RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-irrational-misguided-discourse?token=

Politico on Monday night published what certainly appears to be a genuine draft decision by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito that would overturn the Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. Alito’s draft ruling would decide the pending case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which concerns the constitutionality of a 2018 Mississippi law that bans abortions after fifteen weeks of pregnancy except in the case of medical emergency or severe fetal abnormalities. Given existing Supreme Court precedent that abortion can only be restricted after fetal viability, Mississippi’s ban on abortions after the 15th week — at a point when the fetus is not yet deemed viable — is constitutionally dubious. To uphold Mississippi’s law — as six of the nine Justices reportedly wish to do — the Court must either find that the law is consistent with existing abortion precedent, or acknowledge that it conflicts with existing precedent and then overrule that precedent on the ground that it was wrongly decided.

Alito’s draft is written as a majority opinion, suggesting that at least five of the Court’s justices — a majority — voted after oral argument in Dobbs to overrule Roe on the ground that it was “egregiously wrong from the start” and “deeply damaging.” In an extremely rare event for the Court, an unknown person with unknown motives leaked the draft opinion to Politico, which justifiably published it. A subsequent leak to CNN on Monday night claimed that the five justices in favor of overruling Roe were Bush 43 appointee Alito, Bush 41 appointee Clarence Thomas, and three Trump appointees (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett), while Chief Justice Roberts, appointed by Bush 43, is prepared to uphold the constitutionality of Mississippi’s abortion law without overruling Roe.

Draft rulings and even justices’ votes sometimes change in the period between the initial vote after oral argument and the issuance of the final decision. Depending on whom you choose to believe, this leak is either the work of a liberal justice or clerk designed to engender political pressure on the justices so that at least one abandons their intention to overrule Roe, or it came from a conservative justice or clerk, designed to make it very difficult for one of the justices in the majority to switch sides. Whatever the leaker’s motives, a decision to overrule this 49-year-old precedent, one of the most controversial in the Court’s history, would be one of the most significant judicial decisions issued in decades. The reaction to this leak — like the reaction to the initial ruling in Roe back in 1973 — was intense and strident, and will likely only escalate once the ruling is formally issued.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18475/election-integrity-dead

Many election operatives know that elections are won or lost because of process. For decades, one side has been focused on policy, big ideas, and winning debates. Meanwhile, the other side has been focused on process and the rules of the elections game.

[A] war is taking place around elections that has nothing to do with voting machines being controlled by Italian satellites or Internet hackers. They don’t need to be.

Election process fights have become a Darwinian “survival of the fittest.” Whichever side can effectively adapt to a new technological or cultural environment often determines who wins and who loses.

In 2020, an unprecedented burst of mail ballots swamped election offices because of the fright of COVID. All over the country, judges struck down or suspended laws that would have ensured those mail ballots were processed according to the law. At the same time, hundreds of millions of dollars in private money poured into election offices to change the way the elections were run.

It is a dangerous place we find ourselves, where citizens through the legislative process are enacting safeguards to keep our elections clean and manageable, yet a hyper-funded onslaught has mastered the art of killing real, verifiable, integrity in elections.

First, do not assume there will be a “red wave” this November. Many election operatives have demonstrated a fierce ability to adapt and leverage cultural and technological awareness into electoral wins.

Second, a “red wave” cannot overcome the “blue wave” tactics of 2020 seen in urban areas flush with outside cash.

Third, the Biden administration is already turning the battleship of the entire federal government toward turnout in 2022. Institutions have mobilized every single agency into a weapon to increase voter turnout among “historically marginalized communities.” Decoded, that means racial groups. This is all happening with little fanfare, and little means to stop it.

It also means that every federal agency has had a year-long head start into morphing into a get-out-the-vote tool. It means housing, welfare, and education offices will be turned into turnout machines. Institutions have adapted and created an architecture using the powers of the state to target certain voters and get them to the polls.

For good measure, the Biden administration proposed a $10 billion federal fund available for the next decade to replicate and expand the cash injections to election offices like those seen in 2020. Another $5 billion is requested for the U.S. Postal Service so it can expand its role in voting-by-mail. Even if the administration gets a fraction of that request, it will make the $500 million spent in 2020 from private groups to increase urban turnout look like small potatoes.

Perhaps most of all, we can start to pay close attention to the fights going on behind the scenes — the process fights. For so long, we have rightfully cared about policies such as taxes, government spending, education, and energy. We try to move heart and minds. But others put policy second: they are worried about whether process helps or hurts their ability to move bodies and ballots. Process is driving the outcomes of policies; it is time to fully engage before our ability to engage at all is extinguished.

