News

Democrat bill H.R. 0ne would undermine reliability and integrity of e1ections

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The Heritage Foundation is my favorite think tank, and they have a summary of what the law would do:

The Issue

H.R. 0ne would federalize and micromanage the e1ection process administered by the states, imposing unnecessary, unwise, and unconstitutional mandates on the states and reversing the decentralization of the American e1ection process—which is essential to the protection of our liberty and freedom. It would implement nationwide the worst changes in e1ection rules that occurred during the 2020 e1ection and go even further in eroding and eliminating basic security protocols that states have in place. The bill would interfere with the ability of states and their citizens to determine the qualifications and eligibility of v0ters, to ensure the accuracy of v0ter reg1stration rolls, to secure the fairness and integrity of e1ections, to participate and speak freely in the political process, and to determine the district boundary lines for electing their representatives.

What H.R. 0ne Would Do

  • Seize the authority of states to regulate v0ter reg1stration and the voting process by forcing states to implement early voting, automatic v0ter reg1stration, same-day reg1stration, online v0ter reg1stration, and no-fault absentee bal1oting.
  • Make it easier to commit fr4ud and promote chaos at the pol1s through same-day reg1stration, as e1ection officials would have no time to verify the accuracy of v0ter reg1stration information and the eligibility of an individual to v0te and could not anticipate the number of bal1ots and precinct workers that would be needed at specific pol1ing locations.
  • Degrade the accuracy of reg1stration lists by requiring states to automatically register all individuals (as opposed to “citizens”) from state and federal databases, such as state Departments of Motor Vehicles, corrections and welfare offices, and federal agencies such as the Social Security Administration, the Department of Labor, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services of the Department of Health and Human Services. This would register large numbers of ineligible v0ters, including aliens, and cause multiple or duplicate reg1strations of the same individuals and put federal agencies in charge of determining a person’s domicile for voting purposes (as well as that individual’s taxing state).
  • Constitute a recipe for massive v0ter reg1stration fr4ud by hackers and cyber criminals through online v0ter reg1stration that is not tied to an existing state record, such as a driver’s license. It would make it a criminal offense for a state official to reject a v0ter reg1stration application even when it is rejected “under color of law” because the official believes the individual is ineligible to v0te. It would also require states to allow 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds to register; when combined with a ban on v0ter ID and restrictions on the ability to challenge the eligibility of a v0ter, this would effectively ensure that underage individuals could v0te with impunity.
  • Require states to count bal1ots cast by v0ters outside of their assigned precincts, overriding the precinct system used by almost all states that allows e1ection officials to monitor v0tes, staff pol1ing places, provide enough bal1ots, and prevent e1ection fr4ud.
  • Mandate no-fault absentee bal1ots, which are the tool of choice for v0te thieves. It would ban witness signature or notarization requirements for absentee bal1ots; force states to accept absentee bal1ots received up to 10 days after Election Day as long as they are postmarked by Election Day; and require states to allow v0te trafficking (v0te harvesting) so that any third parties—including campaign staffers and political consultants—can pick up and deliver absentee bal1ots.
  • Prevent e1ection officials from checking the eligibility and qualifications of v0ters and removing ineligible v0ters. This includes restrictions on using the U.S. Postal Service’s national change-of-address system to verify the address of registered v0ters; participating in state programs that compare v0ter reg1stration lists to detect individuals registered in multiple states; or ever removing registrants due to a failure to v0te no matter how much time has elapsed. It also would substantially limit the public release of v0ter reg1stration information, making it almost impossible for nonpartisan organizations to verify the accuracy of reg1stration rolls, and prohibit states from using undeliverable e1ection mail as a basis for challenging a registrant’s eligibility.
  • Ban state v0ter ID laws by forcing states to allow individuals to v0te without an ID and merely signing a statement in which they claim they are who they say they are.
  • Expand regulation and government censorship of campaigns and political activity and speech, including online and policy-related speech. H.R. 0ne would impose onerous legal and administrative compliance burdens and costs on candidates, citizens, civic groups, unions, corporations, and nonprofit organizations. Many of these provisions violate the First Amendment, protect incumbents, and reduce the accountability of politicians to the public; its onerous disclosure requirements for nonprofit organizations would subject their members and donors to intimidation and harassment—the modern equivalent of the type of disclosure requirements the U.S. Supreme Court in NAACP v. Alabama (1958) held violated associational rights protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.
  • Reduce the number of Federal Election Commission members from six to five, allowing the political party with three commission seats to control the commission and engage in partisan enforcement activities.
  • Require states to restore the ability of felons to v0te the moment they are out of prison regardless of uncompleted parole, probation, or restitution requirements. Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment gives states the constitutional authority to decide when felons who committed crimes against their fellow citizens may v0te again. Congress cannot override a constitutional amendment with a statute.
  • Transfer the right to draw congressional districts from state legislatures to “independent” commissions whose members are unaccountable to v0ters. H.R. 0ne would make it a violation of federal law to engage in “partisan” redistricting and mandate the inclusion of alien population, both legal and illegal, in all redistricting. This is an anti-democratic, unconstitutional measure that would take away the ability of the citizens of a state to make their own decisions about redistricting.
  • Authorize the Internal Revenue Service to engage in partisan activity. H.R. 0ne would permit the IRS to investigate and consider the political and policy positions of nonprofit organizations before granting tax-exempt status, thus enabling IRS officials to target organizations engaging in First Amendment activity with disfavored views.
  • Limit access to federal courts for anyone challenging H.R. 1. The bill would prohibit the filing of any lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of H.R. 0ne anywhere except in the District Court for the District of Columbia and would allow the court to order all plaintiffs and intervenors, regardless of their number (such as all 50 states), “to file joint papers or to be represented by a single attorney at oral argument,” severely limiting the legal representation and due process rights of challengers.

