McConnell Blocks Attempt to Pass $2,000 Relief Bill, Deflects Accountability to POTUS

posted by Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked a bipartisan effort to enlarge the COVID relief bill to $2,000.  President Trump supports the enhanced relief package.  As a consequence, in justifying his maneuver McConnell did something we are all too familiar with.  It is time to expose the Decepticon game again; this time people will accept.

[POTUS Tweet Link – Washington Post Link]

At first blush you might ask yourself why Mitch McConnell would block this bill and put the Georgia special election senate races in question.  He just handed Georgia democrats an atomic sledgehammer.  However, what most people do not understand is how McConnell works; being in the minority position is not adverse to his interests.  McConnell operates with a Machiavellian strategy, so we will explain.

Senator McConnell said the $2,000 bill would be attached to two other POTUS priorities including (1) section 230 reform, and (2) a request for congressional review of the 2020 election fraud, both have been requested by President Trump.  This is how Mitch McConnell justifies; this is how the GOP will defend his decision; the creation of a false dichotomy is how McConnell works.  But watch what he is really doing.

McConnell admits in his floor testimony the three stage bill will take time to assemble. In essence he admits publicly the $2k, 23o reform and 2020 election review committee will take longer than the January 5th Georgia runoff.  So he is admitting the toxic political issue of the $2,000 denial will exist to benefit the democrats in the race.  Accept this.

Second, McConnell knows a second bill with all three elements will not pass the House. McConnell knows it is a pure political posturing exercise that will produce nothing, yet provide more justification for his blockage.

Once you stop being a battered conservative; meaning once you accept that McConnell knows he is creating a dynamic that supports the GA democrats; then you move to the question: ‘why would McConnell take an action that would put him in the minority?’

On its face the question seems absurd; however, it only seems absurd because people don’t understand the schemes in the upper chamber, the Senate, under Leader McConnell and Leader Harry Reid before him.  The institution of the Senate requires a voter to understand the shell game.  The pea is never where you think it is.

Defenders of the Decepticon schemes rely on our inability to understand a hidden agenda; a secret agenda… However, with more eyes now open this outline will start to make sense.

First, McConnell doesn’t care about holding a majority position in the Senate. Whether he is a majority leader or a minority leader doesn’t matter to McConnell. In fact McConnell’s political skill-set does better in the minority than the majority.

The preferred political position for Mitch McConnell is where he has between 45 and 49 republican Senators, and the Democrats hold the Majority with around 55. Of course with Senator Harry Reid’s retirement, this would now imply Majority leader Chuck Schumer holding office.

Why does McConnell prefer the minority position?

The answer is where you have had to actually follow Mitch McConnell closely to see how he works. When the Majority has around 52 to 55 seats, they need McConnell to give them 8 to 9 votes to overcome the three-fifths (60 vote) threshold for their legislative needs. It is in the process of trade and payment for those 8 to 9 votes where McConnell makes more money, and holds more power, than as a sitting Majority Leader.

The 60 vote threshold, and McConnell’s incredible skillset in the minority, is where he shines. Each of the needed votes to achieve sixty is worth buckets of indulgence to the minority leader and those on K-Street who need the Senate to support their legislative constructs.  The votes to get to sixty are worth a lot of money.

This institutional dynamic is the currency of affluence and influence in the Senate; this is why Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell never changed the Senate rules for legislative passage.  This is why the filibuster was retained and why the 60 vote threshold was always beneficial to both parties.  The color of the flag atop the spire matters not.

Except for budget passage (reconciliation); and McConnell being forced by intransigence in the era of Trump resistance to change the judicial vote threshold to 51; McConnell would never consider changing the legislative threshold (60 votes) to a simple majority (51 votes) because it would be removing his favored position.

A simple majority vote is adverse to the institutional interests.  That is why McConnell retained it during his reign as majority leader; as did Harry Reid before him.

The process of selling votes to the 60-vote threshold in the Senate is where the UniParty operates; and where the status of maximum financial benefit for the minority exists.

Currently, as majority leader with 52 GOP senators, McConnell needs to purchase eight or nine votes for each legislative priority.

Mitch McConnell doesn’t like being the purchaser, he prefers being the vote seller where his skill-set as a broker really shines.  McConnell is much better at extracting terms for his vote sales, than being the purchaser for the votes of an intransigent minority wing. This is why the current Senate doesn’t pass many bills.

If Democrats were in the majority, and McConnell was the minority leader, we would see much more legislation pass because Schumer is a more well financed buyer (K-Street) and McConnell is a much better seller.  Whenever we have this minority dynamic it always leaves people confused because few really watch what McConnell is doing.

