without family, because we have safety nets.” Over time, those safety nets evolved into three rules: Don’t work, don’t save, don’t get married, and we’ll keep you addicted to a government …

Walton: I want to make sure I get it: Don’t work, don’t save, and don’t get married.

Parker: Don’t get married, and now we’ll keep you enslaved to our poverty plantation. You fast-forward five years after [Martin Luther] King’s death, Roe v. Wade is national law. Look where we are today, black people have killed off more people than were in existence during that time. There are 20 million African Americans during the ’60s; we just aborted 20 million after ’60 and ’70.

Sears: We’ve done what the Klan was never able to do. We did it to ourselves.

Parker: Yeah, but the law … did change. The law did say there’s nothing wrong with exterminating [what has] grown in your womb, what God calls his reward.

Then the law supported this through our tax dollars, to build these big corporate welfare recipients of Planned Parenthood. Then they targeted this particular vulnerable community to tell them that their children were environmental hazards, so don’t have too many.

Sears: In North Carolina right now, Planned Parenthood has built, opened four clinics, four, in just one county. But where are they? They’re in the black neighborhood.

Parker: That’s right, 79% of them. …

Sears: My father came to America, we’re talking about the ’60s, he came just 11 days before Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. It’s significant because he came with only $1.75 in his pocket, a foreigner.

I said to him … I didn’t know this until I was running for Congress [in 2004] and I thought I better find out more before a reporter gets to it. I said, “Why did you come?”

He said, “Because this is where the jobs were.”

I said, “Yeah, but it was really bad for us at that time.”

He said, “I don’t know anything about that, I just know that this is where the opportunities were.”

He started with $1.75, moved in with his sister. Six months later, he said, he took whatever job he could get so he could put himself through school, moved out, got roommates.

I said, “So you got financial aid?” He said, “No, I worked myself through school.”

Now he’s comfortably retired, left New York for Atlanta. Surprise, surprise, I didn’t think he could ever leave New York. But somebody would come to him, one of our socialist folks who don’t know how any of this began, and they would say to him, “Why do you have such a big house?” Not knowing the backstory, which is [he] came to America with $1.75.

If my father can do that as a foreigner, don’t tell me this country isn’t great. He’s a black man, you don’t have to, “Oh, is he black or is he …” No, no, he’s black, you can tell he’s black. And he did it.

He did whatever it took, and so his two daughters–college educated, here I am–made history. What’s significant about the history that I made is to say, “I was elected in a majority-minority district.” We were 54% Democrat, and what that tells you is it can be done; it can be done if we ask, if we ask it can be done.

Walton: You really stopped me in my tracks. I’m thinking about how we can get people to not see race.

Parker: That’s impossible, why would you want anyone to do that?

Sears: Yeah, we are who God made us to be. He loves all colors.

Walton: I think we’re all human beings, but that’s just …

Parker: Well, yeah, but we do have different experiences and we did have different shades and black doesn’t crack, so I’m enjoying every minute. I’m enjoying every minute of getting older and more seasoned in this.

But, Bill, to your point, I think where you’re going with that, and correct me if I’m just making an assumption, is how do we break down all of the time when we’re discussing race? Why is it that we can’t find common ground on what this country should be? What we should look like? Why is it that when you talk to the majority of African Americans, they tend to vote Democrat and liberal?

When you talk to the majority of white Americans, they’re turned in the other way. I think that one place we can’t ignore and why this has happened is in education and what has happened there. When you think about the development of the Department of Education–you talk about going through the journey of the past, how did we get here? We really did have problems coming in through those ’60s as African American people.

The next thing we know, we have a Department of Education rather than the society saying, “You know what, OK, maybe we should stop discriminating and segregating against certain ethnicities and allow our children to be educated.” The society kept the wall up long enough for the government to move in. The government moved in to develop [the] Department of Education, and look where we are today. We have 30-something states that have Blaine amendments. It’s written into their constitution …

Walton: A Blaine Amendment is what?

