Colorado Saves Democracy By Not Allowing People To Vote For Preferred Candidate

Babylon Bee🐝

DENVER, CO — In a heroic effort to save American Democracy, the Colorado Supreme Court Has voted to prevent residents of Colorado from voting for their preferred candidate.

"I love democracy, and this is why we had to vote to overrule the millions of Colorado citizens who want to elect Trump through the democratic process," said Colorado Justice and white woman Melissa Hart after the vote. "Trump is a terrifying orange man and if he's elected he will likely grow to over 50 feet and rampage through the country killing people with his laser eyes. Our democracy is too precious for us to allow that to happen."

After Justice Hart's statement, the three other justices who voted with her stood and clapped in approval.

Democracy experts also applauded this democracy-subverting move to make sure democracy wasn't subverted. "Just think. If 4 people in robes hadn't taken away the voting rights of millions, we would have lost our democracy!" said journalist and democracy expert Linda Florgbott. "Thank God we saved it just in time."

At publishing time, Trump had gained another 12% in Colorado polls.

Army's Recruiting Woes Are Aggravated by a 'TikTok Mutiny' of Gen Z Soldiers

streiff reporting for RedState 

The US Army is facing a so-called "Tik Tok Mutiny" as young soldiers take to the Chinese Communist smartphone app Tik Tok to complain about virtually every aspect of their service. The mutiny is led by Tik Tok influencers like Specialist Anthony Laster, who criticize Army life for having 'No Privacy, The Pay Sucks, Sh***y Food, Disrespectful Leadership, NO SLEEP!'

Another "mutineer" is Specialist Dana Estrella, who complains about being unable to call in sick and maintaining something approximating military bearing.

Here is Specialist Itzell Hernandez, who seems more interested in setting up a potential OnlyFans site than anything else sniveling about the inconveniences of a deployment to the field.

Some of the videos are true, but you have to wonder what they were told during the enlistment process...or what they refused to hear...about military life. The fact that he's astonished that you must meet performance standards to qualify for schooling is extraordinary. 

Other complaints raised include having to maintain physical fitness and appropriate weight, lack of personal autonomy, and barracks maintenance being a bigger part of military life than killing people and breaking things.

None of this should be a shock. As I posted back in March in Secretary of the Army Guarantees a Lot of Young Soldiers Will Die but Has the Right Thoughts and Feelings:

The US Army is a barking shambles. In Fiscal Year 2022, the Army missed its recruiting goal by 15,000 soldiers or 25% of its goal (Military Recruiting Numbers Lowest Since the Vietnam War). At the end of the fiscal year, the Army was supposed to have 485,000 soldiers, but it only had 466,000. That shortfall of 19,000 soldiers is the equivalent of disbanding five of the Army’s 31 brigade combat teams. While we can quantify the number of soldiers not enlisted, what is much more difficult is to put a number on those who have voted with their feet because of Army leadership that has become highly politicized and the men — fathers, teachers, coaches, and family members — who will actively discourage young men from enlisting because the Army no longer represents American values (Army Backs off Enlisting High School Drop Outs but the Woke Cancer Killing Enlistments Remains Stronger Than Ever).

It has tolerated bizarre sexual fetish sub-cultures that permit senior officers to victimize their subordinates and document the process on social media; see Army Starts Sham Investigation Into Bondage Fetish Colonel and His Friends Because They Think You're Stupid.

Along the way, the Army has reduced enlistment standards and concentrated on recruiting the characters from the Star Wars cantina (Army Backs off Enlisting High School Drop Outs but the Woke Cancer Killing Enlistments Remains Stronger Than Ever). Army recruiting is so adrift that the GAO concluded that the Army literally has no plan for pulling out of its death spiral; see GAO Finds Military Has No Plan for Ongoing Recruiting Crisis, the Real Question Is Do They Care?

None of this should be a shock. If your recruiting program is focused on recruiting sexual and racial/ethnic minorities because they add to your Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity bean count rather than young men, yes, men who want to be soldiers, don't be shocked when you find your ranks are filled with those minorities who believe their personal attributes are all that is needed. If you recruit whiney, privileged kids with the promise that they will "find themselves" in the Army rather than serve the nation, don't pretend to be surprised when they don't adapt well to living in a communal environment, taking orders, and staying in good physical condition.

