Cagle World

What’s with Mitt Romney, the newly minted Republican senator from the great red state of Utah?

Mitt hadn’t even been sworn in yet and he put his name on a New Year’s Day op-ed column in the Washington Post bearing the headline “Mitt Romney: The president shapes the public character of the nation. Trump’s character falls short.”

Then Mitt showed up on CNN to repeat his complaint that after two years the president of his party has “not risen to the mantle of the office.”

Sorry he feels that way, but if moderate Mitt really cared about the GOP he would have put a leash on that super ego of his.

Lots of us Republicans have criticized the president’s words and actions – justifiably.

But Mitt’s criticism – delivered publicly in two of the liberal media’s holiest places – was an ill-timed cheap shot aimed at reminding everyone in the Washington elite that he may be a loser, but compared to the president he’s still a morally superior being.

Mitt knew his scathing criticism would immediately be spread far and wide by the Trump Hate Media, which it was.

He also knew it would instantly earn the president’s ire, which Trump expressed in a series of counter-tweets.

Even Mitt’s niece, Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, hit her uncle upside the head for his subversive selfishness.

“POTUS is attacked and obstructed by the MSM media and Democrats 24/7. For an incoming Republican freshman senator to attack @realdonaldtrump as their first act feeds into what the Democrats and media want and is disappointing and unproductive.”

Mitt’s attack on the president was more than a little hypocritical, given that he had unsuccessfully begged him for a cabinet position and had happily accepted his support last fall when he was running for Utah’s senate seat.

There may be many Republicans who agree exactly with everything Romney said, but that’s not the point.

It was stupid of him to write a column excoriating the president two days before he even took his Senate seat.

He wants to be treated with respect in the Senate, and this is the way he starts?

He should have showed up in Washington, taken his Senate seat and said and done nothing.

If he has complaints or comments about the president, he should have made them to Trump in private.

Trump quickly put Mitt in his place with his tweets and now Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will have to do it in the Senate.

For the next two years or so McConnell will have to remind Senator Mitt exactly who he is and isn’t:

“Take your seat, Mr. Romney. You’re a junior member of the senate. You’re not our party spokesman. You have to earn the right to be a spokesman, the way Lindsay Graham has.”

What Mitt did with his op-ed piece – beside pump up his deflated ego, hurt his own party, help the Democrats and give the liberal media free Republican ammo to fire at the president – was to really piss off his new boss McConnell.

I don’t think McConnell will be calling on the rookie senator from Utah anytime soon to seek his advice on anything.

Meanwhile, now that Nancy Pelosi and her leftist Democrat children have taken control of the House of Representatives, the next two years are going to be very rough for the president, the GOP and conservatives.

The last thing they needed was another egotistical Republican flake running loose in the Senate, but it looks like that’s what the junior senator from Utah is going to be.

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Copyright 2019 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

The liberal media are up to their usual dirty immigration tricks.

This time, they’re exploiting the death of a second Guatemalan child who died while in the custody of the Border Patrol at the southwestern border.

As usual, the liberal media didn’t blame the parents for irresponsibly dragging their eight-year-old son across Mexico with the hope of illegally sneaking into America.

As usual, they didn’t blame Democrats in Congress for refusing to help President Trump secure the border properly in order to dissuade illegal immigrants from Central America from trekking to our border in the first place.

As usual, the liberal media and their Democrat friends blamed the Border Patrol for the tragic death of a sick child.

It doesn’t fit into the liberal media’s false narrative that the men and women of the Border Patrol have been overwhelmed by an unprecedented invasion of illegal immigrants from Central America.

It doesn’t matter that the Border Patrol and other federal agencies are trying to process, house and care for the 14,000 unaccompanied children that are among the 140,000 illegal Central American immigrants seeking asylum who’ve been detained in the last two months.

Of course, the ultimate bad guy in this tragedy – as the liberal media never tire of telling us – is President Trump.

