(CNN) — A coalition of Texas abortion providers went back to the Supreme Court Thursday, asking the justices to expedite a review of the state law that bars abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.

The law has been in effect for 23 days, but the federal appeals court hearing the challenge has only set a tentative hearing schedule for December. The providers are asking the justices to — in effect — step in and decide a key issue in the case now, instead of waiting for a federal appeals court to rule on the issue.

The new court papers mark the latest furious attempt on behalf of providers to stop a law that bars most abortions before a woman even knows she is pregnant. The law, which challengers say was drafted with the specific intent to evade judicial review, is now being challenged by providers in federal and state courts, as well as by the Department of Justice.

In the new brief, the providers say the law is written in a way that makes it almost impossible to challenge because it bars Texas officials from enforcing it and instead allows private individuals to bring suit against anyone who may assist in helping a person obtain an abortion performed after six weeks. The clinics are asking the Supreme Court to decide “whether a State can insulate from federal-court review a law that prohibits the exercise of a constitutional right by delegating to the general public the authority to enforce that prohibition through civil actions.”

Separately, they have filed papers asking the court to put their request on a fast track. Under normal circumstances supporters of the law would have had about 30 days to respond, and the process could drag into the winter months. Instead, the clinics want the justices to consider the case October 29 and hear oral arguments in December.

That timing would coincide with the Supreme Court hearing another, completely separate challenge to a Mississippi law that bars most abortions after 15 weeks. Mississippi is asking the court to overturn Roe v. Wade and the court has set arguments for December 1.

If the court were to grant the request from the Texas providers, it could hear the two challenges in the same month.

“Texas intentionally outsourced enforcement of S.B. 8’s blatantly unconstitutional six-week abortion ban to the populace at large as a ploy to insulate the State from responsibility for enacting a law that violates a clearly established federal right,” the clinics wrote.

Under normal circumstances the Supreme Court does not like to rule on an issue until the normal appeals process has played out.

“We’re asking the Supreme Court for this expedited appeal because the Fifth Circuit has done nothing to change the dire circumstances on the ground in Texas,” said Nancy Northup of the Center for Reproductive Rights. “We’re doing everything we can to block this ban and restore abortion access in Texas.”

In making the unusual request, the clinics noted that providers in neighboring states have reported increases of patients traveling across state lines and other states have begun to push copycat laws.

The clinics had previously asked the justices to block the law before it went into effect, but the high court declined to do so on September 1.

Back then, in an unsigned 5-4 order, the majority wrote that while the clinics had raised “serious questions regarding the constitutionality of the Texas law,” they had not met a burden that would allow the court to block it due to “complex” and “novel” procedural questions. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the three liberal justices in dissent.

Roberts said that he voted to block the law pending appeal to give the courts more time to consider the unusual statute.

Roberts said that the state Legislature had imposed a “prohibition on abortions after roughly six weeks” and then “essentially delegated enforcement of that prohibition to the populace at large” with the consequence of insulating the state from the responsibility of enforcing the law.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the majority’s order “stunning.”

“Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand,” Sotomayor wrote.

“No federal appellate court has upheld such a comprehensive prohibition on abortions before viability under current law,” she wrote. “Taken together, the Act is a breathtaking act of defiance — of the Constitution, of this Court’s precedents, and of the rights of women seeking abortions throughout Texas.”

This story has been updated with additional details.

Source: https://whdh.com/news/texas-abortion-providers-go-back-to-supreme-court-to-expedite-challenge-to-six-week-ban/

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The post “THEY ALREADY FAILED US” first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Also included on the list is the video surveillance company Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology, Co. Ltd., which manufactures equipment that may be used in China’s Xinjiang region, where the ethnic Uighur people and other Turkic Muslims are reportedly being detained in concentration camps. Other entities on the list include aerospace, transportation and nuclear technology companies. Companies on the Pentagon’s list may be engaged in delivering U.S. technological information to the Chinese Communist Party.

