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President Trump answers reporters' questions in the Oval Office on March 30, 2017.(Photo: Chip Somodevilla, Pool/European Pressphoto Agency)

WASHINGTON More than a dozen of Ohios leading conservative activists fired off a letter to President Trump on Thursday asking him to back off his attacks on the House Freedom Caucus.

The letter, from 20 tea party leaders and Republican stalwarts across Ohio, came after Trump publicly threatened todefeat members of the Freedom Caucusin the 2018 midtermelections. The Freedom Caucus is a group of about three dozen arch-conservatives in the House, including Rep. Jim Jordan of Urbana.

We respectfully ask you to stand with our conservative heroes in the Freedom Caucus,along with other conservatives in the House and Senate, the Ohio contingent wrote in their letter. Please workwithmembers of the Freedom Caucus, notagainstthem.

Among those signing the letter wereAnn Becker, president of theCincinnati Tea Party, and Lori Viars, vice president of Warren County Right To Life.

Trump attacked the Freedom Caucus lawmakers after they helped torpedo the GOP Obamacare repeal bill last week, which the president and House GOP leaders had championed as their best chance to kill the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Trump's jab raised the specterof a bruising internal GOP fight.

We felt he was going a little bit too far, Tom Zawistowski, of the Portage County TEA Party,said of Trumps threat. He said the Freedom Caucus saved the president from a bill that would have been an albatross around his neck.

We just think maybe hes putting some blame where he should putting some thanks, he said.

The letter, while politely worded, signals that conservatives will not sit quietly on the sidelines if Trump abandons hard-core GOP principals and takes a more pragmatic route that involves working with Democrats.

Read more:

Trump threatens House Freedom Caucus, says it needs to 'get on the team'

What is the House Freedom Caucus and why is Trump attacking its members?

Republican moderates reject talks with House Freedom Caucus

Here is the full letter and the list of signers:

Open Letter to President Trump from Ohio conservative leaders

Dear Mr. President,

We, the undersigned conservative leaders in the swing state of Ohio, voted for you and worked hard to bring others to the polls to elect you last November. We want to see you succeed in Making America Great Again! We appreciate much of what you have already done in the first few months of your administration.

However, we respectfully ask you to stand with our conservative heroes in the Freedom Caucus,along with other conservatives in the House and Senate.These patriotsare working to keep the campaign promises that you and they made tous.

Please workwithmembers of the Freedom Caucus, notagainstthem, to ensure you are all successful in keeping your campaign promises and "draining the swamp." Mr. President, we are praying for your success as you work to rebuild our nation.

Respectfully,

Ann Becker, Butler County for Trump co-chair; Cincinnati Tea Party president; GOP State Central Committee member

Tom Zawistowski,"We the People" Convention president; Portage County TEA Party

Janet Folger Porter,Faith2Action president; Trump general election volunteer

State Rep. Candice Keller,Butler County Trump volunteer; Ohio House Dist. 53

State Rep. Nino Vitale,Ohio House Dist. 85 (Champaign, Shelby & Logan Co.)

Kirsten Hill,Ohio Liberty Coalition president

Mike Lyons,Ohio Liberty Coalition board member

State Rep. Paul Zeltwanger,Ohio House District 54 (Warren, Hamilton & Butler Co.)

John McAvoy,Toledo Tea Party president

State Rep. John Becker,Ohio House District 65 (Clermont Co.)

Terri Iannetta,Summit County Tea Party president

Jim Green,North Central Ohio Conservatives, Inc. president

Mary Ellen Buechter,Miami County Liberty vice-president

Jim & Jennifer Hiles,Hocking Hill TEA Party Patriots co-founders

Jeff Malek,Medina TEA Party Patriots president

Anne Kaczmarek,Liberty Camp for Kids president

Barbara Burkard,Miami Valley Citizens Info

T.J. Honerlaw,Warren Co. Republican Party Central Committee

Lisa Cooper,Republican State Central Committee, District 26tee vice-chairman; Trump general election volunteer

Lori Viars,Conservative Republican Leadership Committee board member; Trump Campaign general election volunteer; Warren Co. Right To Life vice-president

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Ohio tea party to Trump: Stop attacking conservatives - Cincinnati.com

MINOT, N.D. - A group of students at Our Redeemer's in Minot took a break from reading, writing and arithmetic Thursday for a tea party!

And they had an expert from across the pond teaching them how to have their tea in class.