The 800-pound gorilla in the room is that small unit discipline has ceased to exist. I've heard stories of unit leaders being afraid to discipline women or minority soldiers because they know their careers will come to a screeching halt. The obsession of the Karens in Congress over cases of sexual harassment has created an environment where all that is needed to get you relieved from your command and put on the greased slide out of the Army is to have a woman soldier make a sexual harassment/assault complaint. You're guilty, and you only make things worse by trying to defend yourself because then you are a terrible person in addition to a predator. I've heard the same story about attempting to discipline sexual minorities and racial/ethnic minorities who understand the power of the accusation of racism. There is no sane world in which soldiers, and at least one non-commissioned officer, can have TikTok followings numbering in the hundreds of thousands creating these videos in uniform and on-base win total impunity unless the chain of command is so emasculated and afraid of its shadow that it lives in fear of maintaining discipline.

Lurking behind all of this is the fact that a smartphone app developed in Communist China, TikTok, which Chinese intelligence can access, seems to be ubiquitous. All of those videos have geolocation. Facial recognition software allows anyone these soldiers come into contact with to be identified. The Army appears afraid to enforce this fundamental operational security principle; one can only assume it is because it fears making the complainers mad.

If there is a bright spot in this fiasco, it is this. Finally, we have something that no one can hang on "Boomers." When we left, the Army could still fight and win wars. And while any number of sh**bird privates may have had ideas like this flit through the vacuum they called a mind, they were all too smart to document those thoughts for posterity or as the subject of a meeting with the "Old Man."

X22, On the Fringe, and more- December 19

 

We Are Well Beyond Hypocrisy ~ VDH

Have we again forgotten the subpoenaed Trump children?

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

The abject narcissism of the insular Left is startling. They apparently believe the American public is amnesiac enough to forget what leftists once did, now that they’re doing the utter opposite. And they assume we are to discount their hypocrisy and self-absorption simply because they self-identify as erudite and moral and assume their opponents are irredeemable and deplorable.

Impeachment

The Left is saturating the airwaves with outrage over the current House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry. They allege that formally investigating Joe Biden’s role in the family grifting operation is somehow a poor constitutional precedent, if not out-of-bounds entirely.

So we hear further arguments that it will be unwise to impeach a first-term president when he loses his House majority, that there is no reason to “waste” congressional time and effort when Biden will be automatically acquitted in the Democratically controlled Senate, and that the impeachment is cynically timed to synchronize with president’s reelection efforts.

All of these are the precise arguments many of us cited when Donald Trump was impeached in December 2019 (as his reelection campaign began, and immediately after being cleared of the 22-month, $40-million-special-counsel Russian-collusion hoax).

The Democrats tried to remove an elected president over a phone call without a special counsel’s report. So Trump was impeached only after the 2018 election led to a Democratic House majority, which went from eating up nearly two years of his administration in the Russian-collusion hoax straight into the impeachment farce. There was no concern about the cost to the nation of putting an elected government into a continual state of siege.

There is one difference, though, between the Trump impeachment and the Biden impeachment inquiry. Donald Trump was impeached because he accurately accused the members of the Ukrainian government of paying Hunter Biden, with his zero fossil fuel expertise, an astronomical sum to serve on the Burisma board—as the costly quid that earned the lucrative quo from his dad Vice President Joe Biden.

No one now denies that Joe Biden got prosecutor Viktor Shokin fired by threatening to cancel legislatively-approved U.S. aid. Shokin knew about the skullduggery through which the Biden family eventually received $6.5 million from Ukraine—and so Biden ensured his firing, and publicly bragged about it in performance-art fashion.

In sum, Trump had a perfect right as commander in chief to delay (he did not cancel) aid to Ukraine, to ensure that its government was not still paying off the Bidens for their lobbying efforts on its behalf.

It is also now clear that Biden serially lied about his ignorance of Hunter’s shake-down operation. In fact, he was, as Devon Archer emphasized, “the brand” central to Hunter’s scheme to coerce money from foreign governments. Joe was proverbially, in Hunter’s words “the man sitting next to me” and thus able to either punish or reward foreign interests, depending on the size of the checks they wrote to his various fronting family members.

Offspring subpoenas

The left is now furious that Hunter has been subpoenaed by the House to testify in private about how he earned his multimillion-dollar income, whether he fully paid taxes on it, and to whom he distributed his winnings.