According to the liberal media, the boy and the seven-year-old Guatemalan girl who also died in Border Patrol custody in early December perished because Donald Trump’s cruel and heartless administration insists on enforcing our immigration laws.

As USA Today’s lopsided “news” article spun it, the back-to-back deaths of the children “prompted an outcry from immigration activists, politicians and human rights groups and raised questions about the Trump administration policies that have separated children and parents and filled detention centers.”

Others in the liberal media shamelessly pushed the same theme, turning the two children into martyrs and innocent patron saints for the open borders movement.

Of course you’ll never see the New York Times devote so much tearful front-page attention or significance to the deaths of Americans murdered or harmed by illegal immigrants.

Those innocent victims, and their grieving families, don’t count as martyrs to the Times or CNN because they don’t fit the liberal media’s two major agendas – opening up our borders and destroying Donald Trump.

And unless you watch Fox or listen to conservative talk radio, you’re not likely to hear those five-year-old soundbites from hypocritical Democrats like Barrack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, who were advocates for strong border-fences and tougher laws against illegals until President Trump promised to actually implement them.

According to Democrats and the liberal media, enforcing immigration laws as they were written by previous administrations is now un-American and immoral – mainly because it’s being done by President Trump.

Building a fence – or a wall or a barrier or whatever it’s called – to protect America’s border is now considered to be a crime against humanity, a joke, a waste of taxpayer money.

But if all that’s true, why do we have so many gated communities? Why is there an iron fence around the White House? Why do I have a gate in front of my house?

Why? Because they work, and sensible people who aren’t playing partisan politics know it.

So why not live in a gated country?Why not put a strong fence with a gate at our country’s southern border?

In the end it’s up to Congress to fix immigration.

If the Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate really want to stop more kids from dying in the arms of Border Patrol agents, they have to secure the border, pass comprehensive immigration reform – and do it now.

If they won’t do it, then it’s time for us to begin working to send every one of them home in the next election. I can’t think of a better New Year’s resolution for the whole country.

Happy New Year.

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Copyright 2018 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

By the time you read this, you’ll know whether the federal government has been partially shut down for the holidays.

You’ll also know whether Donald Trump had the political courage and brains to do what Republicans running Congress have failed to do for two years – put their butts on the line to fund a stronger border wall on our southern border.

And you’ll know whether the president’s chances for getting reelected in 2020 have gone up or down.

Going into Friday, everything about a potential government shutdown over Trumps’ wall was still up in the air.

President Trump was threatening to not sign a “continuing resolution” that would temporarily fund the federal government until February because the House bill did not contain money for building a border wall.

Conservatives in Congress and in the media were urging Trump not to sign.

Democrats in Congress and the liberal media were spreading fear and hysteria about the dire effects of a government shutdown on innocent people, as they always do.

Republicans in the House scrambled to pass a bill that added $5 billion for wall funding to the bill the Senate has already passed.

Meanwhile, future House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her Senate soulmate Chuck Schumer were declaring that Democrats in Congress will never vote to fund a border wall – or a fence, or a moat, or whatever Trump wants to call it.

Late Thursday, they were on TV complaining that “Trump’s Tantrum” was throwing the country into chaos.

If a fourth of the gigantic federal government is shut down temporarily by Trump by midnight Friday, it won’t be his fault.

It won’t be the Democrats’ fault, either. It’ll be the Republican’s fault – especially party leaders like House Speaker Paul Ryan.

They’re the chickenhearted ones in Congress who put President Trump behind the political eight ball.

Speaker Ryan never wanted the border wall, so he would never bring up a bill to fund it for a vote in the House. Trump forced his hand at the last minute.

It would have been much easier for Republicans, and the president, if Ryan had done the right thing and made House Democrats vote for or against funding the wall months ago.

The president recently said he’d be proud to take the blame for shutting down the government over the important issue of border security, but he really has no choice.

With Pelosi and her gang ready to take over the House for the next two years, this is Trump’s last chance to get funding for his wall.

The Democrats in Washington and everywhere else don’t want real border security, now or ever.