England native Silvia Rau knows a thing or two about tea party etiquette.

Rau shared some lessons with the youngsters at Our Redeemer's.

A group of students donned in fancy colorful hats gathered for a sip of tea and a snack, in the British tradition.

Rau, who moved to the U-S in the '90's, taught them how to properly sip their drink, and to take food one item at a time.

It's not like a buffet where you pile it all on because that's the idea of a small tea plate, said Rau.

Rau also debunked some myths about the tea party.

We actually are not supposed to point up, we're not actually supposed to sip tea with our pinky. It's kind of a joke, said Tavia Carlson, 4th Grader.

If I had to pick... the sandwiches. They were really good, said Carlson, when asked her favorite part of the party

Rau also showed the importance of manners.

I said, 'When you come in for tea, it's a very relaxed, but nice meal.' And I said, 'We have our best manners when we have tea,' and they've done that. Please and thank you, I've heard it all the time, said Rau.

Bringing a taste of British culture to the Northern Plains of North America.

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Fancy that! Our Redeemer's students learn tea party etiquette - KFYR - KFYR-TV

Back in January, I argued in these pages that whatever President Donald Trumps proclivities toward being a strongman ruler, the American system of checks and balances in the end had a good chance of containing him. Fridays failure of the Republican attempt to repeal Barack Obamas Affordable Care Act underscores how difficult our political system makes any kind of decisive political action. During Obamas presidency, House Republicans voted some 60 times to repeal parts or the whole of the ACA, and Trump himself pledged that he would replace it with something wonderful on Day One of his administration. And yet it appears the ACA will continue to be, as House Speaker Paul Ryan admitted, the law of the land. This happened despite the fact that we no longer have divided government, with the Republicans controlling both houses of Congress and the presidency.

The fundamental reason for the failure of the American Health Care Act lies, of course, in the internal divisions within the Republican Party. The bill was extremely unpopular from the beginning due to the fact it would have potentially resulted in 24 million fewer Americans having health insurance, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The Democrats, though a minority, were therefore uniformly opposed to repeal, meaning that the Republicans could afford only 26 defections for the legislation to fail. The hard-line Freedom Caucus in the end could not be badgered or threatened to accept Obamacare Lite, coming, as many of them do, from safe, gerrymandered districts.

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This is where the mounting number of institutional checks within the American system came into play. Had this vote been held 75 years ago, the powerful committee chairmen in the House, together with the Republican Party leadership, could have corralled these renegades through a combination of bribes or threats. Today, such tools do not exist: Earmarks have been eliminated along with the powers of the committee chairs, and there is too much money from groups outside the control of the party hierarchy. The Freedom Caucus holdouts were much more frightened of a Tea Party challenge in the primaries than they were of either Paul Ryan or Donald Trump.

And then, of course, there is the fact that the Republican Party is itself much more narrowly ideological and fragmented than it was in the mid-20th century, making it better adapted to vetoes and obstruction than to actually governing. As Ryans ill-fated predecessor, John Boehner, understood, party discipline no longer exists.

President Trump came into office seeming to think he could run the U.S. government like he ran his family-owned business, through executive orders. As he admitted on Friday, We learned a lot about the vote-getting process. Unlike a parliamentary system, the U.S. Constitution firmly vests most powers in Congress; the president is powerful only to the extent that he can be a cheerleader and consensus-builder in a system of widely shared powers.

So, far from being a potential tyrant as many Democrats fear, Trump looks like he is heading to the history books as a weak and ineffective president, hobbled by the same checks and balances as his predecessor. He has expressed regret that he went for health care reform before tax reform, but he will find that the latter is an even further bridge. Should the Republicans push ahead with their border adjustment tax, they will find a huge coalition of powerful and well-organized interest groups opposing them. (Note, for instance, how vociferously Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, home of retail giant Wal-Mart, has expressed his opposition.) Whatever the national interest in lowering the headline rate of corporate taxation, the organization of Congress gives these interest groups the ability to veto any measure affecting their narrow part of the economy. Ditto for an ambitious infrastructure initiative: It is that same Tea Party bloc that will be the most relentless opponents of any effort to spend federal dollars on it. And even if Congress approves, the courts and states will have a major say in how and whether projects are executed: just look at the remaining obstacles to Keystone XL getting built.