McConnell takes his favorite 18 controlled GOP senators (Decepticons) and he brokers their votes on an ‘as needed’ basis.  The eight to ten senators he selects each time get compensated in the process.  McConnell rotates the financial beneficiaries on a bill-by-bill basis.  As a consequence each of the 18 or so McConnell senators get quite wealthy over time, and McConnell gains additional power and influence.

McConnell decides who takes committee positions, those committee positions are worth money to K-Street purchasers of legislation.  That’s one aspect to his power.

McConnell also hand-selects which senators will provide the votes to the majority to reach the 60 vote threshold.  He uses a formula of favoritism, loyalty and studies the election cycles to determine who in his tribe will sell their votes and gain.  That is the second aspect to his power.

If any of the republican Senators attempt to disrupt this UniParty business model McConnell excommunicates them from the legislative process; the best reference for the ‘excommunicado’ approach is former U.S. Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC).

Additional references for how McConnell operates this scheme as the Minority Leader can be found in the Corker-Cardin amendment which allowed the Iran nuclear deal/payments under Obama; and/or the “fast track” Trade Promotion Authority deal for TPP passage, again for President Obama’s maximum benefit.

In these two examples McConnell worked with Harry Reid to flip the vote threshold from two-thirds (super-majority) need to approve, to two-thirds (super-majority)  needed to deny.  They flipped the dynamic in order to give Obama the tools he needed for the Iran deal and the Trans-Pacific-Partnership trade agreement (TPP).

[SIDEBAR – Within TPP Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was again working on the priorities of U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue.   McConnell and Donohue have been working together on UniParty trade and domestic legislative issues for around twenty years. It is well established that Senate Leader Mitch McConnell has one major career alliance that has been unbroken and unchanged for well over two decades. That alliance is with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and specifically with CoC President Tom Donohue.

CoC President Tom Donohue represents Wall Street interests and supports: all multinational trade deals, open-border immigration policies, amnesty legislative constructs, and all of the issues that have generally irked common-sense GOP voters for the same period of time. [SEE HERE and SEE HERE]. Tom Donohue is the biggest lobbyist spender in DC every year, by a mile.

To remind ourselves how Minority and Majority Senator McConnell took down the threat of the Tea Party revisit these old articles:  CNN Part I and CNN Part II  both showcase how McConnell works.   Then do some research on how McConnell worked with Haley Barbour in Mississippi [SEE HERE] – END SIDEBAR].

Hopefully, now you can see how the business model within the senate is lucrative from a financial standpoint.  Selling votes from the minority position is worth a lot of money.  Additionally, the power dynamic is essentially even within this process.  The majority holds political and financial power…  and the minority holds enough political power to keep the majority in check (as well as mutually beneficial financial power).

For those who understand the dynamic the next obvious point is: what happens if Schumer takes the majority, eliminates the filibuster and takes legislative passage to a simple majority (51-votes)?  This is, after all, what the far-left has promised to do.

From McConnell’s position if the Democrats are the party that changes the precedent for Senate legislative passage, he feels it will provide him ammunition to retake control in the 2022 mid-term; and he wouldn’t be the historic figure to have changed the rules.

McConnell counts on the GOPe machinery (RNC), the purchased and allied Wall Street media, and his K-street backers to assist him in getting back in power.  The righteous donation requests from the political and financial class are always enhanced by the extremes and outrage.  If Schumer kills the filibuster and takes the senate to a simple majority McConnell will weaponize the maneuver against his “friend across the aisle”.

That’s the way the Machiavellian processes work….

What Big Tech Didn’t Want You To See On The Federalist In 2020

Article by Joy Pullman in The Federalist

What Big Tech Didn’t Want You To See On The Federalist In 2020

Google, Facebook, and Twitter ultimately don't want you to see anything from The Federalist. They also hope you don't notice.

 

Leftist media has skewed U.S. politics for decades, but Big Tech’s amplified influence over global discourse and governments is new. While Congress passed no legislation related to this political and national security emergency, we the people were held captive in lockdowns during a major election while crucial public information was filtered, hidden, and surveilled by unaccountable companies with no allegiance to the United States and obvious disdain for hundreds of millions of its inhabitants.

This is a huge social problem. Regaining our freedom to speak and to share and compare information may be the first task towards redressing our grievances against those who claim to govern us. For how can consent of the governed be truly granted when the people’s ability to inform their consent is manipulated? It cannot.

To regain our self-governance, then, we all need to develop new habits of information-gathering and -sharing. As a tiny part of and precursor to more of that effort, here is an accounting of Federalist work that Google, Facebook, and Twitter tried to keep people from seeing in 2020.

You will notice it fits the pattern of big tech censorship that big tech claims isn’t censorship: it all goes one way politically. All of it also comprises election-meddling by effectively promoting misinformation and disinformation on key voting issues.