Parker: It’s where it’s written into their constitution that money cannot follow children to the schools the parents want. The reason for the Blaine Amendment was because of religious divisions at that time. But now it’s trapping poor children in failing schools. Now, keep in mind, there is a Supreme Court decision coming very rapidly. So next June, it could be all over. But you said what happened in the past; that’s what happened in the past.

So now you have all of the poor, all of those that are low wage and poor, being educated in a government system that’s union controlled, whose philosophy is secularism and socialism. Two generations later, of course, you have all those that are on the margins, poor, low wage, which are very disproportionately African American [and] Latino, voting for Democrats and liberals. People vote their economic interest, not their racial interest.

Walton: How popular are vouchers?

Parker: Vouchers are incredibly popular, and let me give you one story on the [school] voucher movement, because I’ve been in that movement a long time as well. When the philosophers behind and the thinkers behind school choice were calling it school choice, we were getting very, very low ratings in the black community. They didn’t want school choice, and so [economist] Milton Friedman finally said something is wrong, why is it that this phenomenal opportunity for money to follow children to schools parents want not being received in black America?

They finally polled. They did what you said: “Well, maybe we should go ask black folks.” Well, you know what black folks heard when they heard school choice? They heard that [as] the Jim Crow South, there’s kids not getting an education. So they changed their parental choice … Now [it] is called educational options and EdChoice. And guess what, black people are polling 95% that they want opportunity.

Walton: Yeah, Obama shut down the voucher program and he …

Parker: He tried to shut it down, but he didn’t, he wasn’t successful. That was only a D.C. voucher program, though. Remember, that was only the sampling here, and that was a fascinating sampling too, thanks to [education activist] Virginia Walden Ford, who now has a movie out about her life and her opportunity to get that voucher set up here in Washington, D.C. That her own son didn’t get to take advantage of, because he had graduated by then. …

[The voucher] was for $7,500 and it could only go with the student if you were failing in your class, your school was also failing, and … you know how many applications they got? You had to be at a certain income level, [which was] low. And you know how many applicants they got? Like 3 million. People want school choice, they want to get to the economic station in life that they don’t need the big hand of government. It starts right there.

Walton: Well, and most of the politicians have school choice, because they can send their kids to private school.

Parker: That’s exactly right and they do.

Sears: Well, that’s it. See, this is one of the things that helped Ron DeSantis [win the governorship] in Florida …

Parker: That’s exactly right.

Sears: … when there were 100,000 black women who voted for him as opposed to [Andrew] Gillum, the Democrat, because Gillum said he was going to take school choice away. You’re not going to do that, not to my children.

In my race for example, the Democrat that I was running against, the incumbent, he sent his children to–not private school, because he was a little bit savvy there. But he sent them out of the district to school in Virginia Beach, where they were better. But in the meantime …

Walton: Well, he could afford to do that.

Sears: Right, his constituents were trapped in failing schools. You point that out, you talk about this kind of hypocrisy, and you’re getting right to the heart of the thing.

Parker: Let’s return, though, to what you just said about Gov. DeSantis now, because it is really, really important. Because you made the point earlier, Winsome, about how Republicans need to go into these districts and make their case. Gov. DeSantis made a deliberate effort to go into black communities all through the state of Florida and talk to them specifically about school choice, because they have a vibrant school trust program.

They don’t have a Blaine Amendment in Florida, so therefore money can move. How money began to move with students in Florida is because [a] prior governor, Gov. [Jeb] Bush, opened up under No Child Left Behind the opportunity for money to start moving. To say if you’re trapped in a failing school, you don’t have to be. That opened up the door for Florida to be very aggressive in promoting educational options.

DeSantis went specifically to the places that you said, he went to the PTAs, he went everywhere. Gillum, the African American going to solve all problems for black people decided that he was going to publicly rebuke the opportunity grants for money to go with parents and children to other schools. He rebuked the charters. In fact, he said he was going to shut down the charter schools. You’re right, 18% of African American women voted for DeSantis.