Trump could end up being a powerful and transformative president under one condition: that he breaks decisively with the Tea Party wing of his own party and pursue bipartisan cooperation from the Democrats. On the infrastructure initiative and possibly on tax reform this is entirely plausible. This would also have been possible with health care reform, had Trump worked sincerely to fix the ACA rather than foolishly demonizing from the start what has proven to be a popular law.

Im not counting on any of this happening, however. Trumps instinct is to run to his red-state base of core supporters for comfort and adulation, rather than seeking to govern as president of the entire country. Note that he has yet to hold an event in a state he didnt win. He needs moreover to think carefully about the interests of his working-class supporters, rather than outsourcing policy to conservative ideologues like Paul Ryanwhose ideas would make them worse off. In Latin America, populist presidents shower their supporters with new social programs; our populist president has spent much of his early days trying to take benefits away from them.

Moreover, Trump has done so much to undermine trust that its not clear the Democrats would accept an olive branch even if it were offered. Their intention to filibuster the appointment of Neil Gorsuch, an eminently qualified jurist, to the Supreme Court is a harbinger of future obstruction for its own sake. It is much more likely that the Trump presidency will continue to hobble along, weakened by its own lack of experience and internal contradictions. I am personally very pleased that the AHCA failed, since I thought Obamacare was a good thing, and I hope Congress will reverse many of the cuts proposed in Trumps budget. But Americans should not be pleased with an institutional system that privileges small minorities like the Freedom Caucus and makes the search for broad consensus so difficult. This is what feeds demands for strongman leadership in the first place and prevents the country from facing difficult decisions for the common good.

Go here to see the original:
Trump's a Dictator? He Can't Even Repeal Obamacare - POLITICO Magazine

Its painful to see our own sheriff pointing to an incident when an immigrant committed a crime and using that to slander by implication all undocumented immigrants and call sanctuary cities bad business. If he has been in law enforcement as he claims, he has seen a lot more crime committed by US citizens.

Criminals are the problem, not sanctuary cities, and most of the criminals are US citizens. We have more people in prison than any country in the world. Sanctuary cities are not saying that they will tolerate serious criminals and the sheriff knows it. He admitted in the meeting that he knows of no sanctuary city that has that policy.

Why would the sheriff choose to scapegoat immigrants other than for political reasons, to show that he is a tough sheriff, at the expense of ruining the lives of hard working recent immigrants?

For me personally, its painful to see recent immigrants and refugees scapegoated, as if attacking and getting rid of law abiding hard working people will solve all of our problems. The crime rate among immigrants is about half the crime rate for US citizens. These are not the people who have outsourced or automated our jobs or caused the recent sub prime mortgage financial collapse. Economic analysis shows that these recent immigrants benefit our economy.

The argument that they are somehow bad because they are undocumented and therefor illegal is truly offensive in a nation that has thrived as a nation of immigrants. Morally, no human being should be deemed illegal. This wasnt always the case. The Holocaust was entirely legal. 6 million Jews and about 5 million other innocent men women and children were brutally murdered and almost no on went to prison or was charged with a crime. The 11 million murdered civilians were deemed illegal.

We have not had a rational, effective immigration policy. The history of our immigration policy is a history of a policy based on discrimination. This great country has benefited all of us, since we or our families all came here as refugees or as economic migrants. I would hope that, in time of need, we will want to provide a safe harbor to others.

Originally posted here:
Home Front Page Videos Video highlights of Morris Tea Party sanctuary cities talk by Sheriff James... - Morristown Green

The piano tinkled "Tea for Two," and soon most of the room joined in singing during a spring tea party on Friday, March 24, at Montgomery Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Taylor Springs.

Painstakingly organized by activity director Mandy Smith, the tea party featured exquisite table settings, finger foods, cookies and cakeseverything in spring pastel colors, including elegant hats for every woman in the room.

"What a wonderful day for all our ladies," Smith said. "I'm not sure what I loved the mostseeing each resident in her fancy hat and pearls, the smiles on their faces as they saw each table with fancy china sets, cakes made by Kim Smith's cakes, all the wonderful finger sandwiches, piano music played by Dottie Paden, or hearing the ladies tell me past memories of tea parties they attended or held years ago.

"I want to thank Administrator Carla VonderHaar, Helen Loucks and Nancy Meyer, Theresa Legg and Al Lemme for all their volunteer hours, Cindy Laurent, Karen McCaffrey and to all our wonderful staff at MNRC. It took every department to make this one of the most amazing days for all our ladies."

Originally posted here:
Spring Tea Party For Residents At MNRC - thejournal-news.net