Tag Archives: The Federalist

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On Friday, The Federalist posted an article about a recent problem with the voter fraud investigation in Fulton County, Georgia.

The article reports:

A 2020 election scandal in Fulton County, Georgia’s most populous county, continues to grow with new details revealed in a State Election Board (SEB) meeting last Wednesday — and now, a week later, with an FBI raid seeking election documents from the county. 

Fulton County was notoriously plagued with issues like long lines and voting machine malfunctions in the 2020 primary election, problems The New York Times described as “a full-scale meltdown.” The problems continued through November’s Election Day and beyond, prompting concerns about votes being counted without proper supervision, among other things. The county’s repeated failures in 2020 so degraded trust in Fulton County’s ability to administer elections that the election director was forced to resign.

Now, members of the State Election Board have raised new concerns about the county’s administration of the 2020 election, revealing in last week’s meeting that the “tapes” used to verify that ballot counters started their counts at zero may be missing.

When a ballot scanner is used to count ballots, election officials must start the process by printing and signing a “zero tape,” which confirms the count started at zero. After counting ballots on the ballot scanner, officials must print and sign a closing tape, which confirms the final vote tally from that machine. In December, an attorney for Fulton County admitted that the county failed to sign off on more than 100 “tabulator tapes” — equivalent to about 315,000 votes — from early voting in the 2020 election. That admission was prompted by a complaint that was investigated by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office.

The article concludes:

State law only requires the secretary of state to retain election documents for 24 months past the election, and local governments only retain “records related to the process of computing, tallying, and canvassing the vote” for two years, according to the Georgia Archives.

But, as Johnston noted in last week’s meeting, the complaint was submitted in early 2022, “well within the 24-month period.”

On Wednesday, a week after the SEB meeting, the FBI executed a search warrant at the Fulton County election office. According to election attorney Cleta Mitchell, the search warrant included “zero tapes” from the 2020 general election.

Meanwhile, the board is left with few answers. It’s unclear whether the tapes ever made it out of Fulton County, if they were signed, or even if they exist at all. If they do exist, they may have been handled properly but thrown away in the years since 2020. They could even still be filed away somewhere, where investigators have been unable to track them down. No one seems able to provide a paper trail.

The people responsible for the fraud probably figured that time would run out before their activities were discovered. Obviously, that is not the case. Hopefully, there will be enough trials and convictions to discourage anyone else from attempting to steal an election.

A Refusal To Admit The Obvious

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On Wednesday, The Federalist posted an article about the ongoing discussion of the integrity of the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia.

The article reports:

At the center of that effort in Georgia was Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. He repeatedly assured voters there were no problems — no violations, no misconduct, nothing to see — publicly stating there was “no sign of widespread fraud” during Georgia’s election process, refuting claims of irregularities in a letter to Congress, and again asserting that officials had not found systemic fraud.

…But just last month, Fulton County — Georgia’s most populous county — admitted that approximately 315,000 early ballots in the 2020 election were counted without the required poll worker signatures, a clear and direct violation of state regulations. County officials have further acknowledged they do not dispute that those ballots were improperly certified.

The article notes that Secretary of State Raffensperger has not cooperated with the investigation:

In December, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Georgia, seeking access to voter registration records amid concerns about whether the state is complying with federal election laws meant to prevent voter fraud and ensure only lawful votes are counted. According to the Justice Department, those records are necessary to evaluate compliance with the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act, and the Civil Rights Act of 1960.

Raffensperger has refused to provide the records, arguing that doing so would require releasing sensitive personal information — a claim the Justice Department disputes, noting that federal law permits review of voter rolls with appropriate safeguards in place.

The article concludes:

Federal officials have been explicit about the consequences of refusing transparency. “At this Department of Justice, we will not permit states to jeopardize the integrity and effectiveness of elections by refusing to abide by our federal election laws. If states will not fulfill their duty to protect the integrity of the ballot, we will,” said Dhillon.

President Trump was right to demand answers. The American people were right to ask questions. And Georgia deserves accountability — which Raffensperger must finally face.

It seems like almost a give that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. We can’t undo that. The question is whether or not anyone will ever be held accountable.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

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The level of fraud in government programs is astonishing. Every day we read about another scandal involving the government’s ‘safety net.’ Many of us are wondering how much of our tax dollars are funding fraud rather than a ‘safety net.’

On Wednesday, The Federalist reported:

The ongoing scandal regarding Minnesota’s welfare-industrial complex demonstrates the extent to which government-created graft has “hidden” in front of the nation’s noses for not just years but decades. Another report released just before Christmas illustrates the depths of those fraudulent payments.

Last summer, I wrote here about a report by Louisiana’s legislative auditor highlighting nearly $10 million in Medicaid payments that state made on behalf of deceased beneficiaries between February 2019 and last March. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most recent report shows that this type of government waste and abuse — or, depending on one’s perspective, fraud by insurance companies, who receive payments for “covering” dead people — occurs with regularity nationwide.

The report came from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General (OIG) and covered payments made to Medicaid managed care organizations from July 2021 through June 2022. The report arises because in most (but not all) cases, state Medicaid agencies do not directly administer benefits (i.e., pay doctors and hospitals who treat beneficiaries). Instead, they contract with managed care organizations and pay insurers a capitated (i.e., per-person) amount every month for that coverage. That dynamic represents a clear opportunity for fraud: If no one reports the beneficiary as deceased, the insurer will get paid to “cover” that person indefinitely.

The article notes:

A footnote in the report demonstrated how this type of abuse is a choice that states consciously make. OIG noted that “Connecticut, Maine, Mississippi, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming had no capitation payments with a service date after the month of the enrollee’s death.” In other words, these six states all imposed proper safeguards to ensure that Medicaid dollars did not go to dead beneficiaries, while 35 other states did not, leading to the improper payments. (The remaining states did not have significant amounts of capitated payments to managed care organizations and therefore would not face this type of fraud.)

It’s time for all states to put in place laws that protect taxpayer money. The government should not be paying money to dead people!

Holding The Line

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On January 12th, The Federalist posted an article about the reaction to President Trump’s statement about being flexible about using federal funds to fund abortion. This may be an issue where Republicans actually demonstrate having a spine.

