"Founding Father James Madison crafted a Constitution for the worst of times -- and the worst of leaders. He famously observed that we needed a system that did not depend on the good intentions or motivations of our rulers: 'If men were angels, no government would be necessary.' So he created a system that contains a series of checks and balances to prevent the concentration -- and the abuse -- of power. ...

"There has been a growing crisis of faith on the left as leaders and pundits have attacked our Constitution and its institutions, including the Supreme Court. These objections appear to be based not on the Constitution failing to resist extraconstitutional demands but on it failing to yield to such demands. These figures apparently are upset that the democratic process or the Supreme Court have not given them what they demand. Thus, the Constitution or the court must go.

"Widespread references to Jan. 6 should inspire greater confidence in our constitutional system and dispel the doubts being voiced by President Biden and others. The Capitol riot was denounced by most Americans; Republican leaders like Vice President Pence and Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) carried out their constitutional duties. Federal judges (including many appointed by then-President Trump) uniformly rejected challenges to the election; the Supreme Court, with six conservative justices, repeatedly ruled against Trump -- including all three of his appointees.

"The Constitution has weathered every storm in our history, including a Civil War and a 'war' over civil rights. We've tackled everything from a depression to desegregation; we've faced periods of violence and vitriol that tore us apart. And yet, we remain."

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"As Election Day nears and the nation prepares to head to the polls, it's still unclear which party has the best chance to win control of the Senate. But four volatile races in different regions of the country will likely determine the balance of power between Democrats and Republicans.

"The Senate races in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvania are ground zero in the battle for Congress' upper chamber, with polling averages showing no clear advantage for either Republicans or Democrats, and the candidates in each race are clamoring to be the win that brings their respective party over the 50-seat threshold for a majority. ...

"The Senate is currently split 50-50 between the two parties, with Vice President Kamala Harris' tie-breaking vote giving Democrats the slimmest possible majority. Assuming Republicans win the races in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina and Wisconsin, as well as every other race they are heavily favored to win, they would need to win two of the four critical toss-up seats to gain control of the Senate or one of the four seats to maintain the 50-50 split."

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"U.S. President Joe Biden's administration is not serving U.S. economic, energy or national security when it issues unrealistic statements and assessments of what each requires.

"While every administration exaggerates to some extent, misleading claims have become more problematic in today's changing policymaking environment.

"I am not talking about embarrassing misjudgments, like the administration's costly belief that rising inflation was 'transitory.' Political misinformation falls along a spectrum, from the Biden administration repeatedly defending ridiculous statements (the Afghan withdrawal was a success) and shifting blame (expensive gas is due to 'Putin's price hike') to his predecessors Donald Trump cherry-picking pandemic data and Bill Clinton relying on semantic obfuscation.

"Most recently, Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas have repeatedly asserted that America's southern border is secure, even though they know perfectly well that it is not. The administration's own delayed data release late last month reveals a record-shattering 2.4 million border-patrol encounters for the fiscal year, plus an estimated half-million illegal migrants who evaded an encounter.

"Squandering credibility is a high price to pay for temporary relief from political pain. Presidents Richard Nixon and Clinton were badly damaged for lying about their scandals and each is now properly remembered as much for that as for what he accomplished in office."

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"Even Greenpeace has finally acknowledged the truth: recycling plastic makes no sense.

"This has been obvious for decades to anyone who crunched the numbers, but the fantasy of recycling plastic proved irresistible to generations of environmentalists and politicians. They preached it to children, mandated it for adults, and bludgeoned municipalities and virtue-signaling corporations into wasting vast sums --probably hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide -- on an enterprise that has been harmful to the environment as well as to humanity.

"Now Greenpeace has seen the light, or at least a glimmer of rationality. The group has issued a report accompanied by a press release headlined, 'Plastic Recycling Is A Dead-End Street --Year After Year, Plastic Recycling Declines Even as Plastic Waste Increases.' The group's overall policy remains delusional -- the report proposes a far more harmful alternative to recycling -- but it's nonetheless encouraging to see environmentalists put aside their obsessions long enough to contemplate reality."

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"Congressional investigators have obtained evidence that the Biden administration has launched a sprawling effort to use federally funded job training and food stamp programs to register new voters in Democrat-skewing demographic groups such as young adults and Native Americans, fueling concerns the federal government is placing a partisan thumb on the scales in the midterm elections.

"Part of the plan, spurred by a 2021 executive order by President Joe Biden, is captured in an eight-page memo that the Labor Department's Employment and Training Administration sent out in March to state and local officials responsible for providing training to workers in need of jobs.

"The memo explicitly authorizes states to use the American Job Center Network, a federally-funded job training program with more than 2,000 outlets nationwide, to facilitate voter registration among workers seeking its help, specifically targeting Native American, youth and farm workers."

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"Crime has emerged as a big factor in this election. After inflation, voters say crime is the most important issue affecting their votes for Congress, placing it above immigration, abortion, and climate change.

"This is a problem for Democrats.

"Crime touches personal lives and cuts across demographic lines. About two-thirds of voters believe it's both a 'very important' problem (Economist poll) and a problem on the rise (Harvard-Harris poll). More blacks than whites see it as 'very important,' and majorities across partisan lines believe it's getting worse. Harvard-Harris also found that voters believe Democratic Party leaders rank crime low on their priority list, sixteenth to be exact. Moreover, 64% of voters blame 'woke politicians' for worsening crime. Even a majority of Democratic voters agree.

