Roe v. Wade had long been a prize jewel in the crown of leftist accomplishments. And Democrats fought hard against appointing the new justices who recently overthrew it. Now that it’s gone, the liberals are destroying every obstacle they can to get it back. Next target: the U.S. Senate filibuster.

The U.S. Senate is currently split between 50 Republicans, 48 Democrats, and 2 independents who caucus with their Democratic colleagues. Because of this 50-50 split, Vice President Kamala Harris has often stepped in to cast the tie-breaking vote on gridlocked bills, essentially giving the Democratic party a majority by one vote. While this bodes well on paper for the Democratic party, U.S. Senate dynamics often prohibit such a razor-thin majority from effectively passing bills—thanks to the filibuster.

Dating back to the ancient Roman senate, the filibuster is a tactic used by minority legislators to stall (and hopefully permanently block) a bill before it can be passed by the majority. Historically, a filibusterer would take the floor and speak for hours at a time—a 1908 U.S. Senate filibuster lasted eighteen hours—and since the U.S. Senate could not conduct business while a senator was talking, the bill would be stalled. (Since 1970, however, filibusters have not been required to be actual speeches; often, a minority senator will simply threaten to filibuster, which suffices to stall the bill under the current U.S. Senate dynamics.)

In the U.S. Senate, a 60-vote supermajority is required to end debate on a certain issue, which, practically speaking, means that a minority can use the filibuster to block a bill until 60 senators can be convinced to vote for it. And unfortunately for the Democratic party, they do not hold 60 seats in the Senate.

Democrats have found ways to work around the filibuster obstacle, such as compromising with Republicans or passing bills under the “budget reconciliation process” which allows certain bills to be passed with the 51 votes they currently have. But the long and short of it is, if Republicans won’t compromise, and the Democrat-sponsored bill can’t fit under budget reconciliation terms, then it’s very hard for Democrats to pass their initiatives. And, with such a momentous issue as abortion on the line, the party does not intend to let it stay that way.

The party has already tried once this year to get rid of the filibuster. In January, U.S. Senate Republicans stopped a Democrat “voting rights bill” for the fifth time in six months, and, failing yet again to reach the 60-vote count, U.S. Senate Democrats responded by attempting to change filibuster rules to allow the bill to pass by a 51-vote majority. Unfortunately for the Democrats, they couldn’t even unify their own party behind the motion. Democrats Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) opposed removing the sixty-vote margin, with Manchin arguing that

“Eliminating the filibuster would be the easy way out. It wasn’t meant to be easy. I cannot support such a perilous course for this nation . . . putting politics and party aside is what we’re supposed to do.”

Thus, with two Democrats joining the Republicans, the filibuster was preserved on a vote of 52-48. As it is now, an abortion law also looks unlikely before the November election.

However, despite being unable to pass important bills without Republican support, and now even unable to unify their own party to remove the filibuster roadblock, Democrats aren’t giving up. Their next goal—announced in advance—is to gain at least two more seats in the U.S. Senate. They can’t convert Manchin and Sinema, so they’ll simply fill two more seats with senators who will toe the party line. In her remarks to the Democratic National Committee a few weeks ago, Vice President Harris spelled out the game plan:

“Democrats, with just two more seats in the Senate, we can codify Roe v Wade. We can put the protections of Roe into law. (Applause) . . . I cannot wait to cast the deciding vote to break the filibuster on voting rights and reproductive rights.  I cannot wait.  (Applause.)  Fifty-nine days.  Fifty-nine days.“

If Democrats can flip two U.S. Senate seats in this election, then they will have the votes to overcome Manchin and Sinema’s immovable moderate stance, and with a new 50-50 vote on removing the filibuster, Harris will step in with the tiebreaker. That’s the new game plan: no annoying pro-filibuster majority, no filibuster. No filibuster, no Republican bill-blocking. No Republican bill-blocking, and Roe v. Wade is back again. This time, as a federal law passed by Congress and signed by the president.