The article reports:

Less than one week after President Donald Trump appeared to encourage congressional Republicans to put the annually passed congressional restriction on taxpayer-funded abortion on the chopping block, the White House is walking back his comments and members of the Senate GOP who looked like they might cave with Trump are committing to holding the line on the Hyde Amendment.

For nearly 50 years, the legislative provision barring taxpayer-funded elective abortions, including through federal healthcare programs such as Medicaid, was a nonnegotiable for Republicans who claim to belong to the pro-life party. Congress’ latest fight over whether to extend Obamacare, however, put the Hyde Amendment in the line of fire from both Democrats, who have had it out for Hyde for years, and the GOP alike.

The first call from inside the house came last week, when Trump urged GOP representatives to “be a little flexible on Hyde.”

The article concludes:

The Federalist also asked the White House early last week to clarify Trump’s comments and position on the Hyde Amendment, especially considering his historic support for making it permanent, but did not receive a response. On Friday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt appeared to walk back Trump’s declaration. She told The Daily Signal that “The president did not change the administration’s policy” on prohibiting taxpayer-funded abortion and pointed to his 2024 executive order demanding Hyde Amendment enforcement.

“What the president was saying yesterday was Republicans, and frankly Democrats, too, need to show a little bit more flexibility so we can actually get something done with respect to the issue of health care,” Leavitt added.

Using federal funds to fund abortion is a bad idea. First of all, it devalues life. We have enough scientific evidence now to know that a baby is a baby when it is conceived–it is not a blob of tissue, it is not any other animal–it is a baby. I don’t think we will ever reach a point where abortion is illegal in all fifty states, but we can stop the federal government from funding it.

I Told You So Just Doesn’t Cut It

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This post is based on an article posted at The Federalist on December 23. Obviously, I am a bit late to the game, but it is an important article.

The article reports:

Fulton County, Georgia, recently made an admission that should have commanded national attention. During a hearing before the Georgia State Election Board, county officials acknowledged that approximately 315,000 early ballots cast in the 2020 presidential election were unlawfully certified yet were nonetheless included in Georgia’s final, official results, in a race Joe Biden was officially declared to have won by just 11,779 votes.

The admission arose from a challenge filed by David Cross, an election integrity activist, who alleged that Fulton County violated Georgia election law in its handling of early voting. Under state statute, each ballot scanner is required to produce tabulation tapes at the close of voting, and poll workers must sign those tapes to certify the reported totals. These signed tapes are not merely an administrative safeguard. They are central to determining whether the vote count itself is legitimate.

So I guess that phone call from President Trump to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was justified! However, that is not the point.

The article concludes:

Cross, whose persistence brought these revelations to light, has asked the State Election Board to decertify Fulton County’s 2020 advanced voting results for the historical record. His request is not aimed at changing past outcomes. We cannot undo the fact that for four years Joe Biden was president. But an official acknowledgment that Fulton County’s vote certification, and by extension the Georgia outcome, was invalid would place a permanent mark on the deliberate misconduct of those responsible and the institutional failure that enabled it, while reinforcing the principle that election law is not optional.

If the State Election Board declines to act, this episode may quietly fade from memory, leaving nothing to prevent it from happening again. Democracies do not fail when rules are broken. They fail when no one is held accountable.

Let’s put the people in jail who were responsible for this fraud, and let’s have an honest election this year and in 2028!

The Truth Comes Out

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On December 23, The Federalist posted an article about the corruption in Georgia during the 2020 election.

The article reports:

Fulton County, Georgia, recently made an admission that should have commanded national attention. During a hearing before the Georgia State Election Board, county officials acknowledged that approximately 315,000 early ballots cast in the 2020 presidential election were unlawfully certified yet were nonetheless included in Georgia’s final, official results, in a race Joe Biden was officially declared to have won by just 11,779 votes.

The admission arose from a challenge filed by David Cross, an election integrity activist, who alleged that Fulton County violated Georgia election law in its handling of early voting. Under state statute, each ballot scanner is required to produce tabulation tapes at the close of voting, and poll workers must sign those tapes to certify the reported totals. These signed tapes are not merely an administrative safeguard. They are central to determining whether the vote count itself is legitimate.

I am not saying that all of the questionable ballots were case for Joe Biden, but isn’t it interesting that it took over 300,000 questionable votes to defeat President Trump.

The article notes:

On Jan. 2, 2021, Trump called Raffensperger (Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger) to discuss the irregularities in Fulton County, mentioning the county no fewer than 14 times during the call and stating flatly that it was “totally corrupt.” Trump cited estimates of “250 to 300,000 ballots” that had been “dropped mysteriously into the rolls,” repeatedly noting that Fulton County had never been “checked.” In light of what has now been formally admitted, those claims read less like hyperbole and more like an uncannily accurate description of what actually occurred.

Rather than taking those concerns seriously as questions of whether the law had actually been followed, Raffensperger dismissed them outright, insisting that “we do have an accurate election.” What he did not disclose was that his chief of staff, Jordan Fuchs, was secretly recording the conversation in violation of the law, as The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway reported last year. Immediately after the call, Fuchs leaked the tape to The Washington Post, where, the very next day, it was selectively framed to create the now-infamous narrative that Trump had pressured Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes.”

The article concludes:

If the State Election Board declines to act, this episode may quietly fade from memory, leaving nothing to prevent it from happening again. Democracies do not fail when rules are broken. They fail when no one is held accountable.

The state needs to make restitution to all of the people who were financially destroyed by the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) case brought against the people who challenged the integrity of the Georgia election.

Should We Forgive The Student Loans Of People Who Don’t Exist?

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On Tuesday, The Federalist posted an article about another scandal in Minnesota involving government funds.

The article reports:

In Minnesota, home to the largest population of Somali immigrants in the U.S. and the site of numerous fraud investigations, fraudsters received $12.5 million in student loan and education grant money, according to a letter Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

The letter calls on Walz to resign, and states that a new fraud prevention system at the department has found over $1 billion in “attempted financial aid theft,” including by international fraud rings and artificial intelligence (AI) bots.

“[Y]our careless lack of oversight and abuse of the welfare system has attracted fraudsters from around the world, especially from Somalia, to establish a beachhead of criminality in our country,” McMahon wrote. “As President Trump put it, you have turned Minnesota into a ‘fraudulent hub of money laundering activity.’”

