While Hunter Biden enjoys the privileges of a sweeping presidential pardon, Rachel Powell, a Pennsylvania mother of eight, is spending the holidays locked away from the people she loves. While President Joe Biden’s corrupt son enjoys a get-out-of-jail-free card erasing a long list of felonies and potential offenses, Powell, marked as an “insurrectionist” for a property damage crime at the Capitol, languishes in a federal prison.
It’s the punctuation mark on the perversion of justice that has defined the Biden years, an era of lawlessness in which “no one is above the law” but this president, his grifting family and his constitution-ripping cronies.
Biden’s unconditional pardon of his ne’re-do-well progeny, issued as Americans were still drowsy from their Thanksgiving leftovers, covers more than a decade of felonies and sundry crimes that Hunter “committed or may have committed.” Legal experts are calling the act of absolution “unprecedented,” exceeding President Gerald Ford’s pardon of the man he succeeded, Richard Nixon, post-Watergate. Even that wide pardon only covered Nixon’s presidency — Jan. 20, 1969 to Aug. 9. 1974.
Joe Biden’s 11-year blanket pardon of Hunter is even more expansive than the pardon Gerald Ford gave to Richard Nixon in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. pic.twitter.com/9ThNOEGyo5
The only thing surprising about Biden’s broad act of leniency gifted to his crack-addled son is that anyone is surprised by it. But Never Trumpers like Joe Walsh sound absolutely heartbroken that Biden has once again been shown to be the unrepentant liar he is after insisting on multiple occasions that he would not pardon Hunter, who faces sentencing on gun-related and tax evasion felony convictions.
“I said I would abide by the jury’s decisions, and I will do that, and I will not pardon him,” the president told ABC News’ David Muir, press puppet for the Democratic Party and their presidential candidates, in an interview in June.
After hearing that Biden is breaking his word, a dispirited Walsh sounded like a cuckolded lover.
“They’re all like that,” the Trump-hating former Republican congressman from Illinois moaned Sunday evening on MSNBC. “So, the next time any of us complain about anything Trump does, this — this pardon is just deflating. For those of us who have been out there for a few years now yelling about what a unique threat Donald Trump is, for Joe Biden to do something like this, Trump — ‘nobody’s above the law,’ we’ve been screaming.”
Walsh and his fellow Never Trumpers have joined Democrats in their full-throated support of one of the darkest chapters in U.S. history — the politically-driven witch hunts of pro-Trump protesters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. For nearly four years, Biden’s Department of Justice, led by his Javert, Attorney General Merrick Garland, in arresting, prosecuting and imprisoning hundreds of political prisoners. Like 44-year-old Rachel Powell. The Biden administration and their pals in the Pravda press continue to paint the eventual riots over a rigged 2020 election as a coordinated “insurrection” driven by their No. 1 political enemy: Donald J. Trump, the 45th and soon-to-be 47th president of the United States.
‘You’re Going to Take Eight Years of Her Life Away?’
Nearly 1,600 people have been caught up in the Biden Justice Department investigations. More than 500 people“have been sentenced to periods of incarceration,” some on an “obstruction of an official proceeding”charge tossed out earlier this year by the U.S. Supreme Court. Interestingly, the high court’s ruling found the DOJ employed an “inappropriately broad interpretation” of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
The DOJ hit Powell, who became known as the “bullhorn lady” in the press, with the obstruction charge. She also was charged with civil disorder, disorderly conduct in a Capitol building, destruction of government property, and entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon — the “ice axe and battering ram” that law enforcement officials say she used to break through a window and “breach the Capitol” as Congress convened to count the 2020 electoral votes. Powell told Newsweek that she “used the axe and the cardboard battering ram to break a window so that some in the group near the tunnel could move to open spaces,” and a bullhorn “to flag a nearby safe haven that she saw on the other side of the glass she had shattered.”
Powell is serving a nearly five-year prison sentence after D.C. District Judge Royce Lamberth threw the book at her in October 2023. Before that, Powell spent years on strict house arrest awaiting trial and sentencing.
“She had an ankle monitor. She was not allowed to leave her home,” said Cynthia Hughes, founder and president of the Patriot Freedom Project, a nonprofit organization providing support to J6 political prisoners and their families. Hughes was interviewed on an upcoming edition of The Federalist Radio Hour podcast. Her nephew, Tim Hale, spent three years in prison on J6-related, trumped up charges, including a year in solitary confinement.
Powell “missed her daughter’s wedding. She missed the birth of her two grandchildren. She couldn’t even go to a doctor appointment if one of her children needed the assistance of her mother,” Hughes added.