Just Plain Hiding the News They Can’t Use

In June, a foreign think tank, NBC, and Google colluded in an attempt to demonetize The Federalist in retaliation for our coverage of Black Lives Matter rioting. The tech giant demanded we end our commenting section, and continues to refuse to allow it back. Google-owned YouTube also continues to shadowban Federalist content and choke our engagement.

In July, Google claimed it had “mistakenly” made it impossible for people to find a slew of conservative news sites, including CNSNews.com, The Washington Free Beacon, Breitbart, Twitchy, RedState, PJ Media, The Blaze, Townhall, LifeNews, PragerU, and The Daily Wire.

After the election, Instagram slapped a warning label on a post in which President Trump honored Pearl Harbor Day. Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, put an automatic “fact check” on Trump’s post that claimed Joe Biden won the election, although Trump’s post included nothing about the election results. Instagram later removed the “warning.”

In October, “Twitter suspended U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Mark Morgan for a post celebrating the success of the U.S. southern border wall keeping violent criminals from reaching American communities,” reported The Federalist’s Tristan Justice.

The online publisher banned Morgan, a public official, from communicating the elected president’s publicly stated priorities, telling him in an automated message the post violated the publisher’s “hateful conduct” policies. Morgan had written: “@CBP & @USACEHQ continue to build new wall every day. Every mile helps us stop gang members, murderers, sexual predators, and drugs from entering our country. It’s a fact, walls work.” If this is hate speech, all conservatives are criminals.

Evidence of Biden Family Corruption

Infamously, Twitter and Facebook tampered with the 2020 election in October by immediately and actively suppressing public knowledge of a federal corruption investigation into Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, related to information found on a Delaware laptop.

Yesterday, the computer store owner who turned the laptop over to federal investigators sued Twitter for defamation. Twitter’s ban was predicated on alleging the laptop containing “hacked” material, even though, as The Federalist documented, Twitter regularly allows the circulation of hacked and hoax information. The laptop owner says he did not hack it, he owns it, and that Twitter claiming otherwise has significantly damaged his reputation and employment.

In October, Twitter openly admitted it was pre-emptively choking the story on their platform even before deploying their Chinese- and Democrat-funded “fact-checking” organizations to explain away what are obviously politically motivated, selectively enforced, anti-truth information operations designed to help Democrats control the United States.

Twitter also pre-emptively blocked The New York Post’s subsequent reporting on its Hunter Biden laptop scoop, despite those containing additional corroborating details, and although witnesses and additional evidence also surfaced to independently corroborate the story. Twitter banned members of Congress and the president’s campaign from posting information about the story. It kept the Post locked out of its Twitter account for weeks following the breaking story in the run-up to the election.

Lest we all become too dulled to this successful attempt to control the nation without the people’s consent because we’re all used to leftists refusing fair play and equal treatment, we all need to remember that enough Biden voters to swing the election decisively to Trump said they would have changed their votes if they knew about this corruption story. Big tech bias is not a trivial issue. It is the difference between a fair election and a corrupted one, between self-rule and a corrupted oligarchy.

Evidence of Election Tampering and Errors

From May 2018 to October 2020, Twitter and Facebook restricted posts from President Trump at least 65 times, according to a media study. They did this precisely zero times to Joe Biden (or Hillary Clinton), and it’s not because he’s the most accurate politician alive.

In June, the anti-Trump bias ridiculously caused Twitter to put a warning label on an obvious parody video about a “racist baby.” More seriously, at the same time Twitter repeatedly throttled as “false” President Trump’s claims that mail-in ballots are an insecure voting method. That is absolutely true and it made the 2020 election ripe for fraud, abuse, and contested results.

On election night, Twitter flagged a post from President Trump that said: “We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!” Twitter claimed this was “disputed and might be misleading” and banned users from sharing the tweet. Later it was shown that Pennsylvania indeed counted post-election ballots against its own law forbidding that.

On Nov. 4, Twitter slapped a “warning label” about “disputed information” in a tweet from Federalist Cofounder Sean Davis, whose “offending” tweet accurately summarized the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s ruling that ballots brought in after election day would be counted.

On Nov. 9, Twitter put a warning label on a quote from and link to an affidavit of sworn testimony alleging election fraud tweeted by Federalist Senior Contributor Ben Weingarten. “This claim about election fraud is disputed,” Twitter claimed, preventing people from retweeting it without adding their own comments. It later removed the choke without explanation.

In December, Federalist Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway explored the disqualifying errors in a “fact-check” done by one of Facebook’s partners of allegations of election fraud in Georgia. Facebook used the same fact-check she fisked to pre-emptively ban her article from its platform.

