Read it.

Does it make sense for cities and states to decide which illegal aliens can stay in the country?

No.

Should cities and states be allowed to flout federal immigration law, or any other federal law they don’t agree with?

No.

Are cities and states that have sanctuary policies for illegal aliens harboring and enabling lawlessness?

Yes.

Would Kate Steinle and Laken Riley be alive today if sanctuary city policies didn’t exist?

Yes.

Read it.

It’s hard to watch the incessant gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Donald Trump trial in Manhattan without feeling like you’re traveling in a time warp back to 2016. We’re back reliving the “Access Hollywood” tape and talk of how Trump would have never been elected except porn star Stormy Daniels accepted a six-figure check to keep quiet.

The richest vein of hypocrisy on this adultery-mangles-electability question flows through the Clintons. Hillary Clinton appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to denounce Trump for squashing the bimbo stories. It was typically shameless. She said: “I think the defendant, the former president, knew exactly what he was doing when he went to such great lengths to try to squash, bury, kill stories, pay off people, because he understood the electoral significance of them.”

The cast of “Morning Joe” treated Hillary Clinton as a therapist for their Trump angst, and no one interrupted and asked about all the squashing, burying, and killing of stories that Hillary Clinton engaged in when they first sought the White House in 1992. On the cusp of the Gennifer Flowers allegations breaking in January of that year, Hillary Clinton was telling Margaret Carlson of Time magazine “My marriage is solid, full of love and friendship, but it’s too profound to talk about glibly.”

Read it.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is fighting back against the Biden administration’s new changes to Title IX. Paxton has filed a complaint against the Department of Education’s new rules, which expand the definition of sex-based discrimination to include “gender identity.” …

Read it.

It’s an open secret that the Biden administration disdains lawful civilian gun owners almost as much as it does the lawful gun industry. But in case there was any doubt, new gun export regulations published late last month by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security make the administration’s position painfully clear: It doesn’t think ordinary civilians can be trusted with firearms.

The interim final rule on gun exports, published April 30, significantly alters licensing policies for U.S. companies seeking to lawfully export guns and ammunition to civilian markets in other countries. And although it doesn’t necessarily affect American gun owners, it does show the Biden administration’s true colors on the natural right of self-defense—but projected into the international arena.

Here are four things to know about how the rule attacks the lawful gun industry and civilian gun ownership more broadly.

Axios.

Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki claims in her new book that President Biden never looked at his watch during the ceremony for soldiers killed during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 — contradicting news photos and firsthand accounts of Gold Star families.

Who are you going to believe, Jen or your lyin’ eyes?

New York Magazine.

Jamaal Bowman, the two-term congressman from Westchester County and the would-be future of the progressive left, is tired of the questions about George Latimer. “Yeah, I mean, I think it says something about his character, his integrity, and his actual leadership for the district. But enough of him. When are we going to talk about me?”

Read it.

The Arizona grand jury that recently indicted 18 people for allegedly trying to help former President Donald Trump overturn the results of the 2020 election with so-called ‘fake electors’ went completely rogue and took ‘aggressive steps to haul in witnesses,’ to the point where they ‘even brought charges against some’ who were told by prosecutors that they weren’t under investigation, Politico reports.

Read it.

When happens when your city pisses away all of your tax revenue on trying to feed, shelter and coddle activists and homeless people? You wind up having to make budget cuts. And, in Seattle, those cuts could be coming in the form of closing up to 20 elementary schools.

The district’s budget deficit has reached more than $100 million, according to new reporting from MYNorthwest.

And Superintendent Brent Jones’ proposal for ‘Well-Resourced Schools’ might lead to the shutdown of over a quarter of the district’s 73 elementary schools, the report says.

Read it.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson recently traveled to Springfield with a big wish list of stuff he wants from state lawmakers. Among them, $1 billion in extra funding for Chicago Public Schools.