It is disturbing to me that international bad actors are taking advantage of the lack of accountability in spending American taxpayer money.

The article concludes:

In June, the Department of Education announced a “nationwide effort to eliminate identity theft and fraud in the federal student aid programs for the fall 2025 semester,” and a requirement for institutions of higher education to verify “certain first-time applicants who are enrolled in the summer term,” as an immediate effort to combat fraud.

“Federal Student Aid (FSA) data indicates that the rate of fraud through stolen identities, particularly involving technologically advanced fraud rings, has reached a level that imperils the federal student assistance programs,” the department stated at the time.

Another obvious safeguard, also announced by the Education Department in June, required first-time student aid applicants to “present, either in person or on a live video conference, an unexpired, valid, government-issued photo identification to an institutionally authorized individual and the institution must preserve a copy of this documentation.”

As the department has noted, the Biden administration removed verification capabilities for student loans and “diverted resources from fraud prevention toward its illegal loan forgiveness efforts,” opening the door for massive fraud.

I think it is time to turn the student loan program back to the states and back to private banks. I suspect that will end a lot of the fraud. Private business will always do a better job than the government. Note that it is the people from private industry put in place by President Trump that are finding the fraud.

One Problem With ObamaCare

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On Monday, The Federalist posted an article about the problem of fraud in the ObamaCare subsidies.

The article reports:

In recent months, these pages have recounted myriad reports of fraud in Medicaid and on the Obamacare Exchanges. The Congressional Budget Office and others have noted millions of potentially erroneous or fraudulent enrollees, who are receiving tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded subsidies.

On Wednesday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) added to the reports pouring in. Its preliminary analysis raised additional questions about fraud relating to Exchange subsidies, providing yet another reason for Congress not to extend the enhanced Covid-era subsidy regime that expires at the end of the month. 

…During the last plan year, GAO noted that “we either were not requested to provide the federal Marketplace [i.e., Exchange] with documentation or generally did not provide what was requested, yet our four fictitious applicants received subsidized coverage for November and December 2024.” In one example, the federal Exchange sent a letter that “confirmed the applicant’s income based on documentation we submitted,” even though GAO had not sent any such documentation.

This year, GAO said the Exchange “initially approved coverage for 19 of our 20 fictitious applicants,” with the only exception being “when the broker we were working with stopped responding to us.” In another case, the Exchange cut off coverage after the fictitious enrollee did not provide citizenship documentation. But in total, nine months into the plan year in September, “coverage for 18 [of 20] fictitious enrollees remained active,” totaling over $10,000 per month in taxpayer subsidies paid to insurers on behalf of nonexistent enrollees.

One example of fraud:

In 2023, a total of 58,000 Social Security numbers received subsidies yet also matched Social Security Administration death data. These instances included more than 7,000 numbers “where the reported date of death occurred prior to enrollment” in the Exchange, and more than 19,000 numbers where “matches had different names and dates of birth” between the Exchange database and the Social Security Administration database, a potential sign of “synthetic identity fraud.”

The article concludes:

Regardless, lawmakers should not spend another $350 billion (plus interest) throwing good taxpayer money after bad, even as one government report after another shows Exchange-related fraud remains out of control. After incurring more than $38 trillion in debt, Washington should finally realize it has run out of other people’s money to spend on such profligacy.

It is past time to make the subsidies go away and find a better way to do healthcare.

Where The Money Went

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On Friday, The Federalist posted an article about how Medicaid money was spent.

The article reports:

Five states and Washington, D.C., funneled more than $1.35 billion in federal taxpayer Medicaid funding to illegals, according to a preliminary audit of the program completed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

CMS Administrator Dr. Mehemet Oz posted the results of the preliminary audit on social media showing California, D.C., Illinois, Washington, Colorado, and Oregon spent millions each on illegals, with California spending the bulk, topping over $1.3 billion alone.

That money, according to Oz, was spent “just in the last few months.”

The left constantly claims this does not, or even cannot, happen because it is against federal law to use programs like Medicaid — something meant for Americans — for illegals, but that small sample of states shows that states are defrauding the American people out of their own programs to the tune of billions of dollars.

That claim is even more spurious considering the Democrats are only days away from breaking the all-time longest government shutdown record because they care more about funding health care for illegals than citizens of their own country.

“Some want to deny that illegal immigrants are receiving Medicaid. Others insist it’s illegal for Medicaid to cover illegal immigrants. And others accurately point out that hospitals can provide emergency services to illegal immigrants under the program,” Oz said, noting CMS is intending to have the money returned to them.

The article concludes:

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations seemed to have alleviated some of the pressure from certain emergency rooms notorious for being abused by illegal aliens, as The Federalist reported, but Dr. Jared Ross, an emergency room doctor, said that illegals being kicked off Medicaid from the OBBB could have the unintended consequence of turning them toward emergency rooms instead of going to general practitioners using insurance.

Reforms in the OBBB are necessary to stop American taxpayers and communities from having to deal with the burden illegal aliens put on their health programs and institutions, but another major avenue of reform will be altering EMTALA to limit illegal immigrants’ capacity to abuse the system.

American taxpayers cannot afford to continue to support people who are here illegally.

Allowing Space For Fraud In Obamacare

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On Tuesday, The Federalist posted an article about one aspect of Obamacare that is often unused and provides a gateway for fraud.

The article reports:

Obamacare failed to make health care more affordable. Every day the government shutdown lumbers on, more Americans are looking more closely at health care costs and learning just how damaging the impact of Obamacare has been.

The latest evidence comes from the Obamacare exchanges which have seen a spike in “zero-claim enrollees.” Because of irresponsible Biden-era policies, federal subsidies were increased during Covid. Health insurers received payments on behalf of 35 percent of enrollees—and 40 percent of fully subsidized enrollees—who did not use a single service for the time period they were covered. Zero-claim enrollment, which is more than double the rate in a typical health insurance market, is consistent with evidence of widespread fraud.

So the insurance companies were receiving money from the government on behalf of people who did not use the insurance. It is very possible widespread fraud was involved.

