Almost two years after a similar rule was rejected by the Supreme Court,
the Biden administration on Thursday released another finalrule
for regulating America’s power plants.
Under the rule
, coal-fired power plants and most new natural gas-fired power plants would have to eliminate 90% of their carbon emissions by 2039 or close down in 2040.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s new rule would raise electricity costs for Americans, kill manufacturing jobs, and disproportionately affect the poor, farmers, and small business.
EPA’s rule, if it overcomes legal challenges, would result in the closure of coal-fired power plants that now produce 16% of Americans’ electricity
. It would make natural gas power generation, which produces 43% of electricity, more costly and increase the incidence of blackouts.
Under the rule, America would become a less attractive location for energy-intensive manufacturing and Americans’ electricity bills would rise.
This is the latest in a series of government attempts to reduce emissions—and power—from the nation’s energy-generating sector.
EPA’s Clean Power Plan
, proposed in 2015 under President Barack Obama, stated that if emissions exceeded the agency’s requirements, a state or group of states would be required to shut down power plants or install renewable energy sources.
But although the Clean Air Act allows EPA to set maximum levels of new and existing emissions sources, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency that the law does not allow EPA
to shut down power plants.
Specifically, EPA can’t move from regulating individual power plants to regulating regional emissions, as it did in the rejected Clean Power Plan
. The high court’s opinion cited the major questions doctrine, according to which Congress must “speak clearly if it wishes to assign to an agency decisions of vast economic and political significance.”
That’s why President Joe Biden’s EPA
is trying another tactic to regulate emissions with this latest rule.
Rather than shutting down power plants by regulating regional emissions, as in 2015, the power plants would either have to comply with an unproven technology to sequester, or bury, 90% of their carbon dioxide emissions, or they would have to close down.
Obama issued his Clean Power Plan as a regulation because, despite sizable Democratic majorities in both chambers, Congress didn’t pass legislation to reduce emissions from power plants.
The American Clean Energy and Security Act (introduced in 2009 by Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Edward Markey, D-Mass.) and the American Power Act (introduced the next year by Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Joe Lieberman, D-Conn.) would have accomplished this, but neither proposal became law.
In the same way, Biden’s plan to close power plants would not pass Congress, so he is trying to bring out a regulation to achieve the same goal.
However, this term the Supreme Court is reconsidering the so-called Chevron doctrine, which now gives government agencies wide leeway to interpret laws. That decision is due in May or June.
If the high court overturns the Chevron doctrine, as predicted
, EPA’s new power plant rule will be on weaker grounds, because it relies on an ambiguous interpretation.
In 2022, the Supreme Court found the first Clean Power Plan to be an example of “agencies asserting highly consequential power beyond what Congress could reasonably be understood to have granted.”
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts argued
that “EPA claimed to discover an unheralded power representing a transformative expansion of its regulatory authority in the vague language of a long-extant, but rarely used, statute designed as a gap filler. That discovery allowed it to adopt a regulatory program that Congress had conspicuously declined to enact itself.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch concurred, saying: “The framers [of the Constitution] believed that the power to make new laws regulating private conduct was a grave one that could, if not properly checked, pose a serious threat to individual liberty.”
Severe, government-imposed cuts in carbon emissions raise the cost of electricity
and American-made goods. Under EPA’s new rule, power plants would have to invest in more costly equipment or close down.
Cleaner air and efficient power generation are worthwhile goals. But so is the security that comes from a healthy economy and the rule of law.
The Supreme Court, which struck down Obama’s power plant rule in 2022, could well strike down Biden’s version in the future.
Victoria Coates, vice president of the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation, spoke at the University of Pennsylvania on Thursday about the ongoing antisemitism
directed at Jews occurring on college campuses today. She said that Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, did not start but instead revealed that such antisemitism has been festering on American campuses for a long time.
With decades of experience as a national security adviser in Congress, at federal agencies, and in the White House, Coates leads the Davis Institute in designing and promoting policies focused on the nation’s security and protecting America’s interests around the world. (Heritage founded The Daily Signal in 2014.)
Here are Coates’ remarks to the Penn Alumni Free Speech Alliance and the Open Discourse Coalition on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia:
In terms of national security, our current predicament in academia has not been caused by recent events, but it has been revealed by them.
For our purposes tonight, the stark reality for me is that free speech at Penn [the University of Pennsylvania] is no longer free. It comes at a very real dollar cost—a cost born by the university, by the city of Philadelphia, and by The Heritage Foundation to ensure my safety because the opinion I am here to express—that I think hating Jews is a bad idea—is considered so radical as to raise legitimate concerns about potential violence if I dare utter it in a public forum such as this one.
While I thank all these first responders from the bottom of my heart for their service, and we are hopefully operating under an abundance of caution, my goal is to have such an escort unnecessary the next time I visit Penn.
The fact that an unprecedentedly savage terrorist attack in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, revealed the antisemitism that has been festering on American campuses
here at home is what makes this issue relevant to my broader work on national security.
