Category: Rights

Scratch a Lib-Find a Tyrant #2744

There are some people I know that would actually relish the idea of this happening, just for the ‘opportunities’ it would present. And they are the kinds of opportunities I think all my readers can readily imagine.

Biden Administration May Consider ‘Vaccine Passports’ For Interstate Travel

President Joe Biden really wants Americans to get vaccinated, and after rolling out all the stops, from free beer to free Uber rides to child care, the administration has plans to penalize those that either won’t get the shot or don’t feel obligated to prove to the government or businesses that they’ve gotten the shot.

The administration may consider creating vaccine requirements for interstate travel for citizens within the US.

The AP reports that “…while more severe measures — such as mandating vaccines for interstate travel or changing how the federal government reimburses treatment for those who are unvaccinated and become ill with COVID-19 — have been discussed, the administration worried that they would be too polarizing for the moment.”

“That’s not to say they won’t be implemented in the future,” the AP writes, “as public opinion continues to shift toward requiring vaccinations as a means to restore normalcy.”

The Biden administration has forced many federal employees to vaccinate, and has urged US businesses to force their employees to get vaccinated as well, under penalty of losing their position or persistent COVID testing.

The Biden administration said they would work with businesses to create a vaccine credentialing system, but has repeatedly said that there would be no federal database of vaccine recipients.

Disney, United, and Google issued vaccine mandates for their employees. More than 600 colleges and universities are requiring the vaccine as well, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

“We are essentially saying there are different paths you can take, but the path that you cannot take is doing nothing—that’s the one unacceptable position right now,” said deputy director of strategic communication and engagement for Biden’s COVID-19 response team Ben Wakana.
Georgetown Law took up the question of Americans’ rights to travel freely within the United States under the Trump administration at the start of the pandemic. At the time, Americans in many parts of the country were asked to “lockdown” for two week and to “slow the spread” so that when Americans got sick and ended up in the hospital, they didn’t all end up there at once, overwhelming the medical infrastructure.

Meryl Chertoff, Executive Director, SALPAL writes: “The right of Americans to travel interstate in the United States has never been substantially judicially questioned or limited. In 1941, the Court declared unconstitutional California’s restriction upon the migration of the ‘Okies’—whose travails are famously documented in ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’ Justice Douglas referred to ‘the right of free movement’ as ‘a right of national citizenship,’ and the rights of the migrants were upheld under the Commerce Clause.”

“The Privileges and Immunities Clause protects the rights of US citizens,” Chertoff goes on to say, “who are each also the citizens of a state, against discriminatory treatment under the law of a different state. In a 1985 case, the Court found that the Privileges and Immunities clause prohibited discrimination against a non-resident except where (i) there is a substantial reason for the difference in treatment; and (ii) the discrimination practiced against nonresidents bears a substantial relationship to the State’s objective.

In deciding whether the discrimination bears a close or substantial relationship to the State’s objective, the Court has considered the availability of less restrictive means.”
“The baseline, then, is that freedom of movement within and between states is Constitutionally protected,” Chertoff concluded.
On Thursday, the CDC was asked outright what they would be doing to make sure that counterfeit vaccine cards were not in circulation, and if they’ve reconsidered creating a federalized system to track vaccine recipients and issue identification for the vaccinated to enable them to move freely through society while those who don’t have the credential are shut out from public life.

Biden administration COVID spokesperson Jeff Zients was asked “Is the administration reconsidering something like a QR code, or a passport, to help verify people’s vaccination status and if not, what are you doing to stop the proliferation of fake vaccine cards?”
“There are a number of ways people can demonstrate their vaccination status,” Zeints said. “Companies and organizations and the federal government are taking different approaches, and we applaud this innovation.”
“Through vaccination requirements, employers have the power to help end the pandemic,” Zients said.

But, Zients said, “There will be no federal vaccination database as with all other vaccines, the information gets held at the state and local level. Any system that is developed in the private sector or elsewhere must meet key standards, including affordability, being available both digitally and on paper, and most importantly protecting people’s privacy and security.”
Biden said on Thursday “I know there are a lot of people out there trying to turn a public safety measure, that is children wearing masks in school so they can be safe, into a political dispute. And this isn’t about politics. It’s about keeping our children safe.”
“I saw a video and reports from Tennessee, protestors threatening doctors and nurses, who before a school board were making the case that to keep kids safe there should be mandatory masks. And as they walked out these doctors were threatened, nurses were threatened. Our health care workers are heroes. They are the heroes when there was no vaccine. They’re doing their best to care for the people who are refusing to get vaccinated,” Biden said.

