FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—When courts issue wrongful injunctions
, taxpayers are often left paying for the damage done to their own government. But Reps. Derek Schmidt, R-Kan., and Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo., are introducing a bill on Monday that aims to shift that burden from taxpayers to the plaintiffs seeking these injunctions, forcing the courts to enforce pre-existing federal law.
The legislation, titled the “Wrongful Injunction Accountability Act of 2025,” seeks to “ensure compliance with Rule 65(c) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in restraining actions brought against the United States,” according to a draft text of the bill provided to The Daily Signal
.
“Our bill creates a way to enforce these taxpayer protections already on the books, discouraging frivolous lawsuits and ensuring the responsible use of Americans’ tax dollars,” Schmidt told The Daily Signal.
“The American people’s voice is suppressed when a single judge can impose injunctions that disrupt the work of elected officials chosen by voters,” Hageman told The Daily Signal. “The Wrongful Injunction Accountability Act discourages such litigation and leaves the plaintiffs responsible for costs and damages of baseless injunctions. American taxpayers deserve a judicial system they can trust, this bill restores that.”
As leftist lawfare
seeks to undermine President Donald Trump’s agenda, the legislation would codify a memorandum
the president issued in March.
Under Rule 65(c)
of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, a party seeking a preliminary injunction or temporary restraining order is required to provide an assurance—typically in the form of a bond—to the court, meant to cover potential damages incurred by the enjoined party if it is ultimately determined the injunction was wrongfully issued. The courts, however, have frequently waived or minimized the requirements laid out in Rule 65(c).
The bill stipulates that when courts fail to demand this security, or if the amount paid by plaintiffs is insufficient, “the movant shall be liable to the United States for the costs and damages sustained.”
“In recent years, injunctions brought against the federal government have been abused through overuse,” Schmidt said.
“When these injunctions are found to be wrongfully entered, not only do the gears of self-government grind to a halt, but the disruption also often results in an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars,” Schmidt explained. “That’s why current federal rules are designed to discourage plaintiffs from rolling the dice by seeking injunctions of dubious merit. Current federal rules already require a party seeking an injunction against the United States to post bond so taxpayers are not stuck with the cost if courts eventually rule against the injunction. This rule is supposed to protect taxpayers, but courts too often do not enforce it, and taxpayers are left holding the bag.”
The new legislation follows a memorandum sent by President Donald Trump to department heads on March 11 titled, “Ensuring the Enforcement of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c),” which claimed that waiving the practice, and thereby inviting left-wing lawfare
, amounted to “anti-democratic takeover,” of the government.
“In recent weeks, activist organizations fueled by hundreds of millions of dollars in donations and sometimes even government grants have obtained sweeping injunctions
far beyond the scope of relief contemplated by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, functionally inserting themselves into the executive policy making process and therefore undermining the democratic process,” the memorandum stated.
“Taxpayers are forced not only to cover the costs of their antics when funding and hiring decisions are enjoined, but must needlessly wait for government policies they voted for,” the memo continued. “Therefore, it is the policy of the United States to demand that parties seeking injunctions against the federal government must cover the costs and damages incurred if the government is ultimately found to have been wrongfully enjoined or restrained. Federal courts should hold litigants accountable for their misrepresentations and ill-granted injunctions.”
By the end of April, more than 220 lawsuits had been filed against the Trump administration, and, according to The New York Times
, at least 160 rulings in these cases have provided at least temporary pauses on Trump policies.
“This bill addresses the kind of frivolous litigation we’ve seen run rampant in the United States over that past few months,” Hageman said. “By requiring a bond from parties requesting injunctions, this will serve as a tool to enforce Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c) and will limit judicial activism.”
We’ve all been there: you go out with friends, have a great time … then they leave you stuck with the bill. After four years of reckless, ruinous and arguably illegal Joe Biden administration
policies, America will be stuck with a massive border bar tab for years to come.
President Donald Trump
is busy keeping his promises to secure the border, remove aliens in accordance with the law, and hold noncitizen visitors and students accountable for the promises they made when getting visas to respect our country and its rules.
He’s been sued at every step by illegal aliens
and their left-wing advocates. Lower-level federal judges—usually, but not always appointed by Democrat presidents and working in Democrat-dominated states—are ordering nationwide injunctions as a default, in cases filed on the flimsiest of legal pretexts.
According to former Attorney General Bill Barr, federal courts issued
a total of 27 nationwide injunctions in the entire 20th century, but they’ve issued 79 against Trump alone this century.
As Trump tries to enforce the law, the full scope of Biden’s border bar tab
is coming to light.
