Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team!
Programming Note: My staffers and I are taking the week off for vacation and to celebrate the Fourth of July. But don’t worry: We’ve prepared plenty of material for you, so keep watching for the newsletter to appear as usual! The Prayer Tree will resume on July 8th.
And if anything major happens (like Joe Biden suddenly being replaced with a pod person), we’ll step away from our barbecue grills to fill you in. Have a safe, fun and patriotic Fourth of July week!
Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
P.S. The Morning Edition is a reader-supported publication. It delivers Monday-Saturday.
Daily Bible Verse
Delight thyself also in the Lord: and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.
Psalm 37:4
Looking back at the Obama IRS
These days, the federal bureaucracy is so corrupted with partisanship and the two-tiered system of justice is so obvious that polls show most Americans no longer have any trust in our institutions to apply laws and regulations fairly and impartially. Even more shocking, a Rassmussen survey found that 46% of Americans believe “there is a group of politicized thugs at the top of the FBI who are using the FBI…as Joe Biden’s personal Gestapo.” That includes 64% of Republicans and even 30% of Democrats.
When a federal agency once revered as heroic crime fighters is now viewed by many Americans as the equivalent of Hitler’s goon squad, you know something has seriously gone off the rails. How did this happen?
I would argue that you could trace it back to the IRS scandal during the Obama Administration, famously painted as “scandal-free” by a fawning media that spent eight years studiously ignoring its many scandals. After Obama began raising taxes and increasing debt, grassroots opposition started forming under the name of the “Tea Party” movement, inspired by the patriots who launched the Boston Tea Party.
These groups were very effective in helping the Republicans win back control of the House in 2010 and were increasing and expanding their efforts in the lead-up to Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012. Obviously, Democrats believed they were TOO effective. But they didn’t fully trust their usual tactic of having their lapdogs in the media mock Tea Party members as dumb rubes and smear them as racists (no matter how many black people you could see at Tea Party rallies.) They needed to undermine the movement more effectively.
Enter the Obama IRS.
With their numbers growing, many of these Tea Party groups applied to the IRS for tax-exempt nonprofit status. This should have been a relatively quick paperwork-shuffling task, yet the application process stretched on for month after month. Tea Party group leaders were subjected to outrageous demands for unrelated financial records and lists of their donors, which was none of the government’s business.
This warfare-by-government-paperwork dragged on until after the election, preventing many of these groups from engaging in legitimate democratic activities such as voter registration drives. When Democrats cry about how opposed they are to “election interference” and making it harder to vote, remember that they are pioneers in the field.
The IRS official in charge of this process was Lois Lerner, who was called before a House Committee to explain herself. She issued a long statement declaring her innocence of any wrongdoing, then immediately took the Fifth and refused to answer questions. One could argue that by making that statement, she forfeited her right to invoke the Fifth Amendment, but we’ve learned only too well in recent years that laws don’t apply to well-connected Democrats. This was when we were just learning that and people were still surprised.
When Obama was pressed on this scandal by Bill O’Reilly, he insisted that there was “not even a smidgeon of corruption” at the IRS. It took the election of Trump and new Attorney General Jeff Sessions to perform a real investigation. In 2017, Sessions issued a statement finding that the IRS’ use of political criteria “was wrong and should never have occurred. It is improper for the IRS to single out groups for different treatment based on their names or ideological positions. Any entitlement to tax exemption should be based on the activities of the organization and whether they fulfill requirements of the law, not the policy positions adopted by members or the name chosen to reflect those views. There is no excuse for this conduct. Hundreds of organizations were affected by these actions, and they deserve an apology from the IRS.”
In fact, these groups deserved far more than an apology. Their fundamental right to engage in a political campaign to help determine their own leaders had been undermined for partisan reasons by a federal agency that was supposed to remain impartial. The people responsible for that outrage also deserved punishment, but did they get it? Are you kidding?
Obama was reelected, nobody from the IRS was indicted, and Lois Lerner retired with her full pension. The fact that the people whose rights she helped deny have to pay taxes to fund her pension only added insult to injury.
The IRS scandal was a major example of the corruption of a federal agency, but Obama’s opponents were prevented from exercising their right to participate in the election, so it worked. As former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said when questioned about spreading the lie that Mitt Romney didn’t pay his income taxes for 10 years, “I don’t regret that at all. Romney didn’t win, did he?” At the time, that was so shameless that even the Huffington Post ran an article condemning him.
But the Democrats at the top shared Reid’s “values,” and to them, the IRS scandal wasn’t something to be ashamed of, it was a future blueprint for every federal agency under their control. Today, the Biden DOJ and FBI still proclaim their impartiality, but they no longer even bother hiding their biases or corruption. Democrats who disrupt government proceedings are hailed as heroes who speak truth to power, while Republicans who do the same are thrown in federal prison for years, sometimes after enduring horrific conditions while waiting to find out what they’re going to be charged with.