Before Oct. 7, these two things would have been considered separate and distinct, with Israel being the purview of foreign policy experts and free discourse that of constitutional scholars. But now, these two problem sets have merged in a unique fashion, demanding new approaches and analysis. I don’t claim to have a silver bullet to solve the problem tonight, but perhaps the first step in that direction is the acceptance that we have one.
Not since the Vietnam War era have international affairs and campus culture so dramatically collided. And, of course, the two cases are distinct in that the United States was a direct participant in Vietnam, as were many of the students protesting the war. Our situation seems much more a domestic product, albeit one that has been triggered by events abroad.
What has become apparent to me in the aftermath of Oct. 7 is that First Amendment rights on campuses across the country have become selectively applied. Certain groups enjoy freedom of worship, assembly, and expression. And others, namely Jews and those who support them, due to the threats of violence attested to in this room by the presence of armed security, are compelled to hide the symbols of their religion, disperse gatherings that could become targets, and modify—if not entirely suppress—opinions that have been judged by others as so noxious as to legitimately provoke violence.
While all forms of ethnic and religious bigotry are abhorrent, it must be said that antisemitism today, given the scale of the Jewish population on American campuses and the disproportionate brunt of racist attacks they have suffered, is in a category of its own as a problem because, in its current manifestation, it is the only case where the victims of the attacks are seen as complicit in their own victimization, which, by extension, is deemed legitimate.
The point I want to emphasize tonight is that this should be a flashing red light of danger to all of us who love academic discourse and inquiry in general and Penn in particular. It should be no comfort to us that while fellow Ivies [Ivy League schools] such as Harvard got Fs for confronting antisemitism
in the Anti-Defamation League’s report card on the topic released earlier this month, Penn got a D.
The ADL is hardly a bastion of conservatism, so this must be taken seriously or antisemitism could become a canary in the coal mine; a warning of a broader corrosive hate that will not be confined to Jews and that could destroy the free discourse in academia we are gathered here today to preserve.
Making antisemitism acceptable, and even fashionable, should be intolerable to all of good faith, regardless of religion. While after World War II, many hoped the searing evil of the Holocaust would be such a wake-up call that “Never Again” would mean just that, in reality, antisemitism might
have been defeated but it was not eradicated. Its focus simply shifted as, almost exactly 76 years ago, the modern state of Israel was established as a Jewish state.
That Israel has an official religious identity should not be considered radical, as many more modern states have official religions such as Christianity (Argentina, Iceland, Denmark) and Islam (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia). Yet the religious identity of Israel has made it subject to almost continuous attack both external and internal—the most recent and sensational on Oct. 7.
In a new twist, Hamas’ target was not exclusively Israel but rather Jews as well as those seen as complicit with them. The terrorists thus indiscriminately killed and tortured Americans, Europeans, Africans, and Asians—and even fellow Muslims. Three Americans are still hostages in Gaza today, more than six months after the attacks.
We can discuss the geopolitical ramifications of the fallout of Oct. 7 and possible resolutions to the conflict in the question and answer portion of our event, and I’d like to get to that as quickly as possible so this isn’t an interminable monologue, but I would like to return in conclusion to the way these terrorist attacks abroad have revealed what is going on in campus culture here at home.
Strikingly, there have been more Palestinian-related
protests in the U.K. and U.S. than there have been across the entire Arab world, indicating that this phenomenon is not exclusively of the Middle East. As with Oct. 7 itself, the protests and threats that are spreading across our country are not political in nature and are not targeted at the Israeli government. They are targeted at Jews, particularly American Jews, which is something very different and pernicious—and which was just waiting for a trigger such as Oct. 7 to come out into the open.
As I said earlier, my main purpose here tonight is to express my opinion that it is incumbent on all of us who value academia to admit this reality and be unafraid in our opposition to it. We tolerate it or excuse it at our peril. So, I hope by my presence here tonight to not only identify the problem but hopefully become part of a civil and open discourse on how to resolve it.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The Daily Wire’s new streaming television show “The Pendragon Cycle” will highlight the Christian faith of King Arthur
and Merlin as portrayed in Stephen R. Lawhead’s book series.
The series will show how the wizard Merlin and his father, the bard Taliesin, learn to let God direct their supernatural powers, Jeremy Boreing, The Daily Wire’s CEO and the series’ director, explains in a video first released to The Daily Signal
. The show does not have a release yet or a set number of episodes yet.
“It’s one of the more religious, although not overtly so, scenes of the film, and in a way, it’s a micro expression of the macro story of the season,” Boreing says. “In this scene, we see Taliesin in this very dangerous situation with this group of people who do not know him, do not share his values, and not being very hospitable to him.”
“It’s by these two sort-of supernatural characters, Taliesin and Merlin, learning not to use their power as an expression of their own will, but to be used by the most high God,” the director adds.
Taliesin (James Arden) gets accosted by men holding swords as his wife, Charis (Rose Reid), stands behind him in a YouTube video screenshot from The Daily Wire’s production diary of “The Pendragon Cycle.”
The video then cuts to Tom Sharp, who plays Merlin, telling his close companion, “Nothing will happen to me that was not appointed to happen.”
