Good morning!

Blessings on you and your family, and from all the Huckabee staff!

Today's newsletter includes:

• Bible Verse Of The Day
• House Narrowly Passes "Equality Act"
• Senate Parliamentarian Rules Against Minimum Wage Gambit
• A UN Whistleblower
• California's Priorities Are Off
• How President Biden Is Like An Opossum
• The Media Ignored This Part Of The Texas Power Story
• “Change!”
• A Reader Writes Back...
• America The Beautiful

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

BIBLE VERSE OF THE DAY 

House Narrowly Passes "Equality Act" 

By Mike Huckabee

Thursday, the House narrowly passed the so-called “Equality Act.” It’s a typical “progressive” bill in that it has an innocuous name that nobody could argue with hiding its toxic contents.

The bill enshrines sexual and gender identities as protected classes on the level of race and actual gender and eviscerates the 1992 Religious Freedom Restoration Act and religious freedom protections of the First Amendment. It specifically states that if a religious organization doesn’t bend its sacred beliefs to the LGBTQ agenda, it can be sued for discrimination and the RFRA will not provide legal protection. It redefines “public accommodation” to include churches, religious homeless shelters, adoption agencies and other faith-based organizations.

It would force doctors to violate their Hippocratic Oaths by performing abortions and providing hormones and surgery to people who want to alter their genders, even if they think it’s harmful to the patient’s health. It also would codify forcing everyone to treat biological males who “identify” as women as women, which could put an end to girls’ and women’s sports, end privacy for women in intimate places such as locker rooms, and force shelters for traumatized women to accept men who claim to identify as women.

The bill was passed by the House with no committee hearings, and during the debate, even though some Democrat leaders claimed it included no hostile infringement on religious liberties, Illinois Democratic Rep. Mike Quigley gave away their real feelings by declaring that the Republicans’ religious freedom arguments were just “transphobia,” “homophobia,” and “hate.”

This now goes to the Senate, where it will need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. Let’s hope all the Republicans and maybe a few Democrats care about the Constitution and the rights of women and people of faith, and reject it. If they actually pass it and Biden signs it, we’d be facing a long court battle to have the Supreme Court throw it out as unconstitutional. I’m not an attorney, but it seems to me that any law that has to include a paragraph saying in effect, “No fair citing the First Amendment” is pretty much the definition of unconstitutional.

And just so you know, these are the three House Republicans who joined with Democrats in voting to pass the “Equality” Act: Reps. Tom Reed and John Katko (both of NY) and Brian Fitzpatrick (PA.)

Senate Parliamentarian Rules Against Minimum Wage Gambit

By Mike Huckabee

The Democrats’ plan to put a $15 minimum wage hike into a COVID-19 stimulus bill as part of a budget reconciliation measure so it only needs 51 votes has come to a halt, thanks to an unexpected roadblock: the Senate Parliamentarian ruled that it can’t be included in a budget reconciliation bill because it’s not a budget item, it’s a major legislative change, and those are subject to filibusters.

Naturally, Democrats are denying the obvious truth and refusing to remove the item from the bill. They’re urging party members to vote for it anyway and simply ignore the Parliamentarian. They don’t need no stinkin’ rules! Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that critics should be happy that “progressives” aren’t demanding a minimum wage of $24 or $25 an hour.

I’m glad to hear she’s making my point for me. I’ve long said that if you’re going to completely ignore market forces, disconnect the cost of labor from what it’s worth, pull an arbitrary minimum wage out of thin air, and pretend that it has no negative effects (according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, a $15 minimum wage would destroy 1.4 million jobs), then why not make it $150 an hour so that everyone can get rich? As long as we’re living in Economic Fantasyland, we might as well all have mansions.

I expect the Democrats’ next move will be to try to stack the office of Senate Parliamentarian, so there are three of them, and the two new ones who don’t know or care about the rules can outvote the one who does.

A UN Whistleblower

By Mike Huckabee

Here’s just what we need: one more reason for the US to tell the UN to pack up its overdue parking tickets and get out.