We have a host of reasons why his demand should be categorically rejected. Among them, CPS already spends $29,000 per student, Chicago teachers are already among the nation’s highest paid in big cities and the Chicago Teachers Union refuses to close the many empty, failing schools across the district. Not to mention that both CPS and CTU refuse to hold themselves accountable to students. Just 20% of minority CPS children can read at grade level and in math it’s even worse.

Now add to that the growing rate of teachers simply not showing up to school. The U.S. Department of Education’s definition of chronic teacher absenteeism is 10 or more absences in a school year.

I think we will see, within my lifetime, public schools reduced to being the last resort of people who can’t afford private or home schooling.

The Foundry.

She was there to smear Trump as much as possible in an attempt to turn people away from supporting him in November. That’s all this trial is about.

The Foundry.

Why does the Biden administration want open borders so badly? For three very big reasons. One is ideology, which I covered in last week’s BorderLine column. Another is extortion, which I will cover in next week’s column. But this week, I look at how the Left uses illegal immigration to give itself an unfair electoral advantage.

First, illegal immigration affects congressional representation because the apportionment of members of Congress by state is based on U.S. census data. As Heritage Foundation Border Security and Immigration Center Director Lora Ries writes, the census currently counts all noncitizens—from green card holders to illegal aliens—in addition to U.S. citizens for the purposes of apportioning congressional districts among the states. The more citizens in a state, the more congressional districts—i.e., seats in Congress—a state gets. In turn, the number of congressional districts in a state determines how many Electoral College votes that state receives. (Heritage founded The Daily Signal in 2014.)

While president, Donald Trump tried to restore the U.S. citizenship question on the 2020 census and exclude all noncitizens from apportionment calculations. Yet court challenges prevented him from doing so prior to the deadline for getting a new census form printed and distributed. Joe Biden then immediately terminated the effort when he took office. That should tell you which states and party benefit most from the population overcount.

L.A. Times.

The ironic thing about Democrats is that they hate democracy when it doesn’t give them power.

Read it.

In an attempt dissuade voters from choosing Robert F. Kennedy in the upcoming presidential election, his cousin Jack Schlossberg has been mocking him by impersonating voters from different parts of the country in a series of videos posted to Instagram.

This would be Caroline’s kid. (So young, and already he lives Big Brother.)

Read it.

My, what a surprise.

As an alternative to a primary election, Illinois law allowed for a party to get its candidates on the ballot for General Assembly spots by party slating procedure, along with collection of a requisite number of public signatures on nominating positions. A number of Republican challengers have been proceeding accordingly.

But over the course of just 30 hours on the first days of this month, the Democratic supermajority changed the law to retroactively disallow that procedure, thereby barring challengers from the November ballot as Republican party candidates.

The new law almost certainly gives Democrats a win in races in which Republicans did not run a candidate in the primary and could result in dozens of unopposed races.

Read it.

For a while now the joke has been going around that Biden’s two-state solution for the Israel-Hamas conflict involves the two states of Michigan and Pennsylvania. The more time passes, the more this seems not a joke at all. Biden is apparently terrified not only of the campus left, but that he could lose Michigan’s substantial Arab voting block, and hence the election, if he doesn’t placate them.

New York Post.

“For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”

This philosophy, announced by Brazilian President Getulio Vargas in the 1940s, is no longer just the favored approach of Latin American strongmen. It has become the openly practiced strategy of today’s Democratic machine.

Laws that hamper Democrats are ignored. Laws that might be used to hurt Republicans are enforced to — and often well past — the limits of the law.

Read it.

The Biden administration has agreed to shut down a national security experts’ group as part of settling a lawsuit accusing the group of being politically biased in favor of Democrats.

On Sept. 19, 2023, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) launched the Homeland Intelligence Experts Group to provide advice on intelligence and national security efforts. In November, America First Legal (AFL) and former Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell sued the DHS, the group, and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, arguing that the experts group violated provisions of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA).

Read it.

Read it.

