GOP to Biden: Come to Your Census
The new president managed to slip one order through that could tilt the balance of the House and Electoral College.
Joe Biden hasn’t said where he stands on packing the courts, but we know one thing he’s willing to pack: Congress. While most people were focused on Biden’s big-ticket actions on Wednesday, things like rejoining the Paris Climate Accord and transgendering America’s bathrooms, the new president managed to slip one order through that could tilt the balance of the House and Electoral College for years. If you didn’t care about Census policy before, trust me. You care about it now.
It was a stealthy move, adding a major Census change to Biden’s stack of executive orders. The last thing Democrats want to do after the November election is draw more attention to how they’re systematically changing the process. And frankly, before now, most Americans probably had no idea how important the population count is to their political representation. Thanks to the Biden administration, they’re about to learn.
The radical Center for American Progress called what the president did “setting up the Census to succeed.” In reality, Biden was doing something quite different. He was setting up Democrats to succeed. In his first few hours as president, Biden rolled back Donald Trump’s policy and added illegal immigrants back into the Census count. Some of you are probably wondering, what’s the big deal? Well, the big deal is that what Biden just did is give millions of people who broke the law a voice in the political process.
Every 10 years, our country uses those Census numbers to redraw congressional lines. It’s all based on population. And when you include illegal immigrants, as Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) pointed out on “Washington Watch,” you’re rewarding the states where most of these undocumented people live. “I think the Republicans were very clear, and majority of Americans were very clear. We don’t feel like people who are in the United States illegally should be counted towards congressional reapportionment.” Just think about liberal states like California, he said. “There are estimated 2.2 million illegals living in California. That’s three [more] congressional districts.” And if you didn’t count the illegals for congressional reapportionment, that’s three less seats in California. It’s a significant shift either way.
Comer, like a lot of Americans, strongly believes, “It’s not right to reward states like California, who completely ignore our immigration laws, who have sanctuary cities, and use taxpayer dollars to welcome illegals into their state.” And, let’s not forget, Comer warned, “that gives them more Electoral College votes” too.
“What Joe Biden did yesterday by executive order is something that the Republicans on the House Oversight Committee have been adamantly against for over a year,” Comer explained. Think about where those California seats would come from, he said. Most likely, they’d be siphoned off from conservative red states, where illegal immigrants don’t inflate their population. “You’re going to see states like Alabama and West Virginia… Bible-belt states that are going to lose congressional seats. So they’re being punished, because they abide by our immigration laws. But states like California, who completely disregard them, are being rewarded.”
Changing the Census is a very consequential and serious move. “Those types of things can determine who controls Congress,” Comer warned. And, as the Kentucky Republican pointed out, Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) only won her speakership this year by four votes. “So three seats in California could be the difference, possibly, in someone like Pelosi being elected speaker.”
The last thing any congressman wants to see, Comer insisted, are the blue, liberal states “that are completely turning their nose up at the Constitution [and] doing things on a daily basis to attract illegals into this country, get rewarded with congressional reappointments, and we get punished. It’s just not fair.”
But fortunately, despite this sneak attack on representative democracy, Biden doesn’t hold all the cards. Thanks to the GOP’s overwhelming gains in statehouses last November, conservatives will have a major role in drawing the next district lines. “Republicans,” the FiveThirtyEight explains, “won almost every election where redistricting was at stake.” They won the power “to maximize the number of districts that favor their party… Both parties went into the election with a chance to draw more congressional districts than the other, but the end result was just about the best-case scenario for Republicans. As the map [here] shows, Republicans are set to control the redistricting of 188 congressional seats — 43 percent of the entire House of Representatives.”
Also, and state attorneys general have alluded to this, what Biden did by undermining legal citizens in the Census should be open to litigation. The AGs who’ve banded together to fight the assaults on their states will probably view this as an attack on their federal funding and representation in Congress. If they choose to, they could challenge the order.
Either way, it’s already obvious that Biden is no Uniter-in-Chief. Immediately after his inauguration speech, where he invoked St. Augustine and Martin Luther King, Jr., he went back to the White House and violated every principle those great leaders stood for. Then he made it clear to half the nation with this Census order that he has no interest in a fair election process. On day one, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell shook his head, this administration “took several big steps in the wrong direction.” It’s time for Biden to “refocus his administration,” McConnell warned, and stop sacrificing our country to “liberal symbolism.” Otherwise, the scars that these last several months have left are only the beginning.
Originally published here.
Republicans Penn. Hopes on Election Overhaul
Democrats may have manipulated state election laws in 2020, but they’ll have a much harder time doing it now — if Pennsylvania has anything to say about it. In some of the best news of year so far, Republicans from the Keystone State are vowing to completely overhaul the mail-in ballot system that may have wrongly handed Joe Biden the presidency.
In a memo from the Pennsylvania State Senate, Senators Patrick Stefano (R) and Doug Mastriano (R) were blunt, blasting the decision to force mail-in ballots on voters and calling the process “fraught with public confusion and misinformation.” With the state’s election credibility in shambles, they insist it’s time to repeal the act that gave the Democrats an opening to abuse the system.
“Taking advantage of the unprecedented use of mail-in voting,” the duo wrote, “Governor Wolf, Secretary of State Boockvar, and a rogue Supreme Court unlawfully usurped legislative power to set the conditions for an election result in their political interest. Their actions were a direct attack on the legislature’s power to set the time, place, and manner of holding elections, as granted by the U.S. and Pennsylvania Constitutions.” These “inconsistent” and “questionable” decisions were not, they insist, the “legislature’s intent.”
