New House Can Stop Weaponized Prosecutions
Conservatives asserted themselves in the election for Speaker of the House and, now that Kevin McCarthy has been picked, action is needed to shut down weaponized prosecutions. Our Republic is imperiled by improper attempts to prosecute Republican leaders.
In the last act of the Democrat-controlled Congress before handing the gavel to McCarthy, Democrat minority leader Hakeem Jeffries reduced the chamber to groans with his Mickey Mouse-style recitation of 26 couplets, one for each letter of the alphabet. For the letter G he shouted “governance over gaslighting.”
Governance over gaslighting, indeed, will be the method of the new Republican House. In becoming next in line to the presidency after our hapless vice president, McCarthy pledged to form and fund a new subcommittee to expose and stop the weaponization of the FBI and other government agencies against the president’s chief political rival, Donald Trump.
Headlines are filled with leaked news from liberal- controlled investigations that should not even exist. The Democrat-controlled Fulton County, Georgia grand jury completed its secret report that may recommend indictments of top Republicans, and the Justice Department issued subpoenas on Republican officials over two-year- old conversations with Trump.
On January 9, conservatives flexed their muscle in the House by electing a young Trump-supporting congressman from rural Missouri, Jason Smith, as chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee. Smith was a late entry in that race and yet overcame the less conservative, older Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL) on the second ballot.
Meanwhile, the new Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee is Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), the two-time winner of the NCAA Division I wrestling championship when he was in college. He also won his state wrestling championship all four years in high school, and at one point defeated a future Olympic gold medalist.
As Chairman, Jordan should perform the equivalent of the “Fireman’s Carry” takedown, a wrestling move that uses an opponent’s aggression against him. He can issue subpoenas against the unhinged investigators who interfere with Trump’s ongoing reelection campaign to return to the White House, with a penalty of contempt for liberals who refuse to comply.
Presidential elections need to be protected by Congress against political hacks who disguise themselves as prosecutors. Our Republic and its democratic processes should not be thwarted by low-level county prosecutors or unaccountable Deep State operatives who seek to change the course of American history by making unprecedented allegations of non-existent crimes.
We learned January 9 that the Penn Biden Center, a so-called think tank funded by donations from China, improperly possessed classified documents from Biden’s time as Vice President more than six years ago. Yet there is no million-dollar investigation of Biden, while biased prosecutors have relentlessly harassed Trump and even raided his home over documents that he had securely locked and protected.
The Republican House should crack wide open the one-sided investigations of Trump at every level, while similar conduct by top Democrats has gotten a pass. Our Nation depends on free and fair elections and that cannot be achieved if biased prosecutors do the bidding of Democrats trying to block Trump’s reelection.
While Republicans do not have a majority in the U.S. Senate, they do not need one to shine a bright spotlight on the misuse of government by Dems against Trump and his many supporters. The House should rescind its own contempt resolutions against good folks like Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, for their non-existent “crimes” of protecting President Trump.
The House should pass resolutions to pardon individuals who have been improperly convicted, or imprisoned without a trial in the D.C. Gulag where they are deprived of medical treatment. Such legislative pardons are untested in courts but could be attached to pet projects that Biden and other Democrats demand the House to enact for their special interests.
The House can subpoena and compel testimony, and should do so immediately. The House controls the purse strings for all of the federal government, and if Democrats refuse to cooperate then Republicans should be prepared to cut off the funding of D.C. and other liberal enclaves.
The officials in Fulton County, Georgia, who have interrogated Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and many Trump allies should receive subpoenas soon from the House Judiciary Committee, to answer questions about why they are interfering with the 2024 presidential election. Protecting the integrity of that upcoming election against scurrilous accusations by rogue prosecutors is central to the House’s authority, and it has jurisdiction to pursue this.
Questions should include what precedent prosecutors can cite for misusing their power to interfere with the reelection campaign of the presumptive Republican nominee. If Georgia county officials refuse to show up and testify, then they should be held in contempt of Congress as Democrats were so fond of doing to Republicans over the last two years.
