“…After years of unsuccessful talks and handshake deals with Beijing, the United States should change course and begin cutting some of its economic ties with China. Such a separation would stop intellectual property theft, cut off an important source of support to the People’s Liberation Army and hold companies that are involved in Chinese human rights abuses accountable.

This will be no easy task. Some industries will have problems finding new suppliers or buyers, and there are entrenched constituencies that support doing business with China. They argue that any pullback could threaten economic growth. But even if American exports to China fell by half, it would be the equivalent of less than one-half of 1 percent of gross domestic product. The cost of reducing Chinese imports is harder to assess, but there are multiple countries that can substitute for China-based production, none of them strategic rivals and trade predators.

The United States economy and its national security have been harmed by China’s rampant theft of intellectual property and the requirement that American companies that want to do business in the country hand over their technology. These actions threaten America’s comparative advantage in innovation and its military edge…”

Original

“…The communists in the USSR and Cuba tried to invent a “new man,” a “socialist man” who would give up his individuality in order to advance the interests of “the people.” But the population never bought it, and oppressive security agencies were imposed to coerce people to live according to socialist ideals. That is why the “beneficiaries” of communism were delighted when their totalitarian societies fell.

Today, with the freeing of females from traditional role constraints, it is still primarily men who do the dangerous and dirty jobs, who make up most of the first responders and the military who defend us, and who, as scientists and engineers, continue to address the natural world for understanding and to serve our needs. These are some of the ways that the characteristics and qualities of men benefit society. And it is the job of socialization to direct the traits of men into constructive channels, a more realistic and productive strategy than trying to turn males into females.

Yes, being a man is not stress-free, and sometimes we have inner struggles. But do women not also have inner struggles, and is that not in our nature as human beings? Feminists who simplistically argue that women’s psychological and other problems are all and always the fault of “toxic” men, are doing a very human thing: blaming others for their problems. That such sad naivete has been adopted by our governments, scientific organizations, and schools and universities does not reflect a very sound understanding of people or the world. Even more so for psychologists, who should know better…”

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ROGER KIMBALL:

“…For almost three years now, the intelligence services and police apparatus of the deep state have worked tirelessly to undermine Donald Trump. Beginning sometime in the late winter of 2016, when Trump’s presidential campaign was showing unexpected signs of strength, John Brennan—the Communist-voting apparatchik turned media mouthpiece whom it pleased Barack Obama to appoint as director of the CIA—began ringing alarm bells about Trump’s possible relations with the Kremlin. His concern was based on two things. One was a report, spurious as it turned out, about “contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in my mind about whether or not those individuals were cooperating with the Russians.” The other was that brittle sense of entitlement, fired by paranoia, that membership in the higher echelons of the deep state’s nomenklatura breeds.

‘…It’s now beyond any reasonable doubt that Obama administration minions launched an all-out effort to destroy, first, President Trump’s presidential campaign and, when that failed, his presidency. The only question is, knowing the truth, will the Justice Department charge these people with crimes?

The whole concern over “Russian interference” with the 2016 election was little more than a smokescreen for a much wider effort to go after Donald Trump. And that’s not us talking, but the New York Times.

A Times report titled “F.B.I. Opened Inquiry into Whether Trump was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia” shows that the investigation into Donald Trump for the non-crime of “collusion” with Russia’s government began before the election. The inquiry aimed at stopping Trump — and not, really, at determining whether Russians interfered in our presidential election.

The actual investigation by the Justice Department and FBI began during the election campaign. Using half-baked and “unverifiable” intelligence about Trump’s purported links to Russia, officials used the so-called Steele Dossier four separate times for FISA court approval to spy on the Trump campaign.

The Bogus Steele Dossier

The only problem is, the Steele Dossier didn’t come from the FBI or Justice Department. It came from Fusion GPS, an opposition research group linked to the Democrats. And Hillary Clinton’s campaign paid for it.

“Ostensibly, the surveillance application targeted Carter Page,” wrote Andrew McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and himself a former federal prosecutor. “But Page was just a side issue. The dossier was principally about Trump – not Page, not Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, or other Trump associates referred to by Steele. The dossier’s main allegation was that Trump was in an espionage conspiracy with Russia to swing the election to Trump, after which Trump would do Putin’s bidding from the White House.”

