A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Fourteen Republican senators betrayed their voter base on Tuesday night when they voted to advance a gun control bill that concedes key constitutional ground to Democrats and their gun-grabbing wish list.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, his pick for lead negotiator Sen. John Cornyn, and nine GOPers committed to passing restrictive gun legislation last week. When the “bipartisan” group of senators finally produced the rushed bill’s text, Republican Sens. Joni Ernst, Todd Young, Shelley Moore Capito, and Lisa Murkowski joined the legislation’s authors (except for Sen. Pat Toomey, who was absent) to ram it through the upper chamber and then to the House of Representatives as soon as possible.
At a time when inflation exacerbated by federal spending is at all-time highs, more than a dozen Republican senators voted to proceed with legislation that funnels billions of dollars to states and government agencies, including the FBI, under the guise of stopping future deadly shootings like the one in Uvalde where 19 children and two teachers died after a shooter entered an elementary school through a backdoor and was not stopped by law enforcement until an hour later.
In reality, the bill is littered with vague language about “dating partners” and red flag laws, which allow law enforcement to temporarily confiscate guns from someone the government deems a danger to the public or themselves, which could be easily exploited by partisan bureaucrats.
The senators promoting this bill have provided little evidence that provisions such as “enhancing” background checks on gun buyers under 21 years of age will actually deter criminals from committing crimes that are already illegal yet it’s been hailed by Democrats and their cronies in the corrupt corporate media as the biggest firearm legislation since 1994.
That’s why pro-Second Amendment groups such as the National Rifle Association strongly opposed the legislation as soon as the full text was released.
“This legislation can be abused to restrict lawful gun purchases, infringe upon the rights of law-abiding Americans, and use federal dollars to fund gun control measures being adopted by state and local politicians,” the NRA said in a statement. “This bill leaves too much discretion in the hands of government officials and also contains undefined and overbroad provisions – inviting interference with our constitutional freedoms.”
Polling suggests that a plurality of American voters also believe red flag laws, like those encouraged by bullies in Congress, can and will be abused by the government and could even be used to root out political enemies. Specifically, more than 72 percent of Republican voters oppose red flag laws on the grounds that they could be easily turned against anyone who disagrees with the regime.
Some of those voters with strong convictions against gun restrictions were likely in states such as Kentucky, Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maine, Louisiana, Missouri, Utah, Ohio, West Virginia, Iowa, Alaska, and Indiana, many of which are Republican-controlled. But instead of their interests being accurately represented by the politicians sworn to consider their concerns in Washington, thousands of voters’ constitutional rights were handed on a silver platter to Democrats by GOP leadership.
That’s why Cornyn was loudly booed and heckled for the duration of his speech at the Lone Star State’s GOP convention last week. Despite facing significant backlash from his home state, Cornyn showed no remorse for failing to protect Texas constituents’ Second Amendment rights.
Instead, he doubled down and smeared the people who elected him to office as a “mob.”
This lack of remorse from Cornyn and other Republicans is not only shameful but alarming. As I noted in my column on this gun bill last week, “If Republicans were willing to cave on the Second Amendment, how much emotional manipulation will it take for them to surrender on other key conservative issues?”
While a significant portion of the gun control bill is a nothing-burger focused on more inflation-fueling funding and only some gun-grabbing, Republican willingness to support it is an act of betrayal against Americans and the Constitution. It shows that the politicians already in or slated for GOP leadership are willing to give concession after concession to Democrats without regard for the voters who elected them.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
Democrats and the corporate media like to call it a “compromise” when they get exactly what they want, and Republicans get nothing. Just witness the bipartisan talks underway in the wake of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas on new gun control legislation. These talks, which reportedly involve four GOP senators led by Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, are focusing on two new gun control proposals: universal background checks and red flag laws. Whatever one’s opinion about the merits of these policies, it’s a fact that Democrats have long wanted to make it harder for law-abiding Americans to purchase guns and easier for the government to take them away. Both of these proposals would do just that, while arguably doing almost nothing to prevent the sort of mass shooting we saw last week in Uvalde. One of the policy ideas, so-called “universal background checks,” isn’t a policy so much as a slogan meant to convey an inchoate desire that bad guys not be allowed to buy guns.
As nearly every gun owner in America knows, almost every gun sold in this country already comes with a background check, which is already required under federal law. As my colleague David Harsanyi noted yesterday, lying on your background check or evading it with a straw purchase are already illegal under federal law. The other idea, a national red-flag law, would empower judges and police to confiscate guns from Americans who have not been charged with, nor committed, any crime at all. What’s more, a person judged guilty of pre-crime under a red-flag law cannot appeal the decision until after his or her guns have been confiscated.