The article notes:

The main explanation for the rise in zero-claim enrollees is the tremendous amount of fraud and abuse endemic to Obamacare. The data does not lie. In 2025, there are more than 6.4 million ineligible people enrolled in a fully subsidized Obamacare plan—and in 15 states there are more than twice as many people enrolled in fully subsidized plans than are eligible. And the examples of the fraud are overwhelming, as a huge money-making apparatus from lead generators to unscrupulous agents and brokers to insurers made massive profits from the fraud. Millions have been enrolled without their consent or knowledge, falling victim to fraud schemes. 

Obamacare supporters and the health insurance industry cannot have it both ways. Those who downplay the fraud simply show that Obamacare is broken in other ways as the coverage does not translate into any care—not a single visit to the doctor, prescription filled, or lab test ordered. The reality is that both explanations indict the law. If millions of enrollees are fraudulent, taxpayers are being robbed. If such a large number of enrollees are real but not using any care, Obamacare’s central theory collapses—that generous subsidies and “free” preventive services would drive better health and savings. Either way, the system is failing on its own terms.

Sunsetting Obamacare subsidies is a good idea. The Democrats previously agreed to do that. Now the Democrats are trying to undo that (along with a number of other spending boondoggles) by shutting down the government. I would rather see the government continue to be shutdown than to ask American taxpayers to fund the Democrats’ list of demands.

The Real Roadblock

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I am not a fan of Senator Thune. I firmly believe he only does the right thing when it is in his best interest. Otherwise, he is a tool of the Washington establishment. A recent article in The Federalist confirmed my opinion.

On Wednesday, The Federalist reported:

Senate Majority Leader John Thune wants GOP voters to believe that Senate Republicans have no ability to speed up confirmation of the more than 140 Trump nominees languishing in the upper chamber. But that isn’t entirely true.

After returning from Congress’s month-long August vacation, Thune took to the Senate floor on Tuesday to pin the blame for the continued confirmation delay of the president’s appointees squarely on the shoulders of Senate Democrats. Verbally wagging his finger at his leftist colleagues, the majority leader said that “their historic obstruction cannot continue.”

“All it takes is a little behavioral change and a willingness to acknowledge President Trump won an election, the American people voted for him, and they expect him to be able to populate his administration with the people that he wants to serve in many of these positions,” Thune said. “The Democrats can play ball — the way every Democrat and Republican Senate have, going back as far as we can find in the annals of history — or things are going to have to change around here. It’s as simple as that. And the ball, I would say, Mr. President, is in the Democrats’ court.”

Except, the ball is not in Democrats’ court — it’s in Thune’s. Contrary to his persistent narrative about Democrat obstruction, the Senate majority leader has always possessed the power to hold the upper chamber in session until confirmation of Trump’s nominees are complete.

The article concludes:

Of course, the key phrase in Bovard’s remarks is “willing.” Like when it comes to fulfilling issue-based promises they campaign on, many Republican senators have shown little to no appetite for doing what’s necessary to get the president’s nominees across the finish line. And that’s especially true for Thune, who has seemingly recanted on his pledge — which he made a day after Trump’s inauguration — that Senate Republicans “are ready to work as long as needed to confirm President Trump’s nominees,” including “Nights. Weekends. Recesses.”

The bottom line is that Thune and the Senate GOP are not going to act out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s going to take vocal, consistent, and continued pressure from Trump and Republican voters to get them to actually do their jobs.

The article explains that there are ways to break the logjam, but the Republican elites are not interested in breaking the logjam. Somehow the idea of Republican unity and working toward a common purpose was thrown out the window by the Republican establishment when President Trump was elected.

A Reality Check

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On Monday, The Federalist posted an article about the ongoing negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. The article reminds us that neither Russia or Ukraine can actually win the war decisively.

The article reports:

President Donald Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday didn’t yield the ceasefire deal Trump was hoping for, but there was apparently enough progress made that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and top European leaders are meeting with Trump in Washington today to discuss the possibility of peace negotiations and a deal to end to the war for good.

What might such a deal look like? Simply put, it would consist of territorial concessions in exchange for security agreements. Ukraine would cede portions of Russian-occupied territory in Crimea and the eastern provinces in exchange for a security alliance with the United States and European powers. Trump himself has alluded to this, mentioning “land swaps” ahead of his meeting with Putin on Friday.

Russia’s main goal has always been a warm-water port. The land Russia has currently seized from Ukraine would provide that port. If Ukrainian President Zelensky would make territorial concessions to give Russia a warm-water port, the war would end. However, the corruption that has provided a lavish lifestyle to the ruling class in Ukraine would also end. That is probably one of the major sticking points in the negotiations.

The article concludes:

And here we come to heart of the difference between Biden and Trump’s view of the war, and of foreign policy broadly speaking. The establishment foreign policy experts that ran things during Biden’s term (and Obama’s) think the world operates according to theories and abstractions rather than solid realities like history and geography. They thought they could simply invoke something like sovereignty, without grappling with the possibility that sovereignty and territorial integrity, given Ukraine’s history and its untenable borders, might be mutually exclusive.

That mindset is representative of an entire class of policymakers in Washington who fail to grasp that the outcome of a war — any war — is far more likely to be decided by something as unmovable as a mountain range or a warm-water port than vague invocations of sovereignty. Likewise, a common language or a shared 1,000-year history between warring peoples are going to be more important factors than the bureaucratic minutiae of a multi-lateral security agreement drafted in Brussels.

After years of attrition warfare between Ukraine and Russia, bankrolled largely by western powers, the underlying factors in the conflict have not changed — and they never will. An adjustment of Ukraine’s borders, together with security guarantees from the U.S. and Europe, is actually in everyone’s best interests, not just Russia’s. Ukraine as it’s currently constituted is indefensible, as events have shown. Lasting peace will require grappling with the history of Ukraine’s borders and adjusting them to reflect solid realities — not some hazy platitudes about democracy and sovereignty. Those kind of abstractions are a big reason we’re in this mess, and rejecting them is the only way we’re going to get out of it.

It’s time that western nations stop funding this carnage.

When The Loyal Opposition Is Not Loyal

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On Friday, The Federalist posted an article about one very specific thing the intelligence community did in their attempt to derail the first Trump administration.

The article reports:

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has released two emails that are significant not only for their content but for their timing, coming just two days before the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska. The emails reveal that in late 2016, then-DNI James Clapper pushed the fraudulent narrative that Russia had hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC), overriding pointed objections from then-National Security Agency chief Admiral Mike Rogers.