Powell’s youngest child was just 7 when she was sent to prison.
While Powell did damage government property, Hughes said she didn’t assault anyone or hurt law enforcement officials during the riot and she had no previous criminal record. Yet, the mother of eight received harsher treatment than many of the Black Lives Matter protesters engaged in riots that burned down government buildings, destroyed private property and brutally assaulted police.
“Yeah, she broke a window but you’re going to take eight years of her life away?” Hughes said. She’s lost her home, she lost custody of her children for a small minute. She had a terrible public defender.”
And now Powell is serving a nearly five-year prison sentence followed by 36 months of supervised release. Hunter Biden, who faced years in prison and more than $1.3 million in fines is a free man. He owes nothing. If it’s any consolation to the J6 political prisoners learning of the pardon from behind prison bars, the younger Biden says he will never forget the kindness bestowed on him by his powerful father and that he will commit himself to “helping those who are still sick and suffering.”
He remains defiant, despite his father’s forbearance.
Jerry Broussard of WhatDidYouSay.org
“I have admitted and taken responsibility for my mistakes during the darkest days of my addiction – mistakes that have been exploited to publicly humiliate and shame me and my family for political sport,” Hunter said in a statement to the press.
‘Miscarriage of Justice’
Biden defended his son and his sweeping pardon, insisting that “Hunter was treated differently” under the law. Well, welcome to the club, Hunter. The hundreds of J6 political prisoners his father’s administration has persecuted over the past four years know what disparate treatment feels like.
President-elect Trump has met with some the families of the people he has described as hostages. He has said that he would pardon a “large portion” of the people convicted on federal charges related to the Capitol riots. On Truth Social earlier this year Trump wrote that one of his “first acts as your next president” will be to “Free the January 6 Hostages being wrongfully imprisoned.”
Following Biden’s generous gift to his repugnant son, Trump asked on his Truth Social account, “Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years? Such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!”
Joe Biden didn’t just pardon Hunter for the gun crimes for which he was convicted. He pardoned Hunter for *EVERY SINGLE FEDERAL CRIME HE COMMITTED* over the last decade—including several years during which Joe Biden was VP and the entirety of Joe Biden’s presidency. pic.twitter.com/wjvwXTL8r6
The president-elect raises a good point. Trump could and should pardon the J6 political prisoners as one of his first acts in office, or at least commute sentences. He likely will stop the prosecutions and end the witch hunt that the Biden administration has carried out. But Biden should spend the last days of his shameful presidency rectifying of the bigger injustices of his time in office. He should pardon the political enemies his DOJ has prosecuted as “insurrectionists.”
He claims his disgraced boy is a victim of politics, “singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong.” Many of the protesters who showed up to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, are victims of vendetta political politics. That was wrong. It remains so.
But Biden is as political as he is corrupt. So the people locked away on political crimes will have to await deliverance from the man the Biden regime desperately tried but failed to defeat, imprison, even murder.
Trump, unlike Biden, is a man of his word, Hughes said. “He keeps his promises,” the Patriot Freedom Project founder said.
And when Trump does follow through on his promise of pardons, Democrats, Never Trumpers and their accomplice media friends will have no standing to complain.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio delivered a masterclass Sunday on how Republicans should respond when media partisans ask them to prematurely commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election. NBC News’ Kristen Welker asked Rubio if he would “accept the 2024 election results no matter what happens.”
“No matter what happens? No! If it’s an unfair election, I think it’s going to be contested by each side,” Rubio said.
“No matter who wins, Senator? No matter who wins?” Welker asked.
“You’re asking the wrong person! The Democrats are the ones that have opposed every Republican victory since 2000. Every single one. Hillary Clinton…”
“No Democrat has refused to concede,” Welker interjected. “Hillary Clinton conceded. Senator, will you accept the election results?”
“Hillary Clinton said the election was stolen from her, and that Trump was illegitimate. Kamala Harris agreed,” Rubio said. “By the way, there are Democrats serving in Congress today who, in 2004, voted not to certify the Ohio electors because they said those machines had been tampered with. And you have Democrats now saying they won’t certify 2024 because Trump is an insurrectionist and ineligible to hold office. So you need to ask them.”
Rubio then pointed out that having “over 500 illegal dropbox locations” in Wisconsin, for example, is something that legitimately undermines confidence in elections.
Rubio’s answer was excellent because he understands the insidiousness of such a question: Republicans are being goaded to relinquish their right to question problematic election administration. Instead of being bullied into agreeing with Welker’s presuppositions, he immediately went on the offensive.
