The judicial pile-up against President Trump, led by Obama-appointed federal judges in D.C., has become increasingly brazen. Comments by these judges reveal a shocking level of political bias by people whose job requires them to be strictly nonpartisan.
Judicial bias was on full display November 28th at a posh D.C. hotel where the Women’s White Collar Defense Association gave its “champion” award to a sitting federal judge, Beryl Howell. With almost no Republicans on hand to deter them, the powerful Democratic women lawyers felt free to let down their hair and say what they think about Trump.
As chief judge on the D.C. district court until earlier this year, Howell issued a series of one-sided rulings that included ordering Trump’s attorney to turn over his confidential notes to federal prosecutors. Most criminal defense attorneys would have howled in protest at her defiance of the traditional attorney-client privilege, but these liberal Democratic women lawyers gave her a high award instead.
In remarks accepting her undeserved award, Judge Howell bragged that she and her D.C. colleagues were, in effect, saving America from Donald Trump, whom she falsely accused of pushing our country to the “brink of authoritarianism.” She incorrectly referred to our country as a “democracy” when we are a republic in which our laws are made by elected representatives restrained by checks and balances, not by a direct popular vote.
Judge Howell avoided mentioning Trump’s name, but the context of her remarks left no doubt that her comments were directed at Trump and his supporters, as the media reported. She went on in her speech to claim that she and her fellow federal judges in D.C. see “the impact of big lies” by Trump in cases arising from the January 6 protest.
When Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made partisan comments against Trump in 2016, even the New York Times called her out in an editorial entitled, “Donald Trump Is Right About Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” Trump had said “I think it’s highly inappropriate that a United States Supreme Court judge gets involved in a political campaign, frankly. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it.”
Howell’s comments were particularly objectionable because her court is presiding over ongoing cases against Trump and hundreds of people who rallied to support him on January 6, 2021. Another Obama appointee, Judge Tanya Chutkan, continues to preside over Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump despite making a string of biased comments in her courtroom.
Chutkan has overseen convictions of more that 30 defendants in cases related to the January 6 rally, and has not acquitted a single defendant. According to The Washington Post, she has been the harshest sentencing judge, ordering at least some jail or prison time in all cases while sometimes exceeding the cruel sentences demanded by prosecutors.
On December 1 Judge Chutkan issued a 48-page diatribe against Trump, who is the frontrunner to be reelected president in 2024. The Jamaican-born federal judge made strained analogies to the founder of our country, George Washington, while imposing tyranny from the bench in her courtroom.
All that was missing from her narrative was a claim that she and other D.C. judges are courageously crossing the Delaware River as Washington did. The real tyranny is from crossing the Potomac River, where these judges have ruled against Trump and his supporters on every legal issue, while making absurd historical allusions.
The American people are turning against what Julie Kelly has called “January 6 jurisprudence,” confirmed by the reputable Pew Research in a recent survey about declining trust in government. Pew found that only 15% of Americans feel that the federal government is right “most of the time,” while a rock-bottom 1% say that the Feds are right “just about always.”
These liberal federal judges should read what Thomas Jefferson said 200 years ago about tyranny from the bench. As the author of the eloquent manifesto against the tyranny of King George III in 1776, Jefferson later recognized tyranny when he saw it coming from federal judges.
“As, for the safety of society, we commit honest maniacs to Bedlam,” Jefferson wrote, referring to the notorious English insane asylum, “so judges should be withdrawn from their bench, whose erroneous biases are leading us to dissolution. It may, indeed, injure them in fame or in fortune,” Jefferson continued, “but it saves the republic, which is the first and supreme law.”
The nearby Supreme Court should rein in the judges presiding over Trump-related cases in D.C., which have become show trials used by Biden supporters to crush his opposition. But instead the High Court wasted weeks pandering to liberal demands for a new code of ethics, and on December 1st the Justices gave themselves a three-day weekend based on the death of long-forgotten former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who resigned nearly two decades ago.
Lack of Discipline in Schools is the Problem
Students are not showing up in public school today, as attendance is no longer desired by parents. Many public schools have become places of indoctrination by the Left, or downright dangerous to attend.
No one can continue to blame this on Covid-19, when schools shut down. Absenteeism is severe long after the pandemic subsided, as in Nevada where more than a third of the students are chronically absent.
Only 42% of American adults are reportedly satisfied with schools, a 20-year low. Disillusionment with costly higher education is increasing and that may have a spillover effect on attitudes toward secondary education too.
This disappearance of students in classrooms is not merely a few teenagers skipping out for some fun, which is not new. Elementary students who need to be learning fundamental skills during that period of their life are not being taken to school.
Just five years ago only 7% of elementary public schools had chronic absenteeism by 30% of students. But in 2021-22, the percentage of the elementary public schools having chronic absenteeism shot up to 38%.
In October the New York Times reported that the schools run by the Department of Defense for about 66,000 children of service members have been doing better than public schools in all 50 states, as measured by the widely followed National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) exam. Most of these schools are on American military bases.
The Department of Defense Education Activity schools were first in our nation on the NAEP reading and math assessments in 2022. These schools were the only state or jurisdiction to show an increase in performance in any grade or subject that year.