What was the “intent to commit another crime or aid and conceal the commission thereof” that prosecutors used to raise falsification of business records from a misdemeanor to a felony? In nearly every case of alleged falsification of records that has been charged as a felony in New York, the defendant was charged with another crime — that is, prosecutors made it clear what the other crime was. In Trump’s case, the indictment did not specify any other crime. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said the law did not require him to specify the other crime.

So Trump faced felony charges without knowing what he was accused of doing. And the really amazing thing is that the trial is now underway and Bragg has still not specified what the other crime is. It is a key element of the case. Without it, the charges against Trump could never have been brought because they were misdemeanors long past the statute of limitations. It is the other crime that makes this whole prosecution possible. But the prosecutor has not specified what it is.

If that sounds vaguely unconstitutional to you, you’re right. As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy points out, the Fifth Amendment “requires a felony charge to be spelled out in an indictment whose criminal elements have been established by probable cause to the satisfaction of a grand jury.” The problem, McCarthy continues, is that the election-stealing conspiracy Bragg’s prosecutors are accusing Trump of engaging in is “not charged in the indictment” and, further, “there is no such conspiracy crime in New York penal law.” McCarthy also argues that the charges violate the New York Constitution.

It’s a political witch-hunt, pure and simple.

Read it.

Despite the fact that the world is teetering on the edge of global conflict, US college campuses being trashed by radical occupiers, and criminal illegals are still overwhelming the border, Joe Biden spent Friday afternoon awarding other Democrats medals.

Biden, who was incapable of saying ‘Presidential Medal of Freedom,’ awarded one each to Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Al Gore, Michael Bloomberg, and Rep. Jim Clyburn.

Read it.

The Austin City Council voted to become a sanctuary city for transgender minors seeking “gender-affirming care” on Thursday. In a vote of 10-1, the council passed a measure that will help it undermine state law by directing police to push any enforcement of the state’s transgender child restrictions to their lowest priority.

Read it.

Arizona state Democrats ignited a firestorm of criticism as they hosted a Drag Story Hour reading on Tuesday at the Capitol, an event in collaboration with Planned Parenthood, drawing a sharp rebuke from Republican counterparts.

The Foundry.

Why does the Biden administration want open borders? As a researcher and writer on immigration, that’s the question I often get asked.

Here are the three reasons I think are behind Joe Biden’s deliberate border chaos: Electoral politics, extortion, and, most insidiously, ideology. I’ll start with ideology and come back to the other two reasons in my next two weekly BorderLine columns.

The most dangerous driver behind Biden’s open borders is ideological. Policy differences can be negotiated, but as we’re seeing on college campuses, people fanatically committed to an idea can prove intransigent, regardless of the facts.

Read it.

The debate was held by the Atlanta Press Club and was the first Democratic Party debate in the county. It was supposed to feature Ms. Willis and her Democrat challenger Christian Wise Smith, an attorney and author. However, Ms. Willis was absent from her podium when the debate began, leaving Mr. Smith alone on the stage. After providing a brief introduction of Mr. Smith, the moderator announced that Ms. Willis “declined to participate in the debate and is represented by an empty podium.”

*sigh* Not ‘podium’ but ‘lectern’. Geez, guys, figure it out.

Read it.

OnlyFans creator and TikTok star Farha Khalidi says that the Biden administration paid her to push “full on political propaganda,” and asked her not to disclose that she was advertising for them.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Read it.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

The Foundry.

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley on Friday said the prosecution’s case against former President Donald Trump is failing as a key witness is benefiting the defense.

Trump is on trial facing 34 felony counts of allegedly falsifying business records in relation to a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election. The prosecution’s first witness, former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, was helpful to Trump as the prosecution made mistakes that the defense capitalized on during cross-examination, Turley asserted on Fox News’ “Outnumbered.”

Read it.

Three times in the past 40 years have Republican presidents signed tax reforms into law. Contrary to what the Left likes to tell us, these reforms have reduced the tax burden on all Americans, which is the reason why no Democrat president has dared to fully reverse the Republican tax cuts.