When will the media start asking democrats if they will accept the outcome of the 2024 election if Trump wins? pic.twitter.com/9kGf9O3sTF
Left-wing corporate media have already smeared Rubio and other conservatives as election “deniers” for refusing to play into the media’s trap. It’s a cheap trick designed to silence legitimate concerns about election administration by painting them as threats to “democracy.”
When Republicans treat the question as anything but a cheap trick, they put themselves immediately on the defensive by assuming the question’s dishonest premises. That’s exactly what South Carolina senator and potential vice-presidential pick Tim Scott did during a recent interview of his own with Welker. When goaded as to whether he would accept the results of the 2020 election, Scott chose to side-step the question.
“At the end of the day, the 47th president of the United States will be President Donald Trump,” he said.
When asked again, Scott responded “That is my statement” and “I look forward to President Trump being the 47th president — the American people will make the decision.”
Scott’s answer was abysmal because he was obviously afraid of the question. But no Republican should be afraid to refuse to play along with corporate media partisans’ bad-faith “gotcha” questions. What’s more, there’s nothing wrong with refusing to resoundingly affirm the results of an election that has not yet taken place, especially at a time when Democrats are deploying everything from weaponized lawfare to unconstitutional attempts to federalize elections via “Bidenbucks” to rig elections in their favor.
Besides, as Rubio pointed out, the 2020 election was far from the first to face scrutiny. Democrats called Republican George Bush’s election in 2000 “fraudulent,” said his 2004 victory was “stolen,” and objected to the certification of Trump’s 2016 election while claiming he had colluded with Russia to steal the presidency.
In the 1960 presidential election, some electors declared Richard Nixon the winner of Hawaii’s electoral votes before a recount eventually led to John F. Kennedy’s electors’ votes being certified. Should Kennedy have resigned his right to question the incorrect initial results prior to the election?
Of course not — yet that’s what Republicans are being asked to do now. They should understand the question as the unserious hackery it is and answer accordingly.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
Headlines recently proclaimed that eight of Trump’s “fake” electors accepted immunity deals. Of course, in reporting the news, the corporate outlets all missed the real story — that the electors’ testimony failed to incriminate anyone, including Trump, and that the county prosecutors engaged in massive misconduct. Equally appalling, however, was the corrupt media’s continued peddling of the “fake electors” narrative.
There were no “fake” electors. There were contingent Republican electors named consistent with legal precedent to preserve the still ongoing legal challenges to the validity of Georgia’s certified vote.
Nor was appointing an alternative slate of electors some cockamamie plan devised by Trump lawyers. On the contrary, Trump’s election lawyers and the contingent electors followed the precise approach Democrats successfully used when the date Congress established for certifying an election came before the legal challenges John F. Kennedy had brought in Hawaii were decided. And that approach allowed Kennedy to be certified the winner of Hawaii’s three electoral votes on Jan. 6, 1961, even though the Aloha State had originally certified Richard Nixon the victor.
The Hawaii scenario in 1960 mirrors in every material respect the facts on the ground in Georgia on Dec. 14, 2020 — the date both the Democrat and Republican presidential electors met and cast their 16 electoral votes for Joe Biden and Donald Trump respectively.
Here’s What Happened in Hawaii Six-0
Election day in 1960 fell on Nov. 8 and pitted Kennedy, a Democrat, against Republican Richard Nixon. The outcome remained unknown for some time, with a total of 93 electoral votes from eight different states undecided in the days following the election. Hawaii was one of those states.
By Dec. 9 of that year, Kennedy had accumulated enough electoral votes to win the White House, but Hawaii’s winner was still in question. While the presidency did not depend on Hawaii’s three electoral votes, Democrats there had challenged the initial returns that gave Nixon a 141-vote edge, or 0.08 percent margin of victory.
Based on the original count in favor of Nixon, the acting governor of Hawaii, Republican James Kealoha, certified the Republican electors on Nov. 28, 1960. On Dec. 13, over the objections of the state attorney general, state circuit court Judge Ronald Jamieson ordered a recount. Then, on Dec. 19, both the Nixon and Kennedy electors met, “cast their votes for President and Vice President, and certified their own meeting and votes.”
In casting their electoral ballots for Kennedy, the three Hawaiian Democrats certified they were the “duly and legally qualified and appointed” electors for president and vice president for the state of Hawaii and that they had been “certified (as such) by the Executive.” The Hawaii electors further attested: “We hereby certify that the lists of all the votes of the state of Hawaii given for President, and of all the votes given for Vice President, are contained herein.”
