Mid-Day Snapshot · June 17, 2024

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“From The Patriot Post (patriotpost.us)”.

THE FOUNDATION

“The great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others.” —James Madison (1788)

ON THIS DAY in 1775, the Patriots fought the British at the Battle of Bunker Hill near Boston, the first major battle of the war. Ordered not to fire on the advancing 2,000 British regulars “until you see the whites of their eyes,” more than 3,200 Patriots took out half of the enemy soldiers before running out of ammunition and falling back. It was technically a British victory, but it invigorated and encouraged the Patriots.

IN TODAY’S DIGEST

EXECUTIVE NEWS SUMMARY

Douglas Andrews, Thomas Gallatin, & Jordan Candler

Government & Politics

  • Team Biden’s losing battle with decrepitude: Try as she might, Jill “Lady MacBeth” Biden can’t fix her cognitively broken husband. Nevertheless, she persists. “This isn’t just about stopping an extremist,” she said at a campaign event in Green Bay over the weekend, “and this election is most certainly not about age. Joe and that other guy are essentially the same age. Let’s not be fooled. But what this election is about, it’s about the character of the person leading our country.” Perhaps a certain low-information segment of Trump-hating voters is persuadable to arguments about the Big Guy’s character. And they’d better hope so, given that his campaign is about to unveil a $50 million ad buy attacking “convicted criminal” Donald Trump. But with images of her husband being very publicly and very virally helped off the stage by Barack Obama during a $30 million Hollywood fundraiser this weekend, arguments about character are like arguments about deck furniture. The Bad Ship Biden is listing, and the first lady, who alone could’ve spared both her husband and her country all this embarrassment, is utterly unmoved. “Joe isn’t one of the most effective presidents of our lives in spite of his age,” she lied, “but because of it.”
  • Inside Biden’s 48 hours at the G7 where alarmed allies noticed he was “losing focus and tired” after missing dinner, wandering off, and snapping at the press (Daily Mail)
  • Obama pleads with digital influencers to back Biden (Fox News)
  • Taxes or tariffs: At a recent meeting with Republican lawmakers at the Capitol Hill Club, Donald Trump “floated the concept of eliminating the income tax and replacing it with tariffs,” explained Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY). It is an intriguing idea, but would it work? Leading economists are skeptical. According to Erica York, senior economist of the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, “The individual income tax raises about $2 trillion annually on a tax base of personal income of roughly $15 trillion,” whereas “Customs duties currently raise about $80 billion annually on imports of $3.4 trillion.” American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Kyle Pomerleau also threw cold water on the idea, observing that “it would take a tariff rate of 71 percent” to produce the same revenue currently derived from income taxes. Furthermore, Pomerleau asserts, “A tariff rate of 71 percent would dramatically reduce the volume of imports. As a result, the revenue generated would be nowhere close to $2.2 trillion.” However, this novel idea could work as a campaign issue to highlight and criticize the federal government’s overspending problem, as well as the fact that our markets are overrun with Chinese imports.
  • NewsGuard probe: NewsGuard claims to be a nonpartisan and unbiased organization that rates news organizations for trustworthiness, and it gets federal funding for this self-appointed role of the “arbiter of trustworthy news” outlets. However, as we at The Patriot Post and other conservative news outlets can attest, NewsGuard is anything but unbiased. Given this reality, the House Oversight Committee announced it will launch a probe of NewsGuard. “This appears to be a very biased, very unfair service that’s getting federal funds. It could be another backdoor attempt at censoring conservative media outlets,” said Representative James Comer (R-KY). Somehow, he noted, “networks like MSNBC and CNN [get] tremendous grades” while conservative alternatives get “very poor grades.” The criteria is problematic for another key reason, he argued. “They turn around and they offer their grades to advertisers, and this is a form of, I believe, trying to discourage advertisers from advertising on conservative networks,” Comer noted. “There’s a concerted effort by the federal government to censor conservative media outlets,” and he wants to “determine whether there’s been any criminal laws broken.”

