Comments by Steven P. Rader | Eastern NC Now

The real Constitutional crisis comes from lower level highly partisan Democrat judges using their offices for political purposes. We have seen the usurpation of legislative power by such judges for years in what is referred to as "legislating from the bench". Now this same category of judges in trying to usurp executive branch powers. Such behavior does nothing but bring the entire judicial system into disrepute with the public. Polling after the outrageous Democrat "lawfare" with trumped up charges against President Trump showed that severely tarnished the image of the entire judicial system. These judges ought to put the image of the judiciary ahead of their own political feelings.

Commented: Thursday, February 13th, 2025 @ 10:45 am By: Steven P. Rader

There are other things the General Assembly can do to clip Jackson's wings on these very questionable politically motivated out of state lawsuits. They can slash all the items in his budget that contributed to hia filing these suits. They can specifically eliminate the positions of each of his staff attorneys involved with the lawsuits, and they can zero out his department's out of state travel budget.

This behavior by Jackson is disgusting and it must be stopped. The DOJ budget is NOT his personal piggy bank to finance his ideological and political lawsuits. Jackson is abusing the public trust.

Commented: Wednesday, February 12th, 2025 @ 12:28 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Everywhere there was a leftist challenge in court expected, a conservative group should have filed a suit on the same subject in a jurisdiction where they were likely to have friendly judges. It was a given the left would sue on some things like "birthright citizenship" and these could have been preempted. THese latest suits are bouncing off the walls, but even so, suits addressing the same issues should have been filed as quickly as possible in more conservative jurisdictions.

Polls show that the Democrat lawfare against Trump pre-election has already tarnished the reputation of American courts with the public, and this post election power grab by the Democrats through the courts is just going to make that worse.

Commented: Monday, February 10th, 2025 @ 3:59 pm By: Steven P. Rader

What is appalling is that the school superintendant never seemed to have brought the school board's attorney into the process. Maybe that is because he is way off in Durham and travel would have eaten them up financially. One of the first things an attorney would have done is determine title. To use an old British expression, the school superintendant was penny wise and pound foolish for not bringing in legal advice into the process at the beginning.

When I served in the Martin administration as General Counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services, on a project this size our Office of Legal Affairs would have been thoroughly engaged. That is so even though a $50 million project was less than 2% of our annual budget as compared to about 2/3rds of the school system's annual budget.

Our taxpayers are out half a million dollars as a result, and that is not acceptable.

Commented: Friday, February 7th, 2025 @ 9:16 am By: Steven P. Rader

Bob describes what USAID was in the PAST. Obama and Biden have subverted it to serve their woke ideology. When I woeked in eastern Europe, I knew quite a few people in the expat community who ran USAID funded programs. They were not all American. Some were Swedish, British, and Latvian, but the money for their programs was provided by USAID, and they were engaged in traditional foreign aid projects. The items listed in that Daily Mail article above are NOT such programs. There has been a radical change in what USAID does with our tax dollars under Obama and Biden and it makes a mockery of what USAID was originally founded to do.

One thing about USAID spending under Biden I found was particularly mindboggling. Afghanistan under the Taliban was one of the largest USAID recipients, getting over a billion dollars in 2023. This is an outright hostile government. Why are our tax dollars propping them up?

Commented: Wednesday, February 5th, 2025 @ 8:54 am By: Steven P. Rader

Newsflash, Bob. Everyone expected the EO to go through the courts. The EO was issued for the purpose of getting the issue back in the courts, so that hopefully, the Supreme Court can clarify that the 14th Amendment means what its authors told their fellow senators and congressmen it meant. That is that it does not apply to those in the country illegally. The authors specifically set that out is the amendment's legislative history. Of course, the left, including liberal judges have a habit of trying to rewrite many parts of the Constitution and "find" things that were really never there.

There were early cases under the 14th amendment that ruled it did not apply to American Indians, and Congress had to pass a special law to designate American Indians as US citizens. The reason was they were not considered as fully "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States due to their tribal loyalties under tribal treaties.

