Ten Commandments Coming Back to Public Schools
A lively oral argument filled the en banc courtroom of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on the afternoon of January 20 in New Orleans, to address this simple question: may states require the posting of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms? Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas have enacted new laws requiring this, which had been banned throughout the United States since 1980.
That was when a 5-4 Supreme Court held, in Stone v. Graham, that state legislatures could not require the posting of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms, even if privately funded. That decision was based on a judicial finding of a religious purpose, which the Court held rendered it in violation of the Establishment Clause.
The Supreme Court has since repudiated the use of a religious purpose test to evaluate state legislation under the Establishment Clause. The entire Lemon test, which was promulgated in 1971 by the Supreme Court in Lemon v. Kurtzman, is no longer good law.
The ACLU argues that a Ten Commandments display in every classroom would have a coercive effect on students. It objects to the use of the King James Version of the Ten Commandments, as found in the Book of Exodus Chapter 20, rather than Jewish or Catholic translations.
Judges peppered the ACLU side with questions about whether it would be unconstitutional to require posting the Declaration of Independence or President Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. President Lincoln quoted verbatim from the King James Version of the Gospel of Matthew, “Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!”
The Court sought historical examples of any impermissible establishment of a religion that was remotely similar to displaying the Ten Commandments in classrooms. The New England Primer, which is called America’s first textbook, sold millions of copies for public elementary school students and included explicit teachings about the Ten Commandments.
A dilemma for the Fifth Circuit as it deliberates in the city called the Big Easy, the birthplace of jazz, is whether to discard Stone v. Graham, which was an unsigned per curiam decision written by liberal Justice William Brennan without oral argument. A majority of the outspoken judges on the Fifth Circuit indicated that they plan not to cast the first stone, an expression from the Bible, but to cast Stone aside and take the chance that the Supreme Court might admonish them for acting so boldly.
A judge opposed to the posting of the Ten Commandments fretted about a child who “believes in a multitude of deities.” In other words, some would grant a heckler’s veto to just one child who might be polytheistic, and allow that view to require taking down the monotheistic Ten Commandments liked by everyone else.
The Pledge of Allegiance is monotheistic, and Texas requires students to recite it in public school without problems. In 1789, George Washington issued his Thanksgiving Proclamation with the words, “Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will,” as an attorney defending the classroom display of the Ten Commandments pointed out.
Yet opponents of the Ten Commandments display requirement complain that this will be in every public school classroom at every level, visible from everywhere in each classroom. This will have a coercive effect, they insist, but a Fifth Circuit judge pointed out that the Stone v. Graham decision said nothing about any coercion caused by a display in a classroom.
Some prayer is allowed at public school football games now, and religious objections to pro-transgender mandates are upheld today. Amish elementary schools that were fined more than $100,000 for not requiring the children to be vaccinated were just given a second chance by the Supreme Court to overturn those penalties in lower courts.
Public school enrollment and attendance have been in a free fall, collapsing at an alarming rate. A post-Covid record was just set in Colorado with a 10,000-student annual decline in enrollment, while Broward County public schools north of Miami in Florida face a potential takeover by the state after disclosure that they are losing nearly $100 million.
Schoolchildren need the benefits of the Ten Commandments in their classrooms now, and should not have to wait for years before the good Louisiana law, which was supposed to take effect at the beginning of 2025, is implemented for their benefit.
Excluding all religious symbols from classrooms has turned them into depressing, valueless places where many kids loathe to be. Chronic absenteeism – missing more than a tenth of the school days – is rampant now and, just as Gen Z is reading the Bible more than the prior generation, posting the Ten Commandments might help boost school attendance, too.
Violent Resistance Shouldn’t Prevail in Minnesota
The resistance in Minnesota to Trump’s deportations has undermined law enforcement efforts, including the biting off of an officer’s finger. Amid defiance, it would set a terrible precedent if the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were to give up on its legitimate operations to enforce the law.
Two women were charged for separate incidents in Minneapolis, each with biting the fingers of federal officers. Shockingly, a federal judge released both of them without even requiring any bail, despite their allegedly having harmed the officers in this barbaric manner.
After an agitator had purportedly kicked a chemical canister at officers, one of the officers was then tackled by a protester while attempting to perform an arrest. When the officer sought to remove a mask from the assailant’s face, she allegedly bit one of his fingers.
Physicians were unable to repair the officer’s fingertip that had been bitten off by the protester. Gloves saved the other officer from permanent damage from the separate biting by another suspect.
Meanwhile, on January 27 there was reportedly an assault on a border patrol agent near the Arizona-Mexico border, and a suspect has been taken into custody. The location was near where pro-migrant protests have been occurring.
Prior to these recent acts of violence, Trump indicated that he may invoke the Insurrection Act. This would authorize him to bring in the National Guard or the military to overcome the resistance.
The safety of the officers should remain the highest priority in the face of violent resistance in Minnesota and elsewhere. “We need real consequences for attacking law enforcement,” said the former captain of the NFL Minnesota Vikings, Jack Brewer.
“These men and women should be able to do their jobs and go home to their families safely,” he added. Brewer explained that liberals are so opposed to ICE because “we’re deporting their voters.”