Economy

  • Homeownership is expensive: If Bidenomics is working so swimmingly, shouldn’t regular folks be able to afford a house? We ask because a recent report by Bankrate makes it clear that home ownership has become increasingly less attainable since Joe Biden became president. As Bankrate notes: “The average annual cost of owning and maintaining a single-family home in the U.S. is 26% higher now compared to four years ago. … Bankrate calculated the average costs of property taxes, homeowners insurance, home maintenance costs and electricity, internet and cable bills and found that they add up to $18,118 a year for a typical single-family home (valued at $436,291 per Redfin) in all 50 states. … Nationally, that is an additional $1,510 per month on top of a mortgage payment. In 2020, those same expenses totaled $14,428 annually for a typical single-family home, equivalent to $1,202 per month.” Indeed, the cost of buying a new house just hit a new record, according to Fox Business, which reports the median U.S. home sale price recently hit $394,000 — a 4.4% increase from a year earlier. Thus, under Joe Biden, the American Dream has clearly become the American nightmare.
  • Conservative think tank files suit against Biden over “energy efficient” appliance rules (Not the Bee)
  • Biden prepared to use oil reserves again to lower gas prices (Washington Examiner)

National Security

  • Partisan battle over national defense: On Friday, the House passed the National Defense Authorization Act largely along partisan lines. Only six Democrats crossed over to vote with the Republican majority, with the final tally being 217-199. The traditionally bipartisan-supported NDAA has become much more politicized of late as the Biden administration has sought to use the military to push its hard-left social agenda. A number of components of the NDAA, which Democrats and the Biden administration have objected to, are a provision blocking the use of taxpayer funding for gender-bending medical treatments, pulling back on climate change funding initiatives in the military, limiting the Pentagon’s push of DEI programs, and the blocking of Joe Biden’s policy to reimburse military personnel who travel to other states for abortions. The Democrat-controlled Senate will likely seek to eliminate many, if not all, of these commonsense provisions.
  • Another illegal immigrant, another heinous murder: We may never know just how much damage Joe Biden has done to our country via his wide-open southern border and the 10 million or so illegals he’s allowed to pour into our country, but this weekend, we saw yet another example of it. As NBC News reports: “A fugitive wanted in El Salvador in the killing of a young woman was arrested in the murder last year of a Maryland hiker, authorities said Saturday. The suspect, Victor Antonio Martinez-Hernandez, 23, was arrested in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at about 11:30 p.m. Friday, Harford County, Maryland, Sheriff Jeff Gahler said at a news conference.” The body of the victim, Rachel Morin, a mother of five, was discovered at Ma and Pa Trail in Bel Air, Maryland, last August 6, the day after her boyfriend reported her missing. Investigators believe Martinez-Hernandez “was hiding adjacent to a trail and where Rachel was walking and attacked and killed Morin before fleeing Maryland.” This murder, of course, calls to mind the equally heinous murder of Laken Riley, and it also raises a question our Mark Alexander has been asking for nearly two years: Where’s the national database of violent crime committed by these illegal immigrants?
  • Biden planning to offer pathway to legal status to migrants who have lived in the U.S. for 10 years (NY Post)
  • Vladimir Putin to visit Kim Jong Un in North Korea as alliance grows (National Review)
  • WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich set to begin espionage trial in Russia (Fox News)

Culture

  • Good news: Title IX gender-bending blocked: Last Thursday, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty blocked the Biden administration’s rewrite of Title IX, calling it an “abuse of power” and a “threat to democracy.” Doughty granted a preliminary injunction against the Biden administration’s new Title IX rewrite after four states — Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, and Idaho — challenged it. Doughty explained, “This case demonstrates the abuse of power by executive federal agencies in the rulemaking process. The separation of powers and system of checks and balances exist in this country for a reason.” Doughty also rejected the Biden administration’s unilateral redefinition of the term “gender discrimination,” noting that Title IX “only included discrimination against biological males and females at the time of enactment.” Doughty reasoned that such a terminology change could only come about via an act of Congress.
  • West Virginia judge rules students who protested trans inclusion in girls track and field cannot be punished for protest (PM)
  • Girls left in dust as male-born transgender athletes take state track titles in five states (Washington Times)
  • NBC affiliate employee fired after two decades of service for sharing “Straight Pride” meme (Not the Bee)
  • 171,300 patients traveled out of state for abortions in 2023 (The Hill) (Correction: 342,600 patients traveled out of state. 171,300 returned home.)