Nineteen states already have some version of red-flag law already on the books, some worse than others, and all relatively new. New York has one, but it didn’t stop the Buffalo shooter from obtaining the guns he used to kill 10 people at grocery store last month. (He also passed a federal background check.)
So much for the policies themselves. The point here is not that they are good or bad ideas but that they are the sort of things Democrats have wanted to do for a long time and haven’t been able to because Republicans have blocked them. Why have Republicans blocked them? Because too many Republican voters understand that the purpose of such laws is to erode the Second Amendment and eventually take guns from law-abiding Americans who pose no risk of danger to anyone.
But now we have these bipartisan talks underway. Reporting on the talks, The New York Times repeatedly framed them as efforts to strike a “deal” or a “compromise,” noting, for example, how projected GOP gains in the midterms “could inform how willing Republicans will be in the coming days to compromise on gun rights, an issue that has become central to their party.”
But there is in fact no compromise on the table. A compromise is when both parties give up something to get something else. That’s not happening here. Democrats aren’t talking about how they’re willing to, say, get rid of gun-free zones in schools and colleges that receive federal funding in exchange for Republican support for a national red-flag law. That would be a compromise or a deal, and it would no doubt enrage the base of either party, especially the Democrats’ radical left wing, which is why it’s very unlikely to happen. What’s happening here is that some Republicans, including Sens. Cornyn and Lindsay Graham, among others, are mulling over whether and when they will cave to pressure from the media and their Democrat colleagues and simply give them what they want without getting anything in return.
Make no mistake, there is no “deal” in the works here, there is only Republican capitulation. That’s something conservatives, at least, should be well familiar with by now. Republicans in Washington have been capitulating to Democrats and the media for decades, on nearly every conceivable issue.
We should not be surprised that they are doing it again, but we should at least be honest about what’s happening and not pretend that Cornyn and Graham and the others are cooking up some kind of genius compromise on gun control. If they were, that really would be news.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
Democrats planning their bid to win back control of the Senate will run hard against the Washington swamp next year, repurposing one of President Trump’s most effective campaign messages from the 2016 election as their own.
Top party operatives are poll-testing messages aimed at winning over voters who are fed up with a gridlocked capital, searching for ways to build an advantage among swing voters who may still like Trump, but not the senators who are seeking reelection in 2020.
And while Democrats could not convince some of their best-known candidates to forgo long shot presidential campaigns in favor of bids for Senate seats, the party will now rely on a once-unorthodox stable of candidates with little or no experience in elected office.
It is a strategy reminiscent of 2006 and 2018, when House Democrats ousted Republican majorities on the backs of candidates with unusual profiles. This year, the stable of Senate Democratic candidates includes more women and veterans than has been typical in recent cycles.
“In races around the country, there are strong Democrats stepping up to run who fit their states and will be a breath of fresh air with new perspectives to bring to the Senate,” said Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), who heads the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
When former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D) and Rep. Joaquin Castro (D) opted against challenging Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), Democrats turned to M.J. Hegar, a veteran and businesswoman who lost a closer than expected bid for Congress last year.
In Iowa, another former congressional candidate, Theresa Greenfield, is Democrats’ preferred candidate against Sen. Joni Ernst (R), though she faces a primary fight.
Arizona Sen. Martha McSally (R) will face Mark Kelly, the retired astronaut making his first run for public office. In North Carolina and Maine, Democrats recruited two state legislators to challenge Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine).
Those candidates will pitch themselves as fresh-faced outsiders who can shake up a corrupt and broken political system — even if, as is the case in Texas, Iowa and North Carolina, the favored Democratic candidate has lost a race before.
“In this race for Senate, it’s time for somebody who will stand up and fight, to build an economy that works for everybody, for the health care that each family deserves, and to reform the corrupt political system in Washington,” former North Carolina state Sen. Cal Cunningham (D) said in a video announcing his bid to unseat Tillis.
Complicating matters for Democrats, only two states that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 have incumbent
Republican senators today: Maine and Colorado. To win back the Senate majority, Democrats must win states like North Carolina, Arizona, Iowa and even Texas — all states that gave Trump their electoral votes three years ago and where he remains either popular or at least competitive today.
That has Democrats also focusing on a different villain: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Several Democratic groups are testing whether portraying Republican senators as McConnell’s minions can be effective.
Those surveys and public polls show McConnell is surprisingly well-known, and not in a good way.