This so-called “Women’s Health Protection Act” is the Democrats’ attempt to codify Roe‘s national abortion protections, which were removed when Roe was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling. As LifeNews summarizes, this bill would:

• “Eliminate all state and federal parental consent laws in relation to abortion”

• “Eliminate all state informed consent laws, including those that allow women to view an ultrasound prior to abortion”

• “Prevent states from passing laws to protect babies at 20 weeks, thereby joining countries like North Korea, China, Vietnam, Singapore, Canada, and the Netherlands in not protecting unborn children later in development”

• “Force doctors and nurses opposed to abortion to lose their jobs, and Catholic hospitals could lose public funds unless they perform abortions”

• “Eliminate decades-long limitations on direct taxpayer funding of abortion – including the popular Hyde Amendment, which has saved more than 2 million lives since enacted“

And since the act has already been passed in the U.S. House of Representatives, it is two U.S. Senate seats away from being signed by a very willing president. This upcoming election matters.

This midterm campaign, multiple Democrat candidates have appeared who are specifically advertising themselves as a Democrat votes against the filibuster. Further, a recent NPR poll reported that about two-thirds of Democrat respondees said they were more motivated to vote in the upcoming election, once the draft of Dobbs was leaked to the public. The alarming flipside is that only 40 percent of Republicans said the same thing. The battle is not over; now is not the time for Republican voters or legislators to sit on their behinds and bask in the laziness of apparent victory. The battle is moving from the courts to the Congress, and Democrats are, too.

If pro-life Republicans don’t get their act together, they could very well find themselves on the mat after all. Lives depend on it.

Anyone tired of “masking up” to enter an airport or get on a flight? There may be an end in sight largely thanks to U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY).  Although the air travel mask mandate was set to end on March 18, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) extended the mandate until April 18. But the extension begs the question, “Will it really end then?” Now Paul and others have taken real action to end the mandates once and for all.

The first promising step is S.J.Res 37. This resolution, introduced by Paul this past February, passed in the U.S. Senate recently by a vote of 57-40. Better yet, it represents bi-partisan support with eight Democrat senators voting in support of the resolution: Michael Bennet (D-CO), Jacky Rosen (D-NV), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Joe Manchin (D-WV), Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) and Jon Tester (D-MT). In typical fashion, U.S. Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) was the only Republican to vote against the bill.

Still, this measure, which expresses disapproval of the CDC’s mask mandate, faces significant challenges in the days ahead if it is to become law. The amount of votes it received are not enough to override President Biden’s veto threat. Moreover, proponents must garner enough support to overcome U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s reluctance to let the member of the House vote on it. But should the resolution fail to pass through its trip to becoming law, all hope is not lost.

Members of Congress, 17 to be exact, have filed a suit against the CDC which would end the federal mask requirement for passengers both on commercial flights and in airports. First names on the suit are, once again, U.S. Senator Rand Paul as well as U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), both of whom filed the suit in their home state of Kentucky. Other GOP House members: Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Paul Gosar (D-AZ), Dan Bishop (R-NC), Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Andrew Clyde (R-GA), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Warren Davidson (R-OH), Bob Good (R-VA), Brian Mast (R-FL), Bill Posey (R-FL) and Matt Rosendale (R-MT).

One of the best implications of this suit is its potential to end the government and, especially, unelected bureaucrats’ overreach in making declarations — calling them mandates, but treating them as law. According to Rosendale, those practices are nothing more than part and parcel of

“the fear mongering narrative of COVID-19. The CDC has forced Americans to wear masks on commercial flights for two years without legal standing. A mandate is not law, and Congress never passed legislation codifying the CDC’s mask wearing demands.”

And there is science to back up the ending of the air-travel mask requirement: COVID-19 transmission on airplanes is unlikely due to the ventilation systems. These systems not only mix outdoor air with recycled air via HEPA filters, but they limit air flow between rows – a key reason behind the lack of connection between outbreaks and commercial air travel. According to an article in The Journal of the American Medical Association,

“The risk of contracting COVID-19 during air travel is low. Despite substantial numbers of travelers, the number of suspected and confirmed cases of in-flight COVID-19 transmission between passengers around the world appears small.”

Confirming this view is Sebastian Hoehl, a researcher at the Institute for Medical Virology at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany. “An airplane cabin is probably one of the most secure conditions you can be in,” he noted.

Given the above information, it is clearly time to end the unwarranted and unscientific policy of mandating masks in airports and airplanes especially since the mandates have ended in virtually all other public places. If you’d like to be sure they do. . . .

Take ACTION: Please click HERE to contact your U.S. Representative and let him/her know how you feel about this. Also, please click HERE to let U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi know she should allow a vote on the measure.