Two of the three Democrat electors were retired federal judges, William Heen and Delbert Metzger, and Heen personally mailed the Democrat electoral votes to Congress on Dec. 20. In fact, the envelope containing the certificates, further attested: “We hereby certify that the lists of all the votes of the state of Hawaii given for president … are contained herein.”
Ten days later, on Dec. 30, 1960, Judge Jamieson held that Kennedy had won the election. In so holding, Jamieson stressed the importance of the Democrat electors having met on Dec. 19, as prescribed by the Electoral Count Act, to cast their ballots in favor of Kennedy. That step allowed the Hawaii governor to then certify Kennedy as the winner of Hawaii’s three electoral votes and, in turn, Congress to count Hawaii’s electoral votes in favor of Kennedy.
The Peach State Repeat
The Georgia situation in 2020 mirrored the events of 60 years ago in Hawaii.
Election day in 2020 fell on Nov. 3, although by then many ballots had already been cast, given the adoption of mass mail-in and early voting. Trump held a lead in Georgia until the morning of Friday, Nov. 6, when Biden overtook the incumbent. With the margin remaining tight, on Nov. 11, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced a statewide audit.
Following the audit, Biden remained in the lead by approximately 12,000 votes, leading Raffensperger to certify the election results on Friday, Nov. 20, 2020. Republic Gov. Brian Kemp signed the certification the same day. Then on Nov. 21, Trump requested a recount, as allowed under Georgia law given the closeness of the count.
On Dec. 4, 2020, then-President Trump and Republican elector David Shafer filed suit in a Fulton County state court against Raffensperger, arguing tens of thousands of votes counted in the presidential election had been cast in violation of Georgia law. While Trump’s lawsuit was still pending, on Dec. 7, 2020, based on the recount, Raffensperger recertified Biden as the winner of Georgia’s 16 electoral votes by a margin of 11,779.
Trump and Shafer’s Fulton County lawsuit contesting the election results remained pending on Dec. 14, 2020, the date the presidential electors were required by federal law to meet. Thus, while the Democrat electors met and cast their ballots for Joe Biden, the Republican electors met separately and cast their 16 votes for Trump.
At that time, Shafer made clear the Trump electors had met and cast their votes to ensure Trump’s legal battle in court remained viable. Nonetheless, following Biden’s election, Fulton County Prosecutor Fani Willis targeted the Republican electors as part of her criminal special purpose grand jury investigation.
While the grand jury has since issued a report and been disbanded, Willis agreed to grant immunity to eight of the electors, likely to push them to implicate the other electors. However, their lawyer confirmed in a court filing that none of the electors implicated anyone in criminal activity.
Since then, Shafer’s attorneys, Holly Pierson and Craig Gillen, wrote Willis a detailed letter reviewing the Hawaii precedent. The attorneys noted they had made three prior written requests to meet “to discuss the factual and legal issues” relevant to Shafer’s role as a contingent Trump elector but had “not yet received any response to those requests.”
The 11-page, single-spaced letter then proceeded to detail both the Hawaii precedent for Shafer’s actions following the 2020 election and the legal advice the Republican elector received that “he and the other contingent presidential electors should meet at the state capitol building on December 14, 2020, and perform the duties of a presidential elector to preserve potential remedies in the event Trump et al. v. Raffensperger, et al. was successful.”
In addition to detailing the Hawaii precedent from 1960, Shafer’s lawyers highlighted the fact that in contesting the 2000 election, lawyers for then-Democrat presidential candidate Al Gore cited that very precedent to support his position that two elector slates could be appointed. In fact, Democrat Rep. Patsy Mink of Hawaii suggested the 2000 Florida electoral dispute be resolved based on that Hawaii precedent too. And three Supreme Court justices in Bush v. Gore cited the Hawaii precedent as a basis for allowing the Florida recount to proceed.
As the letter and Hawaii precedent make clear, Shafer and the other Trump electors not only did nothing wrong, but they acted prudentially to ensure that if the state court lawsuit resolved in the president’s favor, Georgia’s electoral votes would be properly counted on Jan. 6, 2020.
Here we see one of the only differences between Trump’s legal challenge and Kennedy’s: The Hawaii state court promptly resolved the merits of Kennedy’s legal challenge, while in violation of the Georgia Election Code that requires lawsuits contesting elections to be heard within 20 days, the Fulton County court delayed assigning a judge to hear Trump’s election dispute and then delayed the first scheduled hearing until Jan. 8, 2021 — two days after Congress certified Biden the winner of the 2020 election.