A Harvard-Harris Poll survey conducted in May pegged McConnell’s favorable rating at just 23 percent, lower than Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), at 36 percent, or Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), at 27 percent. His unfavorable rating stood at 44 percent, lower than Pelosi’s 50 percent but higher than every other politician tested except Trump, Clinton and Vice President Pence.
In a poll conducted for the Democratic group End Citizens United, Global Strategies Group found reading messages against McConnell moved voters toward Democratic candidates more effectively than messages against Trump or the Republican Congress at large.
“Mitch McConnell is beholden to special interests and he’s blocking progress on everything from making prescription drugs more affordable to addressing political corruption to making health care more affordable,” said Patrick Burgwinkle, who heads communications for End Citizens United.
McConnell appears twice in Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon’s (D) video announcing her bid against Collins. Greenfield lumped Ernst and McConnell together in her own video. In Texas, Hegar called Cornyn “that tall guy lurking behind” McConnell.
More than half of the 295 advertisements the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is currently running on Facebook show McConnell’s image or mention his name.
Attacks against national party leaders are nothing new to Republicans, who spent several cycles using Pelosi as shorthand to tie every prominent Democratic challenger to liberal San Francisco values.
Republicans aren’t convinced that McConnell will be the poison pill that they saw in Pelosi.
“You use party leaders in midterms to polarize an electorate when you have registration advantages in the state or district. In a presidential election the electorate is polarized and motivated. The middle isn’t making a decision to show up for a presidential election based upon a three-way bank shot in the side-pocket about whether a senator serves in the same conference as somebody else,” said Josh Holmes, a longtime Senate Republican strategist and top aide to McConnell.
“The reality for him is that any resource spent attacking Mitch McConnell is a resource that is not used to attack his Republican colleagues, and that’s just the way he likes it,” Holmes said.
But Democrats hope the focus on corruption can be the beginning of a discussion of other issues, too: That health care costs rise because of pressure from special interest groups or that gun safety legislation has not passed because of the power of the National Rifle Association.
Democrats “can make the case that Mitch McConnell and special interests in Washington are the ones preventing these priorities from being addressed,” Burgwinkle said.
President Obama on Thursday commuted the sentences of 330 inmates on his final full day in office, the White House announced. Obama has set a record with his aggressive use of clemency power. The 1,715 commutations granted during his eight years in office are more than any president in the nation’s history. Of those, 568 were sentenced to life in prison.
“You have been granted a second chance because the president sees the potential in you,”White House counsel Neil Eggleston wrote in a blog post. “The president concluded that you have taken substantial steps to remedy your past mistakes and that you are deserving of a second chance.”
This latest round comes just two days after Obama doled out 209 commutations and 64 pardons, including a shorter prison stay for former Army soldier Chelsea Manning. Obama received blowback from Republicans and some Democrats on Capitol Hill over the decision to set Manning’s release for May 17, 2017.
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The former army private, who is transgender, received a 35-year sentence for leaking classified information about U.S. national security activities that were later disclosed by WikiLeaks – the longest sentence anyone’s ever received for a leak conviction.
Retired Gen. James Cartwright was also given a second chance. The former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was accused of lying to the FBI about his conversations with reporters regarding U.S. efforts to cripple Iran’s nuclear program was among those pardoned this week.
But Thursday’s batch did not contain those types of names or other well-known political figures who have typically received clemency from past presidents during their final days. For example, Obama faced pressure to offer commutations or pardons to former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl and former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D). Instead, the list was made up of non-violent drug offenders on whom Obama has focused his attention during the past two-plus years.
Obama started a clemency initiative in 2014 designed to shorten drug sentences he views as unjust.
In many cases, the sentences were handed down under federal mandatory minimum guidelines that have since been rolled back by Congress. But conservatives have been critical of the unprecedented rate at which Obama has granted clemency.
“People say, well why should we change the sentencing rules in criminal justice reform if the president can just do it with a flick of his pen?”Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) said earlier this week.
Clemency advocates praised Obama for his action Thursday, calling it a “last act of mercy.” “With this last act of mercy, President Obama has closed out a historic effort to restore some balance and fairness to a federal prison system that has caused needless destruction of thousands of lives and families,”Jessica Jackson Sloan, #Cut50’s national director, said in a statement. The group, which is working to cut the prison population in half, called on President-elect Donald Trump to pick up where Obama left off.
“Clemency can and should continue to play an important role in ensuring that justice is administered smartly and equally,”Sloan said. “We hope President Trump will continue granting mercy to families desperately seeking to be reunited with their loved ones.”
More than half of all federal prisoners are serving time for drug convictions, and #Cut50 said the vast majority had no prior criminal history.
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American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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