So for all intents and purposes, the Deep State holdovers from the Obama administration were serving as an adjunct to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Early on in the investigation, CIA chief John Brennan convened multi-agency meetings about Trump. They included Peter Strzok, the head of the FBI’s counter-intelligence, and James Clapper, national intelligence director under Obama, among others.

The premise of the meetings, again, was that Trump possibly colluded with the Russians to hack our election and might even be an agent of Russia.

Where’s The Evidence?

Yet, as the Times itself admitted, virtually “no evidence” existed for such a charge.

Such actions are illegal, an attempt by supposedly nonpartisan government employees to subvert the 2016 presidential election. Bureaucrats attempting to veto the legitimate will of the people.

Ironically, these extra-legal machinations posed a far greater direct threat to our democracy than anything Trump allegedly did. And yet the perpetrators still walk free. They make hundreds of thousands of dollars on the lecture circuit and as talking heads on TV.

As the Times points out, even as he deepened his investigation into Trump on behalf of the Democratic Party, former FBI Director James Comey lied repeatedly to Trump about whether he was under investigation. He also leaked the contents of a private meeting with Trump in the White House to the media.

The idea: Create doubts about Trump and sow the seeds of broader action by the Deep State against his presidency. For anyone still harboring any doubts: This was no vindictive political act. Trump had no real choice but to fire Comey.

Firing Comey

But as we know now, firing Comey didn’t end Trump’s problems. It multiplied them.

Within days of Comey’s firing in early May 2017, acting FBI Director Rod Rosenstein named Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate the charges that Trump was, in essence, a Russian agent. Still worse, they did it not because they had actual evidence — the Clinton-financed Steele Dossier, remember, has never been verified — but because they didn’t like Trump’s foreign policy views, in particular on Russia and Vladimir Putin.

Some of those taking part in this conspiracy actually discussed invoking the 25th Amendment. It allows for removal of a president who is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of the office.”

They had no basis for this, of course. But it was a weapon they could use. It begins to look like a silent coup, not an investigation.

We find ourselves in complete agreement with The Federalist’s Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway. She wrote: “Using the completely lawful and constitutional firing of the bumbling Comey as pretext for opening a criminal investigation into the president is a grand abuse of power by the FBI. Attempting to overtake the authority to determine U.S. foreign policy from the lawfully determined president of the United States is a violation of the U.S. Constitution.”

Crimes Of The Deep State

Yes, these are crimes. And not minor ones. The real collusion, it turns out, was by the FBI, the Justice Department, the CIA and the Hillary Clinton campaign. Not Trump and the Russians.

For many reasons, they all wanted Trump to lose the election. When he  didn’t oblige, they tried to remove him from office. It’s still going on. The Democratic Party openly seeks to impeach Trump. Meanwhile, the Mueller investigation trundles on, with nothing so far to show for its efforts.

This was, as others have said before without exaggeration, a kind of silent coup. Top officials at the Justice Department, FBI and CIA, in cahoots with the Clinton campaign, used the extraordinary powers of the U.S. justice and intelligence agencies for purely political ends: to end the Trump presidency.

By the way, our own IBD/TIPP Poll this month shows Americans mostly believe that to be true. In the poll, 51% agreed the Mueller investigation is an attempt to delegitimize the 2016 election. And they’re right about that.

With the House now in the hands of far-left Democrats, we can expect no calls for investigations of this egregious behavior. Justice should investigate these crimes and those who committed them. And start prosecuting…”

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Lawless Federal Judges Are Winning Their War against the Trump Administration

Kurt Schlichter:

“…There are some opponents worthy of grudging respect. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg is a terrible legal thinker, a leftist with no real respect for liberty and a confessed critic of the Constitution over its limitations upon the government’s ability to impose her fans’ pinko vision of soft, huggy tyranny upon Normal Americans. But I respect her as an opponent – to do otherwise would be to lie to ourselves that our opponents are hopeless and helpless. She’s a tough old bird, surviving cancer and other perils and yet she always comes back to torment us with her appalling jurisprudence. You gotta give her props for never quitting. She’s the Energizer Liberal Jurist.