The timing matters because this very narrative — the claim that Russia had hacked the DNC to help President Trump — was used to sabotage the 2018 Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki. Just three days before that meeting, Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 12 Russian nationals on charges of hacking the DNC. The indictment was designed to create political chaos. Mueller knew that the 12 Russians were located in Russia and would never stand trial, meaning he would never need to prove the case. The result of the indictments was exactly what Mueller, his team, and any yet-to-be-identified co-conspirators intended: to sabotage the summit and effectively criminalize diplomacy with Russia.

We all remember Helsinki, where, at the joint press conference standing next to President Putin, Trump addressed the alleged hacking directly:

“You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server. Why haven’t they taken the server? Why was the FBI told to leave the office of the Democratic National Committee?”

What Trump meant was that no one could know what had happened because the key evidence — the DNC server — had never been examined by the FBI or any other U.S. government agency. Trump also noted that Putin had personally assured him, “It’s not Russia.” He then added his own assessment: “I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be [Russia].”

It has never been proven that the Russians hacked the DNC server. People who know such things point to an inside job, possibly with a memory stick. There is also speculation that there is a link between the leaked information from the DNC server and the death of Seth Rich, but so far there has not been any concrete evidence of that link.

Why President Trump Is Asking For A New Census

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On Thursday, The Federalist posted an article explaining the need for a new census and the reason President Trump is asking that it be done before the mid-term elections.

The article reports:

President Donald Trump announced Thursday he instructed the Commerce Department to begin working on a census that does not include illegal aliens. It’s a long-overdue correction to a system that Democrats have exploited for years to tip the balance of power in Washington.

“I have instructed our Department of Commerce to immediately begin work on a new and highly accurate CENSUS based on modern day facts and figures and, importantly, using the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024. People who are in our country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Trump said.

Trump previously signed a memo in 2020 that barred illegal aliens from being counted in the census. The memo was challenged and made its way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately did not rule on the merits as to whether all residents — regardless of their legal status — must be counted and if the president has the authority to exclude nonresidents.

The high court however did rule in the 1976 decision Mathews v. Diaz, a case regarding the Social Security Act, that while illegal immigrants are entitled to due process protections under the Fifth and 14th Amendments, they are not entitled to the benefits of citizenship. 

The article concludes:

NBC News’ Alexandra Marquez says not counting illegal aliens would be “contrary to the Constitution.”

But that is a suspect conclusion drawn by the propaganda press. The Framers likely would not support the position that illegal aliens who invaded the nation should be counted in apportionment to determine representation. In fact, prior to the ratification of the Constitution, most northern states advocated for no slaves to be counted in the apportionment proceedings so that slaveholding states, some of which had slave populations as high as 43 percent of their total residents, would not have an unfair amount of representation compared to their actual voting weight.

Yet, we’re supposed to believe Axios, NBC News, and NPR that illegal aliens would have been counted in the census?

Counting illegal alien in the census skews congressional apportionment and the electoral college — and the American citizen pays the price in diluted representation and misallocated resources.

I would like to see some of the people who support rights reserved for American citizens being bestowed on illegal aliens go to another country and try to claim the rights of that country’s citizens. It would be interesting to see what happens next.

The Truth Is Slowly Leaking Out

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On Tuesday, The Federalist posted an article about some of the behind-the-scenes activities associated with the Russia Hoax.

The article reports:

A crony of then-Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper threatened to withhold a promotion from a senior intelligence official unless he concurred in the fake Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, notes obtained exclusively by The Federalist show.

The notes made public for the first time today recount a conversation the top analyst in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) had with an unnamed superior who worked closely with the then-Director James Clapper, according to sources familiar with the document.

The release of the notes represents the latest cache of documents declassified by the Trump administration official concerning the ICA that outgoing President Barack Obama ordered, which falsely assessed that Putin “aspired” to help Trump win the election. An earlier release by the current Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, revealed the senior intelligence official — whom her office identified as an ODNI whistleblower — had been charged with conducting a “scrub,” which is a review, of the intelligence in the non-compartmented ICA. Emails released last week by Gabbard show the top analyst expressing shock over the ICA’s reliance on the Steele dossier because the versions the analyst reviewed included no intel relying on the Hillary Clinton-based fairy tale of opposition research.

Please follow the link above to read the rest of the article. It is disturbing.

The sad part of this is that the people who were lying to the American voters for political reasons evidently felt that what they were doing was for a greater purpose. No one gave them the authority to manipulate American voters for political purposes. They were so prideful that they felt justified in providing false information to the voters because they knew better than the voters. They assumed authority they did not have in order to undermine the person elected who did have authority.

The Lies That Set The Stage

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On Friday, The Federalist posted an article about the lies that set the Russia Hoax in motion.

The article reports:

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has declassified a long-buried House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) report exposing the fraud at the heart of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) released in January 2017.

That ICA — produced by the CIA, FBI, and NSA at the behest of President Obama — claimed that Vladimir Putin helped Donald Trump win the presidency. It became a weaponized talking point, casting a shadow over Trump’s legitimacy before he even took office.

These are the five lies told by John Brennan that set the scheme in motion:

1. The Single-Source ‘Fragment‘

2. The Anonymous Ukrainian Tip

3. The ‘Putin Inner Circle’ Fantasy

4. The Steele Dossier

5. Brennan’s Most Brazen Deception

In the section regarding Brennan’s Most Brazen Deception, the article notes:

As bad as all this is, the most brazen abuse may be buried in a footnote.

According to the HPSCI report, Brennan personally blocked two HUMINT reports — presumably because they contradicted his narrative — from being formally disseminated.

From the report:

“CIA officers also said that DCIA [Brennan] personally directed that two of the most important reports not be formally disseminated … By briefing information orally, however, DCIA could have tailored his message to different officials, unconstrained by a consistent record copy.”

This isn’t run-of-the-mill fudging. It’s a calculated abuse of power. There’s little doubt that DOJ officials handling the Brennan criminal referrals will now zero in on this footnote, which stands as prima facie evidence of deliberate deception.

Instead of reporting the actual situation, Brennan manufactured a situation that was to his political liking, and totally misled the American people. That is not politics as usual, and there needs to be severe consequences for the lies told.

