In today’s column, I analyze the Supreme Court oral argument held a few weeks ago in Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans, a case involving the First Amendment and Texas’s regulation of license plates. Motor vehicles registered in the State of Texas must display a state-sanctioned license plate. Most vehicles use a standard-issue Texas plate that has a simple no-frills design and displays a random series of letters and numbers. Texas, like many other states, also permits individuals to submit personalized, or vanity, plates in which the numbers and letters on the plate form a message (such as “HOTSTUFF,” a hypothetical example Justice Scalia used at oral argument).
In addition, Texas permits what are called “specialty” license plates, in which the overall design of the plate (but not the sequence of numbers and letters), is custom-made and might contain symbols, colors and other visual matter that is more elaborate than the relatively plain design of the standard-issue plates. Specialty designs may be adopted by the Texas legislature or proposed by private individuals or organizations. Specialty plate designs that come from outside the legislature must be approved (as must personalized vanity plates) by the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles Board, and the Board by law “may refuse to create a new specialty license plate if the design might be offensive to any member of the public” (a term that Texas authorities construe as meaning offensive to a significant segment of the public.) At least some specialized designs, once approved, can be used by members of the general public. As of a month ago, there were about 450 specialty designs that had been approved in Texas, around 250 of which are usable by the public. Although the majority of license plates in Texas are the plain-vanilla non-specialty plates, it is not uncommon on the Texas roadways to see license plates that make use of one of the approved specialty designs.
Applicants who seek approval of specialized plate designs must pay thousands of dollars to have their designs considered, and people who use the already approved designs pay for the privilege, the proceeds going to various state agencies.
The Texas Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the memory and reputation of Confederate soldiers. SCV applied for a specialty license plate that featured the SCV logo, “which is a Confederate battle flag framed on all four sides by the words...
Mark Levin addresses what he accurately describes as “the complete evisceration of American citizenship. More than illegal immigration, it’s the complete evisceration of American citizenship, to destroy the identity of America. I’m not talking about the racial identity,” says Levin, “The identity, heart, soul, history of America, culture of America.”
He continues, “It’s being done by left-wing states, it’s being done by left-wing municipalities, it’s being done by this left-wing federal government. And this is a war on you, the American citizen. And we even have some Republican candidates who are very soft on this issue and keep talking about ‘well we need to increase visas for high-tech jobs when 25 percent of those who graduate from college with massive student debt, subsidizing Marxist professors, and the administrators who have gone nuts with their facility building, they can’t find jobs.”
He says, “Many of them want jobs, young people, they can’t find them because you have billionaires importing cheap labor from overseas.” He notes that Congress is supporting more visas and that at least one Republican candidate for president is doing so as well.
He notes a California bill to protect illegal aliens, which prompted him to ask just what it was they were being protected from. Noting that California is now a one party state and it is the wrong party, in the model of the Communist Party, and how the population is aggressively being...
As a federal appeals court considers whether to keep or rescind a hold on Obama’s immigration program, the attorney general of the state leading the charge against the president’s executive actions “is very confident” the plaintiffs will win out.
“All I can tell you is, based on the law, I feel very confident,” said Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in an interview with The Daily Signal. “I am very confident we are right on the law. And if the law matters, we will do very well.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit is scheduled to hear oral arguments on April 17 about whether to uphold or remove an injunction on Obama’s 2014 immigration actions.
Judge Andrew S. Hanen of Federal District Court in Brownsville, Texas put a hold on those actions on Feb. 16, preventing the immigration initiatives from going into effect.
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This week, Hanen denied the federal government’s request to allow Obama’s immigration actions to proceed, saying that doing so would...
The systematic destruction of the American way of life is
happening all around us, and yet most people have no idea what is happening. Once upon a time in America, if you were responsible and hard working you could get a good paying job that could support a middle class lifestyle for an entire family even if you only had a high school education. Things weren’t perfect, but generally almost everyone in the entire country was able to take care of themselves without government assistance.
We worked hard, we played hard, and our seemingly boundless prosperity was the envy of the entire planet. But over the past several decades things have completely changed. We consumed far more wealth than we produced, we shipped millions of good paying jobs overseas, we piled up the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world, and we kept electing politicians that had absolutely no concern for the long-term future of this nation whatsoever. So now good jobs are in very short supply, we are drowning in an ocean of red ink, the middle class is rapidly shrinking and dependence on the government is at an all-time high. Even as we stand at the precipice of the next great economic crisis, we continue to make the same mistakes.
In the end, all of us are going to pay a very great price for decades of incredibly foolish decisions. Of course a tremendous amount of damage has already been done. The numbers that I am about to share with you are staggering. The following are 19 signs that American families are being economically destroyed…
#1 The poorest 40 percent of all Americans now spend more than 50 percent of their incomes just on food and housing.
#2 For those Americans that don’t own a home, 50 percent of them spend more than a third of their incomes just on rent.
#3 The price of school lunches has risen to the 3 dollar mark at many public schools across the nation.
#4 McDonald’s “Dollar Menu & More” now includes items that cost as much as 5 dollars.
#5 The price of ground beef has doubled since 2009.
#6 In 1986, child care expenses for families with employed mothers used up 6.3 percent of all income. Today, that figure is up to 7.2 percent.
#7 Incomes fell for the bottom 80 percent of all income earners in the United States during the 12 months leading up to June 2014.
#8 At this point, more than 50 percent of all American workers bring home less than...