So, when I discuss the 85-year old’s likely imminent departure from the Supreme Court seat where she has frustrated those of us who dig freedom for so long, I am not hoping for her to lose her latest fight. Liberals will lie and say I am, that conservatives in general are hoping for her demise, but they lie about everything so why not this too? Most conservatives yearn for her to retire, but also wish her a return to good health. I do. I don’t think she’s a bad person deserving of a horrible fate because we disagree. Far be it for me to gainsay Justice Scalia, who liked her. I think she’s misguided, not evil. But also I think we all need to think about the coming fight when she leaves the Court, because that brawl is coming regardless.

Mollie Hemingway:

“…In a Friday night news dump, the New York Times revealed the FBI’s surprisingly flimsy justification for launching a retaliatory investigation into President Donald Trump, their chief adversary during their recent troubled era.

Admitting there is no actual evidence for their probe into whether Trump “worked for the Russians,” FBI officials instead cited their foreign policy differences with him, his lawful firing of bungling FBI Director James Comey, and alarm that he accurately revealed to the American public that he was told he wasn’t under investigation by the FBI, when they preferred to hide that fact.

The news was treated as a bombshell, and it was, but not for the reasons many thought. It wasn’t news that the FBI had launched the investigation. Just last month, CNN reported that top FBI officials opened an investigation into Trump after the lawful firing of Comey because Trump “needed to be reined in,” a shocking admission of abuse of power by our nation’s top law enforcement agency…”

Related:

FBI Trump-Russia investigation shows deep state was worse than we thought

From Glenn Reynolds:

Men who identify as women are being invited for cervical smear tests even though they don’t have a cervix.

“However, women who identify as male are not being offered crucial routine breast screenings or cervical cancer checks.” Well, of course not. Men don’t need those things, that would be crazy!

“…Dennis Backlund spends most nights lying awake wondering where he’s going to live. Soon the day will come when he must leave his longtime home at the President Hotel Apartments as part of a mass eviction of every tenant of the historic, 75-unit building in downtown Palo Alto.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do. I never, ever dreamed that something like this could happen. This was going to be the place where I spent the rest of my life. That is what I thought,” said the 76-year-old, who has lived in his 300-square-foot apartment at the President for the past 37 years. Now he faces leaving not only his home but possibly the community where he was born.

Backlund said he can’t move just anywhere. He lives on a fixed income, doesn’t drive and has to use a walker to get around, so he needs a place that’s affordable and within short walking distance to food and other amenities.

and

Palo Alto continues to rank close to the bottom in Santa Clara County for housing production: The city is 14th out 15 cities in the county when it comes to meeting its state-mandated Regional Housing Needs Allocation, according to a report the Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury issued in June. At the start of this year, the city adopted a plan to produce 300 housing units annually to address its housing shortage. So far, it has only approved one major development with 57 units. The loss of the 75 units at the President will more than offset that project…”

Related:

As Thomas Sowell has written, it’s “The Housing Price of Liberalism.”

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Israel Makes the Hormones I Need, But I Support Palestinian Liberation.

“A large part of the trans community in the U.S. is being forced to choose between our life-affirming transitions and our Palestinian siblings’ demand for freedom.”

Antonio Chaves:

“…Some regulations are needed for safety and the environment, but people who equate regulatory streamlining with Armageddon should read up on how the airlines industry evolved after Jimmy Carter signed the Airlines Deregulation Act of 1978.  Even though travelers complain more today about the quality of service, the option of cheaper flights has been a godsend for less affluent Americans, who would otherwise be suffering through 30-plus-hour bus rides every time they visited faraway relatives.

America is the only nation in the world that was founded on the principle of enumerated powers, but limited government cannot prevail without a critical mass of conscientious grown-ups who cherish their liberties and limit their reliance on government to protecting their natural rights. The mass exodus from states where citizens traded away their freedoms for “equality” should serve as a cautionary tale for voters and policymakers who still believe they can tax and regulate their way to higher living standards.  People on the move carry all kinds of baggage, and not all of it is tangible.  America’s survival may rely on whether or not refugees from these failing states choose to double down on the socialist delusion that prosperity grows out of the barrel of a gun…”

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Victor Davis Hanson:

“…Americans always have been prone to reinventing themselves.

We now live in an age of radical social construction—a sort of expansive update on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s American notion of becoming anyone one pleases.

One common denominator, however, seems to govern today’s endless search for some sort of authenticity: a careerist effort to separate oneself from the assumed dominate and victimizing majority of white heterosexual and often Christian males.

