A new review of financial documents shows Democrats are pouring more money than ever into 2024 political campaigns, especially in close races.
Since 2018, that amount has steadily increased in comparison to Republican spending. By 2020, the parts of the country that supported Joe Biden for president constituted 71 percent of the country’s GDP.
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Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who was the first person in the country to sue the Biden administration over its COVID-19 vaccine mandates, is now co-leading another lawsuit with 11 other attorneys general over another aspect of the mandates. This new lawsuit challenges the mandate for private businesses with over 100 employees.
His first lawsuit, filed on September 14, primarily challenged the mandate’s applicability to federal employees and contractors. Brnovich and 23 other attorneys general next warned the Biden administration in a letter on September 16 that a new lawsuit was coming if the mandate wasn’t reversed. On October 22, Brnovich filed a request for an emergency temporary restraining order to stop the mandate from going into effect.
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The National School Boards Association (NSBA), which according to its website serves about 51 million public school students nationwide, made headlines recently when it requested that President Biden use federal terrorism statutes and issue other “extraordinary measures” against those pushing back against school boards that are indoctrinating children in critical race theory (CRT) and gender ideology. Much has already been written about this, and for good reason. In our Constitutional Republic, the federal government has no authority over education. As James Madison famously stated in Federalist 45, “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.” A quick scan of the Constitution reveals that the people and states have delegated no educational power to the federal government. Because all power originates in the people and the states, all powers not delegated to the federal government remain in the states and the people. The Tenth Amendment states this principle explicitly.
Instead of leaving educational policy (and challenges to it) to state and local governments, however, President Biden is using the power of federal law enforcement to quell debate and intimidate parents from exercising their First Amendment rights. Using federal law enforcement to chill debate on what is and should be a truly local issue is totalitarianism at its zenith. All totalitarian states centralize educational control in the federal government for the purpose of indoctrinating children in their preferred ideology. The Nazis, Soviets, and Communist Chinese all did (or still do) it, and now, following in their footsteps, the Biden administration is giving it a try, albeit in an indirect, more nuanced manner.
But this piece is actually about a second, more subtle point. A key presupposition underlying the NSBA’s request — and the Biden DOJ’s response — is that parental protests against school boards are completely unfounded. As the NSBA letter notes, “many public school officials are [] facing physical threats because of propaganda purporting the false inclusion of critical race theory within classroom instruction and curricula.” The letter then states that “[t]his propaganda continues despite the fact that critical race theory is not taught in public schools and remains a complex law school and graduate school subject well beyond the scope of a K-12 class” (emphasis added).
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The city of Tucson passed a resolution recently declaring that it will defy Arizona’s “Second Amendment Sanctuary” law, which says the state will not comply with federal laws and regulations that violate the Second Amendment. Arizona’s law prohibits the police and sheriffs from enforcing those laws. The state passed the 2nd Amendment Firearm Freedom Act into law in April.
Tucson City Councilman Steve Kozachik introduced the resolution last month. Democratic Mayor Regina Romero and the City Council unanimously passed the resolution on June 22, which they labeled an emergency.
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Chuck Smith has been a marine, a U.S. Navy JAG corps commander, and a lawyer. Now, he wants to be an Attorney General.
“Never before in the history of the United States has the Constitution been more at risk,” he told a crowd at the 41st annual GOP Pig Roast on Saturday.
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The Thomas More Law Center (TMLC) and Bursch Law PLLC filed a petition for rehearing by the entire Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals bench of a two-judge panel opinion dismissing Tennessee’s challenge to the constitutionality of the federal refugee resettlement program for lack of standing.
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This is the seventeenth of twenty-five weekly articles in The Tennessee Star’s Constitution Series. Students in grades 8 through 12 can sign up here to participate in The Tennessee Star’s Constitution Bee, which will be held on September 23. As we wrote about extensively earlier in this series, the foundational concept of Federalism in the United States Constitution is most specifically outlined in the Tenth Amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. One aspect of the Tenth Amendment very relevant to contemporary issues is that it makes absolutely no mention of reserving any powers not delegated to the federal government to cities or counties that are subdivisions of State governments. Indeed, the Constitution grants powers to only three entities–(1) the federal government, which it grants limited and enumerated powers, (2) the State governments, which along with (3) the people–and by that the Founders meant each of us as individual citizens–have all the powers not specifically delegated to the federal government reserved to them. The text of the Constitution, clearly enumerates thirty-three specific powers granted to the national government, as we explained in…
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State Rep. Bill Sanderson, chairman of the House State Government Subcommittee passionately opposed a 2013 bill intended to quantify how much state revenue was forcibly being diverted by the federal government to pay for its refugee resettlement program. First elected to the General Assembly in 2011, Sanderson voted for the gas tax this year. Last week, gubernatorial candidate Speaker Beth Harwell (R-Nashville) announced that she is supporting Sanderson’s bid to continue representing voters in his district at an event held in Kenton, Tennessee. After Governor Bredesen, a Democrat, had withdrawn Tennessee from the federal program in 2008, the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement chose Catholic Charities of Tennessee (CCTN) to continue the resettlement program for the state. The federal government also continued to rely on state revenue to support refugees resettled by the federal contractors in Tennessee. Testimony provided during debate on the 2013 bill cited a seventy-five percent increase in refugee arriving to Tennessee since CCTN took over the program even though the number of refugees arriving to the U.S. were declining. The bill still received enough votes to go to the full committee even with Sanderson abstaining from voting. In the full committee Sanderson spoke extensively against the bill after…
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This is the second part of the second of twenty-five weekly articles in The Tennessee Star’s Constitution Series. Students in grades 8 through 12 can sign up here to participate in The Tennessee Star’s Constitution Bee, which will be held on September 23. Federalism is a foundational concept framed in the Constitution of the United States which defines the relationship between the national government and each of the state governments that comprise our republic (thirteen such state governments in 1789, fifty now in 2017). Both entities–the national government and each state government–remain sovereign, while the powers of governance and responsibilities to the citizenry are balanced between the two. Federalism, along with The Separation of Powers within the national government (which we will discuss in tomorrow’s article) are the two foundational concepts of the Constitution that protect the freedoms and liberties guaranteed to individual citizens. “In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments,” James Madison, probably, or Alexander Hamilton, possibly, wrote of “the federal system of America” in Federalist Paper #51, one of the famous series of essays…
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