U.S. Senator Paul seems to truly be the hero in this fight for “following the science” and for ending government overreach. Early last week, he introduced a pertinent amendment, a “separation of powers” so to speak, that would eliminate Dr. Anthony Fauci’s position as the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and replace it with three separate positions effectively limiting its power.

“We’ve learned a lot over the past two years, but one lesson in particular is that no one person should be deemed “dictator-in-chief.” No one person should have unilateral authority to make decisions for millions of Americans,” said Dr. Paul, a physician. “To ensure that ineffective, unscientific lockdowns and mandates are never foisted on the American people ever again, I’ve  introduced this amendment . . .This will create accountability and oversight into a taxpayer-funded position that has largely abused its power, and has been responsible for many failures and misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

For more information, click HERE.

Then get the right people elected to the school boards.

Written by Ben Boychuk

Suddenly, but unsurprisingly, the U.S. Justice Department is interested in parents protesting local school board meetings. Because of course it is.

In America in 2021, citizens’ loud but nonviolent demonstrations before elected officials are tantamount to domestic terrorism and “hate speech,” while the Black Lives Matter and Antifa insurrectionary violence of 2020—which resulted in at least 30 deaths, over $1 billion in property damage, and the brief rise of lawless “autonomous zones” in Seattle, Philadelphia, New York, and Richmond, Virginia—is “fiery but mostly peaceful protest.”

The danger is clear and present—it simply depends upon who is protesting. As one wag put it on Twitter, “The DOJ used to go after MS13. Now you want them to go after Moms of 13-year-olds?”

Parents don’t like what they see coming out of their local schools. But government officials would prefer to do their work unencumbered by public input. This is old news, with an arrogant new twist. Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe summed up the current conventional wisdom nicely at a debate with his Republican opponent the other week: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

That depends on what the schools are teaching, doesn’t it?

Indoctrination Nation

Parents have two grievances, broadly speaking. First, they oppose COVID-19-related mask mandates for their children. They note that the European countries we’re so often asked to emulate do not have mask (or COVID vaccine) mandates for schools. Sweden, where school is compulsory through the age of 16, actively discourages kids from wearing masks. And yet that country’s transmission rates have gone down population-wide.

The second grievance is also COVID-related, in as much as the lockdowns compelled more parents to notice what their kids are—and are not—learning. Many parents, including many black and Latino parents, do not want their children to be taught that America is a systemically racist nation and that its institutions (capitalism often gets mentioned here) are irredeemable

Parents across the country have shown up to normally staid school board meetings to demand that critical race theory be removed from the curriculum. Defenders of the race-based curriculum like to point out that “critical race theory” is not actually being taught in schools. But that’s just a semantic sleight of hand. No, kids aren’t reading Derrick Bell. Instead, they’re getting “social studies” (since American public schools don’t really teach history anymore) heavily informed by critical race theory and Marxist-tinged critical theory.

Parents are on to the scheme and they’re unhappy about it. The National School Boards Association on September 29 asked Joe Biden to intervene, alleging “America’s public schools and its education leaders are under an immediate threat.” The group says its members have “received death threats and have been subjected to threats and harassment, both online and in person.”

Making a terrorist threat is a crime not protected by the First Amendment. But it’s unclear why such threats could not be investigated by state and local law enforcement, rather than the feds. Well, the NSBA has an answer for that, too, although the rationale is paper-thin: “NSBA believes immediate assistance is required to protect our students, school board members, and educators who are susceptible to acts of violence affecting interstate commerce because of threats to their districts, families, and personal safety.” (Emphasis added.)

Interstate commerce? The NSBA knows that the federal government can do just about anything under the auspices of “interstate commerce,” even if the commerce never crosses state lines. The NSBA’s letter mentions “interstate commerce” three times, even though it never bothers to explain how parents protesting in Loudoun County, Virginia or Coeur d’Alene, Idaho affect the free movement of goods and services among the several states.

While the NSBA notes that some of its members have received threatening letters, and several meetings have been ended early because of crowds “inciting chaos,” it strains to document any actual violence. The NSBA leans on a “fact sheet” published in July by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, which only documents an increase in demonstrations and notes the presence in some instances of “militias and other militant right-wing actors” whose mere presence is supposed to be seen as intimidating.