I left out some of them, but there’s enough there that should scare you. This is the kind of thing that happened in 1930s socialist Germany to make sure that the secular left could not be challenged.

News

Woman who sent her kid to Baltimore public schools shocked to find he is a failure

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Fox Baltimore:

A shocking discovery out of a Baltimore City high school, where Project Baltimore has found hundreds of students are failing. It’s a school where a student who passed three classes in four years, ranks near the top half of his class with a 0.13 grade point average.

Tiffany France thought her son would receive his diploma this coming June. But after four years of high school, France just learned, her 17-year-old must start over. He’s been moved back to ninth grade.

“He’s stressed and I am too. I told him I’m probably going to start crying. I don’t know what to do for him,” France told Project Baltimore. “Why would he do three more years in school? He didn’t fail, the school failed him. The school failed at their job. They failed. They failed, that’s the problem here. They failed. They failed. He didn’t deserve that.”

[…]As we dig deeper into her son’s records, we can see in his first three years at Augusta Fells, he failed 22 classes and was late or absent 272 days. But in those three years, only one teacher requested a parent conference, which France says never happened. No one from the school told France her son was failing and not going to class.

“I feel like they never gave my son an opportunity, like if there was an issue with him, not advancing or not progressing, that they should have contacted me first, three years ago,” said France.

By the way, when I say that my older brother was destroyed by the public schools, this is what I’m talking about. He stayed home from school for an entire month with the “nanny” my parents hired, so that they could both go to work. And of course they had no idea, because my parents didn’t give a darn about us or our educations. This is the way it is for many children, including me. I had parents who had no idea what I was doing in school, and the first time they found out what I had done all year was report card day. That’s what you get when you trust the public schools. I understand that we were a poor, non-white immigrant family, so my parents had to both work, but that doesn’t excuse blindly trusting unionized public school teachers to do a good job. Parents have to monitor kids.

Cato Institute graphs education spending against test scores
Cato Institute graphs education spending against test scores

Advice for mothers

So, I don’t know much about this woman in the news story, but after reading her story, I have three pieces of advice for women in general that have nothing to do with her. And the younger women are when they get this advice, the better it will be for them.

This advice is specific to women who want their children to learn useful STEM skills, so that they can find a job that allows them to move out, get married, buy a home of their own, and retire.

  • Advice #1: Get married before you have children
  • Advice #2: Don’t vote for Democrat politicians
  • Advice #3: Don’t live in Democrat-run cities

That’s all. I’m pretty sure that if women followed these rules, then they wouldn’t get caught in situations where they are living in Democrat-run hell-holes and entrusting their fatherless kids to unionized public school teachers. Just. Don’t.

News

If we seriously want men to marry and become fathers, let’s repeal no-fault divorce

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I saw a very good article at the Heritage Foundation web site about the importance of fathers for children. The author Virginia Allen listed out some of the benefits that fathers provide to children:

Studies have found that children raised without a father are:

  • At a higher risk of having behavioral problems.
  • Four times more likely to live in poverty.
  • More likely to be incarcerated in their lifetime.
  • Twice as likely to never graduate high school.
  • At a seven times higher risk of teen pregnancy.
  • More vulnerable to abuse and neglect.
  • More likely to abuse drugs and alcohol.
  • Twice as likely to be obese.

