An important lesson about guns

ITEM #1:  Congratulations, friends. You took a stand … and the Governor backed down from his latest threat to abuse his power.

Last week we launched a robust digital ad campaign calling on Governor Steve Sisolak to call off his threat to wage a vindictive and politically motivated attack on Douglas County. 

What had the county done to draw the Governor’s ire? Why, it had merely sanctioned President Donald Trump’s campaign rally held at the Minden-Tahoe Airport on September 12. 

In response, Governor Sisolak threatened to withhold $8.9 Million of Federal CARES Act relief funds from the people of Douglas County. These were funds designated for public safety, small businesses, workforce development, non-profit organizations, public health and more — relief that’s desperately needed at a time when so many Nevadans are already suffering thanks to the Governor’s heavy-handed economic shutdown over the coronavirus outbreak.

Because these are federal funds we’re talking about, the Governor lacked the authority to withhold them — yet incredibly, that didn’t stop him from threatening to go down this authoritarian road.

Fortunately, you and your fellow Nevadans responded in a big way to our campaign, which encouraged you to contact the Governor directly and tell him that this assault on your fellow citizens was entirely unacceptable and could not be allowed to stand.

The Associated Press’ Sam Metz reported this week that, “Gov. Steve Sisolak said Monday that he does not plan to take back the $8.9 million in coronavirus relief that Nevada allocated to Douglas County, despite local officials agreeing to welcome President Donald Trump for a campaign rally in defiance of state pandemic directives.”

It’s a win for our constitutional rights and for the cause of liberty — but this episode should also serve as a reminder of how frighteningly quick our Governor is to resort to political retribution. And how politically calculated his inconsistent response to the virus has been — cracking down on church attendance and Republican campaign rallies, while saying nothing whatsoever to criticize the violent protests that recently broke out across our state.

Still, this latest development is a welcome one, and it was made possible by the pressure coming from patriots like you, who responded to our campaign (which reached more than 70,000 Nevadans) by taking a stand against our vindictive Governor.

As Morning in Nevada PAC President Adam Laxalt put it on Twitter:

ITEM #2:  Care for some more good news?

During the 2019 Nevada Legislative Session, Democrat lawmakers pushed through, and Governor Sisolak signed, tax increases that pretty clearly ran afoul of the state Constitution. That’s because they failed to garner support from the constitutionally required two-thirds supermajorities of both legislative houses for any tax hike in our state. 

Democrats had a supermajority in the Assembly but were one seat shy in the Senate. Yet they rammed the tax hikes through the Senate anyway on a party-line vote, and the Governor promptly and illegally signed them into law (what is it with him and disdain for the rule of law, anyway?). 

Republican state senators sued to have the tax hikes thrown out for violating the Constitution, while Democrats argued that the increases, because they were passed as extensions of previous tax hikes, didn’t require supermajorities to implement. Democrats’ reasoning was absurd on its face (the Nevada Constitution is clear that supermajorities are necessary to pass any measure that creates, generates or increases any public revenue, which was obviously the case here). And this week, Nevada’s court system agreed.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Bill Dentzer reports:

“A District Court judge sided with Republican state senators Monday in throwing out two revenue bills passed by the Legislature in 2019, ruling that they were passed in the Senate without the constitutionally required two-thirds majority vote.”

Judge James Todd Russell, in issuing his ruling, pointed out that this case was actually about as straight-forward as they come. 

Here’s Dentzer:

“Russell based his ruling on the intent of the 1994 initiative voters approved that installed the two-third requirement to increase revenue in any form. The initiative ‘set forth basically what the people wanted,’ he said.

 “‘The intent of this particular provision of the Constitution is clear and the language is clear,’ he said. ‘It clearly states an affirmative vote of not fewer than two thirds of the members elected to each house is necessary to pass a bill or joint resolution which creates, generates or increases any public revenue’ in any form.” 

Naturally, Democrats have already said they’ll appeal.

It’s another welcome win, for now at least. And yet once again, it’s pretty terrifying that it even had to come to this. It’s jaw-dropping how Democrats continue to demonstrate that they have nothing but contempt for constitutional limits on their power and the rule of law.

And let’s not forget that they’re absolutely committed to trying to raise taxes again in 2021 — and they remain just one Senate seat short of having the authority to do it cleanly.

Remember in November.

ITEM #3:  As if this past week weren’t already jam-packed with news … we now have a Supreme Court confirmation fight on the horizon.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away last Friday, and we join our fellow Americans in mourning her passing. 

Ginsburg’s death leaves a vacancy on our nation’s highest court during the homestretch of a hotly contested presidential race. 