Who Will Close the Border?
More than 1,000 illegal migrants openly walked across the Rio Grande into El Paso, Texas the night of December 11, capping a record-breaking 3-day weekend in which 2,460 illegal migrants were “processed” there by federal agents. El Paso is just one of nine sectors defined by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) along the 2,000- mile border between the United States and Mexico.
About 500 miles downriver from El Paso, two large groups totalling 1,000 migrants crossed into Eagle Pass, Texas, in the Del Rio Sector, December 9, after 700 migrants had crossed the day before. On December 10, Fox News reporter Bill Melugin tweeted that “CBP sources tell us more than 4,800 migrants have crossed illegally in just these two sectors in the last 24 hours.”
From his first day in office, Joe Biden has signaled his administration’s policy and promise not to enforce our nation’s immigration laws. The predictable result is that a relentless human tide of uninvited people from around the world have been entering our country from the south, after first passing through the lawless narco-state of Mexico.
The roughly 5,000 people who surrender every day to be “processed” by Border Patrol agents in CBP do not even include the thousands of known “got-aways.” That’s the official term for migrants who evade arrest when they sneak across the border, because they have prior criminal records for drug trafficking or sex crimes.
The number of got-aways has exploded under Biden because no Border Patrol agents are available to stop and arrest them. That’s because Biden’s anti-American DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has reassigned CBP and Border Patrol agents to “processing” the unprecedented hordes of illegal migrants who voluntarily turn themselves in every day.
Nor do the numbers include the thousands of people who enter legally through airports or other ports of entry, but then violate the terms of their admission by staying too long, working illegally, or committing deportable crimes. These people are just as illegal as the migrants who waded across the Rio Grande, but we can’t find them without implementing the entry-exit system that Congress mandated over 20 years ago.
The sheer numbers of these unwanted people are so gargantuan that we struggle for words to express how rapidly our country has changed for the worse since Joe Biden took power two years ago. The best estimates are that the number of illegal aliens has increased by at least 5,000,000 since Biden became president.
Five million is greater than the population of half of the 50 states. It’s greater than all but one of our cities and all but two of our counties.
The number of invaders is projected to increase substantially when the Title 42 expulsion policy goes away as ordered by Judge Emmet Sullivan. That’s the same federal judge who persecuted General Mike Flynn on trumped-up charges, even refusing to recognize the Justice Department’s dismissal of all charges against Flynn.
More than half of the five million new migrants have been wrongly classified as asylum seekers, despite the principle that requires refugees to seek asylum in the first safe country they come to. All of the migrants crossing our southern border passed through at least one safe country on their way to the United States, so their bogus asylum claims should have been tossed without further ado.
Even the newly elected Republican majority in the House of Representatives has not shown the appetite or the will to reverse the flow of people across the border. Many Republicans speak only of the crisis “at” the border, as if the problem is just the 5,000 people who crossed in a recent day, rather than the 5,000,000 who crossed in the last two years.
“One of the highest priorities, when the Republicans take back Congress,” Donald Trump declared at a rally in Florence, Arizona in January 2022, “will be to . . . find and detain and deport every one of the illegal aliens that Joe Biden has released into our country.”
Trump’s commonsense promise was cheered by his thousands of supporters, but it has gained no traction in the halls of Congress, where Democrats and even some Republicans are trotting out discredited ideas to extend amnesty to illegal migrants. A week after the midterm elections, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer was bold enough to say the quiet part out loud.
“We have a population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to,” Schumer declared. “The only way we’re going to have a great future is if we welcome immigrants.”
Schumer’s avowed goal of replacing the American population with immigrants is an open declaration of war on the family-friendly, hard-working, middle-class Americans who form the base of the Republican party. Will Republican leaders rise to meet the challenge?