I’ve got a new governor here who wants open borders, who wants to turn California into a sanctuary state, who wants to give illegals free health care and who wants to pay homeowners like me to house homeless people in our backyards.

President Trump, who’s in the White House because of the slogan “Build the wall,” has already said he’d never sign another continuing resolution to fund the government if it didn’t contain money for a strong border wall.

Now’s his time to put up or shut up.

If he doesn’t stand his ground now against Pelosi and Schumer, and if he doesn’t get serious funding for the wall, his political base will say goodbye.

So will his supporters and defenders in the media, like Anne Coulter, who’s already threatened to do as much.

For President Trump, and the Republican Party, the political stakes for this vote are as high as they can get.

Speaker Ryan and the House Republicans never found the courage to pass a bill to fund the wall.They repeatedly showed they had no balls.

What Trump decides to do on this latest continuing resolution bill will either win or lose him the election in 2020.

In my opinion, he can’t lose in 2020 by not signing it. He can only lose by signing it.

He must shut down the federal government over the border wall. By Saturday, we’ll learn if he had the balls to do it.

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Copyright 2018 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

It’s not like it was something we didn’t already know.

But what the FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s did to President Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn is fresh proof that there are two kinds of justice operating in the Washington swamp.

One kind – the mean, devious, throw-the-book-at-’em kind – is used for prosecuting Donald Trump and his people.

The other kind of justice – the nice, easy-going, so-what kind – is used for not looking into the law-breaking email fiascos of Hillary and the financial fishiness of the Clinton Crime Syndicate.

Hillary continues to skate free, unbothered by the FBI or any federal agency for the dirty things she and the Obama administration’s injustice department did during the 2016 election to try to defeat Donald Trump.

But not General Flynn.

His life was ruined by the FBI bosses who set out to nail him – and did.

Comparing transcripts from phone wiretaps, the FBI caught Gen. Flynn lying about what he said in a phone call with former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak in December of 2016.

Flynn’s terrible crime – a single count of lying to an FBI agent in 2017 – obviously had nothing to do with the Trump election team colluding with the Russians, mainly because there was no collusion.

Flynn eventually pled guilty.

But this week Flynn’s lawyers alleged that the FBI had essentially tricked Flynn into not having a lawyer present when he was interviewed in his White House office by two agents.

U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, who’s overseeing Flynn’s case, has turned the tables on the FBI. Smelling a rat, no doubt, Sullivan has ordered Mueller’s office to turn over all the documents it has from Flynn’s FBI interview.

We can hope that Sullivan shames Mueller for his prosecutorial abuse and decides that the FBI interfered with Flynn’s constitutional right to counsel.

In the meantime, the harm done to Flynn can never be undone or repaid.

Though Mueller the Merciful has recommended that he get no prison time, the general was forced to sell his home and went bankrupt defending himself.

What happened to Gen. Flynn is a textbook example of our country’s two-tiered system of justice – one for Trump and Republicans and one for the Clintons and Democrats.

The time, money and energy spent prosecuting – and persecuting — Flynn also shows just how deranged the hatred of Donald Trump has become.

The liberals, the media, the Democrats and the Deep State partisans in the FBI and other government agencies are willing to drop napalm on anyone connected with President Trump.

Trump’s enemies can never accept that he beat Hillary fair and square. They can never accept that some Swamp outsider with his crude style, populist politics and low morals is “their” president.

To get rid of Trump, or his political power, they’ll use whatever it takes – from phony charges of Russian collusion to fake moral outrage over a quickie he had with a porn star long before he was president.

Trump’s enemies say that if we knew about Stormy Daniels and the other women in 2016 we wouldn’t have voted for him.

BS.

Trump supporters knew the kind of man they were voting for. They accepted it. They knew anything was better than four years of President Hillary.

The bottom line, which liberals can never see, is that Trump’s supporters don’t care what he did with Stormy Daniels or what he paid her or anyone else he had sex with to keep quiet.