Lawhead’s “Pendragon Cycle” portrays Merlin as the son of the British bard Taliesin. Taliesin marries Charis, an exile princess from the lost kingdom of Atlantis
. Lawhead’s version of Atlantis takes inspiration from the Minoan civilization on Crete, and The Daily Wire version has taken great pains to capture the strengths of the book series, especially filming arresting scenes of Charis dancing with bulls in Atlantis.
The book series places the story of Merlin and King Arthur in the 500s and 600s A.D., with Christianity rising in pagan Britain. The show will lean in on the Christian elements of Arthurian myth
, elements that Hollywood often overlooks or ignores.
The show will stream on The Daily Wire Plus
, the conservative news outlet’s streaming service. The Daily Wire Plus features movies like Matt Walsh’s “What Is a Woman?” and the satirical comedy film “Lady Ballers.” It also features shows with The Daily Wire’s conservative news personalities, such as Walsh, Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, and Andrew Klavan.
Conservative and Christian projects like The Daily Wire Plus have gained traction in recent years, impressing audiences by delivering content at a higher quality than old-fashioned Christian movies. The Angel Studios film “Sound of Freedom”
took the No. 1 spot at the box office for the July 4 weekend last year.
Watch the latest video for “The Pendragon Cycle” below.
In another staggeringly poor choice for the nation, the Biden administration is putting concern for votes in the coming election before national security
interests.
Strangely, due to election calculations, President Joe Biden
seems to prefer Hamas and China over Israel and Japan.
Already going with the head-shaker of softballing America’s response to Hamas’ terrorist attacks in Israel
, apparently because of worries of losing Arab-American votes in Michigan, Biden is now doubling down and doing it again.
This time, the president is reinforcing China’s dominance
in steel production rather than working together with ally Japan. The justification is to placate union voters in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania.
Both paths are wrong for American national interests.
In response to Japan-based Nippon Steel’s proposed acquisition of U.S. Steel, Biden issued a “highly unusual
” statement March 14 aimed at a pending decision by the interagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. The president placed his thumb on the scale of CFIUS’s review, saying
“it is vital for [U.S. Steel] to remain an American steel company that is domestically owned and operated.”
Biden’s statement set off warning signals to those interested in preserving the sanctity of CFIUS’s vital and impartial role in defending America’s national security. The statement was also an avoidable blunder that undermines U.S.-Japan relations.
This was a particularly unfortunate decision ahead of Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s state visit this month.
Biden doubled down in a subsequent speech April 17 before the United Steelworkers union, saying
that U.S. Steel “should remain totally American.”
He added: “American-owned, American-operated by American union steelworkers—the best in the world—and that’s going to happen, I promise you.”
Why would Biden politicize a deal to the detriment of national security, economic development, and the steel industry itself? It’s because he’s taking “direction” from the United Steelworkers and the union’s corporate ally, steel manufacturer Cleveland-Cliffs Inc.
Nippon Steel outbid Cleveland-Cliffs for U.S. Steel. Cleveland-Cliffs still wants
to acquire U.S. Steel, so it has begun calling in political favors to disrupt the deal.
Cleveland-Cliffs has been trying to kill
the deal behind the scenes by telling lawmakers that there could be layoffs, even though Nippon has specifically promised to protect standing employment levels.
It gets even more tawdry, as Cleveland-Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves has bragged about his influence over Biden, saying
he has “been in total contact with the administration, so I know what’s going on.”
“The contact is about making it abundantly clear between me and [United Steelworkers President] Dave McCall that the only buyer the union accepts for the union-represented assets is Cleveland-Cliffs,” Goncalves added.
The USW’s political influence in electorally vital Pennsylvania
empowers it to boss around the leader of the free world, who seems content to be led around by his nose despite the foolishness of this orientation.
Administration officials explained away their decision to the Japanese by pointing to Biden’s “need to retain political support in Pennsylvania,” according to The Washington Post
.
Interestingly, even though Biden is being pushed around by Cleveland-Cliffs and the United Steelworkers, the Biden administration had already assessed that an acquisition of U.S. Steel by Cleveland-Cliffs isn’t feasible
because of the unique antitrust issues it would present. Perhaps votes also trump legal considerations.
The union absurdly continues to contend that it doesn’t believe Nippon—the world’s fourth-largest
steelmaker—has the financial means to support the labor agreement it currently has with U.S. Steel, the world’s 27th-largest steelmaker.
The explanation clearly doesn’t hold water, but it’s apparently enough for the White House. It is obvious that union leaders fear bargaining honestly with the Japanese will be tougher than dealing with a company that works in tandem with the union itself.
Japan is our most important ally in confronting our most challenging threat, the Chinese Communist Party. It’s a sad state of our politics that the president would prioritize union demands over this essential foreign relationship, especially considering the deal would strengthen competition against Chinese steelmaking dominance.
This is a hugely important issue with real national security impact. To cavalierly push it aside to gain a few votes is both dangerous and simply wrong.
Biden seems to be downplaying national security means to achieve his political ends. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States should rise above this political election season foolishness and jealously guard its objectivity and legitimacy.