Lawmakers, including U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, requested the list in a 2019 letter to Secretary of State Mark Esper. According to the letter, China was using a “Military-Civilian Fusion” tactic involving technological espionage to further its goals.

“If Beijing cannot develop technology on its own, it attempts to steal it from the United States using cyber espionage, intelligence assets operating in the United States, and state-directed companies that acquire American firms to transfer proprietary information,” the letter read.

“As the People’s Republic of China attempts to blur the lines between civil and military sectors,” Hoffman continued, “‘knowing your supplier’ is critical.” Hoffman added that the list should be a “useful tool” for organizations within the U.S. to “conduct due diligence with regard to partnership with these entities, particularly as the list grows.”

Newsweek reached out to the office of Senator Schumer and Huawei Technologies U.S.A. for comment. This story will be updated with any response.

According to a list compiled by the Department of Defense, 20 companies engaged in business practices within the U.S. have alleged ties to the Chinese government including telecommunications company Huawei.STR/AFP/GETTY

In February, Huawei was charged in a Brooklyn, New York federal court with conspiracy to steal trade secrets. According to the DOJ, Huawei and four of the company’s subsidiaries attempted to “misappropriate intellectual property.” Information about internet routers, robotics technology and cellular antennas were allegedly provided to Huawei, allowing the company to cut its “research and development costs and associated delays, giving the company a significant and unfair competitive advantage.”

Huawei also allegedly did business through its subsidiaries in Iran and North Korea despite the fact that the U.S. had levied sanctions against those countries, making such transactions illegal.

Hikvision was placed on a trade blacklist by the U.S. Department of Commerce in October, citing implications that the company was involved in “China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance.”

In an October press release, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross said that the blacklisting, designed to make getting U.S. materials for manufacturing more difficult, would “ensure that our technologies, fostered in an environment of individual liberty and free enterprise, are not used to repress defenseless minority populations.”

Diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China have become strained since the coronavirus pandemic spread worldwide, causing the global economy to suffer losses. President Donald Trump has publicly referred to the virus as the “Wuhan Flu,” after the Chinese city where the coronavirus was first reported in December.

President Trump also signed the Uighur Human Rights Bill of 2020, allowing the U.S. government to levy sanctions against China in response to allegations of human rights abuses.

In response to the bill, China’s Foreign Ministry said in a June statement that the U.S. should not use the legislation to “harm China’s interests and interfere in China’s internal affairs. Otherwise, China will resolutely take countermeasures, and all the consequences arising therefrom must be fully borne by the United States.”

Updated 11:42 p.m. EST 06/24/2020: This story has been updated to include a statement from Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Jonathan Rath Hoffman.

Source: https://www.newsweek.com/pentagon-lists-companies-connected-chinese-military-including-huawei-1513239

The post Pentagon Lists Companies Connected to Chinese Military, Including Huawei first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

At least 217 people have been charged with a federal crime, and more than 1,000 arrests have been made in major metropolitan cities since the Department of Justice launched Operation Legend in July, U.S. Attorney General William Barr announced on Wednesday.

Nearly 400 firearms have been seized by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.

Barr launched Operation Legend on July 8 as “a sustained, systematic and coordinated law enforcement initiative in which federal law enforcement agencies work in conjunction with state and local law enforcement officials to fight violent crime,” the DOJ said in a release.

MURDER CHARGE ANNOUNCED IN KILLING OF LEGEND TALIFERRO, 4, WHOSE DEATH SPARKED OPERATION LEGEND

It was named in honor of 4-year-old LeGend Taliferro, who was shot and killed while he slept in the early morning of June 29 in Kansas City, Mo. Last week, a Jackson County prosecutor announced second-degree murder charges against his suspected killer, 22-year-old Ryson Ellis, who was being held in Tulsa County Jail.