I don’t care about Stormy Daniels or Trump’s other sexual flings, either.I don’t even care if he slept with my gardener. As long as he didn’t sleep with Hillary, I’m good.

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Copyright 2018 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

Worthy Asylum Seekers Or Not?

Earlier this week I was at an event that honored Malala Yousafzai.

Malala, in case you don’t recall, is the brave young school girl from a village in Pakistan who was nearly killed in 2012 by the Taliban.

She was just 15 when she was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman for publicly speaking out for the right of all girls to receive a free, safe and quality education.

Malala, who became world famous while she lay in a coma for 10 days in a British hospital, was lucky to be given asylum in Britain with her family.

She went on to create the Malala Fund, which she says is dedicated to giving every girl in the world “an opportunity to achieve a future she chooses.”

In 2014 she became the youngest person to win a Nobel Peace Prize and now, at the ripe old age of 21, she’s studying philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Oxford.

When I texted my son Cameron to tell him I was at the event honoring Malala, he pointed out that she was a perfect example of why the United States and countries like Britain offer asylum to refugees.

Unlike the 6,000 migrants from Honduras that are now in Tijuana trying to crash their way into the United States, Malala and her family were in serious danger.

They met the international definition of a refugee perfectly – “a person with well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group, who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war or violence.”

Those 6,000 Central American refugees, as my son also pointed out, are not just trying to take advantage of our generous immigration system and hours of sympathetic liberal media coverage.

By cutting in line, and by clogging up an already backed up application process, they are making it so that the people that truly deserve asylum – worthy refugees like Malala and her family – might not be able to get it.

Realistically, despite Rachel Maddow’s tears, most of the migrants from Honduras or Guatemala rushing our southern border are never going to meet the qualifications for asylum, a bureaucratic legal process that takes a long, long time.

Only about 40 percent of applicants from around the world in any given year qualify for asylum, according to the National Immigration Forum’s web site.

As of July there were more than 700,000 pending asylum cases in our overwhelmed immigration courts and the average wait time for a hearing was 721 days.

During 2017, when there was a big jump in asylum applications from Central America and the total cases filed hit 200,000, only about 30,000 individuals were approved.

As Tucker Carlson pointed out last week, to argue, as the left and liberal media do, that those Honduran migrants in Tijuana automatically deserve to be let into the U.S. because of the poverty and violent crime in their native land is patently absurd.

If poor living conditions and rampant violence are the basis for asylum in America, Carlson said, then the whole country of Honduras should get it.

I don’t know if most people know it, but more than half of the individuals who were granted asylum in the United States in 2016 – 20,500 souls – came from two places:

China (22 percent) and the Central American countries of El Salvador (10.5 percent), Guatemala (9.5 percent), Honduras (7.4 percent) and Mexico (4.5 percent).

Most of them – 44 percent – ended up living in California, which helps to explain why one of the richest states in the Union is now the home for about 7.4 million people who live in poverty, more than any other state.

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Copyright 2018 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

Once again California is at the top of the national news every day.

The apocalyptic images of massive wildfires and destroyed towns like Paradise are gone.

Now the whole country is watching scenes of tear gas being used against the thousands of illegal immigrants from Central America who are trying to force their way into the United States near San Diego.

I hope the people bitching about how Donald Trump is handling this invasion of our southern border are paying attention to the news.

They might learn something most of us Californians already know.

Unlike most Americans, many of us have been to the U.S.-Mexican border.

We’ve seen what happens when the sun goes down. We’ve seen the invasion of illegals that comes across into the U.S. – every single night.

We don’t like it and we understand very well how much it has cost our state.

The national liberal media are, as usual, irresponsibly unfair and unbalanced in their coverage of events at the border.

They can’t stop showing video footage of tear gas being used to turn back the immigrants as they rush the California border.

In their never-ending effort to make Trump and conservatives look as mean and rotten as possible, the electronic media have made it seem like tear gas is some new and terrible weapon.

It’s not.

Tear gas is the weapon border patrol agents use when they’re trying to stop a rushing mob of illegal immigrants.