This is a monumental … This the group that Republicans never get. That was the first time in the history that black women voted for a Republican and were the margin to help him win. Black men, Trump got a lot of black men but he did not get black females. But on educational options, you can gain the trust of the black women.

Sears: You know what that does? If you get us voting once and our fingers didn’t fall off and we’re still alive, we voted for a Republican. I’m like, “Gosh,” then we’ll start listening more and we’ll think about the next person we vote for.

Walton: Sammy Davis Jr., because he supported Nixon.

Sears: Right, and then Jim Brown felt some of it too when he was still active as an NFL player. … I ran because I wanted folks to know the seat that I hold does not belong to me, it belongs to you. You are America, you; this is your seat and we will be your representatives. You don’t vote for me just because I’m black or white, you vote because you care about the policies, you care about [them] and you want to see who it is that represents those for you.

I knew that no one ever came to their doors either, so I made sure, I wanted to set an example. I went to one of my schools; I had all of the public housing projects in my district, it’s 54% black. I said to the children, it was third grade, and I said, “Let’s make a law, let’s talk about how you make laws.”

I explained how we did it and then I said, “Now, who wants to make a law?” Young child rose up and he said, “I want to make a law, and the law I want to make is that if you kill somebody, you must pay for their funeral.” What is he experiencing in the third grade that that is the first law that comes to mind? This is boots on the ground stuff, this is in-your-face stuff.

Parker: That’s a good idea.

Walton: But he’s experiencing murder, I mean … there were like 70 murders in Chicago last weekend …

Parker: Well, I don’t know the district you ran in, but what are their property rates and their murder rates? One of the beautiful things about the Trump administration is the Opportunities Zones initiative. Now we know exactly where those districts are.

It’s probably one of those, there are 87, 100 of them in the country and we’re deliberately focused on all of them. Money is flowing in because of the capital gain benefit that you will get by putting your money in one of these Zip codes. This time rates will come down very, very rapidly here. …

Sears: I was vice president of the State Board of Education in Virginia. We would always hear about the things that are not happening …. How do we come alongside and help parents, help the communities? Because we’ve tried to take faith so much out of politics that it is difficult to get the buy-in of the powers that be–the unions, everybody else, the black politicians who … never have anything to do really with us.

I have seen black politicians, especially, from my neighborhood, they act one way when they’re in the neighborhood and they’re totally a different way when they’re in Richmond, for example. They would never know their constituents, they would never know their heritage.

Walton: Wasn’t there a Yale study that showed that the Democrats talk differently to minorities than they do to anybody else [and] the Republicans don’t?

Sears: Well, I’ve got an example for you: the former speaker of the [Virginia] House, way back then Democrat, because so far in Virginia we’ve only had two Republican speakers in our whole history. But, anyway, he came to our local neighborhood watch, and this is how he styled it. We’re all black, and he said, “So and so, you remember, back in ’64, I was the only white man who did X, Y, and Z. And, Bella, you remember back in ’68, I was the only white man who did…”

I’m sitting in shock, I’m in shock. And then we are there, “Yes, sir. Yes, sir.” What? Then his opponent came in and she said, “Well, here’s what I’m going to do on transportation, here’s what I’m going to do on education, and here’s what I’m going …”

My mind was fried, and I got up and I said [to him], “How dare you come and speak to us like that? If you went to, for example, your Western constituency where all the rich folks are, you would talk to them about policy. But here you come and you talk about what you’ve done for us in the ’60s. What have you done for us lately? You come talk policy to us, because we have minds too.” Oh, he got red. …

Parker: I don’t live in Virginia and … their politics is very, very different. What I do know is that every congressional vote now is impacting all of the country, so we are very concerned now about the legislators from particular areas.

Walton: We’ve been talking about that, the size of the federal government such that it really matters because it affects everybody much more than it used to. But we talked about faith and teaching values, even school choice.