Now you know the rest of the story. There were no fake electors. The question now is whether Willis will charge Shafer and others with fake crimes.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
The political scandal of the decade is brewing in Washington, D.C., and it may leave President Donald Trump in a very different position than his enemies wish: Not destroyed, but largely vindicated.
Details have finally started to emerge about an establishment-led effort to plant a “mole” within the Trump campaign, and evidence is beginning to mount that its goal was to undermine and derail his run for office.
The facts are suggesting something chillingly sinister: A government operative directed by the Obama-run FBI purposely infiltrated the campaign of a candidate with the training and background needed to destabilize elections.
In a detailed piece published by The Intercept, investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald summarized the scandal and gave a blow-by-blow account of how its beginning to unravel.
“Over the past several weeks, House Republicans have been claiming that the FBI, during the 2016 election, used an operative to spy on the Trump campaign, and they triggered outrage within the FBI by trying to learn his identity,” he explained.
“The controversy escalated when President Trump joined the fray on Friday morning. ‘Reports are there was indeed at least one FBI representative implanted, for political purposes, into my campaign for president,’ Trump tweeted.’”
Amazingly, FBI and Department of Justice sources did not deny this claim. It’s worth remembering that while the media and DOJ insiders were laughing and dismissing Trump’s accusations a year ago — especially regarding wiretapping and the Steele dossier — he has been proven right on almost every point.
Nobody is laughing now. Instead, they’re scrambling to cover their tracks.
“On May 8, the Washington Post described the informant as ‘a top-secret intelligence source’ and cited DOJ officials as arguing that disclosure of his name ‘could risk lives by potentially exposing the source, a U.S. citizen who has provided intelligence to the CIA and FBI,’”Greenwald reported.
That was almost certainly a last-ditch effort to protect the mole and save face. Then came the threats.
“The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner … actually threatened his own colleagues in Congress with criminal prosecution if they tried to obtain the identity of the informant,” Greenwald reported.
Journalists, including Greenwald and veteran gumshoes at several major media outlets, didn’t stop. After a few rounds of newspaper one-upmanship, the mole’s name has been revealed.
“As a result of some very odd choices by the nation’s largest media outlets, everyone knows the name of the FBI’s informant: Stefan Halper,” Greenwald wrote.
Here’s the truly important and shocking part: Halper is no run-of-the-mill FBI operative. He has a history of being involved in shady CIA operations to infiltrate and derail U.S. elections.
“To begin with, it’s obviously notable that the person the FBI used to monitor the Trump campaign is the same person who worked as a CIA operative running that 1980 Presidential election spying campaign,” Greenwale wrote.
Yes, it was Halper, a former Nixon insider and the same man at the center of the anti-Trump scandal today.
Nearly 40 years ago, a largely buried scandal was playing out in Washington. In involved some famous Republicans, including old names that even today are firmly in the “Never Trump” camp.
“Halper was responsible for a long-forgotten spying scandal involving the 1980 election, in which the Reagan campaign — using CIA officials managed by Halper, reportedly under the direction of former CIA Director and then-Vice-Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush — got caught running a spying operation from inside the Carter administration,” the Intercept explained.
In other words, there may be a structure within the foreign policy and intelligence communities that goes back to at least the time when George H.W. Bush ran the CIA.
That behind-the-scenes power structure — “Deep State,”to borrow the term — was on the side of Hillary Clinton and believed that Trump needed to be stopped at any cost.
One look at the now-public text messages from FBI officials in the weeks and months leading up to the 2016 election definitely seems to support this. And it’s worth pointing out that the now 93-year-old George H.W. Bush admitted to supporting Hillary Clinton.
By any measure, the Bush dynasty has not been friendly to Trump.
“Whatever else is true, the CIA operative and FBI informant used to gather information on the Trump campaign in the 2016 campaign has, for weeks, been falsely depicted as a sensitive intelligence asset rather than what he actually is: a long-time CIA operative with extensive links to the Bush family who was responsible for a dirty and likely illegal spying operation in the 1980 presidential election,”explained Greenwald.
“For that reason, it’s easy to understand why many people in Washington were so desperate to conceal his identity, but that desperation had nothing to do with the lofty and noble concerns for national security they claimed were motivating them,”he added.
Deep operatives. Election interference. Moles and spies deployed against a candidate by our own government agencies. It’s a chilling picture, but one that all of the evidence so far supports. There’s a power struggle of shadows within the swamp in Washington, and it is at odds with the American people and their sovereign voice.