Critics of President Trump’s policy and the media should be applauding the border patrol’s use of non-lethal weapons like tear gas and pepper spray, not decrying it.

They should also point out that he’s following the lead of previous presidents like Barrack Obama, who now pretends to be appalled by Trump even though tear gas was deployed at the same border crossing during his administration.

Though you’d never hear it if from the liberal media, many of California’s Latinos, who now make up 39 percent of its population, are also unhappy with the invasion of illegal immigrants.

But few Latinos who support Trump’s immigration policy will dare to say so because they fear a backlash in their own community.

The Latino laborers and gardeners who work for rich white liberals also are afraid to say anything positive about Trump for fear of losing their jobs.

They keep mum – and the liberal media ignore them.

When the media reporters do their immigration stories for TV, they interview liberals and Democrats to show how compassionate they are toward the poor illegals.

They also interview conservatives and Republicans to show how compassionate they aren’t.

Somehow they never manage to find those everyday Latino workers – many of them here legally – who are worried about losing their jobs to new immigrants.

The only Latino I remember being interviewed about the serious problems caused by the arrival of thousands of Honduran migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border crossing was the mayor of Tijuana.

He told the immigrants of the caravan the hard truth no one in California could say without being branded a racist, “We don’t want you here in Tijuana. Get the hell out.”

It’s too late to save California with a tougher immigration policy or a higher border wall.

Decades of liberal Democrats have already wrecked the Golden State with their high taxes, bad regulations, transit boondoggles and over-generous social programs for citizens and non-citizens alike.

Now we have a newly elected Democrat governor, Gavin Newsom, who is for open borders and things like universal “free” health care.

With a super majority in both houses in Sacramento, Newsom will be able to do anything he wants and the state’s surviving Republicans won’t be able to prevent California from becoming the Venezuela of North America – with open borders.

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Copyright 2018 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

Editor’s note: Michael Reagan is on vacation, and won’t have a new column this week. He will return the week of November 26.

I realize the Democrats took over the House, which is not new news.

But I’m tired of hearing Nancy Pelosi and other liberals in Congress say that now we need to start working together. Now we need bipartisanship.

Really? Where have they been for the last umpteen years?

Since at least 2016, I haven’t noticed the Democrats clamoring for compromise and cooperation in Washington or on CNN.

Suddenly Nancy Pelosi wants to practice bipartisanship? Yeah, right.

I agree with President Trump.

Now that Democrats are in charge of the House and looking under every bed for excuses to impeach Donald Trump, they also need to start writing some legislation.

No matter how “bipartisan” their bills are, of course, they probably won’t get past the U.S. Senate or the president’s desk.

In other words, for the next two years we’ll have gridlock. Nothing major will get done on issues like immigration reform or our trade deals with China.

Meanwhile, out here in California we’ve been burying the victims of last week’s mass shooting at the Borderline Bar & Grill and wondering if there’s any place left in America where we can take our families that’s safe.

When I was growing up in the 1950s all I had to worry about in school was diving under my desk once a month in case the Russians dropped a nuclear bomb on us.

Today, my son Cameron, who’s a stay-at-home dad, has to worry about sending his kids to grade schools where they are holding active shooting drills.

Who ever thought 50 years ago that we’d have to be concerned about this danger?

We now have a whole generation of parents, and grandparents too, who are worrying about where they can go without being shot down by some mad man.

A movie theater? A baseball field? A grade school. A synagogue?

Liberals, issuing their usual simplistic knee-jerk reaction, say the problem is guns and the solution to mass shootings is to get rid of all of them.

But the problem is much deeper than guns. I think America has lost its soul.

Spirituality, morality, kindness, the better part of our natures, love for your fellow humans no matter what their politics – it’s getting harder and harder to find in our daily lives.

Everyone’s angry on TV. Left or right, Fox or CNN, it doesn’t matter what side you’re on.

Social media and cable networks overflow 24/7 with hate, not calls for political compromise.

