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Evangelical Pastor: 'Stealth Missionaries'  Corrupted The Supreme Courto (VIDEO)

Evangelical Pastor: 'Stealth Missionaries'  Corrupted The Supreme Courto (VIDEO)

The Rev. Rob Schenck was once deeply involved in the Christian right movement and white evangelical efforts to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. But the evangelical Protestant minister has grown increasingly critical of the Christian right and the anti-abortion movement that he was once a part of.

Moreover, he is speaking out against the Christian right’s campaign to lobby Supreme Court justices in the 2014 case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby.

Schenck alleges that evangelical Christian fundamentalists knew what the High Court’s decision in Hobby Lobby would be before that decision was publicly announced, and that the leak came from either Justice Samuel Alito or his wife — an allegation that Justice Alito has vehemently denied. And Schenck discussed that allegation when he testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday, December 8.

The Independent’s Alex Woodward, reporting on Schenck’s testimony, explains, “An evangelical minister and former longtime anti-abortion activist told members of Congress that he helped recruit wealthy conservative donors to serve as ‘stealth missionaries’ at the U.S. Supreme Court, where they developed friendships with conservative justices that aligned with the group’s ‘social and religious’ views. The ‘overarching’ goal of Robert Schenck’s ‘Operation Higher Court’ sought to ‘gain insight into the conservative justices’ thinking and to shore up their resolve to render solid, unapologetic opinions,’ he told the House Judiciary Committee in sworn testimony on 8 December.”

Operation Higher Court was the lobbying campaign of Faith and Action, the Christian right group that Schenck was a part of for many years.

Woodward notes that Schenck “testified to the Committee that his group suggested tactics like meeting with justices for meals at their homes and at private clubs to build relationships and advance their perceived common objectives.”

Schenck told House Judiciary Committee members, “I believe we pushed the boundaries of Christian ethics and compromised the High Court’s promise to administer equal justice. I humbly apologize to all I failed in this regard. Most of all, I beg the pardon of the folks I enlisted to do work that was not always transparently honest.… I’m here today in the interest of truth telling.”

The December 8 hearing wasn’t strictly about Burwell v. Hobby Lobby or Operation Higher Court’s campaign to influence Supreme Court justices. It was about Supreme Court ethics in general, and Schenck now believes that it was unethical for Supreme Court justices to be interacting with Christian right lobbyists.

Watch the video of Schenck’s December 8 testimony below or at this link.


Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Why The Christian Right Is Rejoicing Under Trump’s Presidency

Why The Christian Right Is Rejoicing Under Trump’s Presidency

Reprinted with permission fromAlterNet.

In early 2016, few evangelical leaders were on Team Trump, as they had Ted Cruz and other conservative Christians to choose from in a crowded Republican presidential field. After Donald Trump embarrassed his GOP competition and became the party’s nominee, prominent evangelicals began changing their tune. Some, including a number of outspoken anti-LGBT activists, worked with the Trump campaign on a large evangelical advisory board. After Trump won the presidency with 81 percent of the white evangelical vote, most far-right Christian leaders who hadn’t endorsed him came around. Many were gleeful, and some even pronounced that God had stepped in and handed Trump the job.

That excitement has grown since the election as Trump prepared for and took office, nominating several ultra-conservative Christians for key posts and promptly following through on several of his campaign promises tailored to evangelical voters. Trump had already picked far-right evangelical Mike Pence for vice president. Then he nominated Betsy DeVos, who was raised in a Calvinist community in Michigan, for secretary of education and Seventh-Day Adventist Ben Carson for Housing and Urban Development secretary, and appointed several other conservative Christians to additional top positions in the administration.

Ronnie Floyd, an Arkansas megachurch pastor and former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, told the Washington Post that the Trump administration was full of “followers of Christ,” not just DeVos but Health and Human Services Sec. Tom Price, EPA head Scott Pruitt, Energy nominee Rick Perry, Agriculture nominee Sonny Perdue, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

“The administration has been way over the top in giving them visibility and recognition that we can bring values,” said Floyd, who was part of Trump’s evangelical advisory team and gave a prayer at Trump’s prayer service during inauguration weekend.

Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University who was the first major evangelical figure to endorse Trump, has said that hundreds of evangelicals are getting lower-level positions in the Trump administration.

On January 31, Trump nominated the ultra-conservative judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. He’s the judge who wrote the 2014 Hobby Lobby decision, enabling businesses to refuse to pay for insurance coverage of contraception based on “religious objections.” Gorsuch, who is considered to the right of even the late Antonin Scalia, is seen by conservative Christians as someone they can count on to oppose abortion and expand their ability to legally discriminate against LGBT people via “religious freedom.”