Hunter has refused to testify. He is now being held in contempt of the U.S. Congress—to the silence of the usually self-righteous former senator Joe “pay your fair share” Biden.

We hear sanctimonious harangues that Joe is guilty of loving “his only son” Hunter too much, or that it is way out of bounds for a Department of Justice prosecutor to hound Joe Biden by going “after his family,” or that Republican congressional subpoenas and contempt findings should be summarily ignored.

Ask Peter Navarro or Steve Bannon whether one can simply ignore a House subpoena. Ask Ivanka Trump whether she was, or was not, subpoenaed to appear before the January 6 committee. Ask the Trump sons whether they could breezily say “no” to Letitia James’s subpoenas in her farcical real-estate-valuation suit against Trump.

Whistleblowers

Do we remember when, not long ago, whistleblowers were noble?

The alleged whistleblower Eric Ciaramella, an Obama holdover who had burrowed inside the Trump administration, had zero firsthand knowledge of the Trump phone call to Ukrainian president Zelensky. Ukrainian expatriate Lt. Col Alexander Vindman was on the call, as a member of the Trump national security team. He broke the law and apparently disclosed the classified call—in outrage that Trump was apparently too hard on his native Ukraine— to Ciaramella, and then hid the latter’s identity. Both met privately with Rep. Adam Schiff (D—CA) to engineer an impeachment writ. 

This impeachment gambit was well-known to the media and the Democratic House. Both Vindman and Ciaramella were canonized as invaluable tools in wearing down Trump in a way that the failed Mueller prosecution had never done. 

And whistleblowers now? 

IRS Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley and 13-year Special IRS Agent Joe Ziegler never violated any statute or disclosed classified information. They did not leak a presidential phone call to a foreign leader.

Instead, both came forward as whistleblowers to testify before Congress about how the Biden Justice Department deliberately and carefully ensured that the mountain of evidence for the prosecution of Hunter Biden that they had presented had simply been ignored—at least long enough for the statute of limitations to run out on his most egregious crimes.

When they both made their case that facts proved the Biden family received huge sums for selling access to or action from Joe Biden, they were roundly trashed by Democrats in congress and pilloried as disgruntled politicos by a toady press.

Dictators

Never-Trumpers and leftists vie to predict the most nightmarish consequence of a 2024 Trump election win. Supposedly, he will commit every imaginable sin, from ending habeas corpus to jailing his enemies.

This fearmongering has no basis in fact, especially given that the nation has already experienced a Trump administration for four years. And it saw none of the weaponization of the CIA, FBI, DOJ, and IRS that we have seen under the Biden and earlier Obama administrations. There was no concerted effort to destroy the 2020 Biden campaign in the manner of the 2016 Russian-collusion caper, no FBI suppression of evidence as we saw in the case of the Hunter laptop, no warping of a FISA court, no paying social media corporations FBI money to suppress news unfavorable to Trump. And so on.

The Burden of Familial Indictments? 

Suddenly yet another new narrative emerges: Joe Biden is unduly preoccupied, bearing the enormous burden of Hunter’s indictments. Apparently, we have never appreciated the supposedly unnecessary and cruel encumbrance on a president when his son is indicted.

So, we are told that a son’s legal exposure is an unfair weight on a president.

Have we again forgotten the subpoenaed Trump children, much less the four weaponized indictments of Trump himself? Does anyone wish to compare the drug-addicted, prostitute-hiring, gun-losing, pornographic-photo-taking, shake-down grifting of Hunter with the conduct of the five Trump children?

What would Biden think if the next Republican Secretary of State had once tried to ruin him by rounding up “51 intelligence authorities” to blatantly lie that a Trump son’s incriminating laptop was not his own, in order to affect the 2024 election —all in the manner of the Antony Blinken 2020 ruse? Or imagine a future National Security advisor who had once tried, in Jake Sullivan’s 2016 way, to concoct a malicious yarn that Hunter was engineering a computer ping correspondence from Biden headquarters to Moscow. Would those be burdens on Biden? Were they on Trump?

It may well be unwise to impeach a president in his first term when he loses his House majority. It may certainly set a bad precedent to subpoena the children of presidents. It may be regrettable that whistleblowers are either unduly demonized or sanctified. And it is of course wrong to smear a president as a veritable Hitlerian dictator.

But the left does not see such absolutes. Instead, once a supposedly morally-superior agenda is enunciated, then any means necessary are justified to obtain it.

