Tag Archives: 10th Amendment

A Campaign Based On Lies

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One of the main issues in the Democrat party campaign for the presidency is abortion. Unfortunately, they have decided that rather than fight their fight on the merits, they are simply going to lie about the issue. First of all, Roe v. Wade was overturned because it violated the 10th Amendment. A federal ban on abortion would also violate the 10th Amendment and would also be overturned by the courts. President Trump has already said he would oppose a federal ban on abortion, but that is not what the Kamala Harris campaign is reporting. The campaign is also lying about what constitutes an abortion and what medical care should be available to women who miscarry.

On Friday, The Federalist posted an article explaining how a recent claim by the Harris campaign is a lie.

The article reports:

Democrats and their corporate media allies are so desperate to get rid of pro-life laws that they’ll fabricate stories to wrongly smear them as not only bad for women but deadly.

The latest is ProPublica’s story of a Georgia woman who died after a North Carolina abortionist gave her chemical abortion pills — which, contrary to Democrat narratives, are unsafe. The article, however, pretends the death was caused by Georgia’s pro-life laws. The author of the story repeatedly attempts to conflate a procedure used to treat miscarriages, dilation and curettage (D&C), with elective abortion.

In ProPublica’s telling, 28-year-old Amber Nicole Thurman had ingested the chemical abortion pill regimen, which consists of the drugs mifepristone and misoprostol. Mifepristone ends the life of the developing human being; misoprostol helps achieve complete expulsion of the embryo.

It’s worth noting that the FDA’s 2000 approval of mifepristone acknowledged its risks and enacted safety requirements, including a seven-week gestational limit, requiring women to see a physician in person, and a mandatory one-time post-abortion appointment to confirm that the uterus was empty and that bleeding had subsided. The FDA also required manufacturers of the abortion pill to report all adverse health events that were reported to them, such as infection or excessive bleeding — not just patient deaths. 

But thanks to Democrat efforts to relax safety requirements for abortion pills, important safeguards no longer apply. When Thurman experienced “complications” from the abortion, which ProPublica wrongly asserts are “rare,” she went to the hospital for a D&C.

While ProPublica claims, “Thurman had told doctors her miscarriage was not spontaneous — it was the result of taking pills to terminate her pregnancy,” Thurman was not experiencing a miscarriage. She had undergone an abortion. Her unborn twins had already died, and she had retained parts of their bodies or the placenta — a known complication of abortion pill use and one of the very reasons for the FDA’s requirement for a post-abortion follow-up visit with a doctor. 

The article concludes:

Amber Thurman did not die because of Georgia’s abortion law, which was enacted to protect the lives of mothers and preborn children. She died from complications of medical abortion. Perhaps, had the FDA decided not to remove its mandatory requirement for a doctor’s follow-up visit from abortion pill labeling, and had she received more appropriate care, she might have survived.

ProPublica says, “Thurman’s case marks the first time an abortion-related death, officially deemed ‘preventable,’ is coming to public light.” But what about the death of Alexandra Nunez? Or Rebecca Charland, Tonya Reaves, Jennifer Morbelli, Maria Santiago, Lakisha Wilson, Jamie Lee Morales, Cree Erwin Sheppard, Keisha Atkins, Tia Archeiva Parks, or April Lowery — all of whom died during or shortly after their abortions?

Were their deaths preventable? Or is maternal death associated with elective abortion acceptable, even though such abortions are performed on healthy mothers with healthy babies?

Abortion has risks. I have friends who as a result of legal abortions were not able to have children when they wanted to have them. There was also a study in Japan in the 1970’s linking abortion to an increased risk of breast cancer. This is not a safe procedure whether it is done with drugs or other methods.

President Biden’s Plan For Inflation

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On Tuesday, Hot Air posted an article about one way the Biden administration plans to fight inflation. It’s a plan guaranteed to be rife with unintended consequences.

The article reports:

Enough about Joe Biden’s mindless nastiness. I’ll take my cue from Donald Trump and Biden himself and focus on policy this morning.