“And unvaccinated folks are being hospitalized and dying as a result of not being vaccinated,” the president continued, harkening back to his statement that COVID is now a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
“To the mayors, school superintendents, local leaders,” he said, “who are standing up to the governors who are politicizing mask protection for our kids, thank you, thank you as well. Thank God that we have heroes like you. And I stand with you all, and America should as well.”

Do We Still Have the Constitution?

The Constitution — when interpreted in accordance with the plain meaning of its words and informed by a fair reading of history — does not permit the government to infringe upon personal freedoms, no matter the emergency or pandemic. For those who agree with me, worry not. We will persevere. For those who trust the government, worry a lot. You are not in good hands.

As I write, it appears new orders of restraint on personal liberty are coming in the name of fighting a new pandemic. Yet, the purpose of the Constitution is both to establish the government and to limit it. Some of the limitations are written in the Constitution itself. Most of the limitations that pertain to personal freedoms are found in the Bill of Rights — the first 10 amendments.

These amendments were ratified to restrain the federal government from infringing upon personal liberties. Since the enactment of the 14th Amendment in 1868, and subsequent litigation, the Bill of Rights, for the most part, restrains the states as well.

So, the rights to thought, speech, press, assembly, worship, self-defense, privacy, travel, property ownership, commercial activities and fair treatment from government are plainly articulated in or rationally inferred from the first eight amendments. The Ninth declares that the enumeration of rights in the first eight shall not mean that there are no other rights that are fundamental, and the government shall not disparage those other rights. The Tenth reflects that the states have reserved to themselves the powers that they did not delegate to the feds.

The Ninth was especially important to its author, James Madison, because of his view that natural or fundamental rights are integral to each person, and they are too numerous to list.

In the following century, the anti-slavery crusader Lysander Spooner would explain it thusly: “A man’s natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime, whether committed by one man, or by millions; whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber … or by millions, calling themselves a government.”

Natural rights collectively constitute the moral ability and sovereign authority of every human being to make personal choices — free from government interference and without a government permission slip.

Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that government derives all its powers from the consent of the governed. And Madison understood the Ninth Amendment to declare that our personal choices are insulated from government interference so long as their exercise does not impair another’s rights.

From this it follows that if governments interfere with our personal choices — and we have not consented individually to their power to do so — the interference is invalid, unlawful and, because our personal choices are essentially protected from governmental interference by the Bill of Rights, unconstitutional.

Now, back to the coming restraints in the name of a new pandemic.

The former and future interferences with the exercise of rights protected by the Bill of Rights devolve around travel, assembly, commercial activities, the exercise of religious beliefs and your face. These infringements have all come from mayors and state governors who claim the power to do so, and they raise three profound constitutional issues.

First: Do mayors and governors have inherent power in an emergency to craft regulations that carry the force of law? The answer is no.
The Guarantee Clause of the Constitution mandates a republican (lowercase “r”) form of government in the states. That means the separation of powers into three branches, each with a distinct core function that cannot constitutionally be performed by either of the other two.

Since only a representative legislature can write laws that carry criminal penalties and incur the use of force, a mayor or a governor cannot constitutionally write such laws.

Second: Can state legislatures delegate away to governors their law-making powers? Again, the answer is no because the separation of powers prevents one branch of government from ceding to another branch its core powers. The separation was crafted not to preserve the integrity of each branch but to assure the preservation of personal liberty by preventing the accumulation of too much power in any one branch.

We are not talking about a state legislature delegating to a board of medical examiners in the executive branch the power to license physicians. We are talking about delegating away a core power — the authority to create crimes and craft punishments. Such a delegation would be an egregious violation of the Guarantee Clause.

Third: Can a state legislature enact laws that interfere with personal liberties protected by the Bill of Rights, prescribe punishments for violations of those laws and authorize governors to use force to compel compliance? Again, the answer is no because all government in America is subordinate to the natural rights articulated in the Bill of Rights and embraced in the Ninth Amendment.

We should encourage massive peaceful resistance to mayoral and gubernatorial ignorance and arrogance that disregards the Bill of Rights.

We need resistance to tyranny in order to stay free. Power unresisted continues to grow and to corrupt. History teaches that most people prefer the illusion of safety to the cacophony of liberty. The only reason we have civil liberties today is because generations of determined minorities — starting with the revolutionaries in the 1770s — have fought for them.

Today, we are governed by dangerous people who are again threatening to take away our ability to make personal choices, and to use force to compel compliance. In doing that, they will not only have violated their oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights; they also will have committed the criminal acts of nullifying our rights.

We must remind them that by using the powers of state governments to do this, they will make themselves candidates for federal criminal prosecutions when saner days return.