“There is something wrong in Minneapolis,” Brewer observed about Leftists there. “People have completely lost reality.”
Scuffles can turn deadly in a heartbeat when someone impedes officers while they do their job in seeking and apprehending criminals. Bystanders have a right to protest peacefully, but a physical confrontation while armed is very different from merely protesting.
Trump was right in his initial response the night of January 24 to the shooting then by ICE in Minneapolis: “I don’t like it when somebody goes into a protest and he’s got a very powerful, fully loaded gun with two magazines loaded up with bullets also.” No one should be defending anyone who carries those items without ID into a confrontation with officers.
Someone who physically resists law enforcement with concealed weaponry poses a grave risk to the officers and the public. Texas is perhaps the most pro-gun state in our country, and it has a legal requirement of disclosure of carried weapons by a citizen in a confrontation with police, as do many other states.
While peaceful protesters have a right to bear arms, physical resistance to officers should not be done while carrying loaded firearms. An altercation, while possessing a loaded gun, with an officer unnecessarily places the lives of officers and bystanders in jeopardy.
A large percentage of citizens in Texas carry firearms, and yet nothing like the resistance being seen in Minneapolis is happening in Texas or any red state. The resistance in Minnesota has put ICE officers in life-threatening danger, as in the case of the officer allegedly struck by a car, who fired at the driver and killed her.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has been one of the strongest defenders of the ICE officers in Minnesota, which is next door to her home state of South Dakota. On January 27, Trump had a one-word response to a reporter’s question about whether she would resign as Democrats are demanding: “No.”
Armed or violent resistance to the eradication of criminal illegal aliens from our country is going to result in some casualties among those who endanger federal officials. Curtailing law enforcement due to Leftist opposition would be a grave mistake of capitulation.
Meanwhile, Trump boycotted the Super Bowl this year, and Corey Lewandowski, a top advisor at the Department of Homeland Security, vowed that ICE would be there in Santa Clara, California. “There is nowhere you can provide safe haven to people who are in this country illegally,” Lewandowski confirmed on “The Benny Show” podcast.
“Not the Super Bowl and nowhere else,” Lewandowski added. Super Bowl tickets cost an estimated $6,000 to $8,000 per seat, and $25,000 for a seat near midfield; it is difficult to accept that illegal aliens are attending at those prices.
The NFL awarded its prized halftime show to the anti-ICE performer Bad Bunny. Trump did not attend and called Bad Bunny’s performance “absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER!”.
Trump’s Right to Target Private Equity
Inflation in home prices and healthcare is perhaps the biggest reason that swing voters are shifting to the Democrat side in elections. With the midterms less than ten months away, Republicans need to take initiative against a culprit: private equity.
In early January Trump announced his brilliant plan to ban private equity firms from buying single-family homes, which has put their prices out of reach for young adults. Gen Z is the pivotal voting bloc that decides elections now, and if they cannot afford a home then they are more likely to vote against Republicans.
“People live in homes, not corporations,” Trump observed. “For a very long time, buying and owning a home was considered the pinnacle of the American Dream,” but the buying up of these homes by private equity speculators has made homes unaffordable for Gen Z.
Wealthy private equity managers typically enjoy a tax rate lower than what Gen Z pays, which is the opposite of how tax rates should be structured to encourage work by young adults. Private equity managers are allowed to take much of their compensation under the lower capital gains rate, rather than the higher income tax rate that everyone has to pay on their earnings from manual labor or learned professional work.
Depreciation deductions, which are also unavailable to most family homeowners, give private equity a further incentive to invade residential real estate while outbidding Gen Z for homes. Last year private equity obtained additional tax perks from Congress, such as the ability to deduct as an expense from taxes 100% of the value of certain property in the first year of its acquisition, known as bonus depreciation.
While nationwide institutional investors reportedly own only 3% of homes, this is a misleading statistic that includes millions of homes far away from jobs for young workers. In areas highly sought by Gen Z like Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Houston, Jacksonville, and Tampa mega-investors reportedly control up to 27% of single-family home rentals.
Private equity firms are sharks at extracting profits for themselves, and they jack up rental and purchase prices for these homes while Gen Z is unable to compete financially. Often private equity firms swoop in and pay cash to outbid a young couple struggling with debt.
Private equity controls trillions of dollars managed without transparency to the public, while exploiting tax loopholes unavailable to most Americans. Private equity managers do things like buy a hospital to strip it of its assets, and then sell the underlying property off to build luxury apartments, as happened in Philadelphia.
Trump’s announcement caused the stock value of Blackstone, a trillion-dollar asset management company, to drop by an astounding 9.3%, then regaining some of its losses before losing 6% on the day. This demonstrates the significance of how private equity firms have been profiting, while driving up the prices of single-family homes, to the detriment of Gen Z.
The unaffordability of homes for young adults is more than an economic crisis that is deciding elections in favor of Democrats like the New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who won 75% of the Gen Z vote. Home unaffordability also causes Gen Z to delay or not have children, which worsens the crisis of our already-declining birth rate.