Ironically, the quest for a superficial separation from the majority comes at a time when the majority has never been so committed to the promise of the Declaration of Independence and when equal opportunity has become a reality rather than an abstract ideal.

Yet in our new binary society, we all have a choice to be seen either as victims or victimizers. And thus we make the necessary adjustments for the often more lucrative and careerist choice.

Victim Chic
At the most buffoonish, sometimes activists simply construct identities out of whole cloth. Ward Churchill did that pretty well, when he fabricated a Native American persona and parlayed it into a faculty billet at the University of Colorado that was otherwise unattainable for such a mediocrity with pseudo-credentials.

Rachel Dolezal, recently charged with welfare fraud, became Spokane chapter president of the NAACP by falsely claiming she was African-American.

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for years leveraged old family yarns about a high-cheekbone, Native American heritage into Harvard’s first authentically Native American law professor. Her self-invention was much more likely a route to advancement than more dreary publication, better teaching, or just being Elizabeth Warren, middle-aged white female scholar.

Sometimes the self-transformation is subtler, and made through inference, not the wholesale construction of a new identity. Robert Francis O’Rourke, from a wealthy and well-connected Texas family of Irish descent, was a more or less a nondescript Democrat, three-term congressman backbencher—at least until he ran for Ted Cruz’s Senate seat. But in the midst of the national anti-Trump “Resistance,” “Beto” (Robert = Roberto = “Beto”) became a sort of veritable Latino identity politics and hard-left progressive sensation. O’Rourke’s Latinate emphasis too was a wise move, in that most longtime obscure congressional white male representatives do not become national figures and would-be presidential candidates in less than a year.

The oddity of Beto’s efforts at social construction was that Senator Rafael Cruz ran as “Ted.” In other words, he campaigned as what he really was: an assimilated Latino of half-Cuban heritage. In contrast, an Irishman without any Latino ancestry reinvented himself as a veritable Latino. And note that while most so-called white Texans voted for the authentic “Latino” Ted, most Latinos voted for the fake Latino Beto.

Barack Obama grew up as a middle to upper-middle-class student in prep school in Honolulu, the child of a visiting Kenyan student and a white middle-class mother. His sometimes privileged childhood was due largely to the talent and hard-work of his white grandmother from the Midwest who rose through the ranks to become a successful banking executive.

At various times in school Obama was known as Barry Obama or Barry Soetoro before returning to his given name as Barack Obama as a college student. Part of the reason why the later so-called unhinged “birther” conspiracy theory took hold (i.e., that yarn that Barack Obama allegedly was not born in the United States) was that Barack Obama’s own literary agency Acton & Dystel, in one of its own promotional pamphlets produced in 1991, identified Obama as “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”

His publicist likely created that myth—and Obama himself either did not correct the mistake or was not consulted about the attribution—not because Obama was a native of Kenya but because such a false claim was seen as useful in offering greater authenticity of the author’s “otherness.” The editor later confessed error on her part.

Recent California senate candidate and former state legislator, Kevin Alexander Leon was born to Guatemalan immigrants. He later changed his name to Kevin de León by adding the de and an acute accent mark apparently to emphasize his authentic generic Latino and perhaps pseudo-Mexican-American fides, in a manner his Irish first name apparently did not sufficiently convey. “Kevin” apparently sounded too suburban in the manner that Barry lacked the ethnic gravitas of Barack. And Leon, without the de, perhaps was prone to be mistaken as too generically European (in fact, it derives from Greek “leôn,” lion).

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest congressional representative in history, grew up in a mostly upper middle-class family in Yorktown Heights, an affluent suburb in Westchester County, New York. Her parents were Puerto Rican immigrants, her father an architect. Alexandria herself graduated from the upscale Yorktown Heights High School. The suburb was 90 percent white and the average median household income was nearly $110,000, placing it among the most affluent communities in the nation. Ocasio-Cortez graduated from the private Boston University.

In other words, Ocasio-Cortez’s family’s story is one of higher education, upward mobility, and integration into the majority population (somewhat similar to Kamala Harris’s upbringing in Berkeley and Montreal, the daughter of a cancer research scientist, and a Stanford economics professor).

