An important court battle takes shape in Wisconsin.
May 06, 2020
ITEM #1: There is no political cause that’s more important than safeguarding constitutional liberties, and the coronavirus outbreak — which has featured many examples of heavy-handed government overreach in response — has only increased the importance of staying vigilant on this crucial front.
We wanted to highlight an important development this week out of Wisconsin, where a lawsuit has been filed against the state for violating the fundamental rights of freedom of religion, assembly and travel. The state does possess power to act in combating the virus epidemic. But in some critical instances, Wisconsin has gone much too far, especially in the way it has singled out religious worshippers and those taking part in political gatherings for particularly onerous restrictions.
As National Review explains, the petitioners “contend that aspects of the state orders violate their rights to engage in religious worship and in political protest.”
Bloomberg has some additional detail on what’s at stake in this battle:
"The public safety measures … are overly intrusive and 'cannot survive even basic scrutiny, according to a complaint filed Monday with the Wisconsin Supreme Court. ...
"The Wisconsin plaintiffs said they don’t doubt the seriousness of the public health crisis or that it poses life-or-death risks to the state’s citizens, particularly the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions. But the steps Wisconsin has taken to lessen those risks, ‘no doubt in good faith, have gone too far, needlessly infringing our most basic constitutional liberties — to an extent that is without precedent and that would have been virtually unimaginable in a free society just two months ago,’ they said in the lawsuit."
Morning in Nevada PAC President Adam Laxalt, whose law firm represents the plaintiffs in the case, is quoted in the Bloomberg story, contending that, “If a government is going to restrict the right to attend a church service at all, then they need to do it far more carefully and in a far more narrow way than was done in Wisconsin.”
Newmax, in its coverage of the story, spells out some of the particulars of Wisconsin’s “Safer at Home” order:
"[The plaintiffs] note, the order is especially restrictive against Orthodox Jews, who require a 'Minyan,' or 10 men over the age of 13, to be present in order for religious worship to take place.
"The order specifically exempts 'Weddings, funerals, and religious entities. Religious facilities, entities, groups, and gatherings, and weddings and funerals, except that any gathering shall include fewer than 10 people in a room or confined space at a time and individuals shall adhere to Social Distancing Requirements as much as possible.' ...
"The lawsuit states, while limiting those attending a religious service to fewer than 10, it allows 'hundreds of customers into Costco at any given time.'"
There’s a lot at stake here, for all Americans. We’ll be sure to keep you in the loop as this battle progresses.
ITEM #2: Our campaign calling for the responsible reopening of Nevada’s economy continues to build momentum, with more and more Nevadans speaking out every day about the need for our state to get back to work.
As we’ve stressed throughout the campaign, this is not a question of weighing lives against the economy. We’re weighing lives against lives. A continued economic shutdown will not just hurt our state on paper; it will cost us lives as well.
A lot of people are wondering what they can do to continue to help push our campaign forward. Well, there are two big things right off the bat:
- You can visit GetNevadaWorking.com and sign the petition telling Governor Sisolak to reopen our economy.
- And you can click here to contribute to our campaign.
By the way, Morning in Nevada PAC President Adam Laxalt recently joined radio host Dan Mason of NewsTalk 780 KOH to discuss this campaign, and to talk about what’s at stake and why it’s so important to reopen our economy. Click here to listen to their conversation.
ITEM #3: Here’s another item you can file away under “inconvenient news the mainstream press will ignore.”
Recent days have brought a major development in the saga of Michael Flynn, the retired Army General and former Trump national-security advisor who pled guilty of lying to FBI agents during the Obama administration’s shamefully partisan “investigation” conducted by anti-Trump hacks.
There’s a lot to unpack in this story, but National Review captures the essence of it with the headline on a recent editorial: “The Flynn Case Is a Travesty.”
They elaborate:
“There was no criminal predicate for the probe: Flynn’s communications with Sergey Kislyak — then the Russian ambassador to the U.S. — during the transition, which set off the whole affair, were entirely proper. The idea that they violated the Logan Act forbidding private interference in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy was always absurd. The last indictment under the constitutionally dubious act was in 1852, and the statute wasn’t meant to tie the hands of high-level officials of an incoming administration.
“Former FBI director James Comey broke protocol by having agents interview Flynn at the White House on his first day on the job, a tactic Comey subsequently told a chortling New York City audience he wouldn’t have ‘gotten away with’ in a more organized administration. Though the agents had a recording of his conversation with the ambassador, they didn’t play it for Flynn — instead simply grilling him.”
Then comes the latest news:
“The just-revealed notes of an FBI official prior to the interview ask whether the goal was to elicit Flynn’s admission that he talked with Kislyak about sanctions (the supposed Logan Act violation) or ‘to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired.’ The notes are open to interpretation, but it’s not clear what the FBI was doing besides hoping he’d lie.
“In a newly disclosed email, Lisa Page suggests slipping in as unobtrusively as possible a warning that lying to the FBI is a crime, so as not to put Flynn on his guard.
“Still, the agents who interviewed Flynn didn’t think he lied. …
“This paper-thin case (at best) was apparently on the verge of being closed when top FBI officials intervened to keep that from happening. Then, the case got picked up by Special Counsel Mueller’s team. Mueller’s prosecutors pressured Flynn to plead guilty, hoping he’d help make some sort of case against Trump.”