Where Leftism Crashed in 2022
Amid many economic failures in 2022, two of the biggest were Democrat-dominated Hollywood and the marijuana industry. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of Americans voted with their feet by fleeing Democrat- controlled areas to states with Republican governance.
Americans moved out of all four of the biggest liberal states: California, New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. Their population declines were the greatest in the country, while conservative states such Texas and Florida boomed by attracting Americans to move there.
So many people left California, New York, and Illinois since Joe Biden took office that each state would have lost yet another seat in the House of Representatives (and another Electoral College vote) in addition to the seat that each state lost in the 2020 Census. Democrat-controlled Minnesota would also lose a seat, while the states picking up those four seats would be Arizona, Florida, Idaho, and Texas.
The liberal media lost $540 billion in market value in 2022. The Dow Jones Media Titans index, which includes 30 of the world’s largest media companies including Disney, crashed by 40% in value, far more than other industries.
Hollywood’s end-of-year extravaganza, the big-budget “Babylon” movie about itself, was a sickening display of depravity that bombed at the box office. Even liberal critics expressed dismay at how low this movie sank.
Streaming services, which were supposed to be the next wonderful thing, likewise posted losses this past year. As Netflix turned to promoting perversity, millions of Americans turned it off.
The Wall Street Journal estimates that more than 100 million Netflix viewers are freeloading off of someone else’s password, totaling nearly half of its worldwide subscriber base. Reed Hastings, the billionaire Netflix CEO who showers liberal causes with his largesse, saw the value of Netflix stock decline by more than 50% in the past year.
An even bigger drop in value has occurred in the marijuana industry, which is euphemistically called cannabis to avoid negative connotations with the harmful weed. After voters were fooled into legalizing pot in many states, the black market has overwhelmed law enforcement and illegal drug sales are rampant now.
Legalizing the drug did not curtail the illegal traffic as pot promoters promised. Just the opposite: after making cannabis legal in nearly half the states, unlawful drug activity has only increased.
Oklahoma, where a 2018 ballot initiative legalized only medical marijuana, has become the largest exporter of pot and other drugs to other states, which is prohibited by federal law. With an estimated 7,000 marijuana growers dotting the rural landscape, the putrid smells, chemicals, bright lights, and excessive water use have transformed the Sooner State into a dystopia.
A gangland-style murder at a 10-acre marijuana farm shocked the state in November, with many questions unanswered about how six Chinese nationals got into that business. Court documents filed in December allege that the Chinese-born suspect demanded the return of $300,000 he had invested in the pot operation before he started shooting.
Despite such rampant criminality, the cannabis industry is undeterred as it promotes a March ballot initiative in Oklahoma to legalize recreational use of the harmful drug. The once-conservative state, which features one of the highest concentrations of churches in the country, is being transformed by this destructive experiment.
Illegal sales of marijuana have caused the bottom to drop out of prices on lawful sales, resulting in billions of dollars in losses to investors. The price of marijuana in Michigan has dropped by 75%, and similar declines in its value have occurred in California as illegal pot-growing continues to dominate the market.
California and Oregon are unlawfully exporting their excess marijuana to other states, including Michigan and New York. More than two-thirds of cannabis sales are estimated to be illegal in California and elsewhere.
Three out of four midwestern states rejected legalizing marijuana there in November, and pot-producers’ hopes for federal legislation to end the banking ban on the pot industry went up in smoke when it was not included in the recent omnibus bill.
Federal legislation in favor of cannabis seems less likely in the new Congress, where Republicans hold a slim majority in the House.
Legalizing pot has been disastrous to the desert southwest, where it has accelerated a dire water shortage that will soon result in deep cuts in what can be taken from the Colorado River. California and Colorado opened the door to rampant marijuana grows that steal immense amounts from the only source of water for 40 million Americans.
In December a drought emergency was declared for Southern California, as the Biden Administration failed to broker a new deal for how the Colorado River’s unprecedented low water level will be shared across the region. Now the feds threaten to impose rationing on water use by the southwestern United States.