(It’s unclear whether any school board members have been followed into bathrooms by irate demonstrators, as Arizona’s Democratic U.S. Senator Kyrsten Sinema was last week. Would that make a difference? As Joe Biden said the other day, such harassment is “part of the process.”)

The Tedious Work of Politics Redux

Obviously, it’s no fun for a school board member to be shouted at by a throng of 200 angry parents. But the First Amendment for the most part protects what parents are doing. Harsh speech is still protected speech.

That doesn’t mean federal authorities can’t make our lives miserable and chill legitimate speech. During the 1990s, attorney Hans Bader reminds, civil rights lawyers with the Clinton Administration “investigated citizens for ‘harassment’ and ‘intimidation’ merely because those citizens spoke out against housing projects for recovering substance abusers or other classes of people protected by the Fair Housing Act.” Those investigations ended after a federal appeals court ruled they violated the First Amendment. But how much did those people lose in time and money battling the federal government before they won?

And just because the courts ruled one way 20 years ago, doesn’t mean a different set of judges ruling on a similar set of facts wouldn’t go the other way today. Bader notes that in 2017, a federal judge “allowed bloggers to be sued for intimidation for angry blog posts that allegedly created a ‘hostile housing environment.’”

Here, once again, the tedious work of politics becomes unavoidable.

Parents might take a leaf from the literal playbook of a Los Angeles-based group called Parent Revolution. About 10 years ago, Parent Revolution was involved heavily with organizing parents at failing public schools to use a (now largely toothless) state law called the Parent Empowerment Act, also known as the “parent trigger.”

Parent Revolution’s insight was to teach parents to use labor-union organizing tactics. They produced a hardcover book, small enough to fit into a pocket, called The Parent Power Handbook. It detailed, simply and directly, how parents could use the law to organize and transform their children’s schools.

Most importantly, anyone could follow the model Parent Revolution laid out in the handbook.

“Step 1: Build Your Base,” “Step 2: Establish Your Chapter,” “Step 3: Pick Your Focus,” “Step 4: Launch Your Campaign.”

Every step involves practical organization advice. Schedule one-on-one conversations. Host house meetings with people you already know. Ask questions like, “What would an ideal school look like?” Try to identify parents who show an extra level of interest. Form a leadership committee. Decide on a focus—in this instance, removing noxious race-based curricula from schools. And then get people excited about it.

California’s parent trigger law had some limited success. It showed that motivated parents could make substantive changes. It also showed that the education establishment would fight viciously to stop them. (Almost every parent-trigger effort ended up in court.)

But if parents cannot get a receptive audience with their elected school board officials, they may need to resort to a tried-and-true, red-white-and-blue act of civil disobedience: the boycott.

When well organized, boycotts can be a highly effective form of political action. In 1968, Chicano activists in east Los Angeles organized a mass boycott of local schools to demand bilingual education. They got it.

Twenty years later, a smaller group of Latino parents organized a boycott of their own—this time, to insist that their kids learn English. They believed, correctly, that their children were being ghettoized in Spanish-only classes and receiving a second-class education. As one mother of a seven-year-old told the Los Angeles Times, “We want our children to be taught in English . . . that’s why we came to the United States. If not, better to keep her in my country. There she can learn in Spanish.” They won. And in 1998, Californians passed Proposition 227, which eliminated bilingual education statewide.

The boycotts succeeded for at least two reasons. First, schools are funded based on the number of pupils in attendance. In other words, the schools were losing money. Second, the parents avoided running afoul of truancy laws by enrolling their kids in free alternative schools for the duration of the boycott. Eventually, the authorities had to accept the parents’ demands.

If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Unseat ’Em

Every few years or so, parents recognize that what goes on at those otherwise boring school board meetings is pretty important to their kids’ wellbeing and educations. Local school boards may not have as much power as they once did—the number of U.S. public school districts has shrunk from more than 117,000 in 1940 to around 13,000 today—but they’re still important. In states with term limits (such as California), one party recognized decades ago that those seemingly insignificant local boards are ideal proving grounds for future candidates for statewide office.

Parents’ impassioned denunciations of noxious critical race theories and their offshoots make for great viral videos and may help shape future policies. Ultimately, however, they’re little more than political theater.

Unless and until these parents are in a position to persuade board members to change their votes, the only other option is to replace the board.