Commented: Wednesday, January 29th, 2025 @ 8:25 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Stan, it is more the local school administration's fault that their out of town school board attorney was not engaged in this process like he should have been. If a client refers a matter like this to the attorney, he would have responded. The problem is that the school administration seems to have thought they were competent to handle it themselves and they weren't. They probably thought it would cost them higher fees given the logistics of having to bring an attorney from Durham down here to handle these matters. The administration's incompetence in NOT bringing their attorney in to the extent they should has blown up in their face and cost a whole lot more money than his attorney fees would have been.

Again, it would have been the school administration that called in the Durham-based school board attorney on those matters where they were engaged in election interference against candidates not to the school administration's liking. The attorney would not have gotten into that on his own.

Look to the client on thse matters. That is where the problem is. Although, logistically, there are lots of issues where an attorney being located that far away makes things problematic on using him for matters where he is genuinely needed.

Commented: Monday, January 27th, 2025 @ 12:24 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Names don't tell you a whole lot. A good example is the current GOP National Committeewoman from NC whose first name is Keshia, and she is a white woman. We had a former GOP state chairman whose first name was Hassan but he was a black Christian. On the other hand, I remember in the same week of district court with Mitchell Norton prosecuting, there was a black gentleman in Martin County whose given names were Stonewall Jackson and another in Beaufort County whose given names were Robert E. Lee. Mitchall also prosecuted a white guy that week whose last name was Superman, so he joked that in one week, he had prosecuted Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Super Man. Seeing those names on applications, other than Superman of course, would give someone the wrong impression about race.

DEI is systemic discrimination. What you refer to may happen occaisionally but is not systemic.

Commented: Friday, January 24th, 2025 @ 10:16 am By: Steven P. Rader

The left in their misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution want to ignore the key phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof". There is no absolute birthright citizenship. If one looks at the legislative history of the 14th amendment, which is necessary to understand its meaning, it's authors specifically did NOT intend for the amendment to grant unlimited birthright citizenship.

I am sure this issue will end up in the Supreme Court, and I suspect that the majoriy there will not ignore the legislative history of the 14th amendment or that key phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof".

Commented: Wednesday, January 22nd, 2025 @ 7:18 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Perhaps Bob needs a refresher course in reading comprehension or maybe he is just so into Democrat spin he just says whatever comes to mind. Lets look at his distortions.

"Democrats - racist" Well, NO. What I pointed out is that Democrat Frank Bonner was operating purely in his own political self interest. As a white politician finding himself in what would be a black district, he naturally thought that would not be good for his own political future. It would have been the same if he had found himself in a Republican voting district. It was all about his own political self interest for Frank Bonner.

"Courts- not to be trusted" In this case, the district court dealt with a situation that appellate courts had not specifically ruled upon, where a party at one point agreed but then withdrew that agreement. While it is not certain which way the appellate courts would have ruled, the odds of a favorable ruling for the county were certainly high enough it should have been appealed.

"Voting Rights Act - bad" I made no comment on the act itself, only that the evidence here would likely have resulted in a victory for the county if they had fought it out instead of surrendering. To win a voting rights case, the plaintiff must prove that voting is racially polarized and they did not have the facts on their side in this case. No black had run for county commission to establsh such a pattern, and if you looked at other races, there was ample evidence that such a pattern did not exist. Part of that was substantial white vote for a black city councilman in Washington. But it went well beyond that to include heavy white voter support in the nomination of a black candidate over several whites in a Republican sheriff primary, and the fact that the majority of blacks voted in the general election for a white Democrat over that well qualifired black Republican. It also included a state House Democrat primary, where the majority of Beaufort County blacks voted for the white incumbent over a well qualified black challenger who has a Hyde County Deputy Sheriff. The county could have blown Moore's case out of the water if they had contested it based on those then-recent election results, but to me the best result would have been a settlement based on Moore's district proposal. That would have given the county a better voting system than it had and light years better than limited voting.