Higher Ed Should Answer for Idaho Massacre
The arrest of a graduate student for the gruesome murders of four Idaho college students has attracted worldwide attention. Reports suggest a DNA match to that of the suspect, Bryan Christopher Kohberger, whose own attorney said the suspect was shocked merely “a little bit” by his predawn arrest 2,500 miles from the crime scene.
The media portray this crime as an isolated deranged act by one loner whose true motive remains unknown. In fact, the suspect was enrolled in graduate school and employed by nearby Washington State University, where he was working as a teaching assistant at the time of the murders.
Kohberger should have been more closely vetted before he was accepted into a publicly funded Ph.D. program. Without the support of Higher Education and its pipeline to public funding, he would not have killed in Idaho.
A professor at his prior university described him as a “brilliant” student based on a course she taught him over Zoom. Kohberger also pursued studies under another professor known as a prominent expert on the notorious Dennis Lynn Rader, who confessed to committing 10 murders in Kansas and referred to himself as BTK for “bind, torture, kill.”
Kohberger was living alone in an apartment complex among other graduate students in Washington State, not far from the Idaho crime scene.
Liberals cannot blame guns for this crime, which the police believe was committed with a long, heavy hunting knife. People familiar with that type of knife say its blade quickly becomes dull with use, requiring the killer to use enormous force to bludgeon his victims.
Kohberger was apparently supported by government subsidies common for most graduate students in Ph.D. fields of study, even useless ones. This able-bodied 28-year-old was embarked on a multiyear path of higher education that offered him plenty of idle time now and doubtful future employability.
A 28-year-old man needs a real job to stay on track toward becoming a productive contributor to society. Yet higher education consists of many programs that do not teach a marketable skill or put students on a responsible career path.
The system of handouts for those who pursue higher education enabled Kohberger to develop oddities such as reportedly preferring not to eat a meal that was cooked in pots or pans previously used to cook meat. Meanwhile, drug use among many grad students is generally prevalent, as has been mentioned on the Reddit website.
The taxpayer bailout of Higher Ed will come under scrutiny on February 28 when the Supreme Court hears oral arguments on Biden’s plan to stick Americans with potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in unpaid student loans. Two lawsuits challenge Biden’s debt forgiveness program: one brought by a half-dozen states, the other by former students who were partially or completely excluded from the relief.
In addition to its dubious graduate program in criminology, in which Kohberger was enrolled, Washington State University features advanced degrees in many fields lacking enough jobs in the private sector. Anthropology, athletic training, educational psychology, and experimental psychology are among the fields that should not be awarding advanced degrees at taxpayer expense.
Most graduate programs are funded by government largesse, even to the point of giving graduate students a generous stipend for living expenses. Kohberger was likely funded by taxpayers as he allegedly went on a killing spree a few miles away from his campus.
Nationwide, more than 1.75 trillion (not just billion) dollars in student loan debt has piled up. Students who go on to graduate school are typically unable to pay down any of this debt, and the longer they stay in graduate school the longer they can typically postpone being held in default on that crushing debt that their unwillingness to work causes.
We don’t know if this particular grad student stands to benefit from Biden’s massive debt forgiveness plan. But if this young man had been compelled to get a regular job, instead of being encouraged to postpone life by going to graduate school, then this horrible crime might not have happened.
Phyllis Schlafly worked a 48-hour-a-week job, commuting an hour each way, in order to fully pay her way through college in the 1940s. Almost no students do that today, and with Biden promising to waive loan obligations there is little reason for students to work to pay for what they can obtain for free.
This suspected killer reportedly had an addiction to heroin while in high school, and his gaunt look with his spacey stare prompted some to wonder if he was still on drugs. Few would be surprised if the murderer was high on drugs that desensitized him to this allegedly horrific violence, reminiscent of how the shocking drug-related Charles Manson murders of 1969 ended the hippie era.