Please follow the link above to the article for the full details on each lie.

Exactly What Do The Declassified Documents Show?

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Conservative media is overflowing with stories about the document dump about the Russia Hoax. The mainstream media, not so much. There are some things that are revealed in the documents declassified that might be troubling to some of the people who were in power in 2016 and early 2017.

On Monday, The Federalist reported:

Internal emails released on Friday by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard reveal that after former President Barack Obama ordered an intelligence assessment of Russia’s election influence, a top official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence scuttled the release of an already-completed intelligence report that concluded Russian had not hacked the 2016 presidential election.

On Friday, Director Gabbard released newly declassified documents, including scores of emails related to a 7-page draft President’s Daily Brief or PDB. That draft PDB, dated December 8, 2016, concluded, “Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent US election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure.” But hours before the planned publication of the PDB, the ODNI’s deputy director pulled the report, purportedly due to “some new guidance.”

However, the email threads declassified last week indicate the ODNI instead buried the PDB to provide the intelligence community cover to issue a contrary assessment concerning Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election — and did so, against the recommendations of a wide array of intelligence professionals.

Specifically, on Thursday, December 8, 2016, the “Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Cyber Issues” for ODNI responded to an earlier email from the Deputy Director of ODNI concerning the publication of the PDB. “The room’s thoughts (EEMC, NIO Russia, CTIIC, NSA, FBI, CCI) were that it was worth going ahead with the pdb if possible now to provide our current understanding of what happened during the election, and that worst case the ICA has some language and an associated briefer note explaining any changes between the products.”

I am not sure exactly how much of this activity is illegal or if anyone will ever be held accountable for their lies. However, the value of getting it out there is vindication for those of us who have watched the lies the media has told be accepted as fact. I don’t expect apologies from my friends and family who hate President Trump, but it feels good to know that my research in the alternative media has been more accurate than the reporting by the mainstream media.

We Have Some Work To Do Before We Achieve Honest Elections

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On Thursday, The Federalist posted an article about the need to clean up voter rolls in some of our most populous states.

The article reports:

Registered New Jersey voters pick a new governor in the Nov. 4 general election, but before that the state really needs to clean up its voter list.

After reviewing New Jersey’s statewide voter roll, a report from the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) shows an “urgent need for improved list maintenance practices,” after identifying more than 32,000 registration issues, many of which could allow people to vote more than once.

PILF found 14,059 duplicate registrations, with voters registered in New Jersey and at least one other state at the same time. But PILF did not look at all 50 states, meaning there are certainly more to be found. PILF identified duplicate registrations in New Jersey and Florida (6,972 cases), New York (5,725), and Pennsylvania (925).

PILF also found 15,655 registrations using fictitious birth dates, which are sometimes used as placeholders — such as New Jersey’s most common placeholder date, 1800-01-01, that is, 225 years ago. The PILF report found 5,166 such birthdates in Essex County, 2,108 in Passaic County, and 1,928 in Middlesex County.

The article concludes:

PILF sent a July 16 letter with its findings and a request for a meeting to Tahesha Way, who is both New Jersey’s lieutenant governor and secretary of state.

“New Jersey’s same-address duplication problem has improved since the Foundation last reviewed the voter roll and is down from more than 8,200 in 2022,” the letter said. “It appears the bulk of these duplicates are driven by placeholder/fictious dates of birth confusing any process to de-duplicate the rolls. As of this letter, 65 percent of the apparent duplicates contain placeholder dates of birth. It stands to reason that if New Jersey addresses its placeholder data problem, it will substantially aid in the de-duplication process as well.”

Way’s office did not respond to an email from The Federalist seeking a comment on the letter and asking whether the state intends to clean its voter rolls in time for the gubernatorial election.  

I lived in Jersey City for a short time as a child. I remember people with clipboards walking through graveyards in the late summer and early fall. Election fraud has been going on for a very long time.

How Healthcare Fraud Works

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On Friday, The Federalist posted an article illustrating how easy it is for a healthcare provider to commit healthcare fraud. The article tells the story of a woman who went for her annual visit to her allergist and what happened next.

The article reports that when she received her statement of the charges for the visit something wasn’t quite right:

Upon receiving this statement, I immediately questioned the line for “Laboratory Services” in the Explanation of Benefits. At the time, I assumed this line was for a breathing test that my regular provider said I did not need — and which she did not perform on the date of service. However, because this provider (who has since retired) had expressed some discomfort about her working arrangement in the larger allergy practice, I decided not to pursue the matter further at that point, to spare her additional stress.

In recent months, I learned that the practice’s owner had not just sold that practice, but that the entire practice — and he personally — had filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The comments that staff at the succeeding practice made to me about the prior practice being mismanaged and “run into the ground” renewed my interest in pursuing the circumstances behind the Nov. 18, 2022, claim.

A few weeks ago, I spoke with staff at CareFirst about this claim. The staff informed me that, according to the diagnosis codes submitted as part of the claim, the “Laboratory Services” line was not for a breathing test but a Covid test.

As you might suspect, I did not receive a Covid test during this office visit.

The article notes:

Even though I did not meet my annual deductible for 2022, CareFirst still paid for the office visit with no out-of-pocket expense on my part, simply because the allergist’s office claimed they provided a Covid test during the visit. That dynamic provides a perfect recipe for fraud because scammers recognize that far fewer patients would dispute a potentially fraudulent claim if their office visit was provided to them for “free.”

…Trying to report this potential fraud has proven the most infuriating experience of all. As you can see from my Explanation of Benefits, CareFirst advertises a fraud reporting line on all claims. But when I tried to call, I discovered that this line only operates during working hours, despite the fact that the fraud reporting line is an automated system. Worse yet, CareFirst promises a response within one business day, but after several days, it has yet to return my voicemail.

The article concludes:

I work in health policy, yet I feel like I’ve spent the better part of the past week on a wild goose chase trying to figure out how and where to report this suspected incident of fraud. Most normal people who don’t do this for a living would have given up a long time ago.

Therein lies the moral of the story: We need to make it harder to cheat the system and easier to report those who do. Unless and until we do so, no one should sound surprised the next time they hear a story about yet another health fraud scam.