COVID-19

Big communications companies rabidly policed discussions about COVID-19 in 2020. Big tech seemed especially pouncy about information related to face masks. This included Amazon’s Nov. 24 ban of a book by former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson’s book discussing the scientific evidence that mask mandates are ineffective.

It extended to repeated bans and chokes on Federalist content about masks, many by a supposed Facebook “fact check” that didn’t fact check any Federalist articles. It was just a generic fact check applied against anyone questioning the efficacy of cloth masks and generic mask mandates, even when such individuals cited scientific evidence from reputable sources.

Former White House Coronavirus Task Force advisor Dr. Scott Atlas was banned from publishing references to scientific studies on masks. CNN anchor Jake Tapper and CNN commentator Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a professor of neurosurgery, cheered Twitter on. Google-owned YouTube infamously pulled down a June interview of Atlas.

Weirdly, in April Facebook had blocked DIY cloth mask-making sites while banning the sale of medical-grade masks and sanitizer. Yet just a few months later Facebook’s blocking activities supported the use of makeshift masks made out of any material and blocked information, including from The Federalist, pointing out that all masks are not equally effective at virus and other particle filtering. Perhaps pointing out that research has found that gaiter-style or scarf masks actually may increase virus transmission may get this article banned too.

Social media bans on mask information from The Federalist included the well-read Oct. 29 article that quoted and linked to high-quality studies from reputable sources, “These 12 Graphs Show Mask Mandates Do Nothing To Stop COVID,” which was also throttled on LinkedIn.

Spygate

In October, Twitter began publicly testing stronger information controls, which resulted in it warning users who tried to tweet a Federalist article breaking new information about the Spygate scandal. Spygate, of course, is the Obama administration’s documented and so far unpunished use of federal surveillance and policing powers to baselessly persecute, prosecute, and hamstring their political opponents.

The article Twitter impeded reported handwritten notes from Obama CIA Director John Brennan that showed President Obama was made aware months before the 2016 election that the Russian government may have been influencing Hillary Clinton’s false collusion smear against Donald Trump. Sean Davis reported more in that piece for The Federalist:

There is no evidence the FBI ever took any action to ensure that Russian knowledge of Clinton’s plans did not lead to infiltration of that campaign’s operation by Russian intelligence agents. The CIA referral, specifically its reference to a ‘CROSSFIRE HURRICANE fusion cell,’ suggests that the Obama administration’s anti-Trump investigation may not have been limited to the FBI, but may have included the use of CIA assets and surveillance capabilities, raising troubling questions about whether the nation’s top spy service was weaponized against a U.S. political campaign.

Seemingly Random Acts of Censorship

In September, Facebook employed abortionists to “fact-check” two videos from Live Action explaining why abortion is never medically necessary. Numerous obstetrics professionals and a national OB-GYN organization supported Live Action’s statement as accurate, but that didn’t matter to Facebook, which choked Live Action’s page.

In November, Instagram and Facebook’s sweeps caught up an innocent and completely apolitical local charity that used Facebook to coordinate donors and volunteers. Oathkeepers Causeplay may sound like it’s a conservative group, but it’s not (and even if it were, there’s nothing wrong with being conservative). It’s a group of people who dress up like TV and movie superheroes and other characters to cheer up disabled and sick children.

The act of random censorship hurt sick kids by depriving the charity of funds and volunteers. It also scared people away from associating with the charity — which, again, not only did nothing “wrong” but actively does good — out of fears they’d also lose their Facebook-mediated access to friendships and social activity. Good job, Facebook.

Also in October — see a pattern here? — Facebook users who searched for the Christian group Let Us Worship were given a warning message falsely claiming the group was affiliated with QAnon. “This is a peaceful movement from across the political spectrum and they are suppressing it by linking us to Q,” the group’s founder, Sean Feucht, told The Federalist. Facebook claimed the mislabeling was a glitch. Yet nobody shut down their traffic over their inaccurate statements despite the harm they caused others.

Again in October, Facebook demonetized the satire website Babylon Bee for making a Monty Python joke in a headline. Facebook claimed the Bee’s silly headline “Senator Hirono Demands ACB Be Weighed Against A Duck To See If She Is A Witch” “incited violence,” and refused to alter its decision after a review. In a self-parody that is impossible to top, Snopes and Twitter also frequently “fact-check” and throttle the clean satire site. I guess humor is now too conservative to allow.

It wasn’t just 2020, either. This has been going on for years. In fact, you might say Twitter, Google, Facebook, and others have been perfecting their ability to shut down non-leftist discourse and project public opinion cascades. In retrospect, earlier tech bans on speech look like dress rehearsals for the 2020 election bleep show.