“By removing the provisions of law that allow for no-excuse mail-in ballots, we can regain some trust in our elections’ integrity.” It’s the only way, the Republicans argue, that we can “restore confidence in our democracy and shine a light into the shadow of doubt that has been cast over Americans’ most democratic process.”
For tens of millions of voters still frustrated by November’s result, this move by Republican leaders should come as a huge shot in the arm. There’s hope on the horizon. Despite all the ways the Left is trying to frustrate and silence conservatives, they still have the spine to stand up and fight for election integrity. We may not be able to change the outcome from 2020, but we can at least change how the system is safeguarded moving forward. And that ought to be the rallying cry in every statehouse across this great country.
In Georgia, even Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), who had plenty of run-ins with conservatives in the weeks following the election, is calling for an end to no-excuse mail-in voting, insisting that it “opens the door to potential illegal voting, especially in light of the federal rules that deny us the ability to keep voter lists, registration files, clean.”
We have two years until the next nationwide election. Every Republican in every state legislature should be demanding an audit of the processes, voter rolls, mail-in provisions, and any other irregularities that contributed to the disaster we witnessed in 2020. If a state like Pennsylvania has the guts to stand up to the liberal establishment and demand change, every state should. Contact your state leaders and ask them to restore faith in the democratic process by introducing legislation to end the universal mail-in ballot.
Originally published here.
‘The Woke Has Gone for Broke’
In the competition for “wokest school system of all,” Illinois just might be the winner. But be warned, parents in the other 49 states, it’s coming for you too.
We’ve heard about the outrages in classrooms like California, Wisconsin, and Virginia. But “keep your eye on Illinois,” Stanley Kurtz warns, because that’s “where the woke has gone for broke — and America may soon pay the price.” For five years, liberals have been quietly laying the groundwork for this massive shift in the land of Lincoln. And now, after a half-decade of moving this under America’s noses, they’re ready to blowup whatever common-sense learning standards are left and replace them with a formalized level of extremism no one has ever seen.
It all gets off the ground, Kurtz explained, with the state’s “Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards” that’s up for ratification in the general assembly on February 16. If it passes, he warned on “Washington Watch,” “Illinois is about to turn its entire K-12 system into a leftist indoctrination camp.” Now, maybe some of you are thinking, “Come on. It can’t be that bad.” It can, and it is. “Illinois is literally about to mandate that every one of its teachers adopt progressive political orthodoxy and impart that ideology to students.” And whoever doesn’t will lose their license.
“This is literally written into the standards,” Kurtz told listeners. “Teachers have to be willing to endorse the idea that America is a systemically racist country. Crucially for Christians, they have to be willing to affirm the gender identities of any of their students and to affirm the very idea that gender is complex and fluid, meaning there are many more than two gender identities. They have to be willing to lead their students in political leftist protests and lobbying. They are encouraged… [to] consider grading their students — not on their performance, on ordinary knowledge — but on their social justice activism.” If teachers don’t do those things, “well, then… the new standards make it very easy for any district that would want to force a teacher into therapy to help them eliminate their whiteness.”
One of the ways these leftist activists have gotten so far with this is because they use terms that sound good — like “action civics.” “It’s very important that your listeners understand this,” Kurtz urged, “because [they]re going to hear a lot of proposals at the state and federal level to encourage the teaching of ‘civics.’” But these aren’t your grandparents’ civics. Liberals aren’t suddenly suggesting that we teach about the three branches of government, federalism, and the Constitution. “Action civics” is a requirement for students to become “de facto community organizers,” protesting and lobbying for leftist causes. “So, when you hear a proposal to increase civics,” Kurtz warned parents, “you better look into it more carefully.”
If you’re thinking, “I live in a red state. There’s no way this kind of radicalism could come to a conservative district like mine,” think again. All you have to do is look at Joe Biden’s radical appointments to the Department of Education to realize there’s no containing this agenda. The men and women he’s nominated are rabid activists who will look for any opportunity to impose this on the country. Not to mention, Kurtz says, that there are national groups planning right now — within the next month or six weeks — to introduce proposals for civics laws just like this across the country. Their whole goal is to crush any resistance on the part of conservatives who don’t want to teach an un-American liberal philosophy.
So what can parents and others do? If you’re in the state of Illinois, contact your state representative today and voice your opposition. On the national stage, this battle is going to keep playing out. Pay attention to it. Engage in it, especially if it threatens your area. Consider running for the local school board. Most importantly, consider the educational options for your children. The public schools, even in good conservative states, are becoming a battleground for the minds, hearts, and souls of our children. It’s fine to complain about that on Facebook, but we need to take action too.
Maybe you need to consider homeschooling your son or daughter. Maybe you need to send them to a private school and make some other sacrifices financially. The reality is, you’re not going to have your kids for long. And if they’re indoctrinated by the world, you’re probably not going to have them at all. Make that investment in teaching your children. As the scripture says, “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” That’s one of the greatest responsibilities we have as parents, and it is one of the most important things that we can undertake as Christian citizens for the next generation.
For resources on making the switch, check out websites like Mom Possible from the Homeschooling Legal Defense Association. Learn how you can take a five quick steps to find your footing, get in touch with a homeschooling mentor, or scroll through the resources. Check out websites like Reimagine Education, where you can watch dozens of videos on everything from making a game plan to managing your time to dealing with special needs. As a homeschooling family, I can tell you that it takes adjustments, and there are challenges. But the end rewards are more than worth it.
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.