A whistleblower told the Epoch Times that, contrary to UN denials, UN human rights officials did give the names of Chinese dissidents who were set to testify in Geneva against the Communist Chinese Party’s abuses to the communist regime in Beijing. They used those names to block the dissidents from leaving China, and at least one, Cao Shunli, was detained and died while in detention.

The whistleblower also claimed that if the dissident had already left China, the person’s family would be threatened or even kidnapped and tortured. The whistleblower called the UN’s actions “criminal” and accused it of being complicit in genocide. She’s still employed by the UN, but she’s under investigation. That’s right: she’s the one who’s under investigation.

The UN denied the allegations for years, but the Epoch Times has obtained internal emails that appear to verify that it’s true and they were misleading the world. Read the entire article.

And if that’s not horrific enough, and you need another reason to boot the UN, try this: China is currently on the UN Human Rights Council.

California's Priorities Are Off

By Mike Huckabee

California has so many serious, pressing problems that residents are fleeing the state in droves, but fortunately, their “progressive” leaders have prioritized what’s most important. Two Democrat legislators have introduced a bill that would fine department stores $1,000 if they have separate toy and clothing sections for boys and girls.

Sponsor Evan Low, who is chair (I don’t risk a fine by saying “chairman”) of the Assembly’s LGBTQ Caucus, said, “The policy behind this bill is not only important in regards to addressing perceived societal norms but also ensuring that prejudice and judgment does not play a prominent role in our children’s lives. I look forward to working on this issue in the future.”

I look forward to a future when people who do idiotic things like this are voted out of legislatures and work in places where they can’t do any more damage. Let’s hope Californians finally wake up to how many of the problems they’re fleeing are directly connected to the people they keep electing.

In a related story, Hasbro is rebranding “Mr. Potato Head” to “Potato Head,” because we wouldn’t want to place a gender label on a root vegetable. Will future non-gendered “Potato Head” play sets come with two sets of interchangeable genitals that can be swapped out depending on what gender the potato identifies with at any given moment?

How President Biden Is Like An Opossum

By Mike Huckabee

Something I admit I never thought of: How President Biden is like an opossum.

One big difference, though: possums are actually helpful to have around.

The Media Ignored This Part Of The Texas Power Story

By Mike Huckabee

While leftists were rushing to exploit the winter storm blackouts in Texas for political purposes, the media largely ignored how quickly Texans rallied to help each other and the role that churches played. Also, the fact that Texas got all the power restored within five days, while blackouts in blue states like California have been going on for years, without the excuse of historic winter storms.

“Change!”

By Mike Huckabee

Under Trump, separating minors at the border from adults who might harm them was called “ripping children from their parents’ arms” and “putting kids in cages.” Under Biden, the same policy is now called “putting children into ‘influx care facilities,’” or as Peter Doocy of Fox News put it, “kids in containers.”

Read the linked story to see how White House spokesperson Jen Psaki tries to spin this as a totally, totally different thing, but refuses to let reporters in to see whether the “containers” are the same as the alleged “cages.” You know, for “security” reasons.

The reason we need these facilities is because we’re seeing a surge of illegal immigration due to the idea that Biden is throwing open the border and rolling out the red carpet by undoing all of Trump’s border security measures. More than 78,000 migrants were caught crossing the southern border in January alone. Psaki claims that separating children from the people claiming to be their parents was “immoral,” and this is different because we’re seeing so many unaccompanied children crossing the border illegally. Because creating a situation that encourages people to send their children across the border alone illegally during a pandemic is in no way immoral.

Former Acting CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan accused the Biden Administration of hypocrisy, false narratives and outright lies in claiming that the detention facilities were medical facilities because of COVID. He said they’re “needed because this administration is now encouraging, incentivizing, and facilitating illegal entry in the United States and the numbers have skyrocketed.”

Incidentally, and I never get tired of pointing this out: the photos of “cages” that blew up on Twitter and caused so much outrage toward Trump were actually photos of detention facilities built under Obama.

A Reader Writes Back...

Governor Huckabee - Your newsletter is the BEST read every day. You start the day by lifting us up with a Bible quote, fill us in on current events (adding humor which always makes me smile), and close out highlighting America's great treasures. Don't change a thing!

America The Beautiful

God's creation is all around us. To learn more about Carlsbad Caverns National Park, visit its website here.