And if you dare disagree with this Administration’s radical policies, you’re a “domestic terrorist” and a target, and that includes traditional Catholics, concerned parents who speak up at school board meetings, grandmothers praying outside abortion clinics and your great-uncle who likes to wear his red MAGA cap. All “threats to our democracy.”
And all this thick tangle of corruption grew from letting them get away with the IRS scandal during the “scandal-free” Obama Administration. This is why you need to yank weeds out by the roots when they first appear, and not let them grow long enough to spread their seeds.
Thank you for the Constitution
One of the biggest complaints of leftists today is how hard it is to enact their agenda because the Constitution keeps getting in their way. They could turn America into Utopia if only they could repeal the Second Amendment, severely curtail the First Amendment, get rid of the Electoral College and turn the Supreme Court into a partisan political branch under one-party control. This is precisely why the Founders created the Constitution and the Bill of Rights: to restrain the power and reach of a strong centralized government. They had just defeated a tyrant, and they knew human nature well enough to know that that threat never goes away.
All Americans should thank God every day for the Constitution. That thin piece of parchment acts as a powerful shield protecting your rights and freedoms from people who want to plow them under and build a new socialist version of America on top of their graves.
If you think I’m exaggerating, a recent Real Clear Politics poll found that a third of today’s Democrat voters think Americans have “too much freedom,” a phrase I can’t even comprehend.
The Founders wisely made it very difficult to amend the Constitution, a process that requires overwhelming approval. So the left takes aim at it in two main ways: Either by ignoring it completely or by appointing judges and Supreme Court Justices who misinterpret it though their rulings. They justify this by claiming the Constitution is a “living document.” But if it doesn’t mean what it says but whatever any random judge feels that it should say, then it means nothing.
For a long time, we didn’t hear much about the Tenth Amendment. Liberal judges had ignored it so completely that many courts, politicians and bureaucrats acted as if it had been repealed. But it’s still right there in the Bill of Rights, and I’m glad to see that conservative Justices have recently been restoring its force.
The Tenth Amendment clearly states that powers not specifically granted to the federal government belong to the states. There was intense debate during the Constitutional Convention and the ratification process about which limited powers should be with the federal government and which should remain with the states. They didn’t leave that open to interpretation, but it’s been “interpreted” to death anyway as proponents of big government have forged ahead slowly, and sometimes rapidly, to usurp as much power as possible in areas where it has no business being. Here is just one of endless examples of how ignoring the Tenth Amendment “for a good cause” leads to the unconstitutional expansion of federal power:
The federal government decided to get involved in public school cafeterias with the passage of the heart-touchingly-titled “Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act.”
This federal power grab started seemingly innocently. The bill provided school lunches (later growing to include breakfasts) to poor students (later growing to include all students.) How could anyone object to healthy, non-hungry children? Well, it might have had noble intentions, and filled a real need, but schools are supposed to be the province of state and local governments. Still, feeding hungry children is so important that we can make an exception to the 10th Amendment, just this ONE time (as if state and local leaders didn’t care if their own children went hungry.)
Liberals love a bill like this because it gives them the chance to expand federal power while milking it for political gain and posturing about how much more they care about, say, hungry children than their flint-hearted opponents who care only about the Constitution. But we must remember that the government lives by the Golden Rule: “He who has the gold makes the rules.” As soon as schools began taking that federal school lunch money, they learned it was like being a fish that swallowed the bait on a hook.
From that little seed, federal control of schools began growing like wild weeds. Soon, Washington was using the leverage of school lunch funds to impose more and more federal mandates, from dictating school curriculums to forcing boys into girls’ bathrooms. They don’t belong there any more than DC bureaucrats belong in your local classrooms. This is how making exceptions to the 10th Amendment for “one urgent/important/good cause” has led to federal government interference in every aspect of our lives.
This is also why campaigners for parents’ rights should be just as concerned about restoring the 10th Amendment as they are about voting out their leftwing activist school boards.
You can buy my book here: The Three Cs That Made America Great: Christianity, Capitalism and the Constitution - Mike Huckabee
A new song for Democrats
The 1929 song “Happy Days Are Here Again” has been the unofficial theme song of the Democratic Party since FDR used it as a campaign song in 1932. But looking around at the filth-covered, crime-plagued dystopias that have been created in various cities and states by decades of Democratic rule, I think we can all agree that “Happy Days” are hardly the result of Democratic governance. In short, the party needs a new theme song.
“The Internationale” is a little too on-the-nose, so judging by the Party’s recent descent into widespread denial of reality and brutally-enforced self-delusion, I would like to suggest the 1939 tune recorded by everyone from Vera Lynn and Glenn Miller to Connee Boswell: “Wishing Will Make It So.”
