Articles by Andrew Thomas
Trump Still Rewriting the Playbook
Trump’s single best moment, arguably, was when he rubbed in the fact that millions of dollars of Clinton TV ads attacking him—ads unanswered, deliberately, by the frugal Trump campaign—had proven completely ineffective. In that single stroke, unrehearsed and devastatingly accurate, Trump reminded everyone how and why he earned his place on the world’s most exclusive stage. Continue reading
Meteors Colliding: The Election that Gave Us FDR and Hitler
Election years, by definition, are pivotal moments in history. So it is that every four years, leaders summon partisans to the polls with assurances this will be the “most important election in American history,” “most important in a generation,” etc., … Continue reading
Collaborators: Understanding Trump’s Rebellion
Is Trump a true conservative convert in the tradition of Reagan? Time and elections will tell. What is clear is that, in the words of one disgusted conservative, voting for Trump is a “Hail Mary” pass many conservatives are quite willing to make given the lateness of the hour. Meanwhile, the usual alliance of liberal activists and collaborator attorneys and powerbrokers already is talking of impeaching Trump should he be elected president. This should surprise nobody, especially those who must daily wage guerrilla battles simply to preserve the right to remain a conservative. Continue reading
American Jeremiah: The Legacy of Justice Antonin Scalia
There seems to have been a sort of cosmic symmetry in Scalia’s passing away as he did following such faithful labors. He left us quietly, in his sleep, out on a secluded resort in west Texas whose main attractions were hiking and stargazing. Amidst this spectacular creation, Scalia left his country and world to gain his reward for giving voice to truths that will always be consulted whenever a nation finds itself, as we do, staring into the abyss. Continue reading
Writing on the Wall for the GOP? Part II: A Post-GOP Future?
Principled conservatives such as Franklin Graham are acknowledging that increasingly, they have more chance of success outside the Republican Party than inside. GOP leaders by and large do not respect them. So, increasingly, they are leaving and taking their chances elsewhere. Their ranks grow every day. Continue reading
Writing on the Wall for the GOP? Part I: A Slow Train Coming
For decades, Republican Party leaders have given lip service to social issues such as abortion and marriage. This inaction has allowed a militant, secular left to overrun the nation’s main centers of power. Unchallenged liberal court rulings, in particular, have remade America into what U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has called “a country I do not recognize.” Should evangelicals and conservative Catholics finally throw up their hands, after years of being herded into the back of the GOP bus and ignored, and bolt, the Republican Party will not survive. Continue reading
Election 2016: The Battle for the Right Lane
Looming over this entire process is an electoral reality that has the potential to shatter remaining conservative confidence in the Republican nominating process. The Republican National Committee’s delegate allocation process is, if not rigged, demonstrably skewed to favor more moderate establishment candidates. Over a third of the delegates to the GOP convention next year will be awarded “based on the results at the congressional district level.” Three delegates are apportioned for each congressional district—including those in deep-blue pockets of the country that favor more moderate candidates. Continue reading
Culture Clash: Why Liberals Hate Pro Wrestling
Pro wrestling is anti-intellectual. It is a melodrama at heart, a throwback to earlier times when not all popular entertainment was cynical. With their college degrees and the left-wing academic indoctrination that comes with them, liberals can play the highbrow and chuckle at such fare. They do not similarly dismiss illiterate popular music and other art forms that are mindless, yet add to the cultural erosion they favor. Continue reading
The Trump Phenomenon
The problem for candidates such as Trump, who is relying heavily on very conservative support, comes once the field narrows. After the campaign becomes a one-on-one race, the GOP establishment and liberal media join forces with the supermajority of somewhat conservative and moderate GOP voters to ensure the more moderate candidate wins. It is here where Trump may hit a wall, as have many before him. Continue reading
Fruits of a Sprawling GOP Field
The diverse crowd of candidates makes strategic targeting of states more likely, as well. Candidates will be more inclined to pick and choose which states to compete in. For example, more moderate candidates will set down their standards in New Hampshire; there the electorate is less conservative than elsewhere, and likely to be flooded with independent voters looking to cast a ballot in the only meaningful primary election they will presumably enjoy come February 2016. More conservative candidates will flock to deeper-red contests in the South and Midwest. Continue reading
GOP Diversity Takes the Stage
For now at least, in these early days of the 2016 Republican Party race for the White House, faith-based voters find their “cup runneth over” with candidates. Huckabee’s campaign will court the social conservatives who delivered his upset victory in the 2008 Iowa caucuses and powered his showings in other states… Continue reading
Rand Paul Joins the Fray
And so, Senator Rand Paul’s “journey to take America back” begins Kentucky-side on the banks of the Ohio River. “To rescue a great country now adrift,” he declared, “join me as together we seek a new vision for America. Today I announce with God’s help, with the help of liberty lovers everywhere, that I am putting myself forward as a candidate for president of the United States of America.” Continue reading
Obama’s New, International Military
Obama’s efforts to accommodate illegal immigrants have invited a torrent of illegal-immigrant youth to stream north to the U.S. border. A much quieter revolution has taken place inside the Pentagon. The president and his administration now will begin placing teenage illegal immigrants in America’s military and under arms.