The Supreme Court Case that Could Upend Roe v. Wade

On Friday, May 14, Rev. Patrick Mahoney, a Christian activist who has been on the front lines of the pro-life movement for more than 40 years, felt prompted to leave his home in Virginia and drive into Washington, DC. This was unusual for him, since he normally avoided being in DC on Fridays due to the heavy traffic jams.

But on this day, he felt a divine stirring to go to DC and spend time praying about a case that had been submitted to the Supreme Court in June 2020 but had received no response to date. Then, to his shock, on Monday, May 17, he learned that the Court had decided to hear this very case, quite out of the blue.

As the New York Times explains, “The law at issue in the case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, No. 19-1392, was enacted in 2018 by the Republican-dominated Mississippi Legislature. It banned abortions if ‘the probable gestational age of the unborn human’ was determined to be more than 15 weeks. The statute included narrow exceptions for medical emergencies or ‘a severe fetal abnormality.’”

This case, then, would serve as a direct challenge to the 1992 Casey ruling that upheld Roe v. Wade, as well as a direct challenge to Roe itself. That’s why pro-abortion critics of Dobbs raised this very concern, indicating that they recognized the real threat that his bill posed.

But, so as to remove all doubt, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch actually stated this explicitly in a detailed filing to the Court last month. There, she argued that “nothing in constitutional text, structure, history, or tradition supports a right to abortion” (p. 12).

And, holding nothing back, she wrote, “Roe and Casey are thus at odds with the straight-forward, constitutionally grounded answer to the question presented. So the question becomes whether this Court should overrule those decisions. It should. The stare decisis case for overruling Roe and Casey is overwhelming.

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Why Biden’s New Eviction Moratorium Should Worry Gun Owners

For weeks now, Joe Biden has been saying that any extension to the moratorium on evictions originally put in place by the Centers for Disease Control was going to have to come from Congress. Heck, the Supreme Court told the Biden administration that was the case. And for weeks, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer ignored the impending demise of the eviction moratorium, choosing to focus instead on infrastructure and trying to vilify the GOP for their refusal to go along with a sweeping elections bill that’s stuck in the Senate.

That lack of urgency on the part of congressional Democrats led to the moratorium expiring, which in turn led to Joe Biden deciding on Tuesday to go ahead with allowing the CDC to issue a new, slightly different moratorium despite having been told that it’s unconstitutional. As Charles Cook writes at National Review:

President Biden knows that the CDC’s eviction moratorium is illegal, having, per Gene Sperling, “not only kicked the tires,” but “double, triple, quadruple checked.” He also knows that the Supreme Court has ruled that it is illegal, and that the majority of the legal scholars he has consulted think that the Court is correct.

And yet, because a bunch of progressives have spent the day complaining, Biden announced just now that he intends to violate his oath and reissue the order anyway. “The bulk of the constitutional scholars,” Biden admitted at his press conference just now, “say it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster.” Then he said that he was prepared to try his luck anyway.

Biden admitted that the Supreme Court is likely going to strike down this order, but it will take some time for the court system to catch up with the executive branch actions. In other words, he’s willing to ignore the Constitution in favor of the possibility of short-term political gain. And if Biden’s willing to do that when it comes to the issue of evictions, why wouldn’t he embrace that same strategy when it comes to our Second Amendment rights?

The administration is already stretching the limits of executive authority with a pair of proposed rules from the ATF that would impose backdoor bans on homemade firearms and AR-style pistols with braces, but Biden’s latest move on evictions is evidence that the White House could try to implement even more of the president’s anti-gun agenda by trying to go around the legislative branch.

 

This new moratorium isn’t a “law,” but that seems to be a distinction without a difference to many reporters… not to mention the administration itself. I’m no Constitutional scholar, but I do remember my Schoolhouse Rock, and laws start as bills in the legislative branch before becoming law once a president has put pen to paper. There’s no bill involved in this eviction moratorium, and Biden himself has left it up to CDC to impose these new restrictions on landlords, complete with criminal penalties.

Now imagine a scenario a few months into the future, when ATF Director David Chipman decides that, thanks to the ATF’s newly expanded definitions of “frame”, “receiver”, and “readily convertible,” the agency has the power to declare that modern sporting rifles are readily converted to fully-automatic machine guns and should therefore be regulated under the National Firearms Act.

If that sounds crazy, keep in mind that gun control groups are already laying the groundwork for that power grab with several recent lawsuits filed in California.

Brady alleges that Smith & Wesson “knowingly violated” federal law regarding sales of machine guns to the general public, even though the gun that was used by the attacker was a semi-automatic firearm. Brady’s making the claim that Smith & Wesson knowingly manufactured a gun that could be “readily converted” to fully-automatic fire in violation of the National Firearms Act (the gun used in the Poway shooting wasn’t modified to shoot full-auto, but that’s of no importance to Brady’s argument).