Here’s a sample of the lyrics. Tell me if this doesn’t sound like the current “woke” DNC platform:
“Wishing will make it so…Just keep on wishing and care will go…Dreamers tell us dreams come true, It’s no mistake…And wishes are the dreams we dream when we're awake…”
Are you a man who wants to be a woman? Well, just say you’re a woman, and you ARE! Wishing will make it so! Don’t like the police? Fire them all, and crime will magically go down by itself! Are people being robbed, raped and murdered every day? Claim that’s all in your political opponents’ imaginations, and it miraculously goes away! Are there inconvenient facts about sleazy deals or dishonest and disastrous national health policies that might harm your electoral chances? Bully social media platforms into silencing any talk about them and they disappear! Is the economy struggling and hamstrung by inflation? Then declare inflation over and the economy booming, and they are! Were only 10,000 jobs created during the last quarter? Say a million jobs were created…and they were! Suffering horrific problems caused by an open border? Then insist that the border isn’t open, and abracadabra! It’s secure!
I could easily fill up the rest of this essay by just continuing with that last paragraph. The Democrats have become the denial of reality party. They make up new jaw-dropping fantasies faster than President Biden invents new jobs that he used to hold. The question is, how have they brainwashed so many people into actually believing this tripe?
The answer is that they really haven’t. They’ve managed to take over a number of cities and states by driving the reality-based community out, leaving behind almost nothing but their natural constituency: self-deluded radicals and people dependent on government. That’s now become obvious with the year-end release of the latest Census data showing the continued exodus of population from blue to red states.
https://www.newsweek.com/americans-fleeing-democrat-states-census-data-1855248
New York lost the most residents (101,984) followed by California with 75,423 and Illinois with 32,826. The only state in the top eight population losers that had a Republican Governor in 2023 was West Virginia, and it lost only 3,964. The biggest gainers in population were red states like Texas (adding 473,453 people) and Florida (365,205.) The biggest percentage growth came in South Carolina, which increased its population by 1.7% in a single year.
Blue states that are still showing population growth mostly owe it to foreign immigrants.
The new term for this is the “Texodus,” since so many are heading to Texas, but Scott McKay at Spectator.org also adds “Flexodus” to cover the huge migration to Florida. As he notes, those who were disappointed that New York voters kept reality-denier Kathy Hochul as their Governor when they could have saved the state by electing Lee Zeldin (and we see from the Trump trials that it’s only become more dangerous for any rational person or business owner to remain there) must understand that the voters Zeldin needed to win had already moved to Florida and gave Ron DeSantis a landslide victory.
https://spectator.org/texodus-and-flexodus-and-what-they-mean-for-america/
But how long can this continual downward spiral continue? You’d think the people would revolt at some point, and hopefully, the upcoming election will show that they are. The politicians could do something to head off the crash, but they won’t because, as McKay points out, this is planned. It even has a name: “Weaponized Governmental Failure.” Terrible leftist leaders like Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer and Lori Lightfoot want the productive, middle-class people to move out because they actually expect results for their tax dollars and accountability from politicians. When they call 911, they think cops should show up. That’s not the Democrats’ model anymore. They hate normal Americans like that. They’re all in on maintaining power through identity politics, divisiveness, chaos, demonization and government dependence.
And if productive people leave and take their tax dollars with them? Who cares, as long as Democrats in DC keep taxing the productivity of red states and sending billions to failed blue states and cities?
The best thing that could happen to those blue states and the people in them might be forcing them to go through bankruptcy and get their houses in order, but that will never happen as long as Washington keeps refilling their troughs with other people’s money. There’s a way to stop that, but it will take a major change at the federal level, and not just of Democrats, but also some Congressional Republicans who are reliably complicit in the scam.
Read McKay’s entire article. It’s a bracing blast of cold reality in a political world that’s been obscured by a fog of fantasy.
I Just Wanted to Say
Thank you for reading my newsletter.
Thank you for this well written article and every single person with a functioning brain needs to read and digest it! This is some of the most information I have ever read in one article! Thank you a million times over! May GOD continue blessing you and all who contribute to spreading the truth and providing information we need to know. Praying for all GOD loving people and for all of our true American loving citizens! Too many of us have been neglectful in keeping informed about what our government has been doing for over 80 years! I was born in 1940…my daddy joined the Navy to fight in WWll and served on the Battleship Texas, my mother became a nurse, many uncles joined the Marines, Army, Army Air Core and Navy, other uncles left their own stores to go work in the ship yards and just about everyone put their normal lives on hold and became heroes in my way of thinking. Sadly some of them never returned, but all loved our country, our citizens and the people in other countries.
Oh, if today’s elected officials had the same moral and patriotic convictions our citizens had along with the military leaders in those days, this world wouldn’t be swept up in immoral trash we have today! So tragic so many elected officials are in politics only to enrich themselves and to have power that they DO NOT DESERVE! GOD knows and praying more of us who love others and our America will know and choose to become informed to know the truth and vote for what and who is RIGHT for all!
In prayer because I really do care,
Anita
Mike, re Obama IRS scandal, thank you for this history lesson. I remember working at a fish cannery in Alaska that smelled better! That stench has since gotten worse and (IMO) has Obama’s odor all over it!