And that alternate reality ensures that impeaching a president, indicting him, subpoenaing his kids, praising or libeling whistleblowers, or smearing a president as a dictator become good or bad things only by determining whether they prove useful to the progressive project.

The Republican Party’s Paper Elephants

posted by J.B. Shurk at American Thinker 

The worst kept secret in politics is that most Establishment Republicans play for the other team.  If not unofficial card-carrying Democrats, they are full-time members of a Uniparty that actively undermines the work of rank-and-file Republicans.

For the longest time, Republican voters just thought their “leaders” were stupid.  Their unimpressive “representatives” not only seemed incapable of making the simplest of political layups, but also routinely dribbled the ball down the length of the court just to score on themselves.  Far from ever witnessing elected Republicans snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, middle-class Republicans regularly watched country club Republicans snatch defeat from certain victory.  

All that inexplicable buffoonery finally revealed something far more unsavory: just as Marxists have been engaged in a “long march” through our institutions in a diabolical but dedicated effort to replace America’s foundations in freedom with communism’s concrete boots, they did not spare the Republican Party from their subversive infiltration.  There’s a reason why Republican officials in Georgia, Arizona, and elsewhere have worked with lawless Democrat prosecutors to imprison any Republican fighting for free and fair elections: those “Republican” officials have always been agents for the other side.  As ordinary Republicans see more and more of these “Republicans In Name Only” for what they really are, voters have come to the shocking conclusion that the vast majority of elected officials are in fact RINOs, too.

For decades, voters haven’t been choosing between Democrats and Republicans but rather between Democrats and Democrats pretending to be Republicans.  The illusion of electoral choice has allowed Marxist globalism to advance behind the veil of Uniparty tyranny.

That illusion is now shattered.  How do we know?  Because RINO schemes are no longer working as they once did.  Endorsements from Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan — the leaders of the party only a decade ago — are now the kiss of death for any candidate.  People see through the Murdoch family’s efforts to use its media empire to create astroturfed support for politicians under the family’s control.  The Bush-Cheney construction of a post-9/11 surveillance state that Obama and Holder transformed into a whole-of-government operation for targeting conservatives has mangled any goodwill grassroots Republicans once attached to the Bush or Cheney names.  What residual esteem might have remained, Liz Cheney successfully destroyed when she participated in Nancy Pelosi’s nefarious J6 inquisition designed to malign President Trump and his supporters as “domestic terrorists” and punish them for daring to exercise their constitutionally protected free speech.  RINO support for despotism has left an acrid taste that will never be fully washed out.

At this critical juncture in American history, when nothing less than liberty’s survival is on the line, the Establishment quislings running the Republican Party have done demonstrable harm to the country.  When Obama’s IRS was illegally targeting conservative Tea Party groups, Mitch McConnell was silent.  When Obama’s FBI was illegally spying on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, Republican members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were silent.  When Andrew Weissmann was using Robert Mueller’s special counsel witch hunt as a weapon to obstruct Trump’s presidency, Paul Ryan was silent.  When the Gestapo-FBI worked with Democrats to advance the preposterous narrative that the J6 political protest against mail-in-ballot fraud was actually an “insurrection” seeking to topple the U.S. government, nearly every elected Republican remained silent.  When Merrick Garland’s Department of (in)Justice decided to spend the next three years hunting down patriotic grandparents, conservative journalists, and military veterans — most with no criminal records but rather lifetimes of service to their countries — as if they were “terrorists,” elected Republicans remained silent.  

While J6 protesters are separated from their families and thrown into jail cells without any semblance of due process, there is silence.  While J6 targets commit suicide to avoid the financial costs and emotional carnage leveled by an indifferent criminal “justice” system, there is silence.  While Democrat prosecutors, judges, and juries work together to hand out decade-long prison sentences to Trump-supporters as punishment for their unapproved thoughts, there is silence.  While Democrat prosecutors, judges, and juries work together to fine, disbar, financially ruin, or incarcerate anybody advocating for election integrity, there is silence.  While Democrat prosecutors, judges, and juries work together to deliver harsher judgments against President Trump than the U.S. government has sought for some convicted terrorists, the silence is deafening.  At the very moment in history when an opposition party has been most needed to avert America’s descent toward total tyranny, the Republican Party has been AWOL for all to see.