When Congress recently passed — without having read — a $1.3 trillion omnibus bill that was more than 2,200 pages, fiscal conservatives were outraged by the gluttonous and wasteful spending it contained. President Donald Trump, who reluctantly signed the bill despite an initial threat to veto, expressed a similar sentiment when he made clear he would never sign another bloated spending bill like that again. And now it looks like he may be taking steps to undo some of that terrible bill.
Perhaps feeling a bit of buyer’s remorse or simply heat from their base, Trump and congressional Republican leaders recently held talks to find a way to trim some of the fat from the omnibus bill, according to Politico. The most likely way to do that would be through a process known as rescission, and Trump’s White House is reportedly working closely with House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy to put a package together that could cut billions of dollars from the recently passed spending bill, if approved by a simple majority in Congress.
In analysis for The Washington Times, Trump campaign economic adviser Steven Moore and Trump transition tax policy adviser James Carter explained some of the history and process behind the rescission budgetary maneuver, a rarely-used anti-spending tool that last saw favor under President Ronald Reagan.
Up until former President Richard Nixon, presidents had the power to “impound” and refuse to spend federal funds for projects they viewed as wasteful or unnecessary, something Nixon reportedly did with roughly 20 percent of the funds appropriated by Congress each year of his presidency until 1974.
That is when Congress passed the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act, which blocked a president’s sole authority to impound funds and offered up the congressionally-approved rescission tool to stop funding for wasteful programs in its place. The process works by a president submitting a rescission proposal to the House of Representatives, which must then be approved by simple majorities in both chambers of Congress within 45 days. If the proposal is ignored or fails to achieve majorities, the spending remains unchanged.
Reagan proposed some 596 rescissions totaling $43 billion during his two terms, though Congress only approved 213 of those rescissions totaling only $16 billion in saved funds. Unfortunately, only about $6 billion in rescission proposals have been approved since Reagan left office, the last of which occurred in 1999.
It is worth noting that the Democrats’ chief obstructionist to Trump, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, can do little to stop a rescission proposal from receiving a vote as debate on such measures are limited to only 10 hours and can’t be filibustered. However, given the slim majority held by Republicans in the Senate and the tendency of the more moderate establishment members to break away from their party and join the opposition to Trump, nothing is guaranteed.
That said, while some Republicans may not want to risk the wrath of the liberal media by revisiting and cutting some of the bloated budget deal, such a vote would really make the handful of Democrats running for reelection in red states — who are trying to convince voters they’re actually fiscal conservatives — particularly nervous, as where they come down on the issue would certainly be a hot topic during the campaign season.
Hopefully, Trump and his team of budget and economic advisers, working in conjunction with Congressional Republicans, can find a way to make use of the rescission tool to get rid of at least some of the wasteful spending that was stuffed into the omnibus bill to garner bipartisan support. If so, and if it is to be a worthwhile effort, they will need to do more than merely tinker around the edges with modest proposals and actually put forward some significant cuts. It would then be interesting to see how various members of Congress either accede to the cuts or defend the wasteful projects they have agreed to appropriate taxpayer funds.
Every developed nation on Earth, at least so called Western Nations, has something in common and that something is what to do about the poor. Countries wrestle with the social and economic impact – we/they struggle with the ever-increasing cost of caring for our/their poor. Those on the left insist it is our duty as a grand collective to redistribute the wealth from the haves to the have-nots. Those on the right agree that some care should be provided to the working poor, the homeless and truly indigent. This debate has been raging for multiple decades with no end in sight – the left advocating for ever more entitlements and the right insisting on some accountability.
Instead of just endlessly debating the issue the Island nation of New Zealand years ago decided to try something new. In 2013 they overhauled their welfare system to make those who receive payments somewhat more accountable. Some of the changes included discouraging families on welfare from having more children, requiring recipients to reapply for benefits at set intervals, cutting benefits if certain obligations are not met and guiding recipients into work. They also instituted a penalty for abusers of the system where a spouse must repay any benefit his or her spouse received under false pretenses. Try that in America.
Although the system has helped, the government of New Zealand is still not satisfied. So, it’s on to something new and even more radical. They call it a “Universal Basic Income” (UBI) and it “involves a basic, unconditional, fixed payment made to every person in the country by the state in lieu of benefits.”
In other words, instead of poor citizens receiving a rash of benefits from various authorities, they would instead receive, in effect, a welfare salary. They would scrap the entire welfare system and replace it with this UBI.