That may end if Joe Biden is re-elected. In his recently released budget for the 2025 fiscal year, the president calls for substantial tax increases on both corporations and individuals. The Tax Foundation, a relatively neutral think tank in Washington, DC, has compiled the tax hikes and analyzed their macroeconomic effects.

Read it.

Tennessee House Republicans on Tuesday passed legislation to allow some trained teachers and school staff to carry firearms despite aggressive opposition from Democrats and gun control advocates calling for the bill to be defeated. The bill is all but guaranteed to become law within weeks, as Gov. Bill Lee can either sign it or allow it to become law without his signature. Lee has never vetoed a bill.

The law requires criminal and mental health background checks of prospective teachers along with training courses and approval from school administrators. Democrats railed against the bill, suggesting that training courses are not enough and that it was “unfair” to burden teachers with the job of defending their classrooms from potential assailants. This argument is strange because teachers are already burdened with the job of protecting students from harm (not to mention their own lives), they just haven’t had the means to do that job until now.

Democrats also stated that armed teachers would “lead to tragedy,” with expectations that merely having a gun in or near a school would inevitably cause a shooting with the teacher at fault. Of course, if a teacher wanted to come to school armed to commit a crime, there’s nothing stopping them anyway (except perhaps another armed teacher).

Read it.

A Democrat who is running for Congressional office has received fierce backlash for wishing death on supporters of Donald Trump.

Nate McMurray, who is running to represent New York’s 26th congressional district, posted the demented comments on X shortly after the weekend vote on funding for Ukraine.

As we highlighted Sunday, after the House of passed legislation that includes a $61 Billion foreign aid package for Ukraine, Democrats broke into chants of ‘Ukraine’ and waved Ukrainian flags on the House floor.

New York Post.

he privileged daughter of Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar amazingly claims she’s homeless and can’t get food after being kicked out of her prestigious $90,000-per-year Barnard College dorm following her arrest at last week’s anti-Israel protests on Columbia University’s campus.

Isra Hirsi, 21, and a handful of other Barnard students were slapped with suspensions after they were among the more than 100 protestors cuffed and hauled away for refusing to clear out from a tent encampment on the Ivy League school’s campus last Thursday.

“I was a little bit frantic, like, where am I going to sleep? Where am I gonna go?” she whined to Teen Vogue after learning she’d been evicted from campus housing and banned from using the dining hall.

Politico.

When prosecutors deliver opening statements Monday in the trial of former President Donald Trump, one of their critical goals will be to convince jurors that the charges are as serious as they are salacious.

It may be a challenge in a case prominently featuring a porn star, a Playboy playmate, the National Enquirer and allegations of about $300,000 in hush money paid in 2016 to keep a lid on allegations of extramarital affairs by Trump.

But Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his surrogates have insisted that, beneath the sordid details on the surface, the felony charges are really about election interference. Trump, meanwhile, has claimed that the case itself is election interference of a different kind.

It’s not yet clear how jurors — or Americans voters — will see it.

Joel Kotkin.

Once the putative party of the people, the Democrats are increasingly the party of political “Mean Girls.” Epitomized by the congressional “Squad,” radicalized women are driving the party ever further to the leftist fringe on issues such as embracing Hamas, apocalyptic climate policies, mass illegal immigration, and transgenderism.

Party organs including the New Republic and the New York Times hail these activists as the “future of the Democratic Party.” Unlike traditional Democrats who won over small business owners, members of industrial unions, and aspiring middle class minorities, the Mean Girls have broken with the New Deal tradition that united the party. Rather than appealing to the aspirations of  families, in the new configuration it’s all about “the personal is political,” with lifestyle and sexual orientation as defining issues.

Read it.

A scathing report by three federal judges on the “misconduct” of plaintiff lawyers in a challenge to Alabama’s ban on gender-transition medicine for minors illustrates something we learned a long time ago: Many on the far Left, including radical lawyers employed by self-proclaimed civil rights organizations, believe the ends always justify the means and that rules of ethics don’t apply to them.