So what explains Flynn’s guilty plea?
“[Flynn’s] counsel contends that new disclosures show it was elicited on the basis of threatening his son with prosecution. His son’s alleged crime was failing to register with the Justice Department as a foreign agent. Such a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act had almost never been charged by the Justice department prior to Mueller’s investigation, and it’s not even clear the act would apply to Flynn’s son.
“None of this was revealed to the court until now.”
This is just the latest round of damning news about the corrupt Obama Justice Department, and the unconscionable lengths it was willing to go to in order to undermine a candidate of the opposing political party. Last month brought the revelation that the FBI was warned parts of the Steele dossier might have been part of a Russian disinformation campaign. And now this.
Yet our national news media, who ostensibly exist to hold the powerful accountable, will continue to look the other way.
ITEM #4: Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has been on fire lately.
Among the clearest voices calling out Democrats for manipulating the coronavirus crisis to undermine our elections, she’s now turning her attention to the shameless hypocrisy they and their media allies have displayed in response to the sexual-assault allegations against Joe Biden, the Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee.
Here’s McDaniel, from a recent interview with ABC:
“I’m going to take issue — I’m going to take issue with the media ignoring this. It has been appalling, the hypocrisy, as to how Brett Kavanaugh was treated versus Joe Biden. Brett Kavanaugh, every accuser was put on TV. It was wall-to-wall coverage. They went into his high school yearbook. They said he needed an FBI investigation. Michael Avenatti was on TV accusing him of gang rape from an accuser who’d never even met Brett Kavanaugh.
“And then you go to Joe Biden. Five weeks of silence. Nineteen interviews without a single question. He won’t let people go into his records in the University of Delaware. They’re calling on the DNC to do the investigation. …
“[D]ue process and the presumption of innocence has no longer been the standard in this country when it comes to Republicans and now Democrats are suddenly embracing those legal standards that we made the cornerstone of our country when it comes to Joe Biden, but they threw it out the window when it came to Brett Kavanaugh, and so did the media. And the hypocrisy has been appalling, and we need to do some self-reflection as to how Kavanaugh was treated versus how Biden is being treated right now.”
You can watch the interview here.
ITEM #5: A few weeks ago we spotlighted the New York Times’ slimy “1619 Project,” taking issue, as many conservatives have, with what amounted to the project’s smear campaign against America.
The central thrust of the project, a collection of essays the Times published, is that the nation’s founding was inspired primarily by a commitment to preserving the institution of slavery.
So misguided is this view that even the project’s leader was eventually compelled to admit to a major error in the core thesis. As a reminder, the Washington Examiner reported at the time that:
“The head of the New York Times’s much-hyped 1619 Project concedes she got it wrong when she reported that ‘one of the primary reasons’ the colonists revolted against England was to preserve the institution of slavery.
“Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones claims now that she meant to say ‘some of’ the colonists fought to preserve slavery, not all of them.
“The admission comes seven months after her faulty assertion first appeared in the New York Times’s package of essays arguing that America’s founding is defined by chattel slavery. The admission also comes after Hannah-Jones mocked and debased the many academics who directed mild and good-faith criticisms at her bogus statement.”
Fast-forward to today, and the story gets even more incredible. Rather than face repercussions for her affronts to journalism and historical accuracy, Hannah-Jones has now been … awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her work on the project.
We kid you not.
The New York Post gets it right in its story on this embarrassment, aptly headlined, “The only Pulitzer the 1619 Project deserved was for fiction.”
So just to recap: A journalist can get the story wrong, get called out for getting it wrong, admit to getting it wrong, and then receive an award for getting it wrong.
Is it any wonder public trust in the news media is at a historic low?
ITEM #6: Did you know that the coronavirus outbreak is actually a good thing? At least, that’s according to a couple of Hollywood left-wingers. American Greatness has the details:
“Hollywood actor Robert Redford and his son, film director James Redford, claim that the coronavirus pandemic which so far has killed over 61,000 Americans and left 26 million unemployed and the draconian Government-ordered shelter-in-place measures could be a good thing because it will allegedly help fight climate change.”
The story quotes from an op-ed authored by the Redfords, in which they celebrate the news that, “As many of the world’s transportation and industrial sectors have reduced operations, there has been a remarkable decline in global levels of carbon dioxide emissions.”
Another sad reminder of how little esteem many on the left have for human life.
ITEM #7: Fox News’ Jesse Watters speculates on what the mainstream media would be saying today if Barack Obama, and not Donald Trump, were president during the coronavirus crisis.
"Barack Obama, putting politics aside and sacrificing. The key to a successful re-election: Shut down the economy, just in order to save lives.
"His bold, early, and scientific-based action shut down flights from China while his political opponents impeached him. Then he rallied both parties together to pass enormous relief for the American people. And, at a very good moment, rallied the world around China while his main political opponent stayed in the basement around a dark cloud of very credible sexual assault allegations."
Sounds about right to us.
NOTABLE QUOTE
“It went from MeToo, MeToo, MeToo, to Move on, Move on, Move on in a nanosecond because he’s a Democrat.” ― RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, on the hypocrisy of Democrats and the media in response to the Biden sexual-assault allegations