Specifically, let’s talk about Joe Biden’s mindless and nasty demagoguery on economic policies. Faced with the electoral consequences of his corrosive inflationary wave, especially in shelter costs, Biden has to come up with some promised policy solution. And that is … federal rent control:

According to the Associated Press:

President Joe Biden is ready to propose a 5% cap on annual rent increases for tenants of major landlords as he tries to show he’s doing something about the high cost of housing, according to a person familiar with the plan.

The proposal, to be announced while the president visits Nevada on Tuesday, is being championed by Biden in the middle of a tense presidential campaign and a time when housing costs have been a major driver of overall inflation.

Hasn’t this man ever studied economics?

Housing costs are a major driver of overall inflation. That is true, but let’s examine why. Interest rates are double what they were under President Trump. According to U.S. News, the interest rate on November 19, 2020, for a 30-year mortgage was 2.72 percent. A loan of $250,000 would be paid back at the rate of $1,016.63 per month. On May 16, 2024, the interest rate on a 30-year mortgage is 7.02 percent. That loan would be paid back at a rate of $1,666.62 per month. The cost of the actual house you would be financing has also increased significantly in the past four years. So exactly what would be the result of federal rent control? First of all, find rent control in the U.S. Constitution. It’s not there. The 10th Amendment does not include rent control.

In January 2020, The Manhattan Institute posted an article about rent control.

Here are some highlights from the article:

Rent Control Makes It Harder to Find an Apartment

    • Cities that implement rent control see substantial declines in the availability of rental housing.
    • Locking people in to existing rental units leaves many renters in apartments much larger or much smaller than they would prefer.
    • In some cities, waitlists for rent-controlled housing are decades-long.

Rent Control Does Not Increase Diversity

    • Rent control benefits incumbent tenants at the expense of migrants hoping to relocate to a city. In New York City, white tenants have disproportionately benefited relative to black or Hispanic tenants, and landlords give preference to older and childless households.
    • Many of rent control’s benefits typically flow to higher-income households even as rent control drives up rents for everyone else.

Rent Control Degrades the Quality of Its Beneficiaries’ Housing

    • Rent control reduces investment in a property’s quality and causes a city’s housing stock to decay.
    • By suppressing property values, rent control also reduces tax revenue to municipalities, hindering their ability to provide essential services.

It will not decrease inflation, but it will increase government control.

The Political Spectrum Has Significantly Shifted

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Our Founding Fathers had a very different political spectrum than the one commonly referred to by the media. Today’s media has a spectrum of right wing (conservative extremism) and left wing (what they endorse). Our Founding Fathers had a different political spectrum–it had anarchy at one end and tyranny at the other end. Their goal was to create a government midway between the two. Today the tyranny of the left wing goes mostly ignored (lawfare against political opponents, suppression of free speech, censoring information, etc.). but any standard held by a conservative is regarded as a threat to our democracy (we are a republic–not a democracy).

On Saturday, Newsbusters posted an article that illustrates how ridiculous our media has become.

The article reports:

Washington Post associate editor and New York Times columnist freaked out on Friday’s PBS NewsHour at the news that Republicans selected Mike Johnson to be the new Speaker of the House by portraying him as a “far-right” religious extremist out to impose “Christian nationalism” on the country.

Noting Johnson’s relative obscurity, Capehart (Jonathan Capehart at The Washington Post) predicted, “And the more information we find out about him and the more information the American people find out about him, the more I think they’re going to be uncomfortable, from his pushing for a national abortion ban, to introducing legislation for a federal so-called Don’t Say Gay Bill, his comments on homosexuality and same-sex marriage.”

Just for the record, as a Christian, I do not support a national abortion ban. Legally, a national abortion ban would be no different than Roe v. Wade–it would be unconstitutional under the 10th Amendment.

The article concludes:

Brooks (David Brooks, writer for The New York Times), again declining to live up to his billing as Brooks and Capehart’s conservative half, agreed with his liberal colleague, “You know, for me, the bad news about Johnson is the wing of the evangelical world he emerges from.”