To that end, it isn’t enough to show up once to lodge a complaint. Attend every board meeting, not necessarily to speak, though sometimes to speak to put certain thoughts on the record. Mainly, be there to watch and listen. Pay close attention to the structure of the meeting. Scrutinize the agenda and the minutes, which usually appear online in advance. Take note of who else addresses the board during public comment. Get ahold of the budget and break it down line by line. Study state and local education codes.

Oh, and don’t forget to read the contract with the local teachers’ union.

There’s a reason that the first openly bisexual senator did not take her oath on the Bible. There’s a reason that an atheist website rebuked me for “misgendering” someone. Simply stated, to embrace the God of the Bible means to embrace His standards. To reject the God of the Bible means to reject His standards. Conversely, to reject His standards is to reject Him. This is really not rocket science.

Breitbart reported that, “Newly elected Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema refused to be sworn in on a Bible, opting, instead, to place her right hand on a book of laws, including the U.S Constitution and the Arizona Constitution.”

It is no coincidence that she is our first openly bisexual senator as well as the only member of the U.S. Senate who has no religious affiliation.

This doesn’t mean that she is a terrible person or that she has no moral values at all. And it doesn’t mean that she cannot serve the government. Of course not. There is no religious test for leadership either way (in other words, you can’t be disqualified for being a Christian or disqualified for not being a Christian).

But it does mean that her lifestyle and identity are at odds with the God of the Bible, hence her lack of religious affiliation and her refusal to swear in on the Bible. That is perfectly consistent.

Over at the “Friendly Atheist” site, a site which is certainly atheistic if not always friendly, Sarahbeth Caplin wrote an article titled, “Christian Writer Deliberately Misgenders Trans Woman to Defy ‘Social Madness.’” She accuses me of “faith-based bigotry masquerading as Christian love.”

As for one of the websites which published my article, she said this: “The folks at Charisma are eager to start off the new year with yet more doses of the only things they have to offer: fear-mongering and anti-LGBTQ bigotry.” (See here for my article.)

The truth be told, it is not bigotry to affirm biological realities, and the average transgender activist does not have science on his or her side. (By this I mean that the average person identifying as transgender is clearly of one biological/chromosomal sex but identifies as the opposite.)

Yet an atheist website that certainly claims to be rational and science-based embraces transgender activism with enthusiasm, vilifying those who reject it. Why?

And why is it that, according to a Pew Research poll, 92 percent of American atheists support same-sex “marriage”? Or, according to this same poll, 87 percent of these atheists believe that abortion should be legal in most or all cases?

A recent article by Sally Hunt on the Friendly Atheist website critiques the video arguments of pro-life atheist Terrisa Bukovinac. Hunt writes, “I watched [the video]. I’m not convinced. And that’s because it seems abundantly clear that the atheist ‘pro-life’ argument is identical to the religious one, except Bukovinac didn’t invoke ‘God’ throughout the monologue. Both arguments are logically flawed, though. An atheist who opposes abortion essentially says Abortion should be illegal because of my feelings, while a religious person would say Abortion should be illegal because of my feelings, which also happens to be what God wants.”

Obviously, Hunt misrepresents why Bible believing Christians so strongly oppose abortion. It’s not that we have our feelings, which happen to be what God wants too. Instead, we are convinced by God and His Word that the baby in the womb is a real human being, and therefore we align our feelings with the Word.

Hunt, however, rightly represents the atheistic worldview by stating, “Not every form of life is inherently precious, sacred, and valuable. That includes human forms of life.” Indeed, she states, “To say otherwise is arguably a religious position. (It’s religious people who believe we possess souls from conception thanks to God.)”

And with that observation, we come full circle to our premise: If we fail to recognize God and His Word, we will inevitably stray from biblical morality. We will reject the idea that He created us male and female. We will reject the idea that men and women are uniquely fashioned for each other. We will reject the idea that human life is sacred, beginning in the womb. And we will certainly reject the idea that human beings are created in the image of God, with all that implies.

That’s why I have argued that the only type of conservatism that can bring lasting change to America is a biblically-based, God centered conservatism. All other efforts will fall short in the end.

It is true that there “is far too much diversity among both atheists and theists to assume that they stand on opposite sides of any particular issue.”

But it is also true that general patterns apply and that the worldview of an atheist will be a very different than the worldview of a Bible-based theist. And that means that any true moral transformation in America will start with a “back to God” movement. It is the absence of God that is our greatest problem today.

This article was originally published at AskDrBrown.org