"Most relevant to the current election, the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that Republicans are beating Democrats on the crime issue by a meaningful 8 points among suburban women, a key voter group."

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"With legislation on employee classification still being considered in Congress, the Biden Administration has put forth its own version in a newly proposed rule from the U.S. Department of Labor.

"The regulation, similar to California's controversial AB 5, would reclassify worker status using a test.

"Many professions have sought and received AB 5 exemptions, others have fought it by legal action or voters casting ballots, and it seems very likely that the DOL rule will be challenged in the courts, Wayne Winegarden, senior fellow in business and economics at the Pacific Research Institute (PRI), said in an email response to the Northern California Record.

"'The proposed rule will take away opportunities, flexibility and independence from workers,' Winegarden said. 'Making matters worse, the burdensome new requirements will discourage companies from hiring and encourage them to replace workers with automation. It is an anti-worker, anti-growth regulation.'"

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"If you are under 60, you had never experienced this in your life.

"It's inflation.

"It haunted us in the 70s, but we banished it until today. It's far more pernicious than any tax, hitting lower income folks and seniors in their retirement, robbing them of their purchasing power and destroying their savings. It is visible almost everywhere, at the gas stations and the supermarkets. It is no surprise that the midterm elections and possibly even the next presidential election will turn on this one issue. ...

"Next week the Federal Reserve will again decide whether they will raise interest rates 0.75 percent or begin to moderate its policies. By the Fed's own estimates, their policies, if carried out will cost about 1.5 million Americans their jobs. An unelected body of economists will make the decision on whether to cost people jobs or save retirees' nest eggs. It's like chemotherapy for the economy -- it may work, but at a difficult cost."

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"Inflation over the past seven months has hovered between 8% and 9%. These are the worst consumer-price-index numbers since the early 1980s. The last time there was an election with inflation this high, Ronald Reagan won a landslide against incumbent Jimmy Carter, and the Republicans won massive gains in Congress.

"Americans have good reason to worry about runaway prices of groceries, gas at the pump, health insurance and utility bills. The 'essentials' that all Americans have to buy every week are up closer to 15% to 30%. Inflation averaged just 2% during Trump's four years in office and only 1.5% the day Biden entered the Oval Office. The claim by the Biden White House last year that inflation was just a 'high-class problem' or was 'transitory' today sounds laughable. Even more out of touch was Biden's recent declaration that the economy is 'strong as hell.' Maybe that's true inside the bubble of recession-proof Washington, DC. But not so much in the rest of the country. ...

"I and others on these pages in recent weeks have pointed out that when you have roughly 8.5% inflation and less than 5.5% wage growth, the real take-home pay to workers has shrunk by about $4,000 for the average family in the last year. This is the Biden inflation tax -- the cruelest tax of all because it socks the poor and middle class right in the nose. Then on top of that you have the $30,000-plus reduction in the value of average 401(k) plans for tens of millions of Americans because the stock market has fallen in value and inflation is reducing the value of any small gains that Americans may have experienced in the last 20 months. ...

"Economists and business leaders are almost unanimously saying America is going to drive off the road into an economic ditch of recession. Hello! For most Americans we are already in a recession. The idea that things are expected to get worse is a hair-raising proposition for the half of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck."

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"For Sanna Shere's father, buying and running his first Southern California Burger King more than 30 years ago was his entryway to the American Dream.

"The fast-food restaurant the Pakistani immigrant purchased was rundown and struggling. Shere said her dad, Kaiser Shere, invested every penny he had into the restaurant. 'It was really low volume, low performing. People thought he was crazy,' she said of her father.

"But his hard work paid off. The restaurant became one of the region's highest-volume Burger Kings, Sanna Shere said. A few years later, her dad bought a second location. Then he added a few more. When Shere moved back from New York a decade ago, she helped her dad and her brother grow the business to include 21 Burger Kings with close to 500 employees. ...

"That ability to grow has been stymied in recent years by increasingly stringent state regulations, and an increasing minimum wage that has sent the business's labor costs soaring. Now, the future of the Sheres' business is in jeopardy because of a new state law -- the so-called Fast Food Accountability and Standards Recovery Act, or FAST Act -- that threatens to fast-track even more burdensome regulations and a large mandatory wage increase on the industry, and to upend franchise business models across the Golden State and possibly beyond. The measure, the latest in a long string of far-left policies implemented in the state, will make it harder for entrepreneurial Californians to buy and grow their own fast-food businesses. But its impacts will likely be felt in industries that have no connection to fast food.

"Assembly Bill 257, narrowly approved by the California legislature on August 29, and signed by Governor Gavin Newsom on Labor Day, allows for the creation of a new, ten-member, unelected Fast Food Council specifically to micromanage the state's fast-food industry. The council would have broad powers to impose new rules and regulations on thousands of fast-food and counter-service restaurants, including the ability to raise the minimum wage at most of California's fast-food restaurants next year from $15 to $22 an hour -- a nearly 50 percent jump, with cost-of-living adjustments each year after that."

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