In 2018, for example, The Federalist published a theologian’s story about how Facebook banned him from expressing Christian views about teaching young children about LGBT sex and gender identities. Earlier that year, Project Veritas released undercover video of a former Twitter employee verifying the company’s practice of “shadowbanning,” called that at the time because the practice was covert. In 2019, Google banned a conservative think tank from buying online advertising because a scholar affiliated with the think tank had critiqued multiculturalism.

Punishing the Conservative Base While Monetizing Them

Once a website’s content has begun to be flagged as “false” even if it is not, search engines and social media increasingly throttle traffic to the entire site, not just the flagged content. This further serves leftist information control by making publications reluctant to challenge what the unelected tech arbiters of reality have decided we must see and say. This means Google, Facebook, and Twitter ultimately don’t want you to see anything from The Federalist. They also hope you don’t notice.

“[S]tories from right-wing media outlets with false and misleading claims about discarded ballots, miscounted votes and skewed tallies were among the most popular news stories on” Facebook directly after the election, reported The New York Times. Facebook responded with deeper cuts into the reach of information from right-leaning outlets and greater amplification for articles from leftist media:

employees proposed an emergency change to the site’s news feed algorithm, which helps determine what more than two billion people see every day. It involved emphasizing the importance of what Facebook calls ‘news ecosystem quality’ scores, or N.E.Q., a secret internal ranking it assigns to news publishers based on signals about the quality of their journalism.

…The change was part of the ‘break glass’ plans Facebook had spent months developing for the aftermath of a contested election.

Unnamed sources told the New York Times Facebook is working on ways to control information while still keeping users, and that the tools it has developed for this mostly affect right-leaning content. The company may also make permanent some information control mechanisms developed specifically for the 2020 election. But they have to be careful about this, the NYT reported, because when people notice the information control they stop using Facebook so much.

Right-leaning information is consistently among the most popular content on Facebook and YouTube. This means people who consume right-leaning information provide Facebook and Twitter millions of dollars because their time spent on site lures advertising. This allows Facebook to put competing information outlets out of business by siphoning away all advertising revenue while not paying for the content creation that draws the eyeballs, reinforcing their information monopolies.

Nice little racket. Tailor-made for people who don’t believe Americans ought to be allowed to make their own decisions.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/29/what-big-tech-didnt-want-you-to-see-on-the-federalist-in-2020/ 

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Article by Mary Margaret Olohan

Trump Honors Catholic Martyr St. Thomas Becket for Defense of Religious Liberty

President Donald Trump declared Dec. 29 the anniversary of the Roman Catholic martyr St. Thomas Becket, honoring the 12th-century English bishop as “a lion of religious liberty.”

“Thomas Becket’s death serves as a powerful and timeless reminder to every American that our freedom from religious persecution is not a mere luxury or accident of history, but rather an essential element of our liberty,” the president’s proclamation said. “It is our priceless treasure and inheritance. And it was bought with the blood of martyrs.”

The president highlighted Archbishop Becket’s martyrdom in a proclamation issued Monday, describing how knights of King Henry II of England murdered the Catholic saint in his own church after he refused to acknowledge the king as his supreme ruler.

“His last words on this earth were these,” the proclamation said, “‘For the name of Jesus and the protection of the Church, I am ready to embrace death.’ Dressed in holy robes, Thomas was cut down where he stood inside the walls of his own church.”

The White House sends out a proclamation for the 850th anniversary of St. Thomas Becket’s martyrdom.
He was the Archbishop of Canterbury who was murdered in his cathedral after his quarrels with King Henry II. Saint Thomas Becket’s feast day is Dec. 29. pic.twitter.com/YjnBrLjYgi

— Catherine Hadro (@CatSzeltner) December 29, 2020

 

The president’s proclamation heralds Becket as the precursor to “numerous constitutional limitations on the power of the state over the Church across the West,” particularly the Magna Carta, which declared that “[T]he English church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished and its liberties unimpaired.”

“It is because of great men like Thomas Becket that the first American President George Washington could proclaim more than 600 years later that, in the United States, ‘All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship’ and that ‘it is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights,’” the proclamation said.

Trump invited “the people of the United States to observe the day in schools and churches and customary places of meeting with appropriate ceremonies in commemoration of the life and legacy of Thomas Becket” through the proclamation, and highlighted “brave and inspiring shepherds” such as Catholic Cardinal Joseph Zen of Hong Kong and Calvinist Pastor Wang Yi of Chengdu, who was imprisoned by the Chinese government.

“To honor Thomas Becket’s memory, the crimes against people of faith must stop, prisoners of conscience must be released, laws restricting freedom of religion and belief must be repealed, and the vulnerable, the defenseless, and the oppressed must be protected,” the president’s proclamation said. “The tyranny and murder that shocked the conscience of the Middle Ages must never be allowed to happen again. As long as America stands, we will always defend religious liberty.”