Pulling the Trigger on Impeachment
As the liberal excesses of President Barack Obama mount, talk of impeachment inevitably rises in frequency and pitch. His flexing of executive powers to further an aggressive and divisive agenda has prompted both commentators and rank-and-file citizens to raise the issue.
Obama’s Legacy: Border Chaos and the Shredding of American Sovereignty
Facilities in Texas and Arizona have quickly become overburdened, and emergency shelters have been opened at military bases in Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona and California. Border Patrol agents are also concerned about unsanitary conditions…
The Closing of the Presidential Mind – Part 3: Unveiled Ignorance – ObamaCare and its Roots
President Barack Obama’s most famous policy initiative has proved to be, arguably, his most divisive and politically damaging. ObamaCare has become at once his calling card for a high rating from liberal historians and a political albatross. As the impracticality of the system has met with the reality of consumers’ everyday needs, the administration has been forced to change the rules governing the nation’s health-care system seemingly every day. The legality of these edicts has been questionable at best; they ensure that the health-care sector, one-sixth of the nation’s economy, is governed by the daily caprice of the nation’s chief executive.
The Closing of the Presidential Mind – Part 2: Growing Government
President Barack Obama took office in 2009 amid a major recession. He promptly exploited the economic situation to pursue a grand and sweeping agenda of growing government. The theories he embraced went far beyond his campaign rhetoric, as he pushed policies that sought to reshape fundamentally the U.S. economy and society.
Barack Obama’s Tyranny by Executive Decree
Obama’s actions have gone beyond the simple breaking of campaign promises, though he has done that as well in the same stroke. By picking and choosing the laws he wishes to enforce, he has abrogated the duties he solemnly pledged to honor upon taking the oath of office as well as those responsibilities outlined in Article II of the Constitution, which governs the powers of the executive.
Ending the Filibuster
On November 21, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid followed through on threats to use the so-called nuclear option to overcome Republican opposition to President Barack Obama’s nominees to executive and judicial positions. Fifty-two Senate Democrats and independents voted to repeal the traditional filibuster powers of the Senate minority party for executive and judicial nominees.
Holder’s Assault on State Election Laws
As the nationwide collapse of ObamaCare has earned the growing ire and mistrust of voters, the Obama administration is now seemingly trying to minimize the political fallout in upcoming elections with an audacious plan: challenging state efforts to curb voter fraud. Spearheading this effort is Attorney General Eric Holder and a Justice Department increasingly famous for playing hardball politics in court.
Media Bias and Conservative Setbacks in the Federal Shutdown
Following a fortnight of partial federal government shutdown, as Washington returned to business as usual, media and political analysts took the news space and air time formerly ceded to reporting the situation to assessing winners and losers in the national confrontation. Few had little good to say about Republican leaders in Congress, and just as few judged their efforts successful. Rush Limbaugh and other conservative media opinion leaders, in particular, roundly condemned the agreement to reopen federal agencies and institutions without concessions from President Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress.