“I thank God that if confirmed, this administration will have delivered on one of its most critical campaign promises—to appoint a judge in the mold of the late Justice Antonin Scalia,” said far-right Christian James Dobson, who served on Trump’s evangelical advisory board.

Also January 31, Trump appointed Falwell to lead a higher education task force bent on “deregulating” education. Two days later, Trump attended the National Prayer Breakfast, where in a bizarre speech he pledged to repeal the Johnson Amendment, allowing churches to spend money on politics and potentially operate like super PACs.

Trump reinstated the “global gag rule” (or “Mexico City policy”), which prevents U.S.-funded foreign organizations from discussing abortion with their clients or advocating abortion law liberalization, but he made it harsher than under George W. Bush. This rule now pulls all public health funding from organizations, even to vital AIDS and HIV programs, that address abortion. And the president has promised to overturn Roe v. Wade and to sign a bill defunding Planned Parenthood.

In late January, the Trump administration circulated a “religious freedom” executive order that legalizes discrimination, allowing any government agency or any private business to deny services to LGBT people. Trump has since backed away from that order, but another may come in the near future.

On Feb. 22, Trump went ahead with anti-LGBT discrimination. With Attorney General Jeff Sessions leading the charge, the Trump administration rolled back Barack Obama-era protections requiring schools to allow transgender students to use the restroom that matches their gender identity. Education secretary Betsy DeVos reportedly opposed the move—which some doubt based on her religious beliefs and her parents’ funding of anti-LGBT hate groups—but Trump and Sessions strong-armed her into backing it. The next day, DeVos went on to call Obama’s transgender guidance “a huge example…of overreach.”

With all the good news for the Christian right coming so quickly, Falwell said evangelicals are “a happy group of people right now.”

Franklin Graham, who gave a prayer at Trump’s inauguration, spoke at a December “thank-you rally” for Trump in Mobile, Alabama, reiterating that God had showed up for Trump on election night. He was thrilled at Trump’s selection of Gorsuch, writing on Facebook, “Once again he has kept a campaign promise—how refreshing!” He concluded his post with this: “Now we need to pray that God will overrule the liberal socialists and progressives who will do everything in their power to block this nomination.”

Ralph Reed, founder and chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and chair of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, was “prominently seated” at a ceremony honoring Gorsuch. In a Fox News op-ed, he praised DeVos for her strong support of public vouchers to send children to private religious schools. DeVos has said she wants to “advance God’s kingdom” through education.

Televangelist Pat Robertson, one of the most extreme right-wing evangelicals of note, came to Trump’s defense after his “pussy-grabbing” comments surfaced. Now Robertson says people who oppose Trump are revolting against God, and he muses that Obama and Democrats may have enacted a conspiracy to take down the shamed Michael Flynn, who didn’t last a month as national security advisor because he lied about having prior contact with Russia.

Tony Perkins, president of the anti-LGBT hate group Family Research Council, is sanguine about Trump upholding religious liberty, which in his case means legal discrimination of LGBT people by “religious” businesses with federal contracts. Perkins also praised Gorsuch’s nomination.

Far-right Christian organizations are also happy with Trump and his executive orders. The Alliance Defending Freedom, which the Southern Poverty Law Center recently classified as an anti-LGBT hate group, said of the gag rule, “The president has done the right and logical thing in reinstating a policy that never should have been rescinded.” ADF was founded by Dobson and several other Christian right leaders in 1994 and since then has opposed equal rights for LGBT people and even pushed to criminalize homosexuality abroad.

Christian leaders aren’t just thrilled with Trump’s actions and promises, they’re gratified by the surprising amount of access they have to the president. Falwell told the Washington Post that he, along with other members of Trump’s evangelical advisory board including televangelists James Robison and Paula White, have never had such easy access to a president. “I’m very shocked by how accessible he is to so many. He answers his cellphone any time of the day or night.”

Trump has also answered his cellphone for Robison. Dobson says he can call Pence on his cell.

Plenty of evangelical leaders oppose Trump, or at least, his refugee ban, but the most extreme members of the evangelical movement are quite pleased.

Few would have predicted Trump’s stellar relationship with far-right Christians. But now that he’s won them over, benefited from their political support, and amassed a White House featuring many evangelical conservatives, LGBT protections, abortion rights, and public school funding are on the line.

Alex Kotch is an independent investigative journalist based in Brooklyn, NY. Follow him on Twitter at @alexkotch.