They thrive on ratings and clicks and anger – not civility and compromise – to generates their profits.

In my father’s time, in the 1970s and 1980s, we debated important political issues, but we did it without trying to destroy our opponents’ careers or reputations.

Now everything in politics is personal and nasty.

We don’t merely say we disagree with a person’s position. Instead we say, “You’re a racist. You hate women.”

There’s hardly anywhere you can go in the mainstream media to hear an uplifting spiritual message or an inspiring leader who rises above petty politics. There’s almost nowhere you can relax and make yourself feel good.

I tweeted the other day that people should turn off the news and the cable channels for a night and watch the annual country music awards.

That’s what I did. It was just country music and awards. No politics. No anger. No name calling.

It was entertaining and pleasant – an oasis of civility in our angry world. It was something all of us could all use a lot more of.

–

Copyright 2018 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

So what’s the final score?

Who won the midterm elections on Tuesday night? The D team or the R team?

Let’s see.

The Democrats and the progressive left have got Nancy Pelosi back as Speaker of the House for two years. Maxine Waters is ready to rumble too.

Whoopee.

I’m sure Nancy, Maxine and their aged claque of Trump haters and progressives will quickly show America their nasty partisan nature.

They’ve already signaled that they are more interested in trying to impeach Donald Trump than reaching bipartisan consensus on important issues like immigration or funding our infrastructure needs.

Meanwhile, since the Republicans kept the Senate, for the next two years they get to confirm any new Supreme Court justices and dozens more federal judges.

The way I score it, the midterms add up to a monumental win for President Trump, the Republican Party and the rest of the country.

It was president’s tireless campaigning and fighting spirit that made the difference — and made it a historic night.

It’s normal for the House of Representatives to switch parties in a president’s first midterm election.

Ask George W. Bush. Ask Barrack Obama.

What’s really historically abnormal in the midterms is for the president’s party to gain U.S. Senate seats, as the Republicans did.

In the aftermath of Tuesday’s results, it’s interesting to note how differently the Republicans and Democrats have reacted to their losses.

President Trump and Mitch McConnell took it like adults.

They didn’t go on Fox News blaming the government of Saudi Arabia or some other country for messing with our election process to cause Republicans to lose the House to the Democrats.

Republicans know you win some elections and you lose some. They know it’s how party politics in America works ,’ and has since about 1800.

But on the left, the Democrats and their hit men in the deranged liberal media can never believe it when they lose an election.

This time they’re trying to figure out how the Republicans robbed them of the Senate. Was it the Russians? The Chinese? Iranian hackers?

One of their deepest political thinkers, Joy Behar of “The View,” blamed it on gerrymandering – until she was told by someone on the show that senators are elected statewide.

For the next two years it will be very interesting to see what “bipartisan” legislation the Democrats propose – and what actually ends up on the president’s desk.

I’d like to talk some more about the midterms, but in Southern California 11 young people and a brave police officer were gunned down at a college country music night in the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks.

To say this latest mass shooting – which reportedly was done by an ex-Marine who had mental problems – hit close to home to my family is no exaggeration.

In the early 2000s, while my daughter Ashley was in college in the Thousand Oaks area, she was a waitress in the Borderline.

She worked many Wednesday college country nights like the one that has shocked the country less than two weeks after a gunman slaughtered 11 Jews in a synagogue in Pittsburgh.

You ask when do these horrible killings stop. How do we stop future mass murderers from hurting more innocent people?

Dan Bongino, the former Secret Service man, gave the answer on Fox the other night. He said it only stops “When a good guy with a gun takes out a bad guy with a gun.”

He’s right. We need to start protecting ourselves from bad or crazy people with guns with good people with guns.

The president has people with guns protecting him. So do actors, rock stars, CEOs and billionaires.

Congress has lots of people with guns protecting them – even while some of them call for tougher gun control laws that would prevent the rest of us law-abiding citizens from defending ourselves.

Good people with guns should be protecting our children in schools, churches, synagogues, bars – wherever they hang.