While Ocasio-Cortez described herself as working-class and brought up in the Bronx, her family in fact moved to Yorktown when she was 5 years old. In her meteoric political career, she has presented herself as a Bronx barista (where she moved after graduation), and an often impoverished activist, who seeks social justice on behalf of the poor. While her message is certainly mainstream socialist (abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service, ban internal combustion engines by 2030, Medicare for all, etc.), it gains credence by the working-class patina that Ocasio-Cortez wears…”

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Conrad Black:

“…Almost indiscernible in the endless tumult about President Donald Trump is the objective return of American might, right on our doorstep. A casual sampler of the Canadian, and even the American, media, might think that the United States was so far along in its decline that the entire process of government and normal public discourse had broken down in that country, and that the much-discussed process of national decline was accelerating in a climate of virtual chaos.

In fact, the economy of the United States is astoundingly strong: full employment, an expanding work force, negligible inflation and about three per cent economic growth. And it is a broad economic recovery, not based on service industries as in the United Kingdom (where London handles most of Europe’s financial industry, while most of British industry has fled), and not based largely on the fluctuating resources markets as has often been Canada’s experience. In the eight years of president Obama, the United States lost 219,000 manufacturing jobs; in the two years of Trump, the country has added 477,000 manufacturing jobs. This was not supposed to be possible, and this time, unlike in the great Reagan boom, it cannot be dismissed by the left (and it was false in the eighties) as a profusion of “hamburger flippers, dry cleaners and people delivering pizza,” (all necessary occupations).

It is clear that China is feeling the heat of American tariffs. Their magnificent hypocrisy of gamboling in a $360-billion trade surplus with the United States while extorting technology from American companies and reducing American high-tech giants like Apple and Google to snivelling on China’s behalf when their sales in that country are reduced, and all the while leading G-77 in cupped-hands requests for relief from the economically most advanced countries for their pollution of the world environment (although China is the world’s greatest polluter), all of it is ending. The United States will not be the world’s premier chump anymore. The most enthusiastic support the United States is receiving in its trade stance with China is from China’s neighbours, from India to Japan. Of course China is the world’s second-greatest power and must be treated with respect, but that does not mean the shameless grovelling of Trump’s predecessors, paying court to Beijing like lackeys kowtowing to the emperors of the Middle Kingdom…”

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John Hinderaker:

“…Frank Bruni, formerly the New York Times’s White House reporter and now a columnist for the paper, has a long, long op-ed that is unintentionally revealing. It is headlined, “Will the Media Be Trump’s Accomplice Again in 2020?” As though the press were pro-Trump in 2016! “We have a second chance. Let’s not blow it.” A second chance to help a Democrat beat Donald Trump.

Bruni’s piece displays a remarkable lack of self-knowledge. Republicans should be happy to note that he still has no idea why Trump won in 2016: he thinks Hillary was a fine candidate, and it was the press’s fault for not being sufficiently anti-Trump.

Through the first half of 2016, as Trump racked up victories in the Republican primaries, he commanded much more coverage than any other candidate from either party, and it was evenly balanced between positive and negative appraisals — unlike the coverage of Clinton, which remained mostly negative.

The press, including the Times, promoted Trump during the primary process because they thought he would be a weak candidate, and helping him to the nomination would guarantee Hillary’s victory. Since he won the nomination, the press’s coverage of Trump has been the most relentlessly negative of any politician in American history. The Times’s own coverage has been obsessively–almost comically, in a black sort of way–hateful.

Bruni’s arrogance when he describes the role of the liberal press–which he consistently refers to as “we”–is breathtaking:

Above all, it [the liberal press’s “success or failure”] will have an impact on who takes the oath of office in January 2021. Democracies don’t just get the leaders they deserve. They get the leaders who make it through whatever obstacle course — and thrive in whatever atmosphere — their media has created.

That is the function of the press–to create an “obstacle course” sufficient to defeat President Trump.

The funniest thing about Bruni’s column is that, for expertise on how to cover a presidential election, he turns to…Dan Rather! Seriously:

“The shadow of what we did last time looms over this next time,” the former CBS newsman Dan Rather, who has covered more than half a century of presidential elections, told me.

Bruni uses Rather as a Greek chorus, the voice of wisdom. Without irony.