The thing that troubles me is that with the rules on curriculum, the rules on accreditation, the rules on teacher certification, even when you’ve got choice, you sometimes end up in a school that’s not that much different than what it could be. Have you dug into that at all?

Parker: Well, that’s not true. … Competition is what makes a school great in a community. When you think about just the government running schools, we should all be concerned about that, in particular, with the type of curriculum that is now being pushed down …

Walton: Oh, the history curriculums are terrible.

Parker: … As you’re pointing out, Bill, not even just in the government-run, government-funded, union-run schools, but also in the private schools. This secularism has seeped into all of our society, and conformity has seeped into all of our society to where everything has to be politically correct. But one of the best lines that Trump said in his inaugural speech: That was then.

While it’s important to talk about the past and how we got here, I am just so excited about what has happened just in the last two years. That was then, to where everything has changed. [Trump] has stacked the courts now with conservative-leaning philosophy 150 deep. He has an initiative for taxes that has increased employment to the place where unemployment, you’ve got even a high school dropout can find a …

Sears: And in the black community.

Parker: When you think about what he’s done even on education and educational options, now [there] needs to be a court decision to get school choice or what we like to now call parental choice across the country. That has to go through the court because there’s a court decision standing in the way. The Blaine Amendment.

But, in the meantime, he has a Department of Education that is open to school options, and they’re doing everything they can everywhere they can to make sure that the poor person is not subjected to a failing school anymore. We have some positive things to report as well, including in the black community. …

Sears: That’s right.

Walton: Well, one of the things you did powerfully [in an unsuccessful 2018 write-in campaign for U.S. Senate] was you linked abortion to 23 million black babies that were killed. … Margaret Sanger, she founded Planned Parenthood, and she said, “Colored people are like human weeds and need to be exterminated.”

Parker: Barack Obama was the first sitting president to actually address them at their national conference, and then at the end of his speech say, “God bless you, Planned Parenthood.”

Sears: Planned Parenthood.

Parker: The eugenicists are the environmentalists; we should not even use either term in a sentence separate from each other. When you think about what’s coming out of the mouths of these environmentalists today, it is exactly what the eugenicists believe and is exactly what liberals believe in.

Walton: Amplify, I’m not sure I understand.

Parker: Environmentalists really believe that we’re running out of resources, so they want the people that are the weakest …

Sears: Because we’ve only got 12 years, according to them, I guess. It’s 11 by now. It’s so ridiculous, it is absolutely. … If we’re not building houses or anything like that for those who look like me to live in, because people look like you already have your house and that sort of thing.

That doesn’t help black people, it helps us being stuck in poor neighborhoods, filthy neighborhoods, that sort of thing. The environmentalists are not really our friends, and I think we know that. But, unfortunately, we just can’t seem to pull the lever sometimes.

Walton: Well, environmentalism is incredibly elitist.

Sears: It’s very.

Walton: It’s not only true here, it’s true everywhere.

Parker: Well, that’s what I’m saying. The housing policy is a very different question, so I wouldn’t want anyone to get confused that this is the same question, what’s happening with the environmentalists and what’s happening with basic supply-and-demand opportunity regarding housing.

It is a fact that we’ve reached a point a couple of years ago as a society where we have more non-married adults than married. When you need two of anything, you’re going to …

But there is a point that I would like to make on this environmental question, because it’s extremely important for people to understand … the housing debate. Eugenicists and environmentalists are the same people. When you are an elite that believes that you have a limited amount of resources, then you do not want people draining those resources.

They feel that if you are weak, you get into your quote about Margaret [Sanger] saying, “If you have a disability, if you have any type of economic instability, if you are old,” this is why we now have several states who have actually legalized assisted suicide. Make no mistake, these are the environmentalist and these are the liberals, these are the progressives, these are the Democrats. I just wanted to really make that point because I think it’s very, very important …

Sears: That’s an excellent point. It’s an excellent point.