Someone was paid for the Covid test that never happened. Someone paid the co-pay on the office visit because of the Covid test that never happened. Please follow the link to read the entire story. Medical fraud is a serious problem.

How Much Did The Open Border Really Cost?

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On Monday, The Federalist posted an article about the cost of having an open border for the four years of the Biden administration.

The article reports:

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the surge in illegal migration cost governments billions of dollars in 2023, which illustrates the real-world impact of the previous administration’s actions — or inactions. The report also exhorted Congress to provide adequate resources for border security, so that the chaos of the past four years can never happen again.

…CBO believes that, of those 4.3 million, “about a quarter,” or roughly 1.1 million, “were qualified aliens upon arrival.” That term has particular relevance because the 1996 welfare reform law restricted eligibility for federal programs to “qualified aliens” who have served a five-year waiting period. However, CBO also notes that “about half,” or over 500,000, “of those qualified aliens” arriving during the surge “were exempt from the five-year waiting period,” and therefore could immediately receive taxpayer-funded benefits.

…On net, CBO estimated the direct costs to state and local governments from the immigration surge at $9.2 billion in 2023 alone. Including indirect costs raised the total even further, to $9.8 billion in 2023.

America can have either an open border or a welfare state. It can’t have both.

What Happens When You Enforce The Law

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On Monday, The Federalist posted an article detailing what has happened since President Trump took office, enforced our laws, and tightened our southern boarder.

The article reports:

Murder rates are plummeting. While we still have more than half a year to go, Kash Patel, the FBI’s director, says that the U.S. is on track to have the lowest murder rate ever. The current record low occurred in 2014 when the FBI reported a murder rate of 4.45 per 100,000.

The question is: why? Law enforcement matters, but it is probably also that Trump is deporting criminal illegal aliens.

According to Patel, “Let good cops be cops,” is the answer. “I’m gonna let you, the agents, the police officers, the sheriffs, go out there and do the work you so badly want to do. And I’m gonna give you the resources you need to do it. And I’m gonna take away the politicization and weaponization … and that’s what we’ve done.”

Instead of placing a third of FBI agents in the D.C. area, Patel has moved them out across the country to where the crime is occurring. A recent Biden administration document that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified shows that law enforcement resources were being spent on “non-criminal” activities of conservative Catholics, people attending school board meetings, and flagging those who used symbols like “2A” and imagery referencing the Second Amendment. The FBI sent a memo to over 1,000 employees nationwide instructing them to target conservative Catholics.

The article concludes:

A word of caution is needed when discussing these numbers. The US tracks murder/homicide through two sources: FBI data from police departments and CDC data from medical examiners. Academics generally believe the medical examiner reports offer a more accurate final count, and these figures have diverged in recent years. The CDC’s latest data is for 2022, and it reveals the homicide rate minus justified police homicides peaked in 2021 and remained higher in 2022 than in 2020. Meanwhile, FBI murder rate data peaked in 2020 and has declined annually since. Still, the 2023 FBI murder rate, the most recent finalized data, exceeds the pre-Covid 2019 rate (5.75 vs. 5.16).

Reducing crime isn’t rocket science. If you make it riskier for criminals to commit crime, you will get less crime. Letting police focus on going after criminals matters. Getting serious about illegal aliens who are committing crimes can’t be ignored.

I wonder if the people currently suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) are aware that they are safer now (other than from ‘mostly peaceful protesters’).

Why Is (Was) President Trump Such A Threat?

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On Friday, The Federalist posted an article about recently released documents relating to the RussiaGate controversy.

The article reports:

Nellie Ohr isn’t a new name in the Russiagate saga, but newly released documents from Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office shatter the fiction that she was just a low-level researcher and reveal her as a key conduit between Clinton operatives, the DOJ, and the FBI. The documents also pull back the curtain on a darker truth: an internal black hole FBI system designed not just to restrict access to sensitive Russiagate documents, but to bury them so completely that even FBI agents tasked with finding them wouldn’t know they existed.

According to the newly released document from Sen. Grassley’s office, a previously unseen 43-page FBI analysis from 2019, Nellie Ohr was involved in many aspects of the Russia collusion hoax, including in the drafting of the Steele Dossier. The FBI analysis was initiated after then-Congressman Mark Meadows filed a criminal referral, alleging that Ohr had lied to Congress during her 2018 testimony about her role in producing supposed research that helped trigger the Trump-Russia investigation. Meadows had good reason to be suspicious.

As the analysis concluded, Nellie Ohr repeatedly lied under oath. The FBI found that despite her denials, she contributed directly to the writing of the Steele Dossier. One telling clue was an identical analytical error that appeared both in her research and in the dossier itself. Even more damning, the FBI recovered a deleted “FSB report” from a thumb drive which Fusion owner Simpson had given to Bruce Ohr to give to the FBI in December 2016. That same fictitious report had already appeared as part of the dossier given to the FBI by Steele two months earlier, in October 2016. The FSB report bore all the hallmarks of Nellie Ohr’s work, which likely explains why Simpson, or whoever created the thumb drive, deleted the report just four minutes after uploading it, before eventually giving it to Bruce Ohr to pass to the FBI. What they didn’t realize was that what they tried to hide was still recoverable.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. It is interesting to see how much the Washington establishment feared President Trump. He was an outsider with a reputation for being a bull in a china shop and demanding efficiency. The federal government has never been known for efficiency. Considering all of the fraud, waste, and abuse that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has found, they were right to fear President Trump. I just hope that any money that flowed from the treasury back to Congress members will result in severe punishment for those Congress members.

When You Don’t Think Something All The Way Through

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This is a picture of a landfill with used windmill turbine blades. Note the size of the tractor in comparison to the size of the blades.

The picture is from an article posted at The Federalist on Friday.

The article reports:

While green advocates commonly use the terms renewable, sustainable, and net zero to describe their efforts, the dirty little secret is that much of the waste from solar panels and wind turbines is ending up in landfills. 

The current amounts of fiberglass, resins, aluminum and other chemicals — not to mention propeller blades from giant wind turbines — pose no threat currently to local town dumps, but this largely ignored problem will become more of a challenge in the years ahead as the 500 million solar panels and the 73,000 wind turbines now operating in the U.S. are decommissioned and replaced.