New Zealand’s opposition leader, Andrew Little justified the “salary” saying: “The question is whether you have an income support system that means every time you stop work you have to go through the palaver of stand-down periods, more bureaucracy, more form filling at the same time as you’re trying to get into your next job.”
Being that welfare is basically here to stay, this actually doesn’t sound half bad. I’m not keen on the idea of paying someone a salary not to work, but is that not what we are essentially doing now? Yet with a system like this, think of all the government bureaucracy that could be cut. Think of all the hundreds of departments that could be closed by simply making direct payments to recipients, not to mention the waste, fraud and abuse that would vanish by doing away with layer upon layer of said bureaucracy.
Many might say, wow – considering our sad reality, this does sound better. Why has no one suggested this before? Actually, both Finland and the Netherlands are due to launch similar programs sometime this year.
But this has been suggested before, right here in the good old U.S. of A., 47 years ago, by President Richard Nixon. In 1969, Nixon made a speech suggesting the scrapping and replacement of the “Aid to Families with Dependent Children” (AFDC – 1935-1996).
Nixon said his proposal would benefit “the working poor, as well as the nonworking; to families with dependent children headed by a father, as well as those headed by a mother. What I am proposing is that the Federal Government build a foundation under the income of every American family with dependent children that cannot care for itself — and wherever in America that family may live.”
It was coined it as a “Guaranteed Annual Income,”(GAI) and it was the centerpiece of Nixon’s proposed “Family Assistance Plan”(FAP). Yet Nixon bristled over the term GAI and stated that “a guaranteed income establishes a right [income] without any responsibilities [work] …There is no reason why one person should be taxed so another can choose to live idly.” Conservatives in his party disagreed by stating that is exactly what Nixon’s proposal set up. The proposal did pass the House by a comfortable margin of 243-155, but the Senate killed it.
Of course the welfare system then wasn’t anything like the hammock we have today, so all things considered, maybe the New Zealand direct payment model would be preferable to our hopelessly broken, purposely complex and corrupt system.
He is someone you definitely should know about, if not remember well. Read on to learn why.
He is Edward “Ed” Mezvinsky, born January 17, 1937. Then you’ll probably say, “Who is Ed Mezvinsky?”
Well, he is a former Democrat congressman who represented Iowa’s 1st congressional district in the United States House of Representatives for two terms, from 1973 to 1977.
He sat on the House Judiciary Committee that decided the fate of Richard Nixon.
He was outspoken saying that Nixon was a crook and a disgrace to politics and the nation and should be impeached.
He and the Clintons were friends and very politically intertwined for many years.
Ed Mezvinsky had an affair with NBC News reporter Marjorie Sue Margolies and later married her after his wife divorced him. In 1993, Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, then a freshman Democrat in Congress, cast the deciding vote that got President Bill Clinton’s controversial tax package through the House of Representatives.
In March 2001, Mezvinsky was indicted and later pleaded guilty to 31 of 69 counts of bank fraud, mail fraud, and wire fraud. Ed Mezvinsky embezzled more than $10 million dollars from people via both a Ponzi scheme and the notorious Nigerian e-mail scams.
He was found guilty and sentenced to 80 months in federal prison.
After serving less than five years in federal prison, he was released inApril 2008 and remains on federal probation.
To this day, he still owes $9.4 million in restitution to his victims.
About now you are saying, “So what!”
Well, this is Marc and Chelsea Mezvinsky.
That’s right; Ed Mezvinsky is Chelsea Clinton’s father-in law.
Now Marc and Chelsea are in their early thirties and purchased a 10.5 million dollar NYC apartment (after being married in George Soros’ mansion). Has anyone heard mention of any of this in any of the media?
If this guy was Jenna or Barbara Bush’s, or better yet, Sarah Palin’s daughter’s father-in- law, the news would be an everyday headline and every detail would be reported over and over.
And yet say there are no double standards in political reporting. And people are already talking about Hillary as our next President! And then there is possibly Chelsea for president in our future!
The cycle never ends! Lying and corruption seem to make Democrat candidates more popular.
When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty.
~ Thomas Jefferson ~
“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”
A new study conducted by a Princeton professor shows that when blacks riot, conservatives vote. Omar Wasow looked at the destructive black rioting of the 1960s and how it affected public policy. Critics are examining the study – “Nonviolence, Violence and Voting: Effects of the 1960s Black Protests on White Attitude and Voting Behavior” – to see what lessons it might hold for the Black Lives Matter movement today.