Parker: … that people understand that they’re the same as the Margaret Sanger types. …

Walton: we are talking about the links between environmentalism and …

Parker: Eugenicism.

Walton: Eugenicism. And fascinating.

Parker: Oh, well, it’s true. Because when you think about it, and the original question about God: Oh, well, really? Is he going to run out of natural resources? How, you know, it’s just fascinating that Bill Gates and his foundation, why are they in the 50 African countries trying to promote their abortion?

Walton: Well, the people who believe we’re going to run out of resources are the same people who think we’re going to run out of human ingenuity. …We’re surrounded by things that we’ve invented and we’re going to keep [saying], “OK, we’ve got this problem. We’re going to do something to deal with it, and then the market will work.”

Sears: Yeah, they first told us that the planet was actually cooling, remember that? Back in the early ’70s, and I guess that didn’t pan out. I don’t know, where we are in the grand scheme of things is they tell us what things are. But when I read my Bible, I read differently, so I’m fine with where I’m at.

I’d like to see, when we talk about black representation and we look at the places where black people are, where the mayors … the senators or the local reps were on city council. We look at our communities, and they told us that when they became, or when we became, the majority, when we were in office, that things would change.

I’m seeing what’s happening in the neighborhoods, the black neighborhoods, in New Jersey. You hear a few noises here and there about things, but Democrats are in charge and they’ve been in charge, and who’s holding them accountable? That’s the sort of thing that we talk about. Now, we’re not going to win everybody, but we’ll win some and then we’ll move on.

Walton: One of the striking things about the policies that affected marriage, employment, business ownership, schools, the policies that were aimed at the inner city … [are] now spread out to rural white America. … These bad ideas, forget about race, it’s just they’re … bad for people.

Parker: That’s why I don’t talk about it in terms of race at all.

Walton: I don’t think we should.

Parker: We shouldn’t, because when you think about the policies of the left, and to your point, it’s why we have books. Even with social thinkers like [political scientist] Charles Murray having to say we are coming apart, where are we healthy as a society? It’s when husbands are married to the mother of the children.

Walton: It’s a universal truth.

Parker: It’s a universal truth. When demographers like myself, when you look at the data and you try to find “Is race a component, first point, on crime and low educational aspirations?” If you are coming from a single head of household, your tendencies are more increased to go into crime and/or have lower educational aspirations. Seventy-five percent of young boys in our criminal justice system come from single head of households. But when you look at data …

Walton: Regardless of race.

Parker: Regardless of race, there’s just disproportion because the family collapsed first.

Walton: It’s the pathology, yeah.

Parker: In the ’60s, black marital rates were at 70%. Today, they’re at 30%. You can’t have 30% of your adult population married and wonder why your kids don’t know what to do. What has happened, though, when you look at the white family compared to the black family, let’s just look at family and income levels. When you’re looking at husbands married to mothers of children, black household, white household, … guess what we cannot measure? Economic differences, educational differences, crime differences.

You know why? Because they’re so small. They’re like really small. It doesn’t matter what color you are, but when you have a single [parent] household, guess what, we can measure and guess where the big gap is? Wealth, because you have a disproportionate number of single households on this side of that, you have less on this side.

But to your point, the more that that white family unravels, we see the same social pathologies. … That’s why we’re seeing opiates, we’re seeing incredible rates of suicide with white males. We’re seeing white males taking out their anger on their neighbors and shooting them down. This is a problem, so I’m glad that you brought it up.

This has nothing to do with race. The left keeps us focused on race. The left keeps talking about … what blacks are doing and what black lives and black this and black that. No, that’s their language. If we start thinking about the founding principles of this country, [it’s] to be responsible with your choices. If we start thinking about the rule of law outlined in our Constitution, and we start educating our children accordingly to where husbands marry the mother of their children, you will start seeing some of these other pathologies dissipate almost overnight.