Bruni’s theme is that the press needs to stop paying attention to the Trump spectacle and instead focus on substance. He doesn’t mean it, though. He certainly doesn’t have in mind talking about Trump’s strong economy, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, reduced regulations, foreign policy successes or judicial appointments. On the contrary, this is the kind of thing he has in mind:

I think that we’ve improved since then, and all along our efforts have included significant in-depth reporting. The Times’s acquisition and exhaustive analysis of confidential financial records of Trump’s from the 1990s — and its conclusion, in an epic story published in October, that he used questionable schemes to build his wealth — is a sterling example.

Heh. If Bruni thinks that is a “sterling example” of how the liberal press can defeat President Trump next time around, I can already hear the GOP cheers–“Four more years!”…”

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Mark Penn:

“…Echoing Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 2016 strategy, the Democratic leaders so far have fully planted a flag in simply opposing legislation, funding and appointments under the theory that putting lead boots on President Trump is the best way to get him out of office, even if the country is put on pause for another two years.

This is a fundamental mistake, and just as going overboard with Spartacus moments opposing the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh backfired and strengthened the Republicans in the Senate, this strategy too is likely to throw away the best opportunity Democrats had to build a lasting majority coalition by producing the results the Republicans failed to achieve.

The public ultimately was fed up with Paul Ryan, and under him Congress had about a 20 percent rating. He couldn’t get anything done, leading a fractured caucus to nowhere. He ultimately quit, along with 40 other Republicans. They literally abandoned the House, and suburban swing voters – voters who for a long time voted Republican – switched over to the Democratic Party. These voters were turned off by Trump, and frustrated by Ryan, because they fundamentally support progress and compromise. They are moderate, not liberal voters. They are not dancing in the hallway with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez…”

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 Huge Explosion Rocks Gaza As Hamas Terrorists Accidentally Blow Themselves Up At Rocket Warehouse In Rafah.

“…Not only does peripheral France fare badly in the modern economy, it is also culturally misunderstood by the elite. The yellow-vest movement is a truly 21st-century movement in that it is cultural as well as political. Cultural validation is extremely important in our era.

One illustration of this cultural divide is that most modern, progressive social movements and protests are quickly endorsed by celebrities, actors, the media and the intellectuals. But none of them approve of the gilets jaunes. Their emergence has caused a kind of psychological shock to the cultural establishment. It is exactly the same shock that the British elites experienced with the Brexit vote and that they are still experiencing now, three years later. . . .

We have a new bourgeoisie, but because they are very cool and progressive, it creates the impression that there is no class conflict anymore. It is really difficult to oppose the hipsters when they say they care about the poor and about minorities.

But actually, they are very much complicit in relegating the working classes to the sidelines. Not only do they benefit enormously from the globalised economy, but they have also produced a dominant cultural discourse which ostracises working-class people. Think of the ‘deplorables’ evoked by Hillary Clinton. There is a similar view of the working class in France and Britain. They are looked upon as if they are some kind of Amazonian tribe. The problem for the elites is that it is a very big tribe.

The middle-class reaction to the yellow vests has been telling. Immediately, the protesters were denounced as xenophobes, anti-Semites and homophobes. The elites present themselves as anti-fascist and anti-racist but this is merely a way of defending their class interests. It is the only argument they can muster to defend their status, but it is not working anymore.

Now the elites are afraid. For the first time, there is a movement which cannot be controlled through the normal political mechanisms. The gilets jaunes didn’t emerge from the trade unions or the political parties. It cannot be stopped. There is no ‘off’ button. Either the intelligentsia will be forced to properly acknowledge the existence of these people, or they will have to opt for a kind of soft totalitarianism…”

Original

“…The ranks of gun owners with approved concealed carry permits has swollen to 17 million, and new legislation offered in the Senate Thursday would make it easier for them to carry their weapons across state lines.

Bolstered by a larger pro-gun caucus in the Senate, Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn is introducing his latest version of the Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act.

“This bill focuses on two of our country’s most fundamental constitutional protections — the Second Amendment’s right of citizens to keep and bear arms and the Tenth Amendment’s right of states to make laws best-suited for their residents,” said Cornyn, a top Senate GOP leader.

“I look forward to working with my colleagues to advance this important legislation for law-abiding gun owners nationwide,” he added.

He already has 31 co-sponsors.

North Carolina Rep. Richard Hudson has introduced parallel legislation in the House…”

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