IMAGE: U.S. Vice President Mike Pence (R) swears in Education Secretary Betsy DeVos (L), joined by her husband Dick DeVos (2nd L), at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building at the White House in Washington, U.S. February 7, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
Trump Picks Anti-Choice Federal Judge For Supreme Court

Trump Picks Anti-Choice Federal Judge For Supreme Court

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

Within minutes of President Trump’s nomination of federal judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, several hundred demonstrators had converged on the steps of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. to protest his selection.

Waving signs proclaiming, “Gorsuch: Extreme and Dangerous” and “#NoWall #NoBan,” the protesters and a stream of speakers linked the conservative nominee to the administration’s unconstitutional ban on immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim countries, and pledged to defy both.

“This is the most egregious insult in the history of Supreme Court nominations,” declared Terry O’Neil, president of the National Organization of Women, triggering a chant of “Stolen seat, stolen seat!”

“Until this administration begins to respect the U.S. Constitution, it would be unconscionable to consider an extremist nominee to the court,” said Ben Wikler, Washington director of MoveOn.org.

“Leave it to Trump to distract the country from a constitutional crisis by appointing a right-wing litmus test judge to the court,” said Nancy Schoolmacher of College Park, Maryland. “We just had to come down and do something,” added her friend, Barb Considine, standing in the throng of people and TV cameras.

The night began when Trump, in a short White House speech, nominated Judge Gorsuch from the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver to the court. Calling his nomination process the “most transparent” ever, President Trump picked an ultraconservative who is expected to follow in the footsteps of the justice he is replacing, Antonin Scalia, the court’s most ideological right-winger, who died last February.

Gorsuch’s nomination sets the stage for one of the biggest domestic political fights in years, after Senate Republicans spent nearly a year willfully ignoring their constitutional responsibility to consider President Obama’s nominee to the court, Merrick Garland. Gorsuch, despite a reportedly mild-mannered temperament, is known for his anti-choice and anti-LGBT stances, pro-employer rulings in labor disputes, anti-regulatory attitudes, dismissal of scientific expertise, and pro-police bias in brutality cases, according to statements from public interest groups issued after the announcement.

The nomination comes amid unprecedented political and popular resistance to Trump’s presidency. In recent days, there have been escalating protests over Trump’s anti-Muslim executive orders, his firing of the acting attorney general late Monday night after she said that Trump’s decrees were unconstitutional and violated the Justice Department’s historic civil rights mission, and after Democratic senators refused to attend confirmation hearings Tuesday for two Trump cabinet nominees they said had lied to them.

“During his over 10 years on the federal bench, Judge Gorsuch has proven to be a conservative ideologue who has consistently ruled against civil rights, women’s rights, and workers’ rights. And he has expounded a judicial philosophy that would prevent the federal government from properly enforcing countless acts of Congress,” said Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “The president could have nominated an independent or consensus candidate for this seat, someone like Merrick Garland, whose record has proven to be unimpeachable. Instead, he chose Neil Gorsuch to be a rubber stamp and another ‘yes man’ for this administration.”

Michael Keegan, president of People for the American Way, was also quick to criticize Gorsuch as an extreme right-winger. “Over the course of his career, he’s turned his back on fundamental American rights, from shutting down claims of gender discrimination in the workplace, to trying to limit Americans’ ability to join class-action lawsuits to challenge corporate wrong-doing, to ruling in the original Hobby Lobby [Obamacare] decision that corporations are people and can refuse to offer their employees birth control, to claiming that a police officer could not be sued for using excessive force when his stun gun killed a young man running from police simply because he was growing marijuana plants,” he said. “That’s appalling.”

“Over the past 10 years… Gorsuch has written at least 15 labor and employment rulings,” said National Nurses United’s statement. “Gorsuch’s opinions aligned with employers in eight of the 12 cases. Additionally, Gorsuch wrote three opinions upholding National Labor Relations Board rulings against both employers and unions.”

“With Judge Neil Gorsuch, the stakes couldn’t be higher when it comes to women and our lives,” said NARAL Pro-Choice America’s president Ilyse Hogue. “Gorsuch represents an existential threat to legal abortion in the United States and must never wear the robes of a Supreme Court justice.”

Indeed, virtually every issue and concern that is in the public interest is threatened by the Supreme Court nomination. After Scalia died in early 2016, the court was left with a four-four conservative-liberal split on most contentious social and economic issues. The GOP, led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, refused even to hold hearings for Obama’s nominee, a federal appeals court chief judge who sailed through nomination hearings for that post several years before.