Wasow found that Richard Nixon was carried into the White House in 1968 by a “social backlash” that followed the urban rioting of the civil rights era. By analyzing the votes county by county, he discovered that “black protests in which some violence occurs are associated with a statistically significant decline in Democratic vote-share.” By contrast, Wasow says, black-led protests where there was no violence had the opposite effect on subsequent voting patterns. Whites were more willing to vote for liberal candidates when they had not recently been exposed to racial rioting.He goes as far as to conclude that, in the absence of violent protests, Hubert Humprhey would have likely defeated Nixon.
In writing about the study, the Washington Post said, “There are obviously many, many differences between the 1960s protests and those in 2014-2015 … To pick just one, the 1960s protests were larger and more numerous.”
Indeed. The other main difference is that the civil rights movement of the 1960s was actually based around legitimate issues. The current movement is based around complete fiction. One can surmise that in this atmosphere, even nonviolent protests may encourage people to vote more conservatively in the next election. Considering the Black Lives Matter movement has inspired plenty of violence, the backlash may be even more significant once the next election rolls around. If so, it might spell doom for Hillary Clinton.
Journalists will doubtlessly make hay from the racial component of the study, condemning whites for judging all blacks by the actions of a few. But there are plenty of reasons for conservative blowback following these riots and protests, and none of them have a thing to do with race. Americans crave law and order when they sense their communities are out of control. At a time when Democrats are pushing hard to slash black incarceration rates, riots like the ones seen in Ferguson and Baltimore are the worst things that could possibly happen. Violence aside, it’s easy to see how liberal Democrat policies have led us to the inner city problems we see today. When New York City was under Giuliani’s rule, things got clean. When the city went back to the Democrats, the crime returned. Under de Blasio, there’s no telling how dangerous the city will eventually become.
If Democrats suffer in 2016, they might want to consider how this backwards approach to crime and race contributed to their defeat.
“It has been in every age that it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter, who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both, to deceive and overawe the People.”
– Unknown (See also 2 Corinthians 11:14)
Evil men have been, since day one, attempting to deceive the masses into believing that they are good and upright, when the fruit they produce through their works are nothing short of evil and destructive. I want you to see that this method of deceiving the people is still alive and well among those who have not learned from the past – and Time magazine is just the propaganda resource to prove my point.
Time has labeled the following people “Man of the Year”:
Adolf Hitler was declaredTime’s Man of the Year in 1938. Hitler was a fascist dictator whose dangerous political power-grab cost the lives of over 50 million people during World War II, 405,399 of whom were American soldiers and 11 million of whom were exterminated through the Holocaust.
Josef Stalin was declared Man of the Year in 1939 and 1942. Stalin was the cruel tyrant of the Soviet Union who was responsible for killing 20 million of his own citizens. President Franklin Roosevelt referred to Stalin as kind “Uncle Joe” back in the 1930s.
Nikita Khrushchev was declared Man of the Year in 1957. Nikita Khrushchev was a Russian Communist who seized power as dictator over the Soviet Union when Stalin died in 1953. He liked to threaten and bully his opposition, and his leadership of the Communist Bloc in the Cold War was so dangerous he had to be removed by his subordinates. Khrushchev said: “We do not have to destroy America with missiles; America will destroy itself from within.”
Richard Nixon was declared Time’s Man of the Year in 1971. We all know Nixon was due to be impeached because of his abuse of power and obstruction of justice in the Watergate scandal.
Ayatollah Khomeini was declared Man of the Year in 1979. The Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini was a Shiite Muslim who became the dictator of Iran in 1979. The ayatollah came to power as part of Jimmy Carter’s “human rights” policy. Using the youth, he headed a mass campaign of torture, rape and execution against political opponents as well as their families, close friends and anyone who was accused of insufficient Islamic behavior. President Reagan criticized Khomeini as “a maniacal fanatic who has slaughtered thousands and thousands of people, calling it executions.”
Mikhail Gorbachev was declared Man of the Year in 1987 and 1989. Gorbachev was an active member of the Communist Party during his college years and eventually became the head of the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991. He is a self-proclaimed atheist and a globalist.
And he (Jesus) said unto them, “Ye are they which justify yourselves before men; but God knoweth your hearts: for that which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God.” (Luke 16:15)
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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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
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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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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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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March 18, 2016
Being that welfare is basically here to stay, this actually doesn’t sound half bad. I’m not keen on the idea of paying someone a salary not to work, but is that not what we are essentially doing now? Yet with a system like this, think of all the government bureaucracy that could be cut. Think of all the hundreds of departments that could be closed by simply making direct payments to recipients, not to mention the waste, fraud and abuse that would vanish by doing away with layer upon layer of said bureaucracy.
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