Unfortunately, that has become a much more challenging task thanks to the president’s recklessness and willingness to prioritize real national security measures below partisan political considerations.
There is little doubt that the Biden administration should pull that thumb off the scale and allow the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to make the decision based on the facts. The backroom machinations involving disgruntled corporate leaders who lost a bid, a union worried about having to renegotiate contracts with tougher leadership, and political leaders focused on November’s election should not drive this train.
Some things are too important to leave to short-range considerations. True national security interests of a vital nature fall into that category.
In what may be one of the most important and historic cases the U.S. Supreme Court
has ever handled, the court heard almost three hours of oral arguments Thursday in Trump v. United States, the presidential immunity case.
In a spirited discussion in the final case to be heard by the court before its summer recess, former Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben, arguing on behalf of special counsel Jack Smith
, and John Sauer, arguing on behalf of former President Donald Trump
, answered an intense series of questions from all of the justices on whether a former president enjoys immunity from criminal prosecution for official actions he took while he was president.
Trump was not in the audience at the Supreme Court because the judge in his New York criminal prosecution, Juan Merchan, refused to recess the trial Thursday and required Trump to be present in his courtroom.
In his opening statement, Sauer pointed out that the court’s decision in this case would have “implications” that “extend far beyond the facts of this case.” Without such immunity, said Sauer, “there can be no presidency as we know it,” because presidents would be hesitant to carry out their duties in many different situations out of fear of potential prosecution once they leave office.
That immunity, argued Sauer, is based on the Executive Vesting Clause and the corresponding principle of separation of powers, citing both Benjamin Franklin and George Washington in support of that proposition.
Much of the questioning was about how to differentiate between official and personal acts of the president. The government has insisted in its briefing that a president is not entitled to immunity from prosecution even for his official actions, and when asked that question directly by Justice Clarence Thomas, Dreeben answered: “No immunity.”
But Dreeben then qualified his answer by saying that presidents have some “special protection,” meaning that if a former president was criminally prosecuted, he could raise as a defense that such a prosecution would interfere with the president’s core functions as outlined in Article II of the Constitution
.
While Sauer insisted that presidents enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution for their official acts, he admitted they do not have immunity for their personal actions. The sole exception to official-act immunity, said Sauer, is if a president is impeached for particular conduct, since the Impeachment Judgment Clause specifically says that a president who has been “convicted” by the Senate in an impeachment trial is “subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment, and Punishment, according to Law.”
However, even then, insisted Sauer, the government must establish that Congress
clearly intended the criminal law in question to apply to the president.
Thomas got to the heart of the official act vs. personal act issue when he asked Sauer how the court should determine what is or is not an “official act” of the president, a question that was repeated in various forms by other justices.
Sauer repeatedly referenced the court’s 1982 decision in Nixon v. Fitzgerald, in which the court held that a former president
enjoys absolute immunity from civil actions for all acts he undertook within “the outer perimeter of his authority.” Sauer pointed to prior case law in arguing that an objective standard should be used to make such an assessment.
The justices asked a series of hypothetical questions geared toward trying to distinguish between personal and public actions when both are mixed together, such as a president taking an illegal bribe for the appointment of an ambassador, an issue raised by Chief Justice John Roberts
, or a president creating false documents or ordering the assassination of a rival by the military.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor
asked Sauer whether the president can order an official action for personal gain, to which Sauer said that the immunity for official acts does not “turn on the allegedly improper motivation” of the president’s action.
Moreover, he argued, any personal motive that the president may have had for undertaking that action should be out of bounds for a court to examine.
That last hypothetical about using the military for assassinations or to stage a coup was brought up more than once, with SEAL Team 6 specifically mentioned. That is one of the absurd, extreme hypotheticals that has never occurred in our entire history and is not something that should be realistically feared, no matter how the court rules in this case.
Indeed, Justice Samuel Alito made it clear that such questions were not designed to “slander” SEAL Team 6, citing the honorable history of our military and the fact that it would violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice to obey such a blatantly unlawful order.
Sauer said that if the court sets out a test for distinguishing between official and personal acts of the president, then the case should be remanded to the lower court to make such a determination.
In response to a series of questions by Justice Amy Coney Barrett
, Sauer acknowledged that at least some of the alleged criminal acts by Trump would be personal acts, such as his use of private lawyers to file false statements in his election contests.
Some of the questions pertained to the specifics of the federal indictment in this case. Sotomayor, for example, asked whether Trump had a right to create what she called “fake” electors. Sauer answered that there was nothing illegal about creating an alternative slate of electors, citing prior historical precedents such as the 1876 election, when several states had two different sets of electors due to claims about fraud and other irregularities.
Dreeben kept repeating that there are many protections against abusive criminal prosecutions, including layers of approval needed at the Justice Department
, the fact that indictments must be returned by a grand jury, the various procedural protections afforded to criminal defendants, and the layers of review by the trial court and appellate courts.
Alito asked questions suggesting that he was skeptical how much protection those safeguards would actually provide. And Justice Brett Kavanaugh
asked Dreeben about “creative prosecutors”—a polite way of saying “abusive”—using a “vague statute” to go after a former president.