And, although it destorys your narrative, if you go back, Bob, and read the Wasington Daily News accounts when this was happening, you will find my account is accurate.

Commented: Monday, January 20th, 2025 @ 9:57 am By: Steven P. Rader

Bob, in Beaufort County, we have a VERY convoluted system of electing commissioners called "limited voting" which largely destroys the lines of accountability and responsiveness between the voters and commissioners. We need a normal election system like either straight at-large or districts, or some combination of the two, to restore that responsiveness and accountability. "Limited voting" is what the Communist Chinese suggested for Hong Kong elections in their negotiarions on the end of British rule, and the British rejected as totally undemocratic.

Commented: Saturday, January 18th, 2025 @ 6:29 pm By: Steven P. Rader

One of their biggest cities in their own state is on fire, and these hacks concentrate on partisan national politics?? California badly needs a change in its governance. These Democrats can't govern because all they want to do is play politics while they ignore a disaster of their own making on their own doorstep.

Commented: Saturday, January 11th, 2025 @ 9:43 am By: Steven P. Rader

Those "fact checkers" really ought to call themselves "spin doctors" because that is what they really are, spinning everything for the establishment narrative.

Commented: Wednesday, January 8th, 2025 @ 8:29 pm By: Steven P. Rader

The normal way of repealing all the onerous Biden rules is timeconsuming, but using a Democrat legal trick, they could be done rather quickly using the Democrats' favored "sue and settle" method. All it takes is getting agrieved parties to file lawsuits against the rules, after which the Trump DOJ files answers admitting the allegations of the complaints and the case gets settled with a consent judgment through the court declaring the rules void. Since the SCOTUS just issued a ruling severely restricting the administrative rulemaking powers of the executive branch, this would be a great time to chop down much of the administrative state's opporessive forest of rules this way.

Commented: Monday, January 6th, 2025 @ 11:23 am By: Steven P. Rader

Race, of course, has nothing to do with citizenship. I suspect Bob knows this and is just playing dumb.

If one parent is an American citizen, the baby is an American citizen wherever the baby is born. If both parents are legal immigrants who do not have citizenship yet, I do not know how that would be viewed when citizenship by birth is eliminated. In a European country I once lived in, the baby would be eligible for citizenship when the parents or either of them were. I suspect that might be the way it would work here.

In Europe, citizenship is based on the nationality of the parents or naturalization. In some cases that nationality can reach quite far back. For instance in German citizenship law, anyone who has an ancestor who was a citizen in 1871, when the united nation of Germany was formed from around 30 previously independent kingdoms, duchies, and principalities, can claim German citizenship today. There are even provisions for ethnic Germans whose ancestors settled in specific places in medieval times like the Baltic states, part of Romania, and part of Russia to claim automatic German citizenship today by ethnicity. Romania is another example, where anyone who had an ancestor who was a citizen of the Kingdom of Romania in 1919 is entitled to claim automatic citizenship, which about half of the citizens of neighboring Moldova have already done. Moldova was a part of Romania in 1919.

The last European country to award citizenship by place of birth alone was Ireland. and their Constitution was amended in a referendum by a landslide vote to abolish that a couple of decades ago. The problem that led to the landslide vote to end it was abuse by illegal aliens.

Commented: Friday, January 3rd, 2025 @ 8:31 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Everything depends on energy, and when you raise the cost of that, it makes the cost of everything go up for the consumer. It was Biden's anti-energy policies as much as his big spending that have been responsible for the inflation during his tenure. Attempts to raise the price of energy such as that by New York have to be stopped, or it will cost all of us. Considering the impact on interstate commerce, I cannot see how that move will be allowed to stand.

Commented: Sunday, December 29th, 2024 @ 2:55 pm By: Steven P. Rader

New York is again behaving like a Third World banana republic and their attempted shakedown of energy companies needs to be halted in its tracks. It would seem that the Trump administration could act to stop it because New York is intefering in interstate commerce, a federal responsibility.

Commented: Friday, December 27th, 2024 @ 10:45 am By: Steven P. Rader