From the “Wacky Ideas” File

  • The recruiting crisis continues, thanks to the Demo defunders: It’s hard to believe that it’s come to this, but the Seattle Police Department is so desperate for cops that it’s now recruiting DACA recipients to fill out its depleted ranks. Take a look. As Law Enforcement Today reports: “In April, KTTH’s Jason Rantz reported that staffing on the Seattle PD is at levels not seen in 67 years. As of December 31, 2023, the department had only 424 police officers working, the last date for which data was available.” Coincidentally, Barack Obama’s unconstitutional Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy — which protects from deportation immigrants who were brought illegally to the U.S. as children — turned 12 on Saturday, and Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security, headed by impeached DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, marked the anniversary by celebrating its recipients. Let’s be clear about how we got here, though: In the wake of George Floyd’s death, Democrats demonized law enforcement and called for the defunding of police in communities across the country. Never forget.

Misc.

  • Nikki Haley mourns the death of her father on Father’s Day (The Hill)
  • Couple who shielded their two young kids during Michigan splash park shooting shot combined seven times (NY Post)
  • Trump’s CDC director: Gain-of-function research will cause bird flu pandemic with 25-50% mortality rate (Daily Wire)

For the Executive Summary archive, click here.

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FEATURED ANALYSIS

Supreme Court Says ATF Can’t Legislate

No executive agency can write the laws, said SCOTUS in striking down the ATF’s ban on bump stocks.

Nate Jackson

The Rule of Law and constitutional separation of powers matter, said the Supreme Court in Friday’s 6-3 ruling in Garland v. Cargill. In striking down the bump stock ban issued by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in 2017, the Court said the case was less about the Second Amendment than it was a rebuke of executive overreach.

“On more than 10 separate occasions,” noted Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in his majority opinion, the ATF declined to regulate bump stocks because they do not qualify as machine guns under the National Firearms Act of 1934. That law all but banned “machineguns” and was later upheld by the Supreme Court in United States v. Miller (1939). The law defined a “machinegun” as “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger” (26 U.S.C. §5845(b) [emphasis added]).

Thus, Thomas took space in his ruling to explain the basic functionality of a bump stock: A machine gun “automatically” fires multiple rounds “by a single function of the trigger,” he said, but bump stocks don’t do that. They are instead “a plastic casing that allows every other part of the rifle to slide back and forth.” That helps fire rounds more quickly, but it is not, based on the statutory language, a machine gun. That definition, Thomas said, “hinges on how many shots discharge when the shooter engages the trigger.” A rifle with a bump stock is still a semiautomatic weapon — one bullet per trigger pull.

The ATF issued the ban under Donald Trump after the Las Vegas massacre, in which the killer used rifles affixed with bump stocks to murder 58 people and wound more than 500. The political pressure to “do something” was immense, and as is often the case these days, it’s easier to let bureaucrats make those decisions than for members of Congress to make tough votes.

Congress abdicating its authority does not confer it on the ATF, no matter how much Democrats hilariously caterwaul about the Supreme Court “legislating from the bench.” No, the Court prohibited the ATF from legislating in Congress’s stead.

There are more than half a million bump stocks in circulation, bought legally by American citizens before the ban. Turning law-abiding citizens into felons with the stroke of a bureaucratic pen is not consistent with the Rule of Law — or even the “democracy” that left-wingers are so hot and bothered about protecting.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor was caught up in the emotion of it all, as well. In her dissent, she even tried to argue with Thomas on the technicality of function. “Just as the shooter of an M16 need only pull the trigger and maintain backward pressure (on the trigger),” she wrote, “a shooter of a bump-stock-equipped AR-15 need only pull the trigger and maintain forward pressure (on the gun).” That’s simply incorrect.

Amusingly, Sotomayor scored what in soccer is known as an own goal, writing, “Within a matter of minutes, using several hundred rounds of ammunition, the [Las Vegas] shooter killed 58 people and wounded over 500. He did so by affixing bump stocks to commonly available, semiautomatic rifles.”