Sears: I was just in Louisiana and the taxicab driver’s black, he’s listening to a black station, and he’s taking me back to the airport. They have their race is coming up, the Democratic governor and two Republicans are in that race for the governorship. John Bel Edwards is the incumbent.

The thing about it was that the radio station, the commercial was so vitriolic, the Democrat commercial sponsored by black somebody, some organization, was so vitriolic against the Republican, not the Republican candidate, the Republican Party. What they were spewing, and I have to say spewing because it’s poison and it keeps us in our place. We’re not talking about race, but they’re talking about race so we …

Parker: All the time, endlessly.

Sears: … have to say some things about that because we have to have answers for all that. We have to have an answer to it …

Walton: My frame for policy is three questions: What works, what’s moral, what makes people happy? If you took off all the values that you all have been talking about, they’re conservative values, essentially, they’re kind of bougie values. When you get married, you stay married, you get a job, you save, you do all those sorts of things. …

Parker: I think that that’s where we’re going in this discussion that we’ve been having over the last two years with this election. It sounds noisy because of impeachment and other things that are getting in the way of us finding out why America seems to be sinking back to its founding principles.

When you look at the couple of cases that the Supreme Court just decided, that they’re going to take on with the new seatings there, I’m very hopeful that we are going to get beyond this, trying to pretend that race is the driver of this. As we’re now watching the white and the majority community collapse because of these same policies and values. … And then the argument always is, “Well, which came first, the public policy or the culture?” This has been a constant, culture policy.

I don’t believe that we would have 68 million abortions if [the] policy didn’t change. We can pretend that the culture wanted this and it forced policy, but I’m just not sure. I’m still in great debate about did policy change this? I’m not sure that we would see black … marriage rates collapse the way they had if policy hadn’t changed. Where it said, “Don’t marry if you want help financially from Uncle Sam.”

I’m not sure that we would see a lot of these challenges that we’re having today if policy didn’t change, including education policy. It’s an education policy that traps poor children in failing schools. It’s government that’s paying Planned Parenthood to diminish the size of this community. I think it’s sad to see what’s happening with the majority community now, collapsing so and unraveling to the place that it is.

But I’m hopeful that not only does it open us up to this discussion, so the majority of Americans don’t think, “Well, it’s just those people over there, so we don’t have to think about it as long as they don’t come to our community.” But we also can be hopeful because the courts have changed.

Sears: We talk about hope, and we had someone who was going to give us hope and change. Well, when I look at someone like Kanye [West], I may not agree with everything about him. … When I heard him say recently so very emphatically, “Are you telling me that I have to vote for somebody just because of my color?” He didn’t care what you said. …

Parker: This is one thing to be liberal and conservative, [but I] don’t want a bunch of these Democrats becoming Republican if they’re bringing their values with them.

Sears: No, I don’t want that, either. … There’s hope.

Walton: There is hope.

Sears: There’s always hope. … I see it in the people that I talk to, I see it when someone comes up and says to me, “Keep doing what you’re doing.” On Facebook, they troll me. But it’s cool, I’m all right with it. I know that you may not like what’s going on, but there are other people who are wanting to say, “Well, tell me more.”

Parker: That’s right.

Sears: I may not win them …

Parker: We don’t need a lot of helpers.

Sears: Yeah, we don’t need. I may not win them this time around, but next time–but it gives them something to think about. That’s what we want.

Walton: This is incredible. We have to wrap, we’re done.

Sears: Really?

Walton: Fantastic.

Parker: We solved all the problems in the world.

Walton: Well, we’re getting closer and closer and closer. Let’s come back and keep going with this.
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William L. Walton is the host of The Bill Walton Show. He is the founder and chairman of Rappahannock Ventures LLC, a private equity firm, and Rush River Entertainment, a feature-film production company, and is a trustee of The Heritage Foundation. He shared this on The Daily Signal. Star Parker is also an ARRA News Service contributing author.

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