“A society without religion cannot prosper,” the proclamation added. “A nation without faith cannot endure—because justice, goodness, and peace cannot prevail without the grace of God.”

The president’s comments come amidst several high-profile religious freedom disputes that have come to a head during the coronavirus pandemic.

Lawmakers across the United States have issued orders restricting or prohibiting religious services to slow the spread of the disease. The Department of Justice and Attorney General William Barr have repeatedly fought against such restrictions, warning that “even in times of emergency,” federal law prohibits religious discrimination.

In December, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Washington had requested an injunction allowing “sufficient time before Christmas Eve to allow the Archdiocese to plan and celebrate Mass with percentage-based limits rather than a 50-person cap.”

“Under both the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the District’s arbitrary, unscientific, and discriminatory treatment of religious worship is illegal,” the lawsuit said.

Following the lawsuit, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser modified the city’s attendance limits, removing the 50-person limit for religious gatherings and instead capping places of worship at 25% capacity with a maximum of 250 people.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/12/29/trump-honors-catholic-martyr-st-thomas-becket-for-defense-of-religious-liberty/ 

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Article by Beth Baumann in Townhall

 

BREAKING: Trump Campaign Files Second Petition with SCOTUS Over the Election

The Trump campaign on Tuesday filed a petition for a writ of certiorari with the United States Supreme Court. The campaign is effectively asking the high court to review lower court decisions in the Donald J. Trump, et al vs. Joseph R. Biden, et al. case where the Wisconsin State Supreme Court allowed allegedly illegal absentee ballots to be counted. Trump's team claims those ballots were illegally counted. 

The president's campaign said the case originally brought to light a number of issues including:

• More than 28,000 votes were counted from people who failed to provide identification by abusing the state’s “indefinitely confined” status, including two Biden electors.
  
  
• Nearly 6,000 absentee ballots were counted that were contained in incomplete and altered ballot envelopes that the Wisconsin statutes expressly forbid.
  
  
• More than 17,000 ballots were collected by hand, in direct contravention of the statutes, in Democrat-sponsored events in Madison in September and October.

The petition cites the Wisconsin State Legislature's concerns about voter fraud arising from absentee ballots. 

"The legislature finds that voting is a constitutional right, the vigorous exercise of which should be strongly encouraged. In contrast, voting by absentee ballot is a privilege exercised wholly outside the traditional safeguards of the polling place," the petition states. "The legislature finds that the privilege of voting by absentee ballot must be carefully regulated to prevent the potential for fraud or abuse; to prevent overzealous solicitation of absent electors who may prefer not to participate in an election; to prevent undue influence on an absent elector to vote for or against a candidate or to cast a particular vote in a referendum; or other similar abuses."

One of the other issues at hand, according to the petition, is whether or not voters had to provide photo identification, as required by state law. Under state law, a voter has to be considered disabled in order to certify their identity for the purpose of voting. 

Drop boxes were allegedly used to collect absentee ballots and ballots were allowed to be curated without witness information, both of which are violations of Wisconsin law. 

“Regrettably, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, in their 4-3 decision, refused to address the merits of our claim. This ‘Cert Petition’ asks them to address our claims, which, if allowed, would change the outcome of the election in Wisconsin," the campaign's lead attorney in Wisconsin, Jim Troupis, said in a statement. “Three members of the Wisconsin State Supreme Court, including the Chief Justice, agreed with many of the President’s claims in written dissents from that court’s December 14 order.”  

The Trump campaign filed a similar petition against Pennsylvania earlier this month. 

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bethbaumann/2020/12/29/breaking-trump-campaign-files-second-petition-with-scotus-over-the-election-n2582284 

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Article by Nick Arama in RedState

 

Computer Shop Owner Who Had Hunter Biden's Laptop Drops Huge Lawsuit on Twitter

Democrats and media stomped all over the Hunter Biden story before the election in order to help Joe Biden in the election, making up crazy lies like that the laptop was “Russian disinformation,” despite the fact that it was obviously his laptop with his pictures all over it.

But in the process of interfering in the election to help Biden, Democrats and media also stomped on someone else in the process.

The owner of the computer repair shop where Hunter Biden took his laptop to be repaired, John Paul Mac Isaac.

He was made out to be some kind of liar, Russian agent, hacker or perpetrating a hoax when all he had done was report what he found. That reporting led to him getting all kinds of threats. He had to close up his shop and go into hiding because of them. It obviously completely damaged his life.

Now he’s going after Twitter for what he alleges is their part in it all. He’s filed a $500 million defamation lawsuit.