The U.S. Army has a larger minority population than America as a whole: 46% compared with 40%. The
outperformance by secondary schools on military bases compared with other public schools is due to better discipline.
A total of 45% of students in these Department of Defense secondary schools are in low-income families, which is higher than the national average of 38%. Moreover, one-third of the children in military families move each year due to transfers of their parents, which is a hardship.
The military knows how to discipline its members, without permitting bad behavior until expulsion becomes necessary. Corporal punishment, such as swatting a misbehaving student, was allowed nationwide by the U.S. Supreme Court for public schools in Ingraham v. Wright (1977), yet states outside the South ban it.
In public schools 77% of teachers are female today, in sharp contrast with how our military is run. The overwhelming percentage of those public school teachers are liberal and opposed to any physical punishment of any kind for bad conduct.
Studies show that physical penalties for misbehavior are not any more harmful than other forms of punishment, such as repeated yelling. Many of the same students who are violent toward other students and teachers also play in violent sports like football, which create a far greater risk of injury to them than any physical discipline would.
Bringing back sensible discipline to public schools is way overdue, and would be a better focus of the never-ending special sessions in Texas where Gov. Greg Abbott recently called for a record-breaking fourth legislative session on education. Even if vouchers for private schools were to pass there, the vast majority of students would remain in declining, undisciplined public schools.
A third of teachers encounter threats by students annually, yet effective punishment is not allowed. Instead, liberals are permissive about misconduct until violence occurs, and even then sometimes fail to impose appropriate penalties.
While forbidding any meaningful discipline, public schools ultimately expel students but only after an egregious rampage. The single biggest reason for the increase in homeschooling is a fear by parents for the safety of their children in public schools.
Yet rather than restore order in schools, the failed approach of Vice President Kamala Harris while she was the district attorney for San Francisco was to prosecute parents for truancy, the outdated criminalizing of non-attendance at school. When she campaigned for California attorney general she promoted enacting a state law to punish parents when their children missed more than 10% of public school.
“We are putting parents on notice. If you fail to take responsibility for your kids, we are going to make sure that you face the full force and consequences of the law,” Harris threatened parents.
Harris, Biden, and the entire Democrat Party pander toteachers unions who should be blamed for turning schools into dens of crime, drugs, and liberal ideology. A study by the libertarian Cato Institute during Covid showed that delaying the reopening of schools was not based on valid concerns about the virus and safety, but on how powerful the regional teachers unions were.
GOP Should Reject Improper Ballot Initiatives
The “will of the people,” as expressed by outcomes of heavily funded ballot initiatives, is a canard that should be rejected by Republicans. Direct democracy was feared and opposed by our nation’s founders, who established a representative government for the United States and guaranteed “a republican form of government” to each of its member states.
Yet Republican candidates who participated in the third Republican presidential debate seemed to misunderstand this crucial point, as reflected by their senseless responses to questions about a recent ballot initiative that passed in Ohio. Ron DeSantis, for example, unjustifiably blamed the pro-life movement for being “caught flat-footed” by Issue 1, the abortion initiative, without mentioning that God-given rights should not be decided by a popular vote.
Republicans should be defending representative government against misuse of the ballot initiative process, which allows out-of-state industries and liberal billionaires to pass laws contrary to the informed decision-making by each state’s elected representatives. Ohio’s Issue 1 will benefit the billion-dollar abortion industry, while Issue 2 will profit the expanding marijuana industry by invading Ohio with a predicted $4 billion worth of pot.
Fortunately, some members of the Ohio state legislature are rising up against this misuse of ballot initiatives to change the culture of the Buckeye State. Ohio’s elected representatives should not take a back seat or bow down to ballot initiatives contrary to what has been the well-established tradition of Ohio and our Constitution.
The passage of the radical Issues 1 and 2 in Ohio are an assault by out-of-state industries and billionaires to transform the state, and its Republican-controlled General Assembly should strongly resist this invasion. Four out of five Republicans voted against Issues 1 and 2, and that is to whom the Republican legislators should be listening, rather than a multi-million-dollar barrage of television ads.
Legislators should not be deterred by chants in the media that “the people have spoken.” Representatives exist to resist tyranny by a misled majority, and Republican officials should not abandon the pledges they campaigned on for the benefit of Ohio.
Caving in to ballot initiatives is a betrayal of representative government, and of voters themselves. By denying the rights of voters to elect representatives to protect their state’s way of life, Republicans give residents an incentive to move to Texas and other states that prohibit mob rule through ballot initiatives.
Leftists are giddy about their scheme to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to use the ballot initiative process in about 20 states (40% of our country) to enact laws rejected by legislatures there. Not content with transforming Colorado and the West Coast into havens hostile to families, liberals are exploiting this process to invade the Midwest with failed coastal values.
More Midwesterners will inevitably respond by moving to Texas, where Leftists are not allowed to override the legislature. But families in Ohio and Missouri should not have to move to protect their way of life.
In less than a year, marijuana as enacted by ballot initiative has transformed Missouri into a $1.5 billion mecca for pot, with pervasive billboard advertising and retail stores selling it. Child poisonings and motorcycle accidents are sharply higher, while a crisis in fentanyl-related deaths has increased too.