The report is the result of an investigation into the lawyers who filed three related lawsuits—Walker v. Marshall, Ladinsky v. Ivey, and Eknes-Tucker v. Ivey—challenging Alabama’s Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act in 2022. The state enacted the law that year to eliminate the use of experimental hormonal and surgical procedures on minors who experience discomfort with their biological sex.

The final report, issued by three judges representing each of the three federal court districts in Alabama, was initiated after Judge Liles C. Burke accused the lawyers of judge-shopping to get a particular judge they wanted assigned to the cases. Judge Burke called it “a particularly pernicious form of forum shopping” and “a practice that has the propensity to create the appearance of impropriety in the judicial system.”

Read it.

An effort to recall a progressive, George Soros-funded district attorney in California has received enough signatures from voters to advance amid an upswing in crime, officials say.

Organizers seeking to oust Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price collected 74,757 verified signatures in support of their effort to hold a recall election, over 1,000 more than needed, county Registrar of Voters Tim Dupuis announced Monday.

Read it.

If you pay New York state taxes, you’re paying top dollar and getting bupkis. Nothing in the budget deal announced in Albany on Tuesday changes that.

State tax money is supposed to provide services and improve the state’s economic outlook. But a report released last week shows the state’s economic prospects plunging to dead last among the 50 states.

As for services, New York ranks 47th, fourth from the bottom, in what residents get for the money, according to WalletHub.

New York spends the most per public school student, but students perform worse by every measure than students in neighboring states.

New York’s roads rank 45th, according to MoneyGeek. The potholes and pavement roughness cost the average New York driver $715 a year in repairs, fuel and wear and tear. You need a Sherman tank to navigate the Bruckner Expressway.

The Foundry.

Ever since losing control of the Supreme Court to a nominally conservative majority, many of the same liberals who have brazenly called for “packing the court” are now just as brazenly seeking to unpack it.

If ever there was proof that the Left views the Supreme Court as just another legislative body to lobby for their agenda, it’s their shameless efforts to pressure liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, 69, to retire before the presidential election in November so President Joe Biden can nominate a younger—and equally or more liberal—replacement.

According to a pair of March 27 articles in The Huffington Post and at AboveTheLaw.com, two leftist law professors are among the loudest voices calling for Sotomayor’s resignation. “I would love to see Sotomayor retire,” one of them, Lucas Powe Jr., a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “I would love to trade her for a 50-year-old justice.”

Presumably one with two brain cells to rub together.

Read it.

Under the ‘Grocery Protection Act’ introduced by city Board of Supervisors member Dean Preston (Democratic Socialist), stores that want to flee all the crime and other increased liabilities will have to provide the city with six months advanced notice, and make efforts to find a replacement supermarket for the location being vacated, Benzinga reports.

The move comes after While Foods shut down its flagship store in San Francisco after being open for just over a year, citing employee safety concerns.

Vox.

‘Mass protest’ is Woke-speak for ‘progressive civil disturbance’ à la BLM and AntiFa.

The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will not hear Mckesson v. Doe. The decision not to hear Mckesson leaves in place a lower court decision that effectively eliminated the right to organize a mass protest in the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.

Under that lower court decision, a protest organizer faces potentially ruinous financial consequences if a single attendee at a mass protest commits an illegal act.

This is, of course, the legal theory under which anyone even remotely associated with the Jan. 6 demonstrations have been tossed in jail. ‘Rules are for thee but not for me.’

Read it.

Can Democrats take a hint? The answer is obviously no, but with millions of people flooding out of Democrat controlled places and relocating to more conservative regions one might think they would finally get the message.

Blue cities and states across the US have been experiencing a mass exodus of legal residents since before the pandemic event; many of them business owners taking their money (and job opportunities) with them. The hardest hit states in the country include New York, Illinois and California, with cities like NYC, LA, Chicago and San Francisco seeing some of the most aggressive population shift. In states like California the standard operating procedure has been to lie about the situation, using the surge of illegal immigrants to hide population loss in the census.