Teddy Roosevelt rejuvenated a declining Republican Party at the turn of the last century when he took on powerful monopolies perceived as exploiting the public. TR, whom Trump has praised for doing “great things,” became a champion of the common man much as Trump has been.
In his first term, Trump spoke against the tax advantages enjoyed by private equity, and sought to close those loopholes. At the time private equity had its own senators, including Mitt Romney and Pat Toomey from that sector, but they are gone now after voting to convict Trump on the second impeachment which the American public rejected by re-electing him.
Private equity has been driving up the cost of healthcare, too, as it buys up practices and then cuts services, raises prices, and tries to monopolize specialties. From 2013 to 2022, 82 private equity firms acquired 423 oncology practices, which are necessary to treat cancer.
One study found that practices acquired by private equity firms charged 5.3% more for office visits than the practices that continued under physician ownership. There was a shocking 50% increase in spending on radiation therapy after private equity invaded this field.
The number of physician practices owned by private equity has increased from 816 in 2012 to more than 6,000 today, while private equity owns nearly 488 hospitals. One study in November 2022 by the MIT Sloan School of Management discovered that the negotiated prices between hospitals and insurance companies jumped 32% higher after private equity purchased the hospitals.
Patriots Lose at the Anti-ICE Super Bowl
NFL leadership sided against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), by promoting the Puerto Rican rapper who ranted against ICE on national television. Bad Bunny declared at the Grammy Awards, “Before I say thanks to God, I’m going to say ICE OUT.”
The ICE OUT slogan was developed by a coalition of Leftist groups, including the ACLU, to resist the enforcement of federal immigration laws. Nearly every artist at the Grammy ceremony except Trump-supporting Nikki Minaj wore a pin with those words.
The following day Roger Goodell, Commissioner of the taxpayer-subsidized NFL, defended his bad choice by absurdly praising Bad Bunny as “one of the greatest artists in the world.” He featured Bad Bunny at the halftime show during the Super Bowl, while claiming that the offensive performer “will use his platform to unite people.”
It doesn’t “unite people” for the NFL to impose a strident “ICE OUT” advocate on more than 100 million Americans watching the Super Bowl. Trump is one of many who have criticized this selection of a Spanish-speaking, Trump-hating entertainer from Puerto Rico.
The New England Patriots once again played in this year’s Super Bowl, but patriotic Americans shouldn’t support the NFL while it features opponents of our own law enforcement agencies. Our economy would save an estimated $5 billion if everyone tuned out, because an estimated 26 million Americans missed their jobs the following Monday – called “Super Sick Monday” – after watching the annual extravaganza.
Taxpayers are also subsidizing Minnesota schools that are training agitators against ICE, and providing them with anti-ICE resistance manuals. A “De-Arrest Primer” is being distributed to instruct Leftists how to physically interfere with ICE as they try to arrest illegal aliens.
The liberal media have identified two Hispanic men, a Border Patrol agent and an officer of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, as those who fired their guns at Alex Pretti, after he was discovered to be carrying a handgun while scuffling with officers. These officers have many years of law enforcement experience, in doing a dangerous job to protect our country.
Video of the scene shows that an agent found a handgun in Pretti’s possession and alerted others. As the agent took the handgun away from Pretti during a struggle, an initial shot rang out, perhaps from a misfire, and then two agents acted swiftly to protect the lives of their colleagues and bystanders.
A liberal narrative of this law enforcement response to an armed man scuffling with officers has gone unrebutted for too long. If DOJ is doing an investigation, then it needs to exonerate the agents soon before everyone believes propaganda from the Left.
Let’s not forget that it was two heroic Border Patrol agents who risked their lives to confront the shooter at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman had just killed 19 children and two teachers. For 77 minutes no policeman confronted the gunman who had barricaded himself in a classroom, but two off-duty Border Patrol agents arrived and entered the school while risking their own lives.
Gunfire sprayed upon them, with one bullet ripping through the baseball cap on one of the agents’ heads. Undeterred, the Border Patrol agents quickly killed the shooter before he could cause further bloodshed.
Someone who brings a gun to a fight with police is taking a risk of being shot. The gun could misfire, which would trigger gunfire at the suspect, or simply learning of the gun could create a reasonable fear by an officer trained to protect himself and others from the gunman.
With the publicizing of the names of the federal agents by the media, Leftists in charge of Minneapolis may be planning to bring murder charges against them. Such a charge could lead to a conflict between state and federal authority that has not been seen since the Civil War.
Federal courts have the authority to block a state prosecution, but have only done so a handful of times in American history. A federal court can also order the release of someone being held in a state prison while awaiting a trial in state court.
Liberal states are already refusing to extradite criminal defendants accused of providing a telemedicine abortion where it is prohibited by state law. Conservative governors could take a similar path by shielding ICE agents from prosecution by the Leftist mob in Minnesota.
ICE and the Border Patrol cannot do their jobs to protect Americans against illegal aliens if rogue prosecutors in Minnesota are allowed to prosecute federal agents who defend themselves against agitators who harass and impede them. Congress should reaffirm the immunity of federal agents from any state prosecutions based on the use of force to put down the resistance.