With no political party staunchly defending Americans’ liberty, the totalitarian virus spreads quickly.  Nancy Pelosi stepped away from her coven last week to bemoan Republican efforts to burn literary classics.  The allegation is completely false.  Americans are actively defending themselves against the Democrat-aligned Deep State’s viewpoint discrimination and social media censorship campaigns, but Pelosi applies Democrats’ tried-and-true rhetorical weapon — projection — with ease because Establishment Republicans have been silent in the face of tyranny.  She knows she can lie about conservatives burning books while Democrats openly assail free speech because the feckless Republican Party is nothing but a foil meant to advance Uniparty goals.  The charade is obvious and odious.

In support of Nikki Haley’s presidential ambitions, New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu claims Haley will win because she is the natural candidate for people who believe in that “‘live free or die’ thing.”  Putting aside the difficulty of defending how a neocon such as Haley — who believes that internet anonymity is a national security threat — could be the “liberty” candidate, it is Sununu’s flippant description of living freely as some shiny-but-unimportant “thing” that demonstrates the hollowness of his words.  “Live free or die” isn’t a bumper sticker.  It’s an American creed that the good people of New Hampshire made their state’s motto for good reason: without liberty, we have nothing.  To Establishment Republicans, though, “liberty” is a trinket to be dragged out during election season, something for Sununu to say out loud, as if he’s borrowing an unfamiliar word from a foreign language.  Surely someone with a firmer faith in freedom should lead the Granite State — or at least someone who doesn’t beg Democrats to vote for his preferred candidate in the Republican primary.

Alas, this is where we are today — “represented” by a rubbery rump of reprehensible RINOs who refuse to recognize tyranny even when it slaps them across the face.  Former speaker Paul Ryan did nothing to prevent Obama from forcing socialized medicine upon the American people.  He was silent while Biden forced Americans to undergo experimental medical treatments.  He has done nothing to defend conservatives from the DOJ’s ongoing legal persecution.  He has never once called out Liar-in-Chief Joe for targeting “Make America Great Again” voters as “domestic terrorists.”  He has said nothing as federal agencies take turns abusing their authority to put Donald Trump in legal jeopardy.  Yet Janus-faced Ryan has the audacity to call President Trump an “authoritarian.”

Mitt Romney — a morally vacuous, deceitful, and self-serving poser who alters his personal convictions whenever political expediency requires — hyperventilated over President Trump’s accurate assessment that the Biden Crime Family had engaged in quid-pro-quo corruption with foreign actors in Ukraine and elsewhere.  In order to protect Biden’s 2020 election prospects, Romney ludicrously accused Trump of committing the worst kind of impeachable offense — investigating his opponent.  Fast-forward a few years, and not only has Biden abused the criminal justice system to endlessly target Trump, but also the evidence of his own culpability in a foreign bribery scandal has become overwhelming.  Yet mendacious Mitt now sees nothing.

Just like their Democrat donkey friends, the Republican Party’s paper elephants are all jackasses.

Senate Republicans Slam Decepticons For ‘Rushed And Secret’ Border Negotiations With Democrats

Jordan Boyd reporting for The Federalist 

Establishment Republicans led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have been working with Democrats to push legislation funding the proxy war in Ukraine across the finish line. But at least 15 of their fellow Republicans are calling foul on their ploy, which feigns concern for voters’ outrage about the border while further bankrolling the war in Eastern Europe.

Sen. Ron Johnson and 14 of his upper chamber colleagues penned a letter on Sunday to Senate Republican Conference Chairman John Barrasso asking him to call a meeting that would open up border security legislation discussions to the entire conference.

The meeting would also give Republicans a chance to once again voice their concerns about rubberstamping $106 billion to foreign countries, giving President Joe Biden a free pass on the border crisis, and allowing McConnell to take advantage of the holiday schedule pressures to advance his political goals.

“Rushed and secret negotiations with Democrats who want an open border and who caused the current crisis will not secure the border,” the Republicans wrote. “The American public deserves an open and transparent process which cannot occur until the House returns the week of January 8, 2024.”

The Republicans emphasized that delaying a conference meeting until “the week of January 8th” would give them adequate time to formulate a solution that doesn’t sacrifice the interests of Americans who are increasingly frustrated with the amount of money Congress has thrown at Ukraine, while crises at home — including one on our Southern border — continue to worsen.