Democrats have been quick to argue that President Trump and Senate Republicans have a responsibility not to move forward with a replacement until after the election — and that, should Democrat nominee Joe Biden prevail in November, Biden should be the one to nominate Ginsburg’s replacement. President Trump, for his part, has said he will nominate a successor to Ginsburg and is expected to do so by the end of the week.

It’s a bit rich to hear Democrats argue for delaying any nomination on the grounds of norms, decency, the health of our country, etc. … especially in light of their unconscionably brutal treatment of Brett Kavanaugh (not to mention Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork).

But more important, their fixation on the appropriateness of the timing ignores the most relevant factor at play here — the only one that truly matters, when you get right down to it. 

Under our Constitution, the President has the authority to nominate someone to fill the vacancy. And the Senate has the authority to confirm (or not to confirm) the nominee as it sees fit.

That’s it.

Everything else — the number of days left until the election, matters of divided vs. unified government, and so on — may make for interesting debate fodder. And we will indeed address some of that below. But ultimately, these are secondary points next to that fundamental one: Our duly elected President and Senators have the right to do their jobs.

President Trump should nominate — and, provided they find his nominee qualified and fit for the Supreme Court — Senators should confirm a new justice to fill the current vacancy. That justice should be one with an originalist judicial philosophy and a proven commitment to constitutional fidelity and judicial restraint. And the President and the Senate should act as soon as they deem practical and appropriate.

Ironically, none other than Joe Biden himself recently made the case that President Trump and Republicans are well within their right to move forward with the confirmation process.

Just this week, Biden addressed the topic by saying:

“The discussion should be about why [Trump] is moving in a direction that’s totally inconsistent with what [the] Founders wanted. The Constitution says voters get to pick a president who gets to make the pick, and the Senate gets to decide.”

Mind you, Biden intended his comment as an argument AGAINST President Trump nominating, and the current Senate confirming, a new justice. But his words — “The Constitution says voters get to pick a president who gets to make the pick, and the Senate gets to decide” — actually make the exact opposite case … and with near perfection, at that.

Voters did pick a President. That President is Donald Trump. The Senate (made up of 53 Republicans, per the will of the people) does get to decide. A majority of the Senate, it appears, stands ready to make a decision. 

And as even Joe Biden has acknowledged, however unwittingly, our nation’s Constitution gives them the authority to do exactly that.

There’s absolutely no reason they shouldn’t.

ITEM #4:  Despite those clear-cut facts, Democrats are insisting, and will continue to insist, that for a new justice to be nominated and confirmed during the current presidential term, in a presidential election year, would be a perversion of justice.

The mainstream press, of course, are treating and will continue to treat their objections as though they’re not only fair but are being made in good faith.

Democrats are wrong on the merits. But let’s consider another question: Are they even being sincere in their expressed concerns that the process is moving too hastily?

Well, here’s a video that should cure everyone of that delusion really quickly.

It features clips of everyone from Joe Biden to Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders, all arguing, in the not-too-distant past, that it was wrong and outrageous for a Supreme Court confirmation to be delayed. That was back in 2016, when the shoe was on the other foot, and these Democrats were making the case for the exact opposite of what they’re saying today. 

Biden: “The American people deserve a fully staffed Court of nine.”

Clinton: “The President nominates, and then the Senate advises and consents, or not, but they go forward with the process.”

Sanders: “The Constitution is 100 percent clear. The President of the United States has the right to nominate someone to be a justice of the Supreme Court. The Senate’s function is to hold hearings and to vote.”

In other words, Democrats believed the process should move forward when they controlled the White House and it was their nominee up for consideration. Now that we have a Republican President, they’ve changed their tune.

For Democrats, it’s not about principle, and it’s not about timing. It’s about fear that their decades-long effort to politicize our judiciary and turn it into nothing more than a series of super-legislatures to advance their left-wing agenda may be stifled. 

It’s about winning and losing. And they know this time, they’re going to lose.

ITEM #5:  On top of all that, for those who are concerned about norms, precedents and history … the facts STILL point toward Republicans having every right to move forward with a nomination.

As Morning in Nevada PAC President Adam Laxalt summed things up on Twitter:

And he includes a helpful video, courtesy of the Judicial Crisis Network and available here, to back it up.

QED, folks.

ITEM #6:  The Black Lives Matter movement continues to receive nothing but cheerleading and fawning coverage from the mainstream “news” media. But as many conservatives have pointed out, despite the organization’s innocuous-sounding name, a closer look at the ideals that BLM has actually been promoting are — or at least, should be considered — much more controversial.