The Republican response to questions about Ohio Issues 1 or 2 should be that some issues are not suitable for popular vote, as most states recognize by forbidding ballot initiatives from bypassing the legislature. We don’t allow any type of initiative or referendum at the national level because our Founders who framed our Constitution wisely rejected direct democracy.
Yet the liberal media is misusing ballot initiatives to bully Republican legislators into breaking their own campaign promises on which they were elected. There is no such thing as a particular “will” of the people, and candidates should honor their campaign pledges rather than allow out-of-state billionaires to rewrite their laws in a harmful way.
Republicans reject the call for a National Popular Vote to pick our president, and instead that office is filled by the Electoral College. Republican candidates for president should campaign on defending our republican form of government against the progressive strategy of direct democracy.
Our Declaration of Independence stands entirely against infringement on God-given rights by popular vote or by any other means. That timeless document describes the concept of unalienable rights as a “self-evident” truth, yet Trump’s rivals for president seem to think everything is fair game for ballot initiatives.
The Ohio legislature, with its Republican supermajority, could immediately overturn the cannabis Issue 2 ballot initiative to prevent Ohio from becoming a decadent culture of pungent weed. The marijuana-saturated states of California and Colorado are hemorrhaging in population, and Midwest legislators should not allow liberal mistakes to transform the middle of our country based on improper ballot initiatives.
Disappearing Motherhood: Who’s to Blame?
A British tabloid carried a grim headline on October 23rd announcing “America’s fertility crash,” over an article detailing the precipitous drop in the U.S. birth rate during the last 15 years. The decline was greatest in Utah, whose birth rate fell by more than a third despite the Beehive State’s reputation for large families.
Ignoring such a dire long-term trend that harms the health and happiness of the American people, our media have spent most of 2023 promoting entertainment aimed at single young women, starting with Barbie. That blockbuster movie featured an unmarried woman without children, with merely a cameo appearance by one pregnant character who is portrayed as an outcast.
The Barbie phenomenon is joined by the female pop star Taylor Swift, whose record-setting concert tour caused an unprecedented meltdown at Ticketmaster. Now the film version has broken the box office record for a concert movie, drawing mostly young women to theaters where they dance on chairs and sing off-key rather than merely watching.
Taylor Swift, herself childless and 34 years old this month, was asked when she turned 30 whether she wants to have children. She curtly replied, “I don’t really think men are asked that question when they turn 30, so I’m not going to answer that now.”
A man’s fertility, of course, doesn’t begin falling at age 30. But every young woman should be warned how much more difficult it becomes to have children as she moves through her 30s.
Taylor Swift won’t need children to support her financially in her old age, due to her fortune. But the future of our country and the “Swifties,” as her followers are called, is less rosy in our increasingly childless society.
The percentage of women under 45 having children has fallen to barely half today. Childless young adults will eventually become an elderly population dependent on public support, but Social Security works only if there are enough young workers to fund the system on a continuing basis.
For the most part, Swifties have not been attending these concerts on dates with young men. An estimated 90% of these concert fans are women, an imbalance so severe that it has caused havoc with the availability of restrooms at performance venues.
Our nation already has a record number of women and men who are single in the 18-29 age group: 34% of women and 63% of men. Many of them have given up on seeking a relationship.
This isolation is not healthy for our society, or for young women. Single women are obese at a rate of 7-12% more than married women, and Taylor Swift had to remove a reference to “fat” in one of her music videos last year to appease her fans.
Meanwhile, the number of men who have no close friendships has increased five-fold in the last 30 years, to 15%. The hordes of young men and women who are unmarried today are having difficulty finding partners who share their political views, while Democrat politicians play gender-gap politics for their benefit.
Married women typically vote Republican as married men do. But single women vote overwhelmingly for the Democratic candidates, in part because Democrats spend billions of dollars advertising to them.
The percentage of 18- to 34-year-olds who are married today is less than half of what it was a generation ago. In liberal Seattle, it is predicted that soon the number of older teenagers and adults who have never been married will surpass the number of married residents there.
Educated women are deciding not to have children at all. About 25% of women nearing the end of their childbearing age who hold at least a master’s degree are childless.
The decline in the birth rate is something that President Trump and the Republican Congress addressed over Democrat opposition back in 2017, by instituting a $2,000 annual tax credit for each child under age 17. But this child tax credit has fallen in real value due to inflation, and a boost in it during Covid was not extended beyond 2021.
This child tax credit is paltry compared with the benefits that every newborn American contributes to our country over a lifetime. In addition to military service and other sacrifices, the average American will pay $500,000 in taxes over his life, so the child tax credit should be far higher than $2,000.
Other countries have changed their policies to encourage more childbearing. Communist China replaced its one-child policy with a two-child policy in 2016, and then ended its two-child policy in 2021 in favor of promoting having three children. Poland’s conservative-leaning government was just ousted from power in part because it allowed Poland’s birth rate to decline to its lowest level since World War II. Our minuscule, inflation-depleted child tax credit should likewise become an election issue as our birth rate plummets.