We also know that Chipman himself has said that AR-15s should be treated like machine guns, and Biden’s own gun ban plan calls for AR-15s to be turned in or registered under the NFA. There’s no chance that Biden’s ban is going to pass through the Senate (at least with the filibuster in place), but as long as the administration is willing to play fast and loose with the Constitution they could try to impose that ban through the executive branch’s rule-making authority.

I’d like to believe that if the administration was bold enough to try this scheme, the courts would quickly shut down their plans, but there’s no guarantee of that happening. And now that Biden himself has demonstrated that pandering to the Democratic base is more important than safeguarding the Constitution, I’d say the odds of his administration trying at some point to put his gun ban into effect without a vote in Congress just went up considerably.

One more reason there’s a second amendment

Anthony Fauci Claims With COVID There Are No More Individual Rights.

I’m more worried about what is happening behind the scenes in the non-COVID universe while everyone is distracted by the purposeful weaponization of the healthcare institutions.  It’s the other thing, the unseen activity, that is most troublesome when the leftists are this entrenched on a singular narrative.

In this clip from Anthony Fauci on ABC This Week Sunday [Rumble Link], the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, claims that individual rights no longer exist during the era of COVID-19.  When you consider the mindset of the far-left, his opinion on communal rights -vs- individual rights is right in line with the collectivist perspective.  These people are dangerous.

“The fact is, if you get infected, even if you are without symptoms, you very well may infect another person who may be vulnerable … So in essence, you are encroaching on their individual rights.”

It appears from the visible evidence, the Delta variant of COVID-19 may well be more transmissible; perhaps even more transmissible due to increased shedding from people who are vaccinated carriers of the virus.  However, the death rate is lower than the traditional flu.

All of these extreme mitigation efforts appear constructed to protect against something that just doesn’t carry the scale of risk that would match the severity of alarm we are bombarded with.   If you turn off the television, disconnect from corporate media and tune-out these alarmist proclamations, life appears to be carrying along just fine.

Full Interview is available Here

The people in Washington calling it an insurrection are doing so to justify their own attempt to illegally seize power.

Dare I Say That January 6 Was Not an Insurrection?

Please don’t share this article with anyone except for your neighbors, friends, enemies, relatives, and coworkers — I don’t want to get into trouble — but I remain adamant that January 6 was not an insurrection. To say otherwise is a despicable lie.

Insurrection was not on the mind of anyone serious at the Capitol on January 6. It was a very large demonstration aimed at protesting the way an election was conducted. No matter what anyone thinks of the November 2020 election, there was something wrong with states changing their election laws months, even weeks before balloting. In addition, social media monopolies suppressed the news of the Hunter Biden laptop, which would have been a game changer.

In the face of all that stuff, many thousands came to Washington, D.C. to protest. They did not come to seize the reins of power. There were no U.S. military generals or captains or colonels or lieutenants leading or strategizing a coup. There was no shooting of rifles or taking of hostages. Rather, people came dressed like it was a carnival, such as the men dressed in bear or wolverine outfits.

Anyone who ever has read or learned anything about military coups or Bolshevik-style revolutions knows that January 6 was a demonstration that got out of hand, as did scores of racist, anti-Semitic “Death to the Police” Black Lives Matter demonstrations all summer. 

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I truly hope so.

The Duplicitous Ruling Elites Have Awakened the American People

Over the past three decades, a sizable majority of the ruling elites have been preoccupied with self-aggrandizement and cohabitation with the Communist Chinese, ignoring the gradual and now complete domination of many of the nation’s institutions, and most importantly the Democrat party, by American Marxists.

After a premeditated fraudulent election underwritten by the same credulous elites, and with a witless marionette in the White House, these collectivists have been de facto governing the nation since January 20, 2021.  The past six months have revealed that thanks to these Marxists’ mindless allegiance to failed ideology and breathtaking ignorance of the American experience and citizenry combined with the now unmasked duplicity of the ruling elites, there is a massive awakening bubbling to the surface.

This cabal has for the past five years marginalized, physically confronted, and repeatedly accused not only the 75+ million Americans who voted for Donald Trump but any American not in lockstep with them of being racists, fascists, and white supremacists as well as homophobic, xenophobic and among the vilest people on the face of the earth.

What did they do once in power?   Try to bury the hatchet or just ignore this vast swath of the citizenry and hope they go away?  Neither.  They chose to further alienate the bulk of the voting populace.