Foreign Law, Sharia and American Jurisprudence
American judges, including justices of the United States Supreme Court, increasingly rely on and cite foreign law in their rulings. The public is beginning to react accordingly to what many perceive as a threat and affront to U.S. sovereignty. In a rising wave of states, the voters and their elected representatives are taking steps to halt this trend.
When Balanced Budgets Mattered
As America’s leaders confront—or try to avoid—the looming twin towers of annual trillion-dollar budget deficits and mounting national debt, the nation nears the centennial mark of a presidency that showed the way out of such profligacy. The president who would become known as “Silent Cal” Coolidge speaks to us anew, and at an important juncture in our history, in an outstanding new biography by Amity Shlaes.
Nullifying the Federal Leviathan
With its polarizing policies on a range of hot-button issues, the Obama administration has sharply divided the American electorate. This has breathed new vigor into federalism, as these initiatives have invited a backlash at the state level on a comparable array of issues. In turn, these challenges to federal authority have resurrected hoary theories of such luminaries as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and largely forgotten political figures at the very opposite end of the ideological and historical spectrum where the current president sits.
Debt Reduction Comes Back into Style
For most of its existence, the Republican Party has championed rigorous fiscal conservatism. Balanced budgets, aversion to federal debt, “pay-as-you-go” government: These were the mainstays of Republican governance at both the federal and state level for over a century. Republican leaders who became heroes of their party made fiscal responsibility a hallmark of good government.
Proposition 187: Arizona’s page from California’s illegal immigration playbook
The U.S. Senate’s current debate of federal immigration reform reminds Americans of just how long the problem of broken borders has bedeviled the nation. For the last two decades, the people of America’s four Mexican border states increasingly have lost confidence in the federal government and its ability and willingness to secure their southern border.
Biometrics, Visas and Immigration Reform
Last week, the “Gang of Eight” scored their first win in their drive to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws. Three weeks of hearings and debates finally produced, on May 21, a vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee to approve an immigration reform bill that has riled conservatives and yet stands likely to win approval from the full Senate.
Affirmative Action Times Two before the Supreme Court
Two cases currently before the U.S. Supreme Court will clarify where the high court stands on the constitutionality of racial preferences in college admissions. The result may be a green light for such programs—or, more likely, fresh new blows and a judicially hastened end for race-based practices in higher education and other government institutions.
The Tempting of Republican Governors
If anything has united Republicans and the conservative movement in recent years, it has been their staunch opposition to so”called Obamacare, the chief policy initiative of President Barack Obama. Formally known as the Affordable Care Act, this sweeping overhaul of America’s health”care system galvanized conservative activists…
“Me Too” Amnesty and the Hispanic Vote
It was, if nothing else, a fitting metaphor for the size and nature of the work before them. On March 27, 2013, four members of the “Gang of Eight,” a group of U.S. senators who have banded together to seek immigration reform, toured the Arizona-Mexico border. It was what Politico termed their “spring break” trip.
Killing the Death Penalty
The death penalty is itself experiencing a slow death. This demise is the product of the same alliance of criminal-defense lawyers and activist judges who have done so much in recent decades to undermine public safety. In few arenas is the success of their joint handiwork clearer that in their effort to slow down executions with endless appeals, to the point that capital punishment is becoming all but meaningless.
Sovereignty and Activist Judges
In its current term, the U.S. Supreme Court will weigh in on many crucial and emotionally charged issues affecting the nation. These range from voting rights to same-sex marriage to race-based college admissions policies. The intensity of these disputes was on full display on February 27 during the court’s oral argument on the Voting Rights Act. Unusually visceral questioning from Justices Antonin Scalia and Sonia Sotomayor, representing opposite ends of the court’s ideological spectrum, offered a glimpse into the raw conflicts coming to a boil before the high court.
Another Amnesty in the Works
When a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators announced plans in January 2013 to push new immigration legislation, Americans learned that the leaders behind this latest effort to deal with the nation’s broken borders would cross the political aisle. But it did not take long for them to realize that bipartisanship came at a price: amnesty for all illegal immigrants.