On Sunday, the same day Johnson sent his letter, McConnell and Lankford expressed doubt that they would be able to close the border deal before the Senate holiday’s recess. They emphasized that “while progress is being made,” negotiation “takes time to get right.”

“Conducting rushed and secret backroom negotiations is not the way to address the unprecedented border crisis. That’s the kind of business as usual process that Washington leadership has relied upon to mortgage our children’s future and weaken our country,” Johnson said in a statement. “Whatever negotiators produce will need to be fully vetted, discussed, and understood — by members and the general public. That will take weeks — not hours or days. I look forward to our conference meeting the week of January 8th, where we can begin that vetting and discussion.”

So far, Senate negotiations about the plan have been limited to McConnell and his allies like Sen. James Lankford, who met with independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and Democrat Sen. Chris Murphy over the weekend — boxing out other members of the Senate GOP.

Only in recent months has GOP leadership in the upper chamber become “unusually vocal” about the record-breaking number of border crossers illegally entering the country.

Their sudden interest in curbing a crisis created by Democrats coincided with Biden’s indication that he would sign border security legislation so long as it included his proposed funding for Ukraine. The push also comes mere months before several of the Senate Republicans face primaries in the 2024 election.

New Low: Only 6 Percent Of Americans Approve 

Of GOP Leader Mitch McConnell

Tristan Justice reporting for The Federalist

Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky remains the least popular politician in the country, according to a new poll out Monday.

A Monmouth survey of more than 800 adults 18 and older indicates that 60 percent of respondents disapprove of the GOP Senate chief’s job performance. Only 6 percent of respondents said they approve of it. McConnell earned the lowest overall approval rating among congressional leadership and “is the only leader to receive a net negative score from his fellow partisans.” Just 10 percent of Republicans said they approve of his performance, and 41 percent said they felt otherwise.

The Monmouth University survey also found President Joe Biden’s approval rating at an “all-time low” with “particularly poor marks for his handling of immigration and inflation.”

“Only 3 in 10 Americans say the incumbent is giving enough attention to the issues most important to them, which is worse than for his predecessor,” Monmouth reported.

The poll, conducted between Nov. 30 and Dec. 4 with a 4.8 percent margin of error, means McConnell’s approval could be as low as 1 percent.

RealClearPolitics’ popularity tracker has yet to be updated to include rankings for Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana.

Despite a series of recent public health scares, the Republican Senate leader says he has no plans to leave Capitol Hill before his latest term expires in 2027.

On Sunday, 15 Senate Republicans blasted the GOP leader for working behind the scenes with Democrats to pass new funding for the proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. Republican Sen. Ron Johnson led the letter with 14 GOP colleagues demanding Republican Conference Chairman John Barrasso of Wyoming call a meeting to discuss border security.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott Signs Bill Making Illegal Entry Into Texas a State Crime

Ward Clark reporting for RedState 

On Monday, Texas' Republican Governor Greg Abbott signed into law SB 4, which effectively makes illegal entry into Texas a state-level crime. This would allow enforcement by Texas state police and local law enforcement.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas signed into law Monday a bill that makes entering Texas illegally a state crime, an extraordinary step in the hard-fought legal battle between the state and the federal government over efforts to curtail illegal immigration.

The measure, SB 4, grants local law enforcement the power to arrest migrants and judges the ability to issue orders to remove them to Mexico. It has sent ripples of fear throughout the Latino community in Texas, which makes up 40% of the state’s population, and was condemned by civil rights organizations and immigration advocacy groups after the Texas legislature passed it last month.  

The law is expected to take effect in March.

Constitutional objections are already being raised by Texas Democrats; immigration is an issue that, under the Constitution, is enforced by the federal government, but it is something of an understatement to note that, for the last few years, such enforcement has been inefficient and in some locations non-existent. Since President Biden took office, there have been 7.5 million illegal immigrant "encounters" nationwide, 6.2 million encounters at the Southwest border, and 1.7 million known "gotaways."

Democratic House members have said the bill oversteps the federal government’s powers and echoes Arizona’s immigration status provision in what opponents have dubbed the “show me your papers” law. The law was mostly rejected by the US Supreme Court in 2012 when it upheld that the federal government sets immigration policy and laws.

Texas Republicans are confident the new law will pass muster.

The Republican author of the Texas bill has maintained that the measure is constitutional.  

Kevin F. Lawrence, the executive director of Texas Municipal Police Association, told CNN in a statement that “SB 4, at least to some measure, would give local law enforcement better tools to work with.”  