They are accelerating demeaning accusations and rhetoric and exploiting the January 6th Capitol incursion as a vehicle to isolate and intimidate many of these same Americans.  They are continuing to fuel racial animosity in the hope of further dividing the citizenry and colluding with social media to censor “misinformation.”  Thus, fomenting resentment, ongoing political confrontations, and a determined retaliation at the ballot box in 2022 and 2024.

Committed to changing the demographics of the nation, the American Marxists have flung open the borders and are pushing amnesty as well as ultimate citizenship for upwards of 29+ million illegal immigrants and at least another 2-4 million more every year.  It is immaterial to the Marxists that the vast majority of these illegal immigrants are lacking basic literacy and employable skills.

Currently, 30% of all working families (or nearly 50 million Americans) are low-income but above the poverty threshold.  60% of these are families headed by racial/ ethnic minorities.  African Americans, while 13% of the population (41 million), account for nearly 30% of low-income working families.  Another 39 million Americans live below the poverty level.

Thus, a total of 89 million Americans live in low-income families or in poverty.  The American Marxists, through the Democrat party, claim to be the champion of minorities and low-income families while they plot to ultimately legalize an illegal alien population equivalent to 75% of the current African American population.

The Marxists and the Democrat party do not give a damn about the African American population, native-born Hispanics, and the low-income white working families as the potential votes of the illegal population are more important.  As the voting patterns in 2020 confirmed, these Americans are rapidly awakening and turning on this traitorous cabal as they are becoming acutely aware of being permanently marginalized.

Thanks to the Democrat-Marxist policies of defunding the police, ending cash bail, and curtailing the prosecution of criminals, murder, and mayhem on the streets of America has skyrocketed.  Now that they are in charge of the federal government, it is national policy to actively and solely focus on gun control and disarming law-abiding citizens as the only solution to the increasing violence and criminality.

Currently, 235 million Americans either own or could see themselves owning a gun. The Marxists in the Democrat party believe they can effectively confiscate guns in a nation of 330 million and 3.8 million square miles by doing the following:

1) Putting language in various bills that will in effect create a national registry of all gun owners.

2) Outlawing semi-automatic weapons.

3) Punitively taxing the ownership of guns, magazines, and ammunition making gun ownership unaffordable and requiring a federal license to own a gun.

4) Expanding open-ended red flag laws allowing anyone to file a complaint against someone, ostensibly based on their suspicions, thus allowing the police to seize the guns of the accused prior to any judicial proceedings.

In their zeal to overturn the Second Amendment and a centuries-old tradition of gun ownership that predates the Constitution, the American Marxists do not fathom the building tidal wave of resistance and push back from nearly two-thirds of the nation’s citizenry who view gun ownership as the only viable means of self-defense against the unbridled criminality wrought by the unfathomable policies of the Marxists.

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Warning; Some strong language within

Liberal Reporter Rips Biden White House’s Endorsement for Social Media Purges

The purge is coming. Actually, a soft version of it already happened after the 2020 election, but the real purge is coming. The previous one was merely a test run. Last Friday, White House Spokesperson Jen Psaki was quite clear that if you’re banned on one platform, you should be banned on all of them. Who the hell are these people? We were worried about authoritarianism under Trump which was always an overreaction by the liberal media because they’re babies, but this was an actual shot across the bow. Big government and the communists in Silicon Valley uniting to censor political speech they don’t like. I know I don’t need to say more on the subject, but even liberal reporters, like Glenn Greenwald, are appalled by this move, calling it some “pernicious s***.”

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DHS/FBI: Owning guns and being familiar with them is a sign of “extremism”

Wow. And they want family/friends to report people. Surely this won’t be abused for political retaliation against people and harassment against pro-rights folks. No, never…..

https://twitter.com/FBI/status/1414192827026878465?s=20

https://www.dni.gov/files/NCTC/documents/news_documents/NCTC-FBI-DHS-HVE-Mobilization-Indicators-Booklet-2019.pdf

Note that the linked file in their tweet is from 2019, but the current administration is positioning itself to use it on American citizens that don’t agree with their politics and ideologies

It’s pretty sad that we are at this point in our country’s history. Owning firearms and weapons for legal personal use (including defense and sport) is in our blood. Doesn’t matter what your politics are, it is not “extremism“ to spend your own money on what you want and buy legal products such as firearms/knives/etc. Perhaps the anti-rights extremists need to look in the mirror and realize that they are the minority and not the majority, which makes them the “extremists”.

Hey, wait a second……I know someone who fits THIS description:

https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/30/biden-atf-nominee-deleted-thousands-of-tweets-prompting-speculation-of-prior-posts/

President Joe Biden’s nominee to run the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) has purged thousands of tweets from his Twitter profile, while still permitting communications on Facebook, raising flags over his prior hearing response that he made his account private due to “violent threats” that were forwarded to the Department of Justice.