Or aren’t our children as important as movie stars and politicians?

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Copyright 2018 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

By Michael Shannon

Ending birthright citizenship, better known as dropping the anchor baby, is the most significant illegal immigration reform the President Trump has announced. With a single executive order, he unplugs a beacon that attracts scammers from the world over. He also attacks a visible manifestation of the “foreigners first” mindset that has infected the State Department, and the rest of the federal bureaucracy, since the 1960s.

For those late to the discussion, birthright citizenship is the GPS theory of national allegiance. If your pregnant wife was sitting in the stands at Lambeau Field and she got so excited she gave birth, the resulting baby would not be entitled to season tickets for the rest of his life. But if your wife, Consuela, was an illegal alien in a sanctuary city, who gave birth in a sanctuary maternity ward, your new child would be a Yankee Doodle Dandy. An instant U.S. citizen with all the welfare rights that come with the birth certificate.

Trump will end that.

As is customary in these situations, the left and its propaganda arm the Opposition Media instantly sprang to the defense of this devaluing of US citizenship. Even worse, the OpMedia had no trouble recruiting reflexive anti-Trumpers like Paul Ryan (R,’INO). Ryan evidently liberated by his banishment to private life, stabbed Trump in the back using his favorite tactic of preemptive surrender. He claims anchor babies aweigh will require an amendment to the Constitution.

The left’s defense of birthright citizenship relies much on sentiment and sad stories and is light on facts. The talking points read like Shotgun Joe Biden wrote the memo. Here are the main defenses of this nonsensical geography theory of national obligation:

The plain language of the 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship.

Birthright citizenship has been a part of the U.S. since the beginning.

The Supreme Court has ruled illegals are entitled to birthright citizenship.

Throwing anchor babies overboard required amending the Constitution.

Each point is factually incorrect. Here is the plain language of the 14th Amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The key phrase is “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The author of the citizenship amendment, Sen. Jacob Howard, who ought to know what he meant, explained, “This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the government of the United States, but will include every other class of person.”

This was tested in the case of Elk v. Wilkins where an Indian sued, contending he had birthright citizenship. Elk lost. The court ruled, “No one can become a citizen of a nation without its consent.” It took passage of a law in 1924 to grant birthright citizenship to American Indians.

The Supreme Court has never addressed the question of birthright citizenship for illegals. The case defenders cite, Wong Kim Ark, concerned two Chinese diplomats who were in the country legally and had a child. In their wisdom, the judges used subjectship under English common law, which the Founders had specifically rejected in the Declaration of Independence, to arrive at a decision that would be overturned today. The case said nothing about aliens in the country illegally.

Mark Levin said, “Not until the 1960’s [was] the Constitution … interpreted to convey birthright citizenship on the children of illegal aliens. And not due to any congressional statute or court ruling, but decisions by various departments and agencies of the federal bureaucracy.”

The federal bureaucracy is controlled by Trump, intermittently at least, so he can tell the executive branch to close the border maternity ward. An amendment isn’t necessary.

Trump should make the order retroactive to the first day of the administration. Certainly, the left will file a lawsuit and fall into a trap of their own making. This is the defining case that can overturn Wong and restore the original intent to the 14th Amendment and not the Hallmark Card legal philosophy that the government has followed for over 50 years. That’s a victory that will last long after the Trump administration.

Finally, Paul Ryan’s back-stabbing response when asked about Trump’s most important policy reinforces my advice to conservatives. Go on strike when you vote in congressional races. Conservatives should vote for every Republican candidate except Representatives. On that line write “On Strike.” Without the conservative base, always taken for granted, Republicans can’t win. In 2020, after the country club conservatives who survive have learned their lesson, resume voting as normal.

Conservatives will never see change in Congress until they change who’s in Congress. Going on strike is the place to start.

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Copyright 2018 Michael Shannon, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Shannon is a commentator and public relations consultant, and is the author of “A Conservative Christian’s Guidebook for Living in Secular Times.” He can be reached at [email protected].