Supreme Court justices typically serve for a quarter century or more, meaning that the court’s ideological center was poised to move to the left. The Republicans essentially stole Obama’s final appointment, hoping that a Republican president would be elected in 2016 and keep the court as a right-wing majority.

Day of Growing Rage On the Hill

Trump’s announcement comes against a backdrop of mounting opposition by Democrats in Congress and large swaths of the public in both blue and red states. Even before he fired Acting Attorney General Sally Yates late Monday, Senate Democrats had flocked to airports and attended rallies to protest Trump’s decree that the U.S. would take no more war refugees from Syria and would block travelers from seven Muslim counties for 90 days. (He also issued orders to ramp up the domestic deportation machinery and to penalize sanctuary cities that would not cooperate with immigration police.)

On the Supreme Court steps Monday night, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY; Sen. Ben Cardin, D-MD; Sen. Cory Booker, D-NJ; Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA; Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-VT; Sen. Al Franken, D-MN; and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-CN all held forth against the executive order banning travelers from Muslim countries, including, initially, legal residents who hold green cards.

What was notable in their statements was their determination to resist Trump’s right-wing policies.

“We now must be determined to fight for the long haul,” Booker said.

“We stand with our fellow human beings who flee terrorism,” Warren said. “We will band together to fight Donald Trump as he tries to put himself above the law of the United States.”

“We do not hate the Muslim people and we want them to know that,” Sanders said. “So we say to President Trump, rescind that ban.”

Those protests were a prelude to Tuesday’s boycott by Democrats of the Senate Finance Committee’s proceedings to vote on Steve Mnuchin’s nomination for Treasury Secretary and Rep. Tom Price’s nomination for Health and Human Services Secretary, denying the a quorum needed to vote on their nominations and bring them before the full Senate. The Democrats cited Mnuchin’s and Price’s false statements, with Mnuchin denying that the mortgage lending giant he oversaw had not abused borrowers, and Price denying that he cashed in on stocks in healthcare companies under his congressional jurisdiction.

The Democrats’ absence forced the GOP to postpone voting on those nominees. At the same time in the Senate Judiciary Committee, Democrats railed against Trump’s firing of Sally Yates and said that Trump’s pick for attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-AL, helped design the Muslim travel ban that Yates called unconstitutional and refused to implement.

“Yesterday, early in the evening, we saw what a truly independent attorney general does,” the panel’s top Democrat, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-CA, said. “That is what an attorney general must be willing and able to do. I have no confidence that Sen. Sessions will do that. Instead, he has been the fiercest, most dedicated and most loyal promoter in Congress of the Trump agenda, and has played a critical role in the clearinghouse for policy and philosophy to undergird the implementation of that agenda.”

The Democrats managed to postpone the Judiciary Committee’s vote on Sessions on Tuesday. Meanwhile, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, ran into new opposition when Democrats discovered that some of her answers to their questionnaire had apparently been plagiarized, according to the Washington Post.

Elsewhere, however, Senate committees confirmed Elaine Chao—Mitch McConnell’s wife—to be Trump’s transportation secretary, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry to be energy secretary, and Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-MT for interior secretary.

At the Senate Finance Committee, Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-UT, told a half-empty room that the Democrats do not have the votes to stop any of Trump’s cabinet appointments. That is because the GOP needs only a simply majority to confirm them.

“I’m really disappointed that my friends on the other side, Democrats on the other side, are deliberately boycotting,” he said. “Why that’s an important thing for them, I’ll never understand, because these two nominees are going to go through regardless.”

“I think this is a completely unprecedented level of obstruction… We did not inflict this kind of obstructionism on President Obama,” Sen. Patrick J. Toomey, R-PA, chimed in. “This is not what the American people expect of the United States Senate.”

Both of those statements—and others like them from Republican senators—are utterly disingenuous, especially in light of the Senate GOP’s obstruction and theft of Obama’s Supreme Court nomination. Under the Senate’s current rules—which the Republicans may yet jettison—Trump’s nominee needs 60 votes to be confirmed. This is Trump’s only appointment that Senate Democrats have the power to block, and the stakes could not be more consequential.

Jefferson Morley is AlterNet’s Washington correspondent. He is the author ofSnow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835and Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA.

Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America’s democracy and voting rights. 

IMAGE: U.S. President Donald Trump shakes hands with Neil Gorsuch (L) after nominating him to be an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., January 31, 2017. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Trump Treating Supreme Court Pick Like An Episode Of ‘The Apprentice’

Trump Treating Supreme Court Pick Like An Episode Of ‘The Apprentice’

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump was set to unveil his pick for a lifetime job on the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday as Democrats, still fuming over the Republican-led Senate’s refusal to act on former President Barack Obama’s nominee last year, girded for a fight.