LeGend Taliferro, 4, was shot and killed while he slept in the early morning of June 29 in Kansas City, Mo. (Courtesy of FBI)

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“LeGend is a symbol of the many hundreds of innocent lives that have been taken in the recent upsurge of crime in many of our urban areas,” Barr said at a press conference in Kansas City. “His life mattered and the lives of all of those victims matter. His name should be remembered and his senseless death, like those of all the other innocent victims in this recent surge, should be unacceptable to all Americans.”

Barr said the federal government has dispatched to nine U.S. cities more than 1,000 additional agents from the FBI, ATF, Drug Enforcement Administration, and U.S. Marshals Service to work shoulder to shoulder with state and local partners on homicide and assault squads to crack cases.

The government has also allocated $78.5 million in grants to support additional police positions, hire more prosecutors, and improve technology to solve firearms crimes.

“We saw one result of those efforts last week when Kansas City Police arrested the suspected murderer of LeGend,” Barr said. “This arrest will not bring LeGend back but it will make his case an example of how we can come together to take violent criminals off the street and to make our communities safer.”

The spike in violent crime, according to Barr, may have a lot of reasons, including the “pent up aggression prompted by state and local quarantine orders,” the premature release of dangerous criminals by the courts and prosecutors, and the efforts “to demonize police and defund their work.”

“Operation Legend is the heart of the federal government’s response to this upturn in violent crime. Its mission is to save lives, solve crimes and take violent offenders off the streets before they can claim more victims,” Barr said. “Rather than demonizing and defunding our police, we are supporting and strengthening our law enforcement partners at the state and local level.

First launched in Kansas City, Operation Legend expanded to Chicago and Albuquerque on July 22, to Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee on July 29, to St. Louis and Memphis on Aug. 6, and to Indianapolis on Aug. 14.

The latest figures on charges and arrests do not include Indianapolis, whose operation was first announced last Friday. The arrests of more than 1,000 people include those charged in state and local courts.

In Kansas City, a total of 43 defendants have been charged with federal crimes. Sixty-one have been charged with federal charges in Chicago, 16 in Albuquerque, 32 in Cleveland, 22 in Detroit, 11 in Milwaukee, 25 in St. Louis, and 7 in Memphis, Tenn.

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The charges include illegal possession of a firearm, possession with intent to distribute controlled substances or narcotics, drug trafficking, theft, carjacking, bank robbery, illegal re-entry of an alien in connection with a widespread drug conspiracy, and making false statements to licensed firearm dealers.

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/doj-operation-legend-barr-200-federal-crimes-1000-arrests

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President Trump, in a statement, accused “the radical left” of trying to “conceal the number of illegal aliens in our country.”Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Trump directed the federal government on Tuesday not to count undocumented immigrants when allocating the nation’s House districts, a move that critics called a transparent political ploy to help Republicans in violation of the Constitution.

The president’s directive would exclude millions of people when determining how many House seats each state should have based on the once-a-decade census, reversing the longstanding policy of counting everyone regardless of citizenship or legal status. The effect would likely shift several seats from Democratic states to Republican states.

“There used to be a time when you could proudly declare, ‘I am a citizen of the United States,’” Mr. Trump said in a written statement after signing a memorandum to the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau. “But now, the radical left is trying to erase the existence of this concept and conceal the number of illegal aliens in our country. This is all part of a broader left-wing effort to erode the rights of Americans citizens, and I will not stand for it.”

The action directly conflicts with the traditional consensus interpretation of the Constitution and will almost surely be challenged in court, potentially delaying its effect if not blocking its enactment altogether. But it fit into Mr. Trump’s efforts to curb both legal and illegal immigration at a time when he is anxiously trying to galvanize his political base heading into a fall election season trailing his Democratic opponent.

“I think the Donald Trump view is: ‘I can look like I’m trying to do something by stoking anti-immigrant fervor, and if I lose in court then, I just stoke anti-court fervor too,’” Joshua A. Geltzer, the director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown, said in an interview. “It should be legally impossible as well as factually difficult to do.”