From Daily Wire:

In October, Twitter locked the Post’s account and barred users from sharing an article that cited emails retrieved from the alleged Biden laptop. The social media giant said the story violated its rules against posting “hacked materials.”

“Defendant’s actions and statements had the specific intent to communicate to the world that Plaintiff is a hacker,” Isaac’s lawsuit, filed on Monday, says. “The term ‘hacker’ is widely viewed as disparaging, particularly when said about someone who owns a computer repair business.”

“Plaintiff is not a hacker and the information obtained from the computer does not [include] hacked materials because Plaintiff lawfully gained access to the computer, first with the permission of its owner, Biden, and then, after Biden failed to retrieve the hard drive despite Plaintiff’s requests, in accordance with the Mac Shop’s abandoned property policy,” the lawsuit continues. “Plaintiff, as a direct result of Defendant’s actions and statements is now widely considered a hacker and, on the same day Defendant categorized the Plaintiff as a hacker, Plaintiff began to receive negative reviews of his business as well as threats to his person and property.”

Good for him. They completely walked over the line and did defame him in their haste to prevent the information from coming out. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey even admitted that they were wrong about doing what they did and that it didn’t violate their policies. So they basically admitted it already.

“We were called here today because of an enforcement decision we made against the New York Post based on a policy we created in 2018 to prevent Twitter from being used to spread hacked materials. This resulted in us blocking people from sharing a New York Post article publicly or privately,” Dorsey testified to Congress on Nov. 17. “We made a quick interpretation using no other evidence that the materials in the article were obtained through hacking, and according to our policy, we blocked them from being spread. Upon further consideration, we admitted this action was wrong and corrected it within 24 hours.”

Too late. You already defamed him and you locked out one of the oldest news organizations in the country from their Twitter account for days because of it.

For some reason, Twitter didn’t apply the same principles to the NY Times story of the illegally leaked tax returns of the president. I wonder why? It could be a very revealing lawsuit that would expose a lot of Twitter workings, with stuff like that could all be adduced in a lawsuit.

But Twitter caught a break. It was only just filed but because it was filed in the federal court for the Southern District of Florida, the judge has now booted the case, saying there isn’t diversity. Now what that means is that there are two ways to get a case into the federal courts – subject matter jurisdiction (a federal question being raised) or diversity jurisdiction meaning the plaintiff has to resort to the federal court because there is a “diversity” of states, plaintiff lives in Delaware, defendant’s offices are in Florida. The judge ruled that it wasn’t properly in federal court because Twitter was incorporated in Delaware so the shop owner and Twitter were effectively in the same state and he could file his suit there in state court, he didn’t need to file in the federal court. So he could refile in state court or he could find an alternative way into federal court, he’s not foreclosed from proceeding with the case.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2020/12/29/301320-n301320

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Portland sees record shootings after mayor disbands Gun Violence Reduction Team

 

OAN Newsroom

 

 

UPDATED 11:37 AM PT – Tuesday, December 29, 2020

Portland, Oregon is experiencing its highest number of homicides in nearly three decades. The Portland Police Bureau is begging the public to take community action as a way to stop the violence.

As of December, there have been over 850 shootings this year. This resulted in at least 250 people shot and contributed to 50 homicides.

“The number of bullets that must have been flying around our neighborhoods, city streets, sidewalks. It’s awful,” Lieutenant Greg Pashley of the Portland Police Department said.

In June, Portland city officials and Mayor Ted Wheeler (D-Ore.) reduced the Portland Police Bureau’s budged by $15 million. Part of the massive budget cut was the total disbanding of the PPB’s Gun Violence Reduction Team, who Democrat city leadership accused of disproportionately stopping people of color.

“We propose to direct over $7 million from the police bureau and $5 million from other city funds directly to communities of color, reinvesting $12 million,” Wheeler said back in June. “We are going to dissolve the Gun Violence Reduction Team.”

In response to the jump in gun violence and decline of police funding, the Portland Police Bureau is left with no other option but to ask churches and local organizations to step in so some people may not feel the need to act out in violence.

 

 

Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell said it has to be a team effort.

“We have come together to do our best to stop the spread of a deadly disease. Violence is also a disease that kills and our community is suffering the consequences,” Lovell stated. “The disparate impacts of violence on our communities of color are shocking.”

However, Wheeler said his decision to disband the Gun Violence Reduction Team didn’t actually impact the city’s tragic rise in gun violence.