There will almost certainly be a court challenge. Three Texas county executives wrote to President Biden last month, seeking to have him prevent enforcement of SB 4; the Constitution does not allow the president any power to interfere with local law enforcement except when local law enforcement and the statutes that authorize it violate federal law or the Constitution, which would presumably take a court case to decide.

Three top county executives in Texas penned a letter to President Joe Biden late last month, urging him to stop SB 4 from going into effect, citing concerns the measure is unconstitutional and could make communities less safe. The county executives lead El Paso, Harris (home to Houston) and Travis (home to Austin) counties, which represent nearly a quarter of the state’s population.  

Governor Abbott has previously authorized state authorities to arrest illegal aliens in Texas, in an attempt to stem the tide of illegal immigrants from points south. 

Abbott has also endorsed former President Donald Trump, who also vocally supports stricter border enforcement, for the 2024 Presidential election.

Congressional Democrats continue to assert that the border is "under control."

The Media Are Lying, Pope Francis Did Not Approve Priests Blessing ‘Same-Sex Relationships’

Evita Duffy-Alfonso reporting for The Federalist 

Corporate media outlets are running salacious headlines that Pope Francis is now allowing “priests to bless same-sex relationships.” The implication from the media is that the Catholic Church has made a “radical” reversal on its stance that marriage is between one man and one woman. This is factually untrue.

On Monday, the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith released a “Declaration ‘Fiducia Supplicans’ On the Pastoral Meaning of Blessings.” In the declaration, the Vatican first reaffirms that marriage is the “exclusive, stable, and indissoluble union between a man and a woman, naturally open to the generation of children.”

The document also establishes that contrary to media reports, liturgical blessings related to formal Church sacraments can never endorse same-sex unions, which the Catholic Church does not recognize. “[T]he Church does not have the power to confer its liturgical blessing when that would somehow offer a form of moral legitimacy to a union that presumes to be a marriage or to an extra-marital sexual practice,” reads the declaration.

The document does say that individuals, including “same-sex couples,” may receive “spontaneous,” “informal” blessings related to overcoming human sin. “[O]ne should not prevent or prohibit the Church’s closeness to people in every situation in which they might seek God’s help through a simple blessing,” states the document.

This, of course, is not new information. Anyone — irrespective of the types of sin they happen to struggle with — has always been able to receive an informal blessing from a Catholic priest. In other words, the document is a pointless reiteration of already established Church teachings. Indeed, the declaration is being grotesquely misrepresented by the corporate media and leftist Catholics who wish the document had been a reversal of Church doctrine, which, again, it was not.

While the document is theologically sound, many Catholics are calling it a “pastoral nightmare.” Ulrich L. Lehner, a Catholic historian who teaches in the University of Notre Dame theology department, warns that the document’s “imprecise language invites misunderstanding and will sow confusion.”

Lehner explains that “some bishops will use it as a pretext to do what the document explicitly forbids, especially since the Vatican has not stopped them before.” Here, Lehner is referring to a cohort of German priests who have been formally blessing same-sex unions, not simply same-sex attracted individuals, since 2021, without condemnation from the Vatican. “[The document] is, and I hate to say it, an invitation to schism,” wrote Lehner.

The misleading “Declaration On the Pastoral Meaning of Blessings” is on-brand for Francis. As The Federalist’s John Davidson explains, Francis has a history of being “intentionally vague about matters that should be clear-cut, and this vagueness sows confusion. Why would he want to sow confusion? To open up room for change.”

In the case of the “Declaration On the Pastoral Meaning of Blessings,” one must ask what its purpose is in the first place if not to sow chaos and confusion. If Francis cared about upholding Church doctrine and providing necessary clarity on the issue of priests blessing same-sex unions, the Vatican would have given an immediate and direct repudiation of the German priests blessing same-sex unions two years ago, with only a secondary note that, as we already know, individuals who seek God’s grace to avoid sin may be blessed by priests.

The Vatican’s response Monday was wildly delayed, failed to directly address German priests, and focused far more on the already-established fact that same-sex individuals can receive blessings rather than the fact that same-sex unions are contradictory to Church teaching and cannot be blessed by priests. All these things combined have prompted the media to egregiously misrepresent the “Declaration On the Pastoral Meaning of Blessings,” but perhaps that was Francis’ intention.