New York’s Roosevelt Hotel is a formerly grand Manhattan edifice that contributed to the city’s lucrative tourist trade. Biden’s policies of paroling inadmissible aliens and mass releasing them at the border brought millions who went to welcoming “sanctuaries” like New York.
The city not only offered free housing and other benefits to illegal and quasi-legal aliens but also rarely prosecuted them for any petty crimes they committed. Mayor Eric Adams scrambled to lease hotels and other buildings, spending around $4 billion tax dollars a year in migrant support. The Roosevelt was just one of more than 200 make-shift shelters operating at the height of the crisis.
Since January 2025—contrary to what the Biden team had been saying for four years—the Trump administration was able to reduce illegal entry at the border by more than 90%, end illegal parole programs, resume internal enforcement, and cut off federal funding of nongovernmental organizations that facilitate mass migration. New York began closing its temporary shelters.
The Roosevelt is due to close as a shelter in June, but as of mid-May, there are still about 2,000 “migrants” there. The hotel is owned by the government of Pakistan, whose finances are in even more dire straits than ours, and which is preoccupied by resurgent conflict with India. After a couple years of occupation by indigents from around the world, most of them unused to Western habits, the Roosevelt will need complete refurbishment before it can re-open to tourists.
According to one estimate, that can cost $50,000-$90,000 per room. With over 1,000 rooms, that means over $90 million for the Roosevelt alone, not counting the common areas. That’s just one of the city’s rented shelters. Who is going to pay to repair them all? New York taxpayers.
Shelter costs are only part of Biden’s border bar tab. Half a million unaccompanied alien children
were let in. All should be attending school unless they are working illegally or being exploited by the supposed “sponsors” to whom Biden’s Health and Human Services handed them.
The healthcare costs for absorbing millions more indigents into Medicaid and Medicare are yet to be known. But given that the average alien let in under Biden is significantly less educated and skilled than the average American, expect the worst.
Lower-skilled, lower-paid workers are more likely to be enrolled in government subsidized health insurance programs. In 2024, average health care spending per person was more than $13,000. Assuming that only one in five illegal immigrants let in under Biden relies on government or charity healthcare, that’s $26 billion a year.
Then there’s crime. Among the millions of economic migrants Biden let in were many thousands of career criminals and gang members. Among the thousands housed at the Roosevelt Hotel were some pimps, thieves and gang-bangers.
“Progressives” will say the answer is to stop prosecuting offenders, but in recent years that recipe has only resulted in more dangerous streets
and unhealthy living across our major cities. Belatedly, Democrats are electing candidates to office who enforce criminal law. This is good, but it will cost more money in police, prosecutors, judges and jails.
Biden’s border bar tab is still racking up, as all these costs will continue until one of two things happens: an alien is removed, or he wins the legal right to remain and then pays more in taxes than he and his family consume in benefits. Both will take time, if they happen at all.
One of the central weaknesses of the Biden administration’s national security policies was its reliance on the concept of “integrated deterrence
” to prevent aggressive actions by the People’s Republic of China.
The strategy entailed building robust alliances in the Indo-Pacific
, forward-deploying greater numbers of U.S. military assets to the region, and a tighter integration of military capabilities across the full spectrum of warfare.
But this approach only works if the United States can also credibly wage and win a war against China and prevent its regional and global military ambitions. In this respect, the Biden administration was far less successful.
There are four major areas the Trump administration should focus on to make deterrence as well as U.S. war-fighting strategies more successful.
The military challenge of China
is an order of magnitude greater than any military threat the United States has ever faced. Over the last decade, it has consistently increased its military budget by 7% every year—far more than the United States—and has dramatically grown its military forces in every respect.
It now fields the largest navy in the world and the largest missile force on the planet. Similarly, the People’s Republic of China is the world’s fastest growing nuclear power, and today fields more tactical weapons in Asia than does the United States. All of this is part of China’s strategy to deter and, if necessary, deny any potential U.S. military actions within the region.
Due to these developments, the United States must grow the size of its military overall—to include conventional forces relevant to deterring Chinese aggression, such as ships, combat aircraft, and logistic support systems—and aggressively address retention and recruiting problems
across the force.
The second area requiring attention is the “missile gap” between the munitions available in U.S. inventories and those required to successfully prosecute U.S. war plans against China. While many of these munitions have been used in the war in Ukraine
and in operations in the Middle East, the paucity of industrial capacity to build required munitions on a scale necessary for a future possible conflict is alarming.