As of now, Police Chief Lovell has been forced to assign additional detectives as investigators into shootings.

 https://www.oann.com/portland-sees-record-shootings-after-mayor-disbands-gun-violence-reduction-team/

 

 

 

 

 

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The Clause, The Act, The Report, and Vice President Mike Pence

The Guarantee Clause, 

The Electoral Count Act of 1887, 

The DNI Ratcliffe Report on Foreign Interference 

and Vice President Mike Pence

posted by @TheLastRefuge2 at The Conservative Treehouse

Amid our national discussion and evidence of wide-spread mail-in ballot vote fraud; and considering the January 6th role of the Senate to certify the 2020 presidential election; and considering a report from Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, is forthcoming with previous assertions of “foreign interference”; and considering five states are sending dual sets of electors; there has been some discussion about “The Guarantee Clause” within the constitution and how it might uniquely apply to 2020.

Here’s the discussion as best I can explain it:

[Article IV – Sec.4] The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.

“The Guarantee Clause” – “At its core, the Guarantee Clause provides for majority rule. A republican government is one in which the people govern through elections. This is the constant refrain of the Federalist Papers. Alexander Hamilton, for example, put it this way in The Federalist No. 57: “The elective mode of obtaining rulers is the characteristic policy of republican government.” [citation]  “The Clause requires the United States to prevent any state from imposing rule by monarchy, dictatorship, aristocracy, or permanent military rule, even through majority vote. Instead, governing by electoral processes is constitutionally required.”

Additionally, The Electoral Count Act or the Electoral Count Act of 1887 is a US federal law stating procedures for the counting of electoral votes by Congress following a presidential election. It was enacted in the aftermath of the disputed 1876 presidential election between Rutherford B Hayes and Samuel J Tilden. In that election, several states submitted competing slates of electors and a divided Congress was unable to resolve the deadlock. [citation]

Essentially, the Electoral Count Act (1887) requires states to complete their certification of electors to congress by a certain date.  The conversation prior to the November 2020 election surrounded whether the COVID pandemic would interfere with the deadlines for state elector certification given the massive numbers of ‘mail-in’ ballots; and whether the counting of them would break through the deadlines imposed by the Act.

A combination of The Guarantee Clause (constitution) and the Electoral Count Act of 1887 (law), establishes the framework for some to argue a fraudulent 2020 election result can successfully be challenged during congressional certification on January 6, 2021.  Thus five state legislatures -under Republican control- have sent dual-sets of electors to congress: Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Georgia and Pennsylvania.

Let us be clear… There is little framework for this type of constitutional issue. This is  uncharted territory, and consequently there is no body of law or case study upon which to apply a historic reference.   However, that said, the issue of Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, producing a report about foreign election interference could be a fulcrum issue upon which “The Guarantee Clause” of the constitution may apply.

Here’s where it gets interesting….  The Guarantee Clause puts the jurisdiction in the hands of the political bodies, executive branch and legislative branch, to decide the merit of any state vulnerability in their election outcome.   There is little, if any, place for the judicial branch to play a role.

In Luther v. Borden (1849), the Supreme Court held questions involving the Guarantee Clause nonjusticiable, meaning that any remedy for a violation would lie with Congress or the President, not the federal judiciary. Nearly one hundred years later, the Court sweepingly declared that the guarantee of a republican form of government cannot be challenged in court. Colegrove v. Green (1946). (citation)

The federal government, not the state government, ultimately holds the responsibility to protect the entire United States from foreign interference within the Guarantee Clause. This would seem to apply to foreign election interference.  “[B]ecause protection against invasion or domestic violence is normally available only from Congress and the President, the structure of this section suggests that the political branches have at least the primary duty to carry out its obligations.”

If DNI Ratcliffe produces a report (prior to January 6th) that outlines foreign interference in the election; and if the argument can be made the states with the contested (dual sets) of electors were subjects/targets of that interference; then a foundation to nullify the electors from the contested states is laid in congress.

In this approach the electoral nullification argument would appear to rest on The Guarantee Clause; where the state election outcome was not valid – as it is not representative of a republican form of government, and the majority vote requirement was manipulated.

If this type of legislative challenge was to take place, there is little precedent for the judicial branch to be involved except to qualify what role The Guarantee Clause would/could play and to what extent the nullification arguments are constitutionally valid.

Again, this is all uncharted territory.  However, there are people claiming this process could work to keep President Trump in office.   The disqualification of the contested state electors under this argument would ultimately fall upon Vice President Mike Pence who is also President of the Senate and in charge of the January 6th electoral vote certification.

There is a lot of “if-this-then” etc within this framework, and all of it ultimately is predicated on congress challenging the election (still unknown); and VP Mike Pence then deciding which electors would be certified or nullified (long-shot); but that seems to be the argument some are making.

I wonder why DNI John Ratcliffe is taking so long to produce his report?

Last thought… I have absolutely no idea if this can work, I am just summarizing a set of theoretical arguments that appear to be surfacing.  Remember, we all want the best outcome for our nation and nerves are frayed…. let us be kind to each-other in fellowship.

“One nation, under GOD“…