By Mike Huckabee
November 13, 2021
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THE EVENING EDITION By Mike Huckabee
Good evening! Here are some stories from me that I think you will want to read.
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
THE LATEST NEWS
1. A GOOD DAY FOR REPUBLICANS IN COURTROOMS:
Friday was a good day for Republicans in courtrooms. The really big news came with the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals denying President Biden’s request to lift its stay on his vaccine mandate on businesses with more than 100 employees.
The Court ordered OSHA to "take no steps to implement or enforce the Mandate until further court order." This is just one step in what’s likely to be a long battle over the mandate - one I suspect will drag on long after the pandemic is completely over, because this isn’t about public health so much as it’s about government control. But judging from the Court’s comments, it sounds as if the mandate has as much chance of staying afloat in the SCOTUS as a cement canoe.
The court noted that in its 50-year history, OSHA has issued only 10 such “emergency, temporary” orders; six were challenged in court, and only one survived. Likewise, they found that the states seeking to block the vaccine mandate were likely to succeed on the merits “for a multitude of reasons.”
You should read the report at the link because it’s fun hearing these wannabe dictators get put in their places, but to cite just a few reasons: the act that created OSHA was never intended to launch a bureaucracy with the power to make sweeping rules that “affect every member of society in the profoundest of ways.” That will come as a shock to leftists, who think all office holders have unlimited power, even school board members.
They also called the mandate “fatally flawed,” being both over-inclusive (hitting all businesses equally, regardless of their level of risk) and under-inclusive (if it’s such a dire emergency, why doesn’t it also apply to businesses with fewer than 100 workers?) I’m not a judge, but I would also ask why, if it’s such a life-and-death emergency, it doesn’t take effect until January? Is it okay to kill voters with COVID, but not to anger them by ruining their holidays?
Oh, and it likely exceeds the federal government’s power under the Commerce Clause by regulating non-economic activity (a person’s choice of whether to be vaccinated) which falls squarely to the states.
And the Court hit Biden for abuse of power, pointing out that such orders are supposed to be “an ‘unusual response’ to ‘exceptional circumstances'” that have Constitutional requirements that he ignored, and that the “Mandate at issue here is anything but a ‘delicate exercise’ of this ‘extraordinary power.’”
As Charles C.W. Cooke at National Review puts it, “Summing up, the court savaged the move in every possible way.”
Still, the question remains: will businesses that are already enforcing it stop and wait for a Supreme Court ruling? Or will they go along with Biden's end-run around the Courts and let him use the power of the Presidency to bully private businesses into doing what he doesn’t have the power to do himself? That’s unconstitutional, by the way. Or as Democrats would call that if Trump had ever tried it, it’s an impeachable offense.
Ironically, in ruling on Biden’s bad motives, the Court relied partly on the Twitter account of Biden’s Chief of Staff Ron Klain, the man sometimes called “Biden’s Brain.”
Klain retweeted MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle’s tweet reading, "OSHA doing this vaxx mandate as an emergency workplace safety rule is an ultimate work-around for the Federal govt to require vaccinations." Klain’s retweet implied that he was agreeing it was an attempt to “work around” the Constitutional limits on Biden's power.
I’m starting to understand what they mean when they say this guy is Biden’s brain.
2. A GOOD DAY FOR PRESIDENT TRUMP:
Former President Trump also had a good day in court in a couple of cases. A former “Apprentice” contestant dropped her sexual assault lawsuit against him. Few details of the case were made available, but Trump had branded the lawsuit a politically motivated hoax, and his attorneys said the woman was paid nothing and had no other choice “as the facts unearthed in this matter made it abundantly clear that our client did nothing wrong.”
In another court victory, a judge threw out former Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s lawsuit against the Trump Organization, finding that it relied heavily on oral agreements that were nullified by written agreements, and that the bulk of his legal bills were linked either to Trump himself, his presidential campaign or the Trump Foundation, not the Trump Organization. Trump’s attorney called the lawsuit a failed attempt at self-enrichment. But then, way too many lawsuits are.
3. OUTRAGED:
I was outraged to learn that the Scottsdale, Arizona, school board president was reportedly keeping an online “dossier” on 47 parents who publicly disagreed with his policies at school board meetings, the way an authoritarian regime keeps secret files on political opponents marked as enemies of the state.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/arizona-parents-spying-school-administrator-ingraham-angle
But I couldn’t be prouder of that district's parents who refused to be intimidated. They took to TV and staged protests, demanding that school board president Jann-Michael Greenburg resign.