NewsMax.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday will hear oral arguments involving a federal obstruction law that has been used to prosecute hundreds of defendants involved in the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and the justices’ decision could affect former President Donald Trump.

The main charge that has sent so many 1/6 defendants to prison is one that had never before been prosecuted in such a context and (it is being argued) beyond the scope of what Congress intended with the law.

Read it.

Sen. Jacky Rosen says she’s committed to cracking down on the corporate landowners jacking up housing costs for her constituents. But the Nevada Democrat has no problem raking in campaign contributions from executives at America’s largest corporate landlord.

Rosen’s campaign and leadership PAC have accepted $83,250 in 2023 from executives of Blackstone, a leading corporate investor in the U.S. housing market, Federal Election Commission records show. Blackstone is the largest landlord in the country, with over 300,000 housing units in its portfolio, and is a direct contributor to the affordable housing crisis, according to a 2023 report by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project. Among Rosen’s donors is Frank Cohen, the chairman and CEO of Blackstone’s flagship real estate investment fund, which is heavily invested in Nevada. Cohen gave $13,200 to Rosen in August.

Now, Rosen says corporate landowners like Blackstone are responsible for driving up the cost of living for everyday Americans by monopolizing residential housing markets. Rosen introduced legislation in January that she said would limit the ability of companies like Blackstone to acquire an excessive amount of single-family residences in a single market and prohibit them from renting homes at an “unreasonable price.”

Read it.

Bound and determined to drive people with money, upon whom their incipient welfare state depends, out of the state.

Read it.

Despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent string of rulings – including a 2022 New York case – that placed clear limits on how much state and local governments can restrict firearms ownership and possession, Democrat-run jurisdictions seem intent on persisting.

Read it.

Liberals are mounting a pressure campaign to force liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor to retire from the bench so President Joe Biden, who faces a tough reelection fight in November, can appoint a younger liberal successor before the election.

The Guardian.

When the office of the New York attorney general, Letitia James, announced that it would be suing the world’s largest meat company, JBS, for misleading customers about its climate commitments, it caused a stir far beyond the world of food. That’s because the suit’s impact has the potential to influence the approach all kinds of big businesses take in their advertising about sustainability, according to experts.

Not to mention driving even more businesses out of New York.

Read it.

Nations are either based on the rule of law or the rules dictated by the powerful. The former is meant to restrain, or better said, eliminate the possibility of the latter. But, as we’ve witnessed with the relentless political persecution of former President Donald Trump and, lately, of Elon Musk, laws only work when they’re fairly applied and enforced.

Neither of those things are happening with President Trump or Mr. Musk. President Trump was found guilty of fraud by a left-wing judge who determined this without considering, or despite, mountains of evidence to the contrary. The New York Attorney General Letitia James accused President Trump of over-valuing his real estate to obtain loans.

Coincidentally, Ms. James ran for the office of attorney general in 2018 with the campaign pledge to go after Trump, showing clear political animus toward President Trump. What’s more, Judge Arthur Engoron has been accused by Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York of violating “political giving rules with financial contributions to Democrats as recently as 2018, and ignored a decision on the appropriate statute of limitations in the case,” according to NBC News. Ms. James prosecuted President Trump in a civil trial, which was by design; criminal court cases require a trial by jury and proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

The Foundry.

This past weekend a funeral was held for Officer Jonathan Diller, who was fatally shot during a traffic stop in Far Rockaway, Queens, in March.

The event was attended by hundreds of police officers and a few politicians.

Some of those politicians, among them New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, weren’t exactly warmly welcomed. That shouldn’t be a surprise, as the top officials in New York seem more consumed by their ideological, banana republic-style crusades against former President Donald Trump and his supporters than in dealing with escalating chaos in the city.

The Foundry.

insanity: They keep trying and failing to legalize racial preferences, and yet, they expect a different outcome each time.

When will they learn from their failures?

Not any time soon.