Elaborating, Brooks explained, “And so, for example, one of the people he’s praised is a pseudo-historian named David Barton. And Barton has been — has a powerful bloc in a subculture of the evangelical world that has been arguing, falsely, that our founders never believed in separation of church and state, that Thomas Jefferson was an ardent Christian who wanted to make this a Christian nation.”

One doesn’t have to defend the anti-historical view that Jefferson, who cut portions out of the Bible he didn’t like, was an ardent Christian to defend the larger point. As for Johnson, Brooks proclaimed, “he is coming from a world where Christian nationalism is very much in the air. And so that’s got to be concerning if he’s coming from this world.”

Nobody who freaks out about “Christian nationalism” ever seeks to define it. Is it just being pro-life or forbidding elementary school teachers to talk about sexual orientation and gender ideology as Capehart mentioned earlier? Mostly, it is just a phrase people like Brooks throw out to scare voters.

John F. Kennedy, Jr., would not have been welcome in today’s Democrat party–he would be considered radically conservative!

What Seems Good Isn’t Always Good

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We need to think about the things Congress is codifying into federal law. The Tenth Amendment says:

Amendment X

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

Theoretically the states are the government laboratories–the places where policies can be tried and if they are successful, copied by other states. Unfortunately, we seem to have lost that concept. When Florida led the country in prosperity and in success in handling Covid, most other states ignored their example. While California is experiencing major energy problems due to rushing too quickly into green energy, some states are considering following suit. While some states with high taxes and bloated governments are losing population to states with more sane fiscal policies. the high tax states are making no effort to rein in their governments. Those high tax states will continue to suffer the consequences of their policies (unless the federal government steps in to help them, which would be a mistake). You don’t give an alcoholic beer money–you let him suffer the consequences of his actions. Subsidizing states that overspend does nothing to solve the problem. The federal government has become expert at overstepping its legal bounds.

Recently, the House of Representatives passed HR 8404. This bill is called the Respect for Marriage Act. It federalizes approval of gay marriage. It also has some language in it about bi-racial marriage, but that it not what it is about. The language about bi-racial marriage is an attempt to link the gay rights movement with the civil rights movement. They are not the same. I really don’t care what someone does in the privacy of their own home. I also don’t want to see anyone denied their rights because of their sexual orientation. Actually, I don’t need to know anyone’s sexual orientation. However, traditionally, marriage is between a man and a woman, whatever race or races are involved. There is a danger here of churches being forced to perform ceremonies that go against Biblical teaching. That infringes on the First Amendment. It would be much simpler for the federal government to stay out of marriage (except for tax purposes) and leave the matter up to the states. If you are gay and choose to get married, move to a state that allows gay marriage.

There is no reason for the federal government to get involved in the issue of marriage. Marriage is a church sacrament. If the federal government wants to establish civil unions for tax purposed only, I believe they have that authority under tax laws, but they do not have any authority to interfere in a church sacrament.

Some Unintended Consequences Of Federal Government Overreach

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Yesterday I attended a meeting of the Joint Legislative Education Oversight Committee in Raleigh, North Carolina. There were a number of items discussed–the Read to Achieve program, Charter Schools in North Carolina, the Founding Principles Act, and the complications in hiring substitute teachers caused by the implementation of ObamaCare. Yes, ObamaCare has made it more difficult for schools in North Carolina to hire the substitute teachers they need. Why? Because ObamaCare requires that every person working thirty hours a week be given health care.

ObamaCare requires that health benefits be extended to non-permanent full-time employees in North Carolina who traditionally have not been eligible for coverage under the State Health Plan. ObamaCare also complicates things for retired certified teachers covered under their retirement health plans. If they are substitute teaching more than 29 hours a week, they have to be covered by their employers and are no longer eligible for their retirement health care benefit.

There were two suggestions made for legislative options that would solve this problem, but my point is this, “How is it that the federal government created a problem for a state that has to be solved with a new state law?” What is the federal government doing saying anything about a state’s health care policies? The shortage of substitute teachers in North Carolina is only one of many reasons we need to rein in the federal government.

The Tenth Amendment states:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

From Healthcare to Common Core, it is time to get the federal government out of the states.