In the wake of the 2020 election, states across the country enacted laws to try to prevent a repeat of the chaos from that election. In some states such as Arizona, Texas, and Florida, laws were passed to prohibit the private funding of election offices. In others, ballot custody vulnerabilities were addressed, such as limits on harvesting and drop-boxes.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/02/january-6-committee-targets-gop-donors-ahead-of-2022-elections/

Judge Timothy J. Kelly and his colleagues on the D.C. District Court have acted as little more than rubber stamps for the Justice Department’s abusive prosecution of January 6 defendants. As I reported last month, Kelly, a Trump appointee, continues to hold six nonviolent Capitol protesters behind bars while allowing the Biden regime to delay trial dates and skirt its discovery obligations.

After months of tolerating the government’s broken promises related to sharing evidence with defense attorneys, Kelly finally issued a toothless order to compel prosecutors in one major case to finally produce Brady material or face consequences. (He won’t do anything.)

But Kelly isn’t just helping Joe Biden’s Justice Department punish Americans who dared to protest Joe Biden’s election that day. In a shocking ruling issued Sunday night, Kelly gave his imprimatur to the House Democrats’ January 6 select committee, paving the way for hyperpartisan, vengeful lawmakers such as Representatives Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) to potentially access the private information of Republican campaign contributors.

In February, the select committee subpoenaed Salesforce, a data and digital communications vendor for the Republican National Committee, demanding all records associated with fundraising efforts between Election Day and January 6, 2021—an event the committee’s lawyers refer to in court filings as an attack by “domestic terrorists.” The subpoena covered outreach conducted by the RNC, the Trump reelection campaign, and the Trump Make America Great Again Committee—a breathtaking trove of internal records and documents were requested including all communications between the company and the political organizations as well as any data reports generated by Salesforce.

The committee claims emails with hyperbolic language intended to raise money before Congress’ joint session on January 6 were culpable for inciting violence. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/03/bromide-politics-a-language-mauled-in-service-to-power/

We Can’t be the Only Ones Sick of the Way Democrats Perverted Words.

We’ve heard since we were school kids that control of the language means control of thought. Anyone who has doubts that this is exactly what the Democrats have in mind must have missed the news last week when the White House named Nina Jankowicz to be the first disinformation czarina in U.S. history. Their objective is to regulate our thinking.

At the same time, the Democrats and their propaganda department, known as the mainstream media, have been hammering the public with words and phrases that mean just what they want them to mean, neither more nor less. It’s their way of conditioning voters’ thoughts as well as creating a cultural and class divide that allows the Democrats to preen as moral superiors and boost their status.

Think of the many examples of language abuse by today’s Democrats:

Our democracy is at stake: A justification for anything on the left’s agenda.

First, they want the public to believe we live in a democracy. We don’t.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-many-inflation-warnings-did-biden-ignore-11651522620?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

New York Times readers may be puzzled by a headline on the newspaper’s website this week: “Biden Received Early Warnings That Immigration and Inflation Could Erode His Support”. Is this news? Especially on inflation, in 2021 it was striking that some prominent members of the Obama economic team were joining conservatives in urging the President not to ignite his desired bonfire of federal spending. But this week’s Times dispatch is nevertheless useful in attempting to understand the failures that haunt the Biden presidency.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns report in the Times:

President Biden enjoyed high approval among Americans in the early months of his presidency . . .  But privately Mr. Biden’s lead pollster was already sounding the alarm that even with the early successes, certain gathering threats could sink support for the president and his party.
“Immigration is a growing vulnerability for the president,” John Anzalone and his team warned in a package of confidential polling, voter surveys and recommendations compiled for the White House. “Voters do not feel he has a plan to address the situation on the border, and it is starting to take a toll.”
Within a month, there was another stark warning. “Nearly nine in 10 registered voters are also concerned about increasing inflation,” said another memo obtained by The New York Times.

Since we’re talking about the Times, this column must issue the standard cautions against believing reports based on anonymous sources.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/leaked-draft-of-supreme-court-opinion-indicates-roe-v-wade-may-be-overturned-11651554510

WASHINGTON—A leaked Supreme Court draft opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito and published late Monday by Politico indicated the court may be preparing to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 precedent that established a constitutional right to an abortion.

The draft, dated from February, couldn’t be independently confirmed, but legal observers said it appeared authentic. The Supreme Court’s spokeswoman declined to comment.

The 67-page opinion, marked as a first draft, declared that Roe was “egregiously wrong and deeply damaging,” and that Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a 1992 decision that limited but didn’t eliminate abortion rights, prolonged the court’s error.

“Abortion presents a profound moral question. The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion,” the draft opinion said. “Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”

The draft, written in February, doesn’t necessarily represent the court’s ultimate decision in the case or even the majority’s current thinking. But it is consistent with the tenor of December’s oral arguments in the case challenging Roe, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, concerning Mississippi’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks. The draft was labeled the opinion of the court, implying a majority of justices had agreed with it.