Did you catch that? “Commonly available.” In its 2008 Heller ruling, the Supreme Court determined that the Second Amendment, at the very least, protects firearms “in common use.” Sotomayor just admitted — in a Supreme Court dissent on firearms law — that AR-15s are in common use.

Second Amendment advocate Charles C.W. Cooke writes, “Sotomayor even uses the word ‘common’! Not ‘everyday’ or ‘universal’ or ‘normal’ or ‘usual,’ but common — the very word that was used in Heller.”

She’s right, of course, and that goes a long way to undermining Joe Biden’s commonly used refrain demanding a renewed ban on such firearms. He often demands a ban, by the way, in conjunction with threatening the American people with F-15s and sometimes even nuclear weapons. Both are more lethal than bump stocks.

Sotomayor was wrong, however, to write, “When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.” If the law says it’s a bird, it’s a bird.

Again, the point of this ruling is primarily about the constitutional separation of powers, which Justice Samuel Alito made plain in his concurrence. “There is a simple remedy for the disparate treatment of bump stocks and machineguns,” he says. “Congress can amend the law — and perhaps would have done so already if ATF had stuck with its earlier interpretation. Now that the situation is clear, Congress can act.”

This ruling will no doubt have an effect on other ATF cases. The bureau already lost a pistol brace case before a district court last week, as well as a case dealing with the definition of a gun dealer back in April.

In short, the ATF is not empowered to enact the Left’s gun-grabbing agenda without legislation passed by our elected representatives. And even then, the government is bound by the Second Amendment. Memo to Joe Biden and other presidents: Governing by executive diktat is no way to preserve “democracy.”

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MORE ANALYSIS

BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

For more of today’s columns, visit Right Opinion.

BEST OF VIDEOS

SHORT CUTS

The BIG Lies

“Our personnel have done an extraordinary job in implementing a very big shift in how we operate on the southern border.” —DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas

“The Supreme Court is [sic] never been as out of kilter as it is today. I mean, never.” —Joe Biden

“I think there’s a crisis on the Court. … This Court is becoming brazenly corrupt and brazenly political.” —Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT)

Dumb & Dumber

“I’m extremely proud of my son Hunter. … He’s one of the brightest, most decent men I know.” —Joe Biden

“You have a president of the United States who is [the] living embodiment of the rule of law.” —MSNBC’s Andrew Weissmann

“Joe isn’t one of the most effective presidents of our lives in spite of his age but because of it.” —Jill Biden

Who Wants to Tell Them?

“I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim June 15, 2024, as World Elder Abuse Awareness Day.” —A Proclamation on World Elder Abuse Awareness Day, 2024

For the Record

“The clips of Biden aimlessly wandering off are bad. But make no mistake: behind the scenes, Biden’s performance is much, much worse.” —Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR)

Upright

“I think [addiction] is a very serious thing. … It’s a very tough situation for a father. It’s a very tough situation for a brother or sister … whether it’s alcohol or drugs or whatever it may be.” —Donald Trump with some compassion for Hunter Biden (“Of course, no other addicts collect millions of dollars in graft from foreign governments and set aside cuts for the ‘Big Guy.’” —Mark Alexander)

Political Futures

“How is it that having an uncle cannibalized would reflect favorably on you? What gears must turn in the political mind to trick oneself into believing this? Has anyone ever looked at a candidate and thought, ‘I like where he stands on taxes, but I’m concerned that no one in his family was turned into a plate of ribs’?” —Christian Schneider

“It is easy to rally the people against what they all hate: corrupt, lawless dictatorships. It takes a superhuman effort to unify people behind a new allocation of power in which the rule of law is king and the king is not law. People who gravitate to politics are characteristically sociopaths with insatiable cravings for absolute power. They abhor separation of powers, which arrests dictatorial ambitions.” —Armstrong Williams

And Last…

“Israel is the only nation on earth that is tasked with protecting its own people and its enemies. Every innocent lost life is, of course, a tragedy. But if you don’t want to be placed in harm’s way, don’t hold hostages in your homes and neighborhoods, and don’t cheer and support a government that puts your life in constant danger for a lost cause.” —David Harsanyi

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MEMES & CARTOONS

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For more of today’s memes, visit the Memesters Union.

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For more of today’s cartoons, visit the Cartoons archive.

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