In writing to Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, David Chipman said he “decided to set my Twitter account to private because of violent threats I had received in the past and anticipated receiving once my nomination was made public. I notified officials at the Department of Justice that I intended to make my account private.”

In addition, it appears Chipman has deleted the vast majority of his tweets. Whereas there were 1,815 tweets in October 2016, there are now a mere 115 as of Wednesday. It is unclear why his Facebook posts remain public and why he can be freely messaged if Chipman is legitimately worried about being threatened through social media. Surely, those threatening the ATF nominee would be smart enough to use other platforms. The contradiction was flagged by American Accountability Foundation.

Yeah, sure David, you did it because of “threats”…..

Now, for a minute, imagine this guy leading a federal agency and using it to target people based on owning guns and ”wrong think”, both of which can be potentially classified as “extremist” depending on opinion. Can you see where this is going?

https://www.mom-at-arms.com/post/david-chipman-feds-should-be-able-to-confiscate-guns-from-people-who-use-hate-speech-online

“…right in Der Grëtchënführër’s face!”

Michigan Senate Repeals Emergency Powers Law, Whitmer Unable to Veto.

Michigan’s Senate on Thursday approved a petition that repeals Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s emergency powers, with another approval expected by the state’s lower chamber.

Whitmer, a Democrat, cannot veto the petition.

The Michigan Senate’s 20-15 vote came two days after the Board of State Canvassers certified the petition, which was started by a group called Unlock Michigan that gathered over 340,000 signatures.

The board deadlocked 2-2 in April but voted 3-0 this time around.

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It’s not just the 2nd amendment that the demoncraps don’t like.
This is the US goobermint working with tech companies to censor unapproved opinions about the bug.
But since it’s just stopping the spread of “disinformation”, it’s perfectly acceptable and nothing to be worried about.

BLUF:
While anti-gun Democrats like Carolyn Maloney will use this GAO report to push for more gun control laws, what the study tells me is that a) we’ve got much bigger issues that are driving up healthcare costs and b) banning or tightly regulating items doesn’t solve the problem. Even if the right to keep and bear arms wasn’t protected by the Constitution, gun control wouldn’t be the best answer to bring down the rate of violent crime and firearm-related injuries, but the Second Amendment makes the idea a non-starter. Want to reduce gun-related injuries? Reduce the number of violent criminals, and leave the 100-million responsible gun owners alone.

The Fuzzy Math Behind The GAO’s New Report On The Cost Of “Gun Violence”

Democrats have a new talking point in their continued push for new federal gun control laws – restricting the rights of Americans doesn’t just save lives, but money too. A new report from the Government Accountability Office claims that that the United States spends $1-billion per year on hospital costs related to “gun violence,” and anti-gun politicians are already pointing to the new report as a reason to pass more anti-gun legislation.

The nonpartisan GAO found gun violence accounts for about 30,000 hospital stays and about 50,000 emergency room visits annually. More than 15 percent of firearm injury survivors are also readmitted at least once after initial treatment, costing an additional $8,000 to $11,000 per patient. Because the majority of victims are poor, the burden largely falls on safety-net programs like Medicaid, including covering some of the care for the uninsured.

The report, the first of its kind from the watchdog agency, is based available data on caring for people who suffer non-fatal gun injuries each year. It’s expected to fuel Democrats’ calls for expanded background checks amid a stalemate on gun control legislation.

“Congress must do whatever it takes — including abolishing the filibuster if necessary—to address this public health crisis,” said New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney, chair of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, who led the coalition requesting the GAO study.

Do you get the feeling that Maloney was going to use this report to call for an end to the filibuster no matter what it said? This report is a means to an end, and the end result that Maloney and her fellow Democrats are aiming for is the end of the filibuster and the establishment of one-party rule; from enacting sweeping gun bans with 51 votes to packing the Supreme Court full of anti-gun justices that will uphold every new infringement on the Second Amendment approved by Congress.

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The Rise Of a Secret Unaccountable Police Force in America

Our founders knew that concentrating too much power in any one federal agency – especially a law enforcement agency – could lead to a tyrannical police state. It was one of their greatest fears. After all, they knew a thing or two about tyranny, and it was something they wanted to avoid at all costs.

As a result, today’s federal law enforcement agencies have very limited authority and very specific missions: Border Patrol patrols the borders, of course; DEA investigates narcotics; and the ATF enforces archaic alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and explosives laws. The FBI has by far the broadest powers, but it too is constrained by a very specific set of rules and guidelines from the U.S. Attorney General – a process called predication. Contrary to what’s depicted on television, before FBI special agents can swoop in and take over a case, they must first have a federal predicate – they must believe that a federal crime or national security threat exists before they can investigate.