Citing the charges against Trump for obstruction and defrauding the United States, Kavanaugh suggested that such charges could be “used against a lot of presidential activities.” Essentially, Dreeben’s answer was for all of us to trust in the good faith of the Justice Department.
There was a lot more to the lengthy questioning and arguments that were made. The liberal justices seemed much more inclined to side with Smith’s position of no immunity for official actions, while the generally more conservative justices seemed more interested in basing some form of immunity on distinguishing between official and personal actions, providing some layer of protection for the former, but not the latter. But the key to such a ruling would be how to make that determination.
Giving a lone federal judge and a handful of jurors in a federal prosecution the ability to decide whether a president acted within his official capacity would give extraordinary power to a small group of unelected individuals, without even considering potential indictments by local prosecutors in the more than 3,000 counties across the country.
Any test the Supreme Court comes up with should be, as Sauer argued, an objective test, not a subjective one that allows individual courts to question the motives of the former chief executive of the United States.
There is only one thing we know for sure about how these issues will be resolved: We will get a decision in the case by the end of June.
A migrant services center in Mexico near the Texas border where pro-Joe Biden flyers
recently were posted also was home to a display opposing Donald Trump in 2020.
The executive director of Resource Center Matamoros has denied any political involvement by the nongovernmental organization. However, new images obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project
, in collaboration with the Muckraker news site, suggest otherwise. (The Heritage Foundation founded The Daily Signal in 2014.)
“The [pro-Biden] flyers were not only on the walls of port-a-potties but also on a table inside the shelter,” Heritage’s Oversight Project posted on X. “This is backed up with a sworn statement, under penalty of perjury.”
Legacy media failed to discredit what we discovered on video
They relied on a denial from the founder of RCM, Gaby Zavala, and claimed translation issues with the flyer were unusual for a native Spanish speaker
The Oversight Project obtained the sworn statement from the person who initially discovered the vote-for-Biden flyers.
As The Daily Signal previously reported, the flyers posted at the migrant services center in Mexico across the border from Brownsville, Texas, told illegal aliens: “Reminder to vote for President Biden
when you are in the United States.”
The Oversight Project’s new thread on X uses images that it says are from the migrant center, including a large, campaign-style poster for Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris that uses photos of them.
The images also include a balloon display from 2020, after Biden’s victory over Trump in the November presidential election, with the words “Bye Trump.”
During the 2020 campaign, Biden’s wife Jill Biden, now the nation’s first lady, visited an organization allied with Resource Center Matamoros and known as Team Brownsville.
RCM’s website also says its founder and executive director, Gaby Zavala, partnered last November with Mike Benavides of Team Brownsville to brief members of Congress about the humanitarian crisis at the Mexico-U.S. border in Texas.
Translated from Spanish, the flyers posted at
Resource Center Matamoros in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas said: “Reminder to vote for President Biden when you are in the United States. We need another four years of his term to stay open.”
Heritage’s Oversight Project notes that left-leaning media outlets attacked initial reports on the vote-for-Biden posters.
“Despite their best efforts, the entirety of legacy media has failed to discredit what we discovered on video,” the Oversight Project posted on X.
“They have relied on a denial from the founder of Matamoras Resource Center, Gaby Zavala (pictured below) and claimed translation issues with the flyer that would be unusual for a native Spanish speaker,” the Oversight Project said in the post. “What they missed is that Zavala is not a native Spanish speaker.”
The post goes on to explain why Zavala isn’t.
RCM Founder Gaby Zavala has stated that her work is “an effort to fight policy, US policy” pic.twitter.com/Ol9EaM5XyD
It’s not clear whether Resource Center Matamoros authorized the flyers or did anything to remove them from the shelter for migrants. Zavala didn’t respond to inquiries from The Daily Signal for this report or previous ones.
But, she told The Associated Press
that her organization doesn’t know who made the vote-for-Biden flyers and “does not encourage immigrants to register to vote or cast ballots in the U.S.”
The flyers, first discovered by Muckraker and shared with the Oversight Project, were found throughout Resource Center Matamoros, including on the walls of portable toilets, a video shows.
RCM provides
information about legal and social services available for those on the Mexican side of the border who seek asylum in the United States. The nongovernmental organization also lobbies U.S. and Mexican lawmakers.
RCM and Zavala’s Asylum Seekers network “conducted lobbying efforts, but do not appear in lobbying disclosure act databases with the House and Senate,” the Oversight Project posted on X. “Additionally, their filed 990s say they did not lobby.”
This remain an active investigation, stay tuned for further updates.
The city of Matamoros borders Brownsville, where Biden spoke
in February about the crisis of illegal immigration at the southern border that has grown since he became president in January 2021.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Emails obtained by Parents Defending Education
, a watchdog organization, show a Seattle school board member called Israel a “right-wing apartheid force” and praised the Black Lives Matter movement six days after terrorist attacks left over 1,200 dead in the Jewish state.
Eliza Rankin, the school board member for Seattle Public Schools, identifies herself as Jewish in the email sent Oct. 13 under the subject line “hate speech.”
