The fall of the Southern Poverty Law Center may have come as a surprise to some people, but it was hardly a shock to Jim Tharpe. The retired reporter, who used to be the managing editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, had a front-row seat for the bigoted dysfunction of the SPLC for years. As the journalist who dropped the first bombshell about the group’s toxic culture in 1994, he was just waiting for the rest of the country to catch on.

In a refreshingly frank column for the Washington Post, Tharpe talks about the open secret of what went on behind the closed doors of SPLC’s Poverty Palace. “To those of us familiar with the SPLC and its inner workings, the allegations swirling around the latest drama were familiar. The question isn’t what went wrong at the SPLC; it is why it took so long for the rest of the country to learn what local reporters already knew. It will probably take a federal investigation to fully unravel this deep-South mystery and provide a credible, long-term fix.”

Tharpe thinks back on his time at the Advertiser more than two decades ago. Just a block from SPLC headquarters, he was the first to sense something about the organization was horribly wrong. He was so sure of it that he started to push for the group to be investigated, especially, he writes, “after ongoing complaints from former SPLC staffers, who came and went with regularity but always seemed to tell the same story. Only the names and faces changed. The SPLC, they said, was not what it appeared to be. Many urged the newspaper to take a look.”

At the time, the Advertiser was in good stead with the SPLC. Like other media outlets, Tharpe writes, “we generally parroted SPLC press releases. We also became friends with SPLC staffers, occasionally attending the center’s parties. Some of my reporters dated staffers at the center.” That all changed suddenly, when the newspaper started digging deeper into the group’s shady finances and its workplace culture.

Despite legal threats and a refusal to cooperate, the Advertiser wrote the first scathing exposé into the SPLC’s “questionable practices.” The group’s leadership went on the attack, insisting the series (which was a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize) wasn’t true. Now, 25 years later, Tharpe shakes his head, the problems still haven’t been resolved. It’s time, he argues, for a full and complete investigation — especially into the SPLC’s finances. “It should look at what the center has told donors in its mail solicitations over the years. And it should take a close look at how that donor money has been spent. Investigators should also look at how SPLC staffers have been treated over the years. Where was the center’s board when this mistreatment was going on? And why did no one step up sooner?”

In the meantime, at least one of the tech giants is making the wise (and overdue) decision to back away from the radioactive organization. In a statement to the Daily Caller, a source inside Twitter confirmed that “The SPLC is not a member of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council or a partner the company has worked with recently.” As recently as last year, the social media company listed the group as one of “safety partners” helping the platform police “hate.” Although Google and Amazon haven’t followed suit, you can bet that the more people uncover about SPLC, the faster the clock is ticking.

Originally published here.

Crime Flies When You’re Suing Trump

While President Trump gets to work on the border wall, House Democrats are trying to build their own blockade in the usual place: federal court. In an administration that can’t sneeze without liberals suing it, the far-Left is making one last ditch effort to stop the White House from building the wall Congress authorized almost 13 years ago. But if the courts’ own data on crime is admitted as evidence, House Democrats have less of a case than ever.

Before Democrats pulled the trigger on another legal challenge, they were already on shaky ground. Under the National Emergencies Act, President Trump already had all of the authority he needed to finish the job on the wall. “President Trump is… acting exclusively within the authority that Congress has explicitly granted to any president [under the act],” experts like Ken Klukowski have pointed out. Not to mention, the money liberals are complaining about has already been approved by Congress.

This president hasn’t “conjured funding from thin air (the military construction and Army Corps funding has already been appropriated),” the Federalist argues, “nor is he using funds for purposes explicitly prohibited by Congress (to the contrary, Congress explicitly authorized the construction of a border wall).” Still, the Left insisted on making the president a prophet, who knew that no matter what he did within the realms of his authority, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) would conjure up some reason to litigate.

Of course, Democrats will spend the next several months trying to persuade judges that there is no crisis on the border — which is almost laughable in light of our current statistics. In February alone, America’s border patrol estimated that 76,000 migrants had crossed illegally into the United States. If that isn’t a crisis, what is? What’s worse, CNSNews’s Terry Jeffrey points out, is that an alarming percentage of these people are coming with dangerous intentions.

Digging deep into some new government reports, Terry was stunned to find that the five federal courts who lead our country in criminal convictions are all along the Mexican border. The busiest judges? The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, which ranked number one overall. “It convicted 8,179 criminal defendants and sentenced 7,126 of them to imprisonment in the last fiscal year.” These are people, Terry told me on Thursday’s “Washington Watch,” “who were prosecuted in front of a federal district judge in a court on the border, convicted, and sentenced to prison. There are other people who were merely fined, other people who were released on supervision. These are the people who did crimes serious enough to hear, ‘You’re going to jail, pal.’”

“If you talk to assistant U.S. attorneys who work in these districts, they know this… If you want to be in a place that’s very busy, go down to west Texas, south Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, or California. And the real dynamic is this: the drug cartels, alien smugglers, and other types of criminals, they know that the U.S. border is not secure. They know they can make a lot of money by bringing contraband, whether it’s people or drugs — across the border. There’s a lot of crime associated with that — up to and including murder.”

And, Terry explains, there’s also the heavy volume of convictions from the federal magistrate court system. Ninety percent of the criminals convicted there are also in those same five districts along the border. So how on earth could anyone argue that there’s no problem on the Mexican border?

“It’s absurd,” Terry told me. “It’s absolutely absurd… Every single year going back to 1959, the office of the U.S. attorneys has published an annual statistical report where they have similar data that show the same pattern… And it really shows the negligence of our government. For years and years, they’ve known this is going on. People on both sides of the border are being victimized by crime, including by serious violent crime, and this is reflected in the caseloads of our courts and the government isn’t doing anything about it.”

“[Liberals] don’t want to debate these facts, because they know they’re true — and they’re willing to pay this price and make the American people pay this price from the benefit they think they derive from allowing illegal aliens to come across the border.”

There’s no doubt that this is a crisis — or that President Trump is justified under the law and by the circumstances to fix it. House Democrats may not have the stomach for addressing the problem, but it’s time they got out of the way of an administration that does.

Originally published here.

This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.