As a practical matter, Mr. Trump’s order could not be carried out even were it legal, because no official tally of undocumented immigrants exists, and federal law bars the use of population estimates for reapportionment purposes.

The move comes a year after Mr. Trump was blocked by the Supreme Court from adding a citizenship question to the census on the grounds that its ostensible reasoning “seems to have been contrived.” The administration has been trying ever since to collect information on undocumented immigrants through separate means like driver’s license files.

A study last year by the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that supports limits on immigration, found that excluding immigrants from the count for purposes of drawing congressional districts would take away seats from some states while giving more to others.

Excluding unauthorized immigrants in 2020 would redistribute three seats, the study found, with California, New York, and Texas all losing a seat that they would have had otherwise, while Ohio, Alabama, and Minnesota would each gain one. The study found even more sweeping effects if the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants were excluded, but the president’s directive made no mention of them.

Steven Camarota, the research director for the center, said the administration’s effort would be difficult administratively and likely tied up in court. “Nevertheless,” he said, “the president has done the country an important service by reminding us that tolerating large-scale illegal immigration creates a number of unavoidable consequences, including diluting the political representation of American citizens in Congress and the Electoral College.”

The White House separately asked congressional appropriators last weekend to include $1 billion into the next coronavirus relief package for the purpose of conducting a “timely census.” The Census Bureau had previously sought permission to extend the tally of the hardest-to-count people into October and delay delivery of reapportionment population totals to next year.

The $1 billion could allow the bureau to abandon that plan and accelerate the counting to deliver a reapportionment count to Congress in December, before Mr. Trump leaves office if he loses the election to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. It could mean that less time is devoted to counting the marginalized people than in a normal census, which experts believe would benefit Republicans.

The president’s directive on Tuesday amounted to his latest election-year effort to restrict immigration and immigration rights in the United States, lately predicated on the need to stem the spread of the coronavirus.

The administration decided last month to suspend new work visas and bar hundreds of thousands of foreigners from seeking employment in the United States, drawing immediate opposition from business leaders and several states.

But last week administration officials backed away from a separate plan to strip international college students of their visas if they did not attend at least some classes in person. Earlier this month, Mr. Trump told Telemundo that he would sign a “much bigger bill on immigration” through an executive order, although that has not come to fruition.

The president’s move to exclude unauthorized immigrants from congressional apportionment upends a long history. Even as he signed his memorandum on Tuesday, the Census Bureau’s own website continued to say in a question-and-answer section that undocumented residents are to be counted: “Yes, all people (citizens and noncitizens) with a usual residence in the 50 states are to be included in the census and thus in the apportionment counts.”

The president’s policy appeared at odds with the Constitution, which requires the government to conduct an “actual enumeration” of all people living in the United States without distinguishing whether they are citizens. But the memorandum signed by Mr. Trump argued that the government has always made distinctions like not counting foreign diplomats or temporary visitors even though they are in the United States physically. Therefore, the memorandum argued, the government can make the further distinction of not counting people who have no legal right to be in the country in the first place.

The argument that immigrants can be excluded from reapportionment counts also runs counter to legal opinions that the Department of Justice issued during the administrations of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, when some in Congress sought to put that exclusion into law.

Critics said the administration’s efforts first to include a citizenship question and now to disregard undocumented immigrants from apportionment would lead to undercounts of even legal noncitizens and minority residents, resulting in less representation and federal funding in areas where they live, which tend to vote Democratic.

Marielena Hincapié, the executive director of the National Immigration Law Center Immigrant Justice Fund, said that regardless of whether Mr. Trump’s latest action was legal, it would discourage compliance with the census among Latinos, who already complete the survey at lower rates than people of other races.

“This is his go-to play every time that he’s feeling cornered or he’s feeling like he’s losing,” Ms. Hincapié said. “He uses immigrants and immigration to divide and distract, and at the same time he sends that chilling effect through all immigrant communities who have already been living in fear under his administration.”

Michael Wines contributed reporting.

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