The terrorist organization Hamas, which is the elected government of the Gaza Strip adjoining Israel, massacred over 1,200 civilians in the Oct. 7 incursion into southern Israel. Hamas also kidnapped over 200 Israeli, American, Argentinian, Thai, Filipino, French, German, and Irish citizens.
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, Black Lives Matter chapters throughout the United States praised what they described as a righteous pushback against Israel’s “colonialism.”
In a “Superintendent Talking Points” document dated Oct. 11 and obtained by Parents Defending Education, Seattle Public Schools describes Filipinos as “Filipinx,” a term described by many Filipino nationals and immigrants
as extremely offensive.
Black Lives Matter’s Chicago chapter posted imagery on X praising Hamas paragliders who jumped into the Nova music festival on the Israeli side of the Israel-Gaza border and mowed down attendees with automatic weapons.
Other BLM chapters posted similar celebrations
of Hamas’ terrorist attacks and attempted to draw parallels between what they see as oppressed Palestinians in Gaza and blacks in the United States.
Black Lives Matter Grassroots stands in solidarity with our Palestinian family who are currently resisting 75 years of settler colonialism and apartheid.
On Oct. 12, five days after Hamas’ terrorist attacks in Israel, Seattle Public Schools Superintendent Brent Jones posted a message about “International Conflict” for parents and students in Washington’s largest school district.
Jones described the “situation” in Israel and Gaza as “complex” and “emotionally and politically charged.” The school superintendent didn’t condemn any terrorist act, instead suggesting that “it is acceptable that we as individuals hold different opinions about the conflict and complex history of Israel and Palestine.”
Jones then wrote: “Antisemitic
or Islamophobic speech or acts will never be tolerated in our district.”
According to emails obtained by Parents Defending Education under the Freedom of Information Act, one parent reached out to Seattle’s school superintendent to ask about the school district’s connections to Black Lives Matter following the BLM chapters’ pro-Hamas posts.
Rankin, the school board member, responded in the Oct. 13 email that she is “a Jewish person who fights for racial equity” and that Seattle Public Schools “has no affiliation to the [Black Lives Matter] organization.”
She proceeded to pledge her support for the Black Lives Matter movement and described “the Israeli government” as a “right-wing apartheid force that does not represent the Jewish people.”
This assertion is objectively false, according to news reports.
On Oct. 11, liberal and centrist Israeli party leaders and officials joined Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a conservative, to form a “unity government”
during the Israel-Hamas war that erupted after the attacks.
Hamas was elected in 2006 by popular vote in Gaza and continues to receive majority support of the civilian population, according to every available poll
.
The response by Seattle Public Schools officials to the terrorist attacks and Israel’s military retaliation appears to be part of a growing trend
of an anti-Israel revision of history in America’s public schools. Similar incidents include Berkeley High School’s anti-Israel social studies lessons
in California.
But this isn’t the only time that Seattle Public Schools has been at the center of an antisemitism controversy.
Ian Golash
, social studies chairman at Seattle’s Chief Sealth International High School
, was suspended April 19 after a report by Adam Guilette of Accuracy in Media, a conservative investigative group.
Guillete recorded Golash as he said Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks in Israel were justified and that there was no evidence of rape at the Nova music festival, where Hamas terrorists killed at least 370 attendees.
Erika Sanzi, director of outreach for Parents Defending Education, described the anti-Israel sentiment as a result of school districts deciding that it’s “OK to vilify and demean certain groups.”
In a written statement Thursday to The Daily Signal, Sanzi said:
K-12 education has an anti-Israel problem that often slides into antisemitism. It’s not that every school board or school administrator holds anti-Jewish views—the problem is that enough do for it to be a real problem.
I am not shocked by what this [Seattle school] board member said because there have been countless similar examples since Oct. 7, and even long before that. When governing bodies view Jews as oppressors, it becomes a crisis for that school district. We are seeing what happens when school districts decide that it’s OK to vilify and demean certain groups. Seattle has allowed this to fester far too long.
Seattle Public Schools has not responded to The Daily Signal’s request to verify the emails and documents provided by Parents Defending Education by publication time.
I can’t tell you how many people I know who do not like former President Donald Trump
yet nonetheless smell prosecutorial overreach in Manhattan.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg
has charged the former president with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Trump has pleaded not guilty.
The case began with Michael Cohen, Trump’s onetime fixer, making a “hush money” payment to the former adult film actress known as Stormy Daniels to keep her from revealing information about an alleged sexual relationship with Trump in 2006. Bragg used the fact that Cohen paid $130,000 to Daniels in 2016, when Trump was running for president, as a pretext to turn a moldy misdemeanor offense into a felony.
But is it even illegal? This trial showcases something rich men and big corporations have been doing for years—paying off mistresses or wronged staffers with cash settlements with little public scrutiny, thanks to nondisclosure agreements.
I don’t like it, but it’s not a crime.
On Tuesday, former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker testified that during a 2015 meeting in Trump Tower, he told Trump, Cohen, and campaign stalwart Hope Hicks that he wanted to help the Trump campaign, if behind the scenes.