As the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh notes, it appears that BLM is now actively trying to shield that true agenda from the public. Walsh reports:

"Until recently, it was very easy to debunk the idea that Black Lives Matter is a politically mainstream organization focused exclusively on the fight for racial justice. All you had to do was point in the direction of BLM’s official website, which had a tab right at the top called 'What We Believe' leading to a section of the site that outlined, well, what they believe. And by their own admission, they believed, and were fighting for, many things that the vast majority of human beings on Earth, whatever their race, would find bizarre or objectionable. But sometime in the past few days, the 'What We Believe' page at BlackLivesMatter.com was unceremoniously scrubbed, with no explanation offered publicly.”

Walsh notes that the site still contains plenty of hints as to BLM’s radicalism, but grants that much of what it includes is indeed inoffensive. 

However, as Walsh, writes, “[T]his is a very selective abridgment of what the ‘What We Believe’ page used to say. Unfortunately for BLM, though, everything lives forever on the internet. A visit to the cached version of the deleted section allows us to compare what they want us to know about their goals today against what they used to say about themselves.”

It turns out that much of what was once included on that site is far more radical than what resides there now. One item in particular caught our attention:

“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.”

Walsh, too, homed in on that section, opining:

“To call such a belief ‘far left’ would be a vast understatement. With its direct opposition to the nuclear family, BLM had positioned itself on the fringes of the fringes of the fringe. And considering that it is precisely the ‘disruption’ of the nuclear family in the black community that has contributed so heavily to the socioeconomic problems that plague it, BLM’s affirmation and promotion of this self-destructive trend is especially grotesque and dangerous.”

Those who run BLM are entitled to their viewpoints, of course. But they should be forthcoming about what their true objectives are. And if they’re not, the press should start asking them some pointed questions about their apparent attempt to hide those objectives from the rest of us.

ITEM #7:  “Not content with aiming to rewrite American history with its 1619 Project,” begins a New York Post editorial, “The New York Times and project chief Nikole Hannah-Jones are now trying to rewrite the history of . . . the 1619 Project.”

We’ve already weighed in numerous times on the 1619 Project … its anti-American distortions of history … Hannah-Jones’ admission that she got the central premise of the project wrong … the absurdity of its receiving a Pulitzer Prize despite its many errors … and the revelation that Hannah-Jones had previously authored a racist screed against white people. 

Each time, we’re tempted to think we’re done with the subject, and that this story can’t possibly take any more twists to blow up the project’s credibility further.

But it truly is the gift that keeps on giving.

More from the Post’s account of the latest:

"Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize for her piece kicking off the series, which explicitly aimed to make the first slave’s arrival on these shores the seminal event of US history — to paint '1619 as our true founding.'

“'Out of slavery,' one Times editor explained, 'grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system.' Even the American Revolution was fought mainly to preserve slavery.

"Yet now, apparently to dodge increasing criticism from President Trump and others, she’s now insisting: 'The #1619Project does not argue that 1619 is our true founding' — for claims to the contrary, blame 'the right.'

"Huh? She’s on the public record at plenty of appearances, such as an Ann Arbor event, saying the project asserts 'our true founding is 1619 not 1776.' And the 2019 print edition of the project’s introduction says of the moment in 1619 when a ship with enslaved Africans arrived on our shores: 'America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began.'

"That line no longer appears in the online version, so the entire Times is a part of Hannah-Jones’ scheme to falsify her record."

Many Americans may not have been aware of the 1619 Project’s smearing of our country and attempt to rewrite history when it first was published. And that easily could have remained the case. That’s why we’ve felt it is so important to continue to cover this topic extensively, and it’s why we’re grateful for all those who have shown the courage to speak out against this radical and reckless assault on the truth. The Claremont Institute has been among the loudest and most important voices in this, and there have been many other laudable organizations and individuals as well.

It should serve as a source of encouragement for all of you who may think, in your moments of frustration, that nobody’s pushing back against the false narratives that the political left is trying to force on our culture.

If the truth is on our side — and it is — then we can break through and get the truth out.

NOTABLE QUOTES

“Our Senate majority will do exactly the same thing in 2020 that we did in 2016: Follow Senate history, follow the clear precedent in each situation, and do exactly the job we were elected to do. We are going to vote on President Trump's nominee to the Supreme Court this year.” ― U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell

“A reminder that it has been 42 days since [Kamala] Harris was tapped as the VP pick. There are 42 days until election day. The senator has not once formally taken questions from the press.” ― Deepa Shivaram