Tag Archives: the Fourteenth Amendment

Wisdom From Someone Who Knows Washington

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On Wednesday, Dick Morris posted an article titled:

It’s Time To Play To Win…By Their Rules

Please follow the link to read the entire article. It is very well written and contains a lot of good information.

Here are a few highlights:

The Democrats are playing dirty, but we can’t let them win. We must play to win — just like them.

By indicting Trump again, the Democrats have upped their game. This coming indictment is not like the Bragg arrest or the classified document charges. Those are trivial by comparison.

It looks like the new Smith indictment will be devised to trigger the Fourteenth Amendment’s prohibition against holding federal office after participating in an insurgency against the United States.

The Fourteenth Amendment, passed as the Civil War drew to a close, prohibits anyone from holding federal office if they had “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same (the U.S. government), or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

Prosecutor Jack Smith may be attempting to portray Trump’s objections to the election of 2020 and his demand for recounts and audits before electors were appointed as just such an “insurrection or rebellion,” disqualifying him from becoming president again.

Smith may hope that, if Trump is convicted by a Washington DC All-Democrat jury, that secretaries of state and governors in blue states refuse to put him on the ballot.

We, who still value free elections, can hope that the courts — particularly the U.S. Supreme Court –thwarts such a move. But do we dare wait until then?

Especially as Democratic efforts to remove Clarence Thomas from the Court gain steam?

The article concludes:

Their efforts to stack the deck against Trump are akin to a political coup d’état.

It is not enough that we fight them at the ballot box. They may not let it get that far.

President Trump, the House Republican majority and Senate Republican minority do not realize the power they have, and they better start using it to save our democracy.

Controlling the power of the purse, the House can refuse to pass any appropriation bills until the Justice Department drops its political prosecutions and its blatant interference with the 2024 election.

Even if the Senate objects, the House has the power to bring the government to a halt by itself.

And a handful of Republicans in the Senate can use their filibuster and committee privileges to bring Biden’s initiatives and nominees to a standstill.

Closing federal agencies until this unlawful affront to democracy and threat to our liberty is thwarted, is a small price to pay to keep our free elections in place and to use them to designate the next president.

The House Republicans should make one simple demand: Stop the prosecution of any presidential candidate until the election has been held.

It is illegal to indict, convict, or remove a president except by impeachment.

Just as it is illegal for a prosecutor to reach into the Oval Office to pluck out a president and put him in jail, so it should be illegal to indict and remove from the voters’ consideration, a candidate for the high office, especially the frontrunner for his nomination.

Please read the entire article. We are in a very dangerous place.

When Will Washington Politicians Decide To Honor The Constitution?

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The Biden administration has done an end run around the U.S. Constitution since coming into office. Executive orders have decimated our energy independence, and various agencies have interfered is things as minute as the appliances we cook on. We have long passed the point where our laws are made by legislators–they are now made by regulatory agencies that are unelected and unaccountable. Now the President is discussing ignoring the role of Congress as ‘keepers of the purse’ and threatening to invoke the Fourteenth Amendment to raise the debt ceiling without the consent of Congress.

On Tuesday, NewsMax reported:

President Joe Biden confirmed that he is floating the idea of utilizing the 14th Amendment to work around congressional gridlock on raising the debt ceiling, The Hill reported.

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Biden invoked legal scholar Laurence Tribe’s recent editorial in The New York Times, where he backed the theory, which claims the president can unilaterally raise the limit under certain circumstances.

“I have been considering the 14th Amendment, and the man I have enormous respect for, Larry Tribe … thinks that it would be legitimate,” Biden said, citing the article.

The article concludes:

But House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., scoffed at the idea outside the Capitol on Tuesday.

“Really think about this,” McCarthy said. “If you’re the leader … and you’re going to go to the 14th amendment to look at something like that — I would think you’re kind of a failure of working with people across sides of the aisle or working with your own party to get something done.”

The Republican-controlled House has proposed its Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023 to solve the debt crisis. Alternatively, the Democratic-led Senate released an economic report condemning the proposal.

Republicans are seeking to make significant inroads to slash government spending in their proposal — a move that Democrats said should take a backseat to pass a “clean” debt ceiling measure.

The un-Republicans in the House before the 2022 mid-terms worked with the Democrats to pass a spending bill that would effectively tie the hands of the Congress that was elected in 2022. Technically this may have been legal, but it was definitely not the right thing to do. Now the Republicans in the House are trying to undo the damage those un-Republicans did. The American people want spending cuts. If the Republicans don’t deliver them, they don’t deserve to be re-elected next year.

 

Equal Justice Under The Law

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The U.S. Constitution states:

Amendment XIV

Section 1.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.  (emphasis mine)

In the past two years there have been some events that have caused me to question whether the Biden administration is adhering to the concept of equal protection under the law. There are many questionable happenings regarding the January 6th defendants and recently questions about the pro-life activist who had never broken a law and whose home was raided by 15-20 FBI agents with guns. Now we have more questions regarding the standard applied to President Trump versus the standard applied to President Obama regarding the keeping and storing of presidential records.

On Tuesday, The American Thinker reported the following:

It almost sounds like a scene from an Indiana Jones movie: a dusty warehouse.  The smell of must permeating the air.  The only sound the scurrying of the occasional rat.  And entombed within it, thousands of boxes upon boxes, practically stamped “TOP SECRET.”

But this is no flight of Hollywood fantasy.  It is the reality of what remains of the Barack Obama presidency: Twenty truckloads of crates, kept in a space that formerly housed the inventory of Plunkett Furniture, containing roughly thirty million documents generated during the eight years of Obama’s time in the Oval Office.

And to the best of anyone’s public knowledge, it may still be sitting there, uncatalogued and unscanned for future perusal.  It’s composed in part, it can be assumed, of classified files.

That is the conclusion being made following a letter from the Obama Foundation to the National Archive and Records Administration  that has recently come to light.  According to the letter, at least up until 2018, the Obama-era documents — all of them — were being stored in the warehouse at Hoffman Estates.  The letter clearly states that classified papers were included alongside the unclassified files.

From the letter: “The Obama Foundation agrees to transfer up to three million three hundred thousand dollars ($3,300,000) to the National Archives Trust Fund (NATF) to support the move of classified and unclassified Obama Presidential records and artifacts from Hoffman Estates to NARA-controlled facilities that conform to the agency’s archival storage standards for such records and artifacts, and for the modification of such spaces. The first transfer of $300,000 was already made on August 9, 2018. An additional interim transfer will be made within 180 days of that date. Subsequent payments are subject to the negotiation of terms of the digitization process and museum operations.”

It is now also being reported by the Daily Herald that the Obama Foundation has extended its lease of the warehouse through 2026.

Somehow the FBI has not chosen to raid that warehouse. I kind of wonder who is pulling the strings at the FBI right now.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article.