What followed was “catch and kill,” the term for the scheme of paying to get dirt on a public figure, then killing the story, as happened with another alleged Trump gal pal, Karen McDougal. The National Enquirer paid her $150,000 for a story that never ran.
Trump has denied that anything extramarital occurred with McDougal and Daniels. But as Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, told CNN
, “You don’t pay someone $130,000 not to have sex with you.”
Back to Cohen. He’s a flawed witness to be sure, who in 2018 pleaded guilty to charges that included tax evasion and lying to Congress
when he testified about Trump, his former master. Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison.
Then, last year, Cohen claimed that he lied when he admitted to tax evasion. A more careful prosecutor would not hang a case on an accomplished liar.
Given his capacity for self-pity and self-sabotage, it’s no surprise that Trump told reporters after the second day of trial, “I’m not allowed to defend myself.”
Trump also continued to throw shade at Judge Juan Merchan, whose gag order, Trump maintained, robbed him of his “right to free speech.” Trump also offered that Merchan “should recuse himself.”
Pecker testified that he was glad to help by running “positive stories about Mr. Trump,” as well as negative stories about his campaign rivals. I’m guessing many Big Media
hotshots feel the same way—about President Joe Biden
.
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After nearly two years of legal and political challenges, Britain’s parliament has finally passed a law
confirming that Rwanda is a safe place to send people who arrive in the U.K. illegally by sea. This is a major policy win for the Conservative government of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and a victory for common sense. Britain, like
the U.S. and Europe, is experiencing mass illegal migration in the guise of asylum claims. The British devised the Rwanda plan in response, but the U.S. already has successful equivalents that can be resurrected when there is a will to once again control America’s borders.
Like those coming to the U.S. by land, most people illegally arriving in Britain by boat are economic migrants. Britain’s asylum system has been swamped by growing demand, and backlogs for processing cases stretch into years.
In 2018, only 300 people arrived illegally in the U.K.
by small boat from France across the English Channel. In 2022, it was more than 45,000. And in August 2023, the U.K. received its 100,000th
illegal boat-borne immigrant, one of 700 who arrived each day. Nearly all of the 100,000 are still in Britain, joined by ever-increasing numbers.
From Jan. 1 to April 21 this year, 6,265 small boats arrived
in the U.K. carrying illegal immigrants, with the largest numbers being from Afghanistan and Vietnam.
Having left the European Union, the British are unable to return asylum-seekers to the first safe country in the EU under what are called the Dublin Regulations. By mid-2023, 96% of asylum-seekers who arrived in 2021 had not received final decisions in their cases, and around 50,000 were being housed in hotels, costing the United Kingdom the equivalent of more than $8.8 million U.S. a day. The limitless liability of illegal immigration to the U.K. is an important electoral issue for Conservative Party voters.
Sound familiar?
In August 2023, Sunak’s government passed an Illegal Migration Act
that barred people who entered illegally by sea from applying for asylum. The act requires British officials to return inadmissible aliens—without appeal—back to their birth country, if possible, or if not, to a safe third country.
To implement the act, Britain needed a safe third country to house putative asylum-seekers pending case processing. Britain does
not have any developing-country neighbors, so they struck a deal with Rwanda in 2022 in which that Central African country would be compensated to take up to 1,000 putative asylum applicants over five years.
Anyone sent to Rwanda could opt at any time to return to their home country or to be resettled in Rwanda as refugees, but they could not return to Britain. The British government fought a series of legal challenges to its policy, but passage of the new law should clear the way for removal flights to Rwanda within weeks from now.
Sunak says he means business. “The only way to stop the boats is to eliminate the incentive to come, by making it clear that if you are here illegally, you will not be able to stay,” he said
at a press conference. “We are ready. The plans are in place.”
The government has also set aside judges and courts on standby to handle the inevitable legal challenges.
The Rwanda plan is Britain’s attempt to regain control over its borders and national sovereignty. The goal is to cut off the possibility of asylum from boat arrivals, thus both destroying the business model of maritime smugglers and saving lives. This past week, five people died
when over 100 illegal migrants attempted to cross the English Channel in an overcrowded boat.
The Rwanda plan has many opponents. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees argues
that if the U.K. is successful, it will set a “worrying precedent for dismantling asylum-related obligations that other countries, including in Europe, may be tempted to follow …” Perhaps so, but the alternative is to cede control over immigration to foreign actors in perpetuity.
The British hope to emulate the success of Australia, which in 2001, started turning back boats carrying illegal migrants. The idea was to give “no advantage” to asylum applicants arriving illegally by boat over those arriving by air.
Australia set up
detention and asylum processing centers on the island nation of Nauru, and on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. Eventually, Australia adopted a strict rule that no asylum-seeker arriving by boat and processed offshore would ever be resettled in Australia. The policy faced considerable political opposition but was highly effective in reducing demand.
The message was quickly understood by would-be boat migrants and migrant traffickers across Southeast Asia. “Arrival numbers went off a cliff
once the Australians started to deport … because ‘news spreads like wildfire among refugees,’” wrote Matthew Paris in the Spectator.