All of these federal agencies are transparent and accountable to the public, although some more so than others. They’re all subject to the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which was signed into law in 1966, and they routinely publish annual reports as well as internal investigations by their inspectors general.

All federal law enforcement agencies keep the public informed of their activities – all except one.

If you want to create a secret police force, the U.S. Capitol Police would be a good choice, since they’re already halfway there. The agency has scant oversight. It’s shrouded in secrecy and refuses to change.

The United States Capitol Police (USCP) is part of the legislative branch, which is exempt from FOIA requirements. Because they report to Congress, the USCP believes they too are exempt from FOIA. I should point out by way of comparison that even the CIA is subject to FOIA. Additionally, the USCP publishes no annual reports, and even the findings of its own inspector general are kept secret and not made public.

The mission of the USCP is to “Protect the Congress – its members, employees, visitors, and facilities – so it can fulfill its constitutional and legislative responsibilities in a safe, secure and open environment,” so you would think that the agency would focus its enforcement efforts in Washington, D.C., but that is no longer the case.

Congress is now seeking to nationalize the USCP by creating “field offices” in different states. Two field offices are planned for now, but more are coming.

“The new USCP field offices will be in the Tampa and San Francisco areas. At this time, Florida and California are where the majority of our potential threats are,” the agency announced in an email last week.

These new field offices will be used to “investigate threats” made against members of Congress, Acting USCP Chief Yogananda Pittman announced last week.

Clearly, Pittman and the agency she heads are reeling from the events of Jan. 6th 2021. In her press release titled: “After the Attack: The Future of the U.S. Capitol Police,” Pittman spells out some of the changes that have already taken place. While the chief announced the acquisition of two new “wellness support dogs” – Lila and Filip – a “pivot towards an intelligence-based protective agency,” the purchase of new riot helmets, shields, and less-than-lethal munitions. Note that she did not identify the types of threats her officers will investigate in their newly created regional offices.

The one thing that is clear, given the USCP’s penchant for secrecy, the public will never know what they’re up to.

Continue reading “”

This is basically Round 2, because almost undoubtedly, the goobermint will file for an ‘en banc‘ from the whole bench of the Circuit and we’ll see what happens after that.

Federal Appeals Court Tosses Ban On Gun Sales For Those Under 21

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Western District of Virginia, at Charlottesville. Glen E. Conrad, Senior District Judge. (3:18−cv−00103−GEC)
Argued: October 30, 2020 Decided: July 13, 2021
Before AGEE, WYNN, and RICHARDSON, Circuit Judges.
Vacated, reversed, and remanded by published opinion. Judge Richardson wrote the opinion, in which Judge Agee joined. Judge Wynn wrote a dissenting opinion.

Prospective handgun buyers sued the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives seeking an injunction and a declaratory judgment that federal statutes prohibiting Federal Firearm Licensed Dealers from selling handguns and handgun ammunition to 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds (and the federal regulations implementing those statutes) violate the Second Amendment.

When do constitutional rights vest? At 18 or 21? 16 or 25? Why not 13 or 33? In the law, a line must sometimes be drawn. But there must be a reason why constitutional rights cannot be enjoyed until a certain age. Our nation’s most cherished constitutional rights vest no later than 18. And the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms is no different………

We first find that 18-year-olds possess Second Amendment rights. They enjoy almost every other constitutional right, and they were required at the time of the Founding to serve in the militia and furnish their own weapons. We then ask, as our precedent requires, whether the government has met its burden to justify its infringement of those rights under the appropriate level of scrutiny.

To justify this restriction, Congress used disproportionate crime rates to craft overinclusive laws that restrict the rights of overwhelmingly law-abiding citizens. And in doing so, Congress focused on purchases from licensed dealers without establishing those dealers as the source of the guns 18- to 20-year-olds use to commit crimes. So we hold that the challenged federal laws and regulations are unconstitutional under the Second Amendment.

Despite the weighty interest in reducing crime and violence, we refuse to relegate either the Second Amendment or 18- to 20-year-olds to a second-class status.

SUPREME COURT FOILS DEMOCRATS’ ATTACK ON CONSERVATIVE NONPROFITS

The second case decided by the Supreme Court today was Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta. The case arises out of an initiative by Kamala Harris, when she was California’s Secretary of State, to force nonprofits to disclose to the state the identities of their major donors.