…“Nobody planned on this, nobody had a plan to get rid of them, nobody planned for closure,” said Dwight Clark, whose company, Solar eWaste Solutions, recycles solar panels. “Nobody thought this through.”

The discussion about what to do with worn-out solar and wind equipment is another topic usually elided in net zero blueprints, which often focus on the claimed benefits of projects while discounting or ignoring the costs. As RealClearInvestigations previously reported regarding the lack of plans for acquiring the massive amounts of land for solar and wind farms needed to achieve net zero, the math can get fuzzy, and the numbers cited most frequently are those rosiest for renewables.

The article concludes:

What’s more, bankruptcies among European companies have begun to mar the renewable wind landscape as surely as the towers, a trend that could continue or accelerate as the Trump administration stops the federal spigot.

“The government has let them off the hook by shaping their policies around climate activism,” Shaffer said. “They’re not putting down escrow money for decommissioning and someone’s going to have to come along and remove them, or we’ll be staring at these rotting towers in the ocean.”

The blades are so big that they are usually broken into three pieces when decommissioned, and the giant chunks of fiberglass, resin, and composite materials go to landfills or warehouses.

Already, horror stories exist of municipalities faced with decommissioning problems. Towns like Sweetwater, Texas, which for many years has been the leading state for wind power, have seen turbine recycling contracts ignored. Global Fiberglass Solutions, one of the companies handling such contracts, did not return requests for comment.

“You can’t reuse turbines, and there are now thousands upon thousands of blades just sitting there in warehouses already,” Isaac said. “It’s an environmental disaster we’re looking at.”

This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations.

There is nothing environmentally friendly about either wind or solar energy when you look at the bigger picture–how it is manufactured and how it has to be disposed of.

Protecting Women’s Health

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This is not an article to debate abortion. I believe abortion is wrong for a number of reasons, but that is not what this article is about. The link between Planned Parenthood and Margaret Sanger is troubling at best. The fact that the majority of abortion clinics are located in low-income neighborhoods is also troubling, but more troubling is the fact that the dangers of the abortion pill are being overlooked.

On Thursday, The Federalist reported:

More than 100 pro-life, pro-women, and pro-family organizations sent a letter to President Donald Trump’s top drug and health agencies asking them to “put the safety of women first” by reinstating the abortion pill safeguards stripped away by the Obama and Biden administrations.

“The danger this drug poses to women and girls is clear,” the letter states.

In the request to U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Martin Makary and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the coalition of concerned advocates warned that data shows “chemical abortion is neither safe nor effective.”

“In short, the FDA’s purpose is to safeguard the health and safety of Americans. In the case of mifepristone, these bedrock principles—necessary not only for the trust of Americans, but also for the safety of women—have been undermined by political whims that obscured the growing evidence of mifepristone’s harm,” the letter continues.

The letter highlighted a new landmark study, which determined that mifepristone, a key part of the drug regimen used to complete more than half of the nation’s abortions, has a rate of life-threatening or serious complications that is at least 22 times higher than what the FDA and the pill’s manufacturer suggest.

Corporate media tried to blackout and undermine the study with smears that it is “bogus,” relies on “bad data,“ and amounts to “junk science” because it was not peer reviewed. The Washington Post even claimed that the discovery of mifepristone’s high injury rate is no big deal because it has a warning label.

Researchers Ryan Anderson and Jamie Bryan Hall told The Federalist they were careful to exclude certain data, including 72 percent of emergency room visit diagnoses, to avoid overstating the risks of the drug. Even with that added caution, they found “11 percent of women who have a chemical abortion suffer a serious adverse event.”

Obviously, pregnancy is a natural reaction to a certain activity. It is a natural function of a woman’s body–it is not a disease that needs to be cured, and it is not simply a lump of cells to be destroyed. When you use a drug to interfere with the body’s natural function, there are going to be consequences. When that drug kills something that is attached to the body, there may be complications.

It’s time that the Food and Drug Administration actually worked for the benefit of Americans rather than for the benefit of drug companies. We have seen the scandals with tobacco, Oxycontin, the Covid-19 vaccine, and now the abortion pill. The agency needs either to go away or to change its paradigm.

Asking The Right Question

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One of the cases before the Supreme Court this week dealt with whether or not district judges have the authority to make rulings that impact the entire nations. On Thursday, The Federalist posted an article about a question asked by Justice Thomas.

The article reports:

In Thursday’s hearing, Thomas asked Sauer (U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer) — who represented the Trump administration — about the history of nationwide injunctions and when courts first started issuing such orders. The solicitor general answered by citing Thomas’ concurring opinion in Trump v. Hawaii, a 2018 case that resulted in SCOTUS reversing “a lower court’s decision to uphold a nationwide injunction on Trump’s travel ban,” according to The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson.

In his concurrence in that case, Thomas noted how nationwide injunctions by lower courts “did not emerge until a century and a half after the founding.” He further observed that these injunctions “appear to be inconsistent with longstanding limits on equitable relief and the power of Article III courts.”

“These injunctions are beginning to take a toll on the federal court system — preventing legal questions from percolating through the federal courts, encouraging forum shopping, and making every case a national emergency for the courts and for the Executive Branch,” Thomas wrote.

In his response to Thomas, Sauer highlighted several examples of universal injunctions that he said began emerging in the early 1960s.

“So we survived until the 1960s without universal injunctions?” asked Thomas, to which Sauer replied, “That’s exactly correct.”

Sauer added, “In fact, those [injunctions] are very limited and very rare even in the 1960s. It really exploded in 2007 in our cert petition in Summers v. Earth Island Institute, we pointed out that the Ninth Circuit had started doing this in a whole bunch of cases involving environmental claims.”

The article concludes:

During one exchange with Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Sauer attempted to answer the Obama appointee’s inquiries regarding executive compliance with injunctions handed down by the judiciary. Instead of permitting Sauer to address her concerns, Sotomayor cut off the solicitor general, prompting Chief Justice John Roberts to interject and subtly suggest that the associate justice allow Sauer to answer.

“Can I hear the rest of his answer?” Roberts asked.

A decision in the case is not expected until the final weeks of the Supreme Court’s current term, which will end in late June-early July.

Nationwide injunctions are simply the latest tool in the effort to prevent President Trump from implementing his agenda. President Trump was elected. He needs to be allowed to run the country.