When a later Australian government closed the Manus and Nauru centers, illegal migration soared again. In 2012, more than 600 people drowned when boats carrying illegal migrants capsized. In response, Australia reopened the offshore centers and resumed sending back all illegal aliens who arrived or attempted to arrive in Australia by sea.
As before, the putative asylum applicants remained in the offshore centers for the entire time, pending the adjudication of their cases. The offshoring policy and an unbending Australian government destroyed the market for maritime migrant smugglers. For example, in 2014, only a single boat carrying migrants made it to Australia.
At its peak in 2014, Nauru’s camp had 1,233 asylum applicants living there. By June 2023, only three remained. Though the boat-borne illegal migration virtually stopped, a credible ability to restart offshore processing is vital to Australia maintaining its current control over seaborne illegal immigration. Therefore, Australia is paying the equivalent of $288,000 U.S. a year to Nauru to keep the detention/processing option open in reserve.
The U.S. does not have the advantage of being an island. But as recently as the Trump administration, we had Safe Third Country agreements in place with Central American countries and the Migrant Protection Protocols with Mexico. Under these agreements, any asylum applicant coming to the U.S. and first passing through a third safe country to get here would be sent back to that country if he or she had not applied for asylum in that country. For example, all those who crossed illegally into the U.S. from Mexico were returned there pending their case adjudication.
The U.S. needs to use all the economic and diplomatic leverage at our disposal to revive those agreements. Meanwhile, similar to the U.K. and Australia, we should prohibit asylum applications from those illegally crossing between ports of entry to discourage frivolous and fraudulent asylum claims.
The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration
crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues like human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more.
When defendants go on trial, the allegations against them are generally clear. Not so with former President Donald Trump
and his “hush money” case.
Prosecutors in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s
office offered new transparency not only to the public, but seemingly also to Trump’s defense attorneys on Tuesday when, one year after indicting the former president, they finally pulled back the curtain to reveal
the motivating “crime” in their case: a violation of state election law.
Former federal prosecutors told the Daily Caller News Foundation that Bragg’s lack of clarity is unfair to the defense, which can’t prepare to argue against a charge they don’t know, and unlike what they’ve seen before.
“I don’t recall ever having a trial where the defense didn’t know what the government was trying to prove,” former federal prosecutor Jonathan Fahey told the Daily Caller News Foundation, likening Bragg’s approach to a “trial by ambush.”
Bragg’s indictment
last April charged Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records allegedly related to $130,000 paid to keep porn star Stormy Daniels from telling her story of an alleged affair ahead of the election. To charge the eight-year old misdemeanor offenses as a felony, he argued it was done to commit or conceal another crime—presumably, a federal campaign-finance violation. But he never specified.
That is, until Tuesday, when it came out after defense attorneys objected to prosecutor Joshua Steinglass’ line of questioning that they were claiming
Trump violated New York
Election Law § 17-152. The statute
makes it a misdemeanor for any two or more people to “conspire” to influence an election using “unlawful means.”
During opening statements Monday, Matthew Colangelo
, senior counsel for the district attorney and a former top official in the Biden Department of Justice
, argued that the records Trump allegedly falsified in relation to Daniels’ payment are part of a broader “conspiracy” to influence the 2016 election involving Trump, his former attorney Michael Cohen, and former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker.
Prosecutors are seeking to demonstrate that conspiracy—which they clarified is rooted in the election statute, though it is not named in the indictment—through witness testimony.
Former federal prosecutor Andrew Cherkasky said the theory put forward by Bragg under the statute is “bizarre.”
“The misdemeanor statute of limitations is expired on this offense, just as it is expired on the underlying offense, raising a significant legal question about the propriety of this approach,” he told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“One of the biggest issues in this case is that the prosecution has essentially withheld this theory until trial has started,” Cherkasky continued. “The defense has complained about this the entire time, but the judge has refused to require identification of the felony escalator at an earlier stage. This amounts to another form of ‘trial by fire,” which isn’t how the American criminal justice system is supposed to work.
John Malcolm, vice president for The Heritage Foundation’s Institute for Constitutional Government and a former deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s
Criminal Division, said there are three things about the revelation that “amaze” him as a former prosecutor. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
“First, that Alvin Bragg’s office did not provide advanced notice of the precise allegations in order to enable former President [Donald] Trump’s legal team to prepare an adequate defense,” he said. “Second, that the statutory code section cited by the lead prosecutor (New York Penal Code Section 17-152) prohibits a conspiracy ‘to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means …,’ but Bragg has still not divulged what those ‘unlawful means’ were.”
“And third, and most shockingly, that penal code section is a misdemeanor, which means that Alvin Bragg is claiming that committing a misdemeanor (making a false business entry) in order to conceal the commission of another misdemeanor (conspiring to promote someone’s candidacy in an unlawful manner) can—like magic—be converted into 34 felony offenses,” he continued.
Fahey said that everything about the case “stinks to high heaven.”
“If this was anyone other than Donald Trump, this would be laughed out of court,” he said.