Schedule B to [IRS] Form 990—the document that gives rise to the present dispute—requires organizations to disclose the names and addresses of their major donors.
***
Since 2001, each petitioner has renewed its registration and has filed a copy of its Form 990 with the Attorney General, as required by Cal. Code Regs., tit. 11, §301. To preserve their donors’ anonymity, however, the petitioners have declined to file unredacted Schedule Bs, and they had until recently faced no consequences for noncompliance. In 2010, the State increased its enforcement of charities’ Schedule B disclosure obligations, and the Attorney General ultimately threatened the petitioners with suspension of their registrations and fines for noncompliance.

Following a trial, the district court found for the plaintiff charities:

[T]he District Court held that disclosure of Schedule Bs was not narrowly tailored to the State’s interest in investigating charitable misconduct. The court found little evidence that the Attorney General’s investigators relied on Schedule Bs to detect charitable fraud, and it determined that the disclosure regime burdened the associational rights of donors. The District Court also found that California was unable to ensure the confidentiality of donors’ information.

This, of course, was the point. It was generally assumed that Harris wanted to know the identities of donors to conservative organizations so that they could be harassed by various California agencies, or so that their identities could be leaked in order for them to be “canceled” by left-wing activists.

In both cases, the court found that the petitioners had suffered from threats and harassment in the past, and that donors were likely to face similar retaliation in the future if their affiliations became publicly known.

The Supreme Court has long recognized that forced disclosure of association with a group can chill First Amendment rights. The seminal case was NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson:

We have also noted that “[i]t is hardly a novel perception that compelled disclosure of affiliation with groups engaged in advocacy may constitute as effective a restraint on freedom of association as [other] forms of governmental action.” NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson, 357 U. S. 449, 462 (1958).
***
As part of an effort to oust the [NAACP] from the State, the Alabama Attorney General sought the group’s membership lists. Id., at 452–453. We held that the First Amendment prohibited such compelled disclosure.

In my view, this should not have been a difficult case. But the notoriously liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the district court’s decision, and the vote in the Supreme Court was 6-3, with Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Breyer dissenting. Justice Sotomayor made this very silly argument:

The same scrutiny the Court applied when NAACP members in the Jim Crow South did not want to disclose their membership for fear of reprisals and violence now applies equally in the case of donors only too happy to publicize their names across the websites and walls of the organizations they support.

Of course some donors are happy to publicize their support for a particular nonprofit, but others, fearing personal harassment or damage to business interests, are not. Which is why the nonprofits in this case did not want to give Kamala Harris their donor lists. It is unusual to see such a foolish argument in a Supreme Court opinion.

The fact that liberal judges were happy to side with California’s effort to pry donor lists loose from conservative organizations is a stark reminder of the importance of not losing control over the Supreme Court to the Left.

H.Res.388 – Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that President Biden’s gun policies are unconstitutional and should never be approved.

117th CONGRESS
1st Session
H. RES. 388

Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that President Biden’s gun policies are unconstitutional and should never be approved.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
May 12, 2021
Mr. DesJarlais (for himself, Mr. Norman, Mr. Rogers of Alabama, Mr. Steube, Mr. Weber of Texas, Mr. Gibbs, Mr. Budd, Mrs. Harshbarger, Mr. Brooks, Mr. Perry, Mr. McClintock, Mr. Keller, Mr. Rose, Mr. Aderholt, and Mrs. Miller of Illinois) submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary

RESOLUTION
Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that President Biden’s gun policies are unconstitutional and should never be approved.

Whereas the right of the people to keep and bear arms is enshrined in our Constitution as the Second Amendment;

Whereas our Nation’s Founders believed this right to be fundamental for Americans to protect themselves and the state of freedom;

Whereas President Biden has directly attacked this right by issuing numerous Executive orders and calling for stricter gun control policies;

Whereas President Biden’s Executive actions on pistol-braced firearms are an unconstitutional attack on Americans exercising their Second Amendment rights;

Whereas President Biden’s Executive actions on homemade firearms, such as 3D printed firearm files or unfinished receiver blanks, are an unconstitutional attack on Americans exercising their Second Amendment rights;

Whereas President Biden has called for Congress to pass unconstitutional laws requiring background checks on all firearm transfers, unconstitutionally banning “assault weapons” and “high-capacity magazines”, and holding law-abiding gun manufacturers liable for the acts of criminals;

Whereas President Biden’s gun restriction proposals would effectively ban commonly owned firearms and magazines used for lawful purposes;

Whereas President Biden’s gun restriction proposals would criminalize private firearm transfers; and

Whereas President Biden’s gun restriction proposals would seek to hold gun manufacturers and dealers civilly liable, encouraging abuse of the court system to drive them out of business through meritless litigation: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that—

(1) it should be the policy of the United States to strengthen the Second Amendment rights of Americans and prevent the potential erosion of these rights; and

(2) Congress should never stop fighting to protect the Second Amendment.