From education to personal health to career success, children who lack a father find themselves at a disadvantage to their peers raised in a two-parent household.

I was looking for a good analysis of why there’s been a decline of marriage and fatherhood, and I found an article by Joe Carter on far-left The Gospel Coalition, of all places. By looking at marriage rates and historical events that changed the marriage rate, he was able to identify the cause of the decline of marriage – and fatherhood.

Marriage and divorce rates per capita
Marriage and divorce rates per capita

I’ll spare you the statistical analysis, which is excellent, and give you the conclusion – although you can guess it from the graph above:

Now that we’ve explored the data, what year should we use as the marker for the beginning of the decline of marriage in the United States? I would argue for 1985, the last year that the marriage rate topped 10 percent.

[…]What changed in 1985 that could have led to the decline in marriage? There are likely numerous factors—which we’ll examine in future articles—but one stands out in particular: By 1985, all states (except for New York) had enacted no-fault divorce legislation.

The most helpful book I know of about no-fault divorce is “Taken Into Custody”, by Dr. Stephen Baskerville. He wrote a column  for Crisis magazine that summarizes some of his ideas.

Excerpt:

Feminists were drafting no-fault divorce laws in the 1940s, which the National Association of Women Lawyers now describes as “the greatest project NAWL has ever undertaken.”

The result effectively abolished marriage as a legal contract. Today it is not possible to form a binding agreement to create a family.

The new laws did not stop at removing the requirement of citing grounds for a divorce, to allow divorce by mutual consent, as deceptively advertised at the time. Instead they created unilateral and involuntary divorce, so that one spouse may dissolve a marriage without any agreement or fault by the other.

Here’s what divorce does to the spouse who is the victim of the unilateral “no-fault” divorce:

Though marriage is a civil matter, the logic quickly extended into the criminal, including a presumption of guilt against the involuntarily divorced spouse (“defendant”). Yet formal due process protections of criminal proceedings did not apply, so forcibly divorced spouses became quasi-criminals not for recognized criminal acts but for failing or refusing to cooperate with the divorce by continuing to claim the protections and prerogatives of family life: living in the common home, possessing the common property, or—most vexing of all—parenting the common children.

Following from this are the horrendous civil liberties violations and flagrant invasions of family and individual privacy that are now routine in family courts. A personalized criminal code is legislated by the judge around the forcibly divorced spouse, controlling their association with their children, movements, and finances. Unauthorized contact with their children can be punished with arrest. Involuntarily divorced parents are arrested for running into their children in public, making unauthorized telephone calls, and sending unauthorized birthday cards.

In my conversations with men, no-fault divorce laws, and anti-male divorce courts are the main reasons given for why they do not pursue marriage and fatherhood. Men do not want to be coerced in a marriage with the threat of divorce by an unhappy wife. Men do not want to be subject to the government in so many areas of their lives if the wife does carry out the threat. They especially don’t want to be separated from their children. One my secular male friends told me that he would not marry unless the woman had evidence in her past of hating radical feminism and no-fault divorce. This was the main criteria. He actually was able to find a woman who was a men’s rights activist who hated divorce. But that was the only way he would marry.

Statistically speaking, the wife is more likely to initiate divorce than the husband. Women initiate 70% of divorces, the majority of those just because she is “unhappy”. I think this is because women get into marriage based on their feelings, and they think that it is the husband’s job to make them feel good. They see their happiness as the primary goal of the marriage, and see a marriage that does not make them happy as a marriage that needs to be ended.

Are we going to repeal no-fault divorce, then?

No-fault divorce was seen as a boon to women who had married the wrong men by following their hearts. It’s an interesting question to ask whether women really would want no-fault repealed. It would mean that they would have to get serious about who they marry, instead of just getting into marriage based on feelings. They would have to evaluate men according to expectations of what a man does in a marriage, instead of on feelings. They would have to think about what men want out of a marriage, and prepare themselves to provide for his needs. They would have to say no to their feelings, when choosing a man, and in keeping a man after the wedding.

If women aren’t willing to demand the repeal of no-fault divorce laws and get serious about men and marriage, then what’s the point of complaining that men don’t want to marry and become fathers? If you’re not willing to fix the root cause of the problem, then don’t complain about the problem.