Trump has announced he would reveal his choice to replace conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, who died last February, at the White House at 8 p.m.

The court is ideologically split with four conservative justices and four liberals, and Trump’s pick can restore its conservative majority.

A source involved in the selection process said Trump has made his choice between two conservative U.S. appeals court judges — Neil Gorsuch and Thomas Hardiman. Both were appointed to the bench by Republican former President George W. Bush.

CNN, citing an unnamed source, said Gorsuch, a judge on the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, has been told he is the likely nominee.

Adding an element of drama to what is normally a sober announcement, CNN said both Gorsuch and Hardiman, who serves on the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, had been brought to Washington ahead of Tuesday’s announcement.

A senior Senate Republican aide said Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has already been informed of Trump’s pick, which the senator described as an “outstanding choice.”

William Pryor, a judge on the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, had earlier been mentioned as a possible nominee.

Under the Constitution, a president’s Supreme Court nomination requires Senate confirmation.

A Supreme Court justice can have influence for decades after the president who made the appointment has left office and Trump’s appointee could be pivotal in cases involving abortion, gun, religious and transgender rights, the death penalty, and other contentious matters.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer said polls had shown that the composition of the Supreme Court was important for many voters at last year’s presidential election.

“I can assure you that this individual will make those voters and every American very, very proud,” Spicer told reporters. “This particular choice is one the president takes very seriously.”

CONSERVATIVE CREDENTIALS

William Pryor, a judge on the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, had earlier been mentioned as a possible Trump nominee.

All three men have strong conservative credentials.

Gorsuch, 49, joined an opinion in 2013 saying that owners of private companies can object on religious grounds to a provision of the Obamacare health insurance law requiring employers to provide coverage for birth control for women.

Hardiman, 51, has embraced a broad interpretation of the constitutional guarantee of the right to bear arms and has backed the right of schools to restrict student speech.

Pryor, 54, has been an outspoken critic of the court’s 1973 landmark Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion, calling it “the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history.”

Amid partisan tension since Trump took office, Democrats remain enraged because Republican Leader McConnell refused last year to allow the Senate to consider Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland for the vacant seat. That action has little precedent in U.S. history.

Gambling that Republicans would win the presidency in the Nov. 8 election, McConnell argued that Obama’s successor should get to make the pick. The move paid off with Trump’s victory, but the court has run shorthanded for nearly a full year.

Some Democrats have said the Republicans effectively stole a Supreme Court seat from Obama by refusing to confirm Garland.

Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley has vowed to pursue a procedural hurdle called a filibuster for Trump’s nominee, meaning 60 votes would be needed in the 100-seat Senate unless its long-standing rules are changed. Trump’s fellow Republicans hold a 52-48 majority, meaning some Democratic votes would be needed to confirm his pick.

“We need to fight this Constitution-shredding gambit with everything we’ve got,” Merkley said in a statement.

McConnell on Monday warned Democrats that senators should respect Trump’s election victory and give the nominee “careful consideration followed by an up-or-down vote,” not a filibuster.

Trump, who took office on Jan. 20, said last week he would favor Senate Republicans eliminating the filibuster, a change dubbed the “nuclear option,” for Supreme Court nominees if Democrats block his pick.

Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative legal advocacy group, said it would launch the first part of a $10 million media advertisement campaign on Tuesday night in favor of whomever Trump chooses. The effort will hold Senate Democrats who face election in 2018 “accountable for their choice” on the Supreme Court, the group said.

Since it had only eight members after Scalia’s death, the court has steered clear of some controversial issues. The most high-profile case currently under consideration is that of a female-born transgender high school student named Gavin Grimm, who identifies as male. He sued in 2015 to win the right to use the school’s boys’ bathroom in Virginia.

Depending on how quickly Trump’s nominee is confirmed by the Senate, he may be able to participate in some of the current term’s cases. If not, the court may have to consider setting new oral arguments and deciding them at a later date.

(Additional reporting by Andrew Chung, Richard Cowan, Susan Heavey, Ayesha Rascoe and Doina Chiacu; Writing by Will Dunham and Alistair Bell; Editing by Susan Heavey and Bill Trott)

IMAGE: THE APPRENTICE — NBC Alternative Series — “Episode 306: The Writing on the Wall” — Pictured: Donald Trump — NBC Universal Photo: Kevin T. Gilbert