Local mom Amy Carney told Laura Ingraham on Fox News, "This latest scandal in Scottsdale…is proof…who[m] the label ‘domestic terrorist’ really belongs to. It's not the parents.” This attempt to slander and frighten parents out of expressing their opinion about their kids’ education is intolerable. Three cheers for those parents for having the guts to respond the way everyone should to terrorists: by fighting back, not knuckling under in fear. Let’s hope they inspire other parents nationwide to keep speaking out and reminding elected officials, which includes school board members, who they really work for.
4. FUNDING FOR BORDER SECURITY PLEASE:
Republican Sens. Mike Braun, Marco Rubio, Mike Lee, Cynthia Lummis and Ted Cruz announced that they will not support any omnibus spending bill that doesn’t include adequate funding for border security, specifically the border wall.
For instance, the Democrats’ current Homeland Security Appropriations bill moves $1.9 billion in wall funding elsewhere. The bill’s summary explains, “Rather than continuing to waste taxpayer dollars on border walls while ignoring proven, more effective, and less costly investments to improve border security, these funds will be refocused toward innovative and cost-effective capabilities and will also provide critical investments to support CBP employees.”
If that balloon juice sounds familiar (when Democrats use the word "investments" twice, you know it's going to cost a lot of money for very little results), it’s because that’s the same tactic they often use to explain away killing policies that work to replace them with policies that don’t. What exactly are these “proven, more effective and less costly investments,” hmm? Are they the policies that Biden’s been implementing since taking office, because honestly, those don't look so “effective” to me. It’s like when they always claim that they could stop gun violence by passing “common sense gun control laws,” but they never come up with any that would have any effect whatsoever.
Besides, we already know what they mean by “critical investments to support CBP employees” because they put funding for it in their “infrastructure” bill. It was a lot of money to make illegal immigration processing centers more efficient, so they can pour into the US even faster.
For the record, Biden not only halted construction of the border wall, but Senate Democrats are trying to remove already completed segments of it from federal land. This despite the fact that in areas where the wall was constructed during the Trump Administration, illegal border crossings dropped by up to 87%. That’s more my definition of “effective.”
5. THIS MESSAGE NEEDS TO SPREAD:
If you own or run a business, and you’ve ever allowed yourself to be bullied by a Twitter mob into firing someone or issuing a groveling apology, then stop what you’re doing and read this article by Stephen Green at PJ Media. Its message should be trumpeted far and wide.
https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2021/11/12/twitter-has-a-dirty-little-secret-n1532099
Last month, one of PJ Media’s writers responded to Rachel Levine being heralded as the “first female four-star health service admiral” with the biologically irrefutable fact that “Rachel Levine is a man.” Twitter suspended his account until he deleted this offensive “misinformation.” He refused. When the parent site retweeted the article, Twitter also locked their account until they knuckled under to the trans police and deleted their biologically accurate “misinformation.” Their managing editor also refused.
So the website has been locked out of Twitter for three weeks, and guess what they’ve discovered: it’s made no difference whatsoever in their web traffic. The few real people who are actually on Twitter aren’t using it to read news, they’re just using it to snark at each other. As Green says, quoting Shakespeare (another white male who’s probably banned from Twitter), Twitter is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
For years, I’ve been advising people to deal with Twitter rage mobs the way I do: laugh and ignore them. If we all did that, it would take the megaphone away from these mice, and they’d all slink back into their holes. I think this story shows that that goes for Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and his entire company, as well.
6. WEEKEND TOPIC:
While waiting for Monday’s final arguments in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, here's a weekend topic we can all discuss: did the prosecution’s chief witness commit perjury, or did he merely lie to America about what happened on CNN? Because it sure seems like one or the other. If I were a betting man, my money would be "Lied on CNN." Everyone already expects that.
7. BANNON INDICTED:
For ignoring a subpoena to testify to Nancy Pelosi’s January 6th kangaroo court – sorry, “select committee” - because Trump is claiming executive privilege, former Trump campaign official Steven Bannon has been indicted by the Obama “Justice” Department on two counts of contempt of Congress.
The linked article at Redstate.com points out that this charge is almost never enforced because of separation of powers issues (remember Obama Attorney General Eric Holder paying no price at all for committing contempt of Congress.) But as the article notes, if you’ve ever been associated with Donald Trump, the “law” sets a completely different, far more hardline standard. This must be called a "select" committee because it involves so many selective prosecutions.
Personally, I’m glad that the crime of contempt for Congress is rarely enforced, or else every prison in America would be overflowing.
8. MUST-READ
Kurt Schlichter on how “Americans are waking up to the Democrats’ race hustle.”
For past editions of my evening newsletter, please visit my website here.
For more of my news coverage, visit my website here.
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