While some production lines have been opened in response to war-fighting requirements in Ukraine and some procurement orders have been given multiyear contracts, more must be done. Similarly, the ability to build additional conventional capabilities while also refitting and refurbishing existing platforms is also disturbingly low. Reindustrializing U.S. military infrastructure should be a priority for the Trump administration.
The third area requiring greater attention is preparing for the mass mobilization of reservists if war with China were to break out. A significant portion of existing active-duty weapons platforms require reserve help in order for them to work and deploy.
Existing reserve centers lack sufficient personnel to process such a large mobilization and the services vary in their ability to track former reserve members, who may also need to be called up, in the event of large-scale conflict. Further, many reservists also work in industries necessary for war so a focused look at the implications of full-scale mobilization also needs to be undertaken.
The final area requiring greater attention is closely examining how a full decoupling of the U.S. and Chinese markets would look like in a wartime environment. Far too many components, parts, and even rare earth elements are controlled or influenced by the People’s Republic of China and its government-controlled companies. In a wartime scenario, the absence of these crucial items could prove disastrous to the war-fighting ability of the United States.
A credible policy of deterrence can only exist if the ability to wage and win a war against an opponent is also viable. This can only be done through the growth of U.S. military forces, addressing significant munition shortfalls, making sure reservists can be mobilized at scale and quickly, and that U.S. military capabilities can continue to fight if access to the Chinese market is curtailed.
The Trump administration needs to focus on rebuilding the war-fighting abilities of the United States to make America safe again. If not, catastrophe could await our armed forces.
FREDERICKSBURG, Virginia—Steve Hotz started Black Horse Forge, a nonprofit organization that provides support for veterans
, active-duty military personnel, and first responders through the ancient art of blacksmithing.
The retired sergeant, who served 17 years in the 82nd Airborne Division of the U.S. Army, said he started the endeavor to teach the arts of blacksmithing, toolmaking. and bladesmithing first to heal himself and then others who had brought ghosts home from war.
Hotz’s decision to join the military happened in the heat of an I’ll-show-my-boss moment: He was an interior designer, and she was giving him the business for reasons he cannot recall now. He walked across the street to get lunch, saw the Army recruiting office
next door, went in, and enlisted. Two weeks later, he was in Fort Benning.
The military suited him well, Hotz said. It was when he was doing special work with the North Carolina Counterdrug Program on a counterterrorist team that he got hurt. He was left blind in one eye and required surgery on his back to fuse his spine.
It also left him trying to cope with the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Back in civilian life, he found that he was not unlike fellow retired military and first responders who struggled to regain the ideal of purpose. He went to a Wounded Warrior event where there was a blacksmith demonstration.
“When I came back, I made a hook,” he said. “That is all I made that night. I was so excited about making this hook. My wife’s like, ‘Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it,’” after seeing that thousand-yard stare ease from his face.
It was an interaction with a Marine at another Wounded Warrior blacksmithing event not long after that that made him realize he had found not only his purpose but a way to help others struggling with depression and PTSD.
“We were just cutting up really hard-core together, and there was a girl crying in the corner. I was like, ‘Oh, maybe that’s his girlfriend or something.’ I might’ve said something offensive,” he explained.
So Hotz walked over to her and apologized if he had offended her. “She tells me she was his therapist and that he was in such bad shape, he couldn’t go anywhere without her. She said she was crying because the interaction between him and me was the first time he had talked in two years, and there he was talking to me like nothing was wrong,” he said.
Within short order, Hotz opened the Black Horse Forge, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the craft to those who serve and come back looking for purpose. He says he has seen firsthand the transformation the craft has given veterans and active-duty service members.
All classes are free for veterans, active military personnel, and first responders. All funds raised from civilian classes go back into funding free courses.
Since opening their doors, tens of thousands of veterans have participated in the free classes, with countless people saying it saved their lives.
It is that kind of giving back and making the community better that caught the eye of television host, podcaster, and bestselling author Mike Rowe
. After the demise of his wildly popular Facebook show, “Returning the Favor,” Rowe was in search of ordinary people doing extraordinary things for a new series.
Rowe explained he had received a call from Facebook telling him there would be no fifth season. It was an announcement that had surprised both him and his many viewers. Feedback for the show had been overwhelmingly positive, and viewership was through the roof.
Over 10,000 nominations were sent to Rowe for exceptional Americans in four years.
The Baltimore native says he is thankful Facebook gave him the opportunity to do the 22-minute online show, equally grateful for the 100 “bloody do-gooders,” as he jokingly calls them, who were nominated by the people. However, the loss of the show and the community that formed around it wasn’t just felt by Rowe. It left a void in viewers who begged—a lot—for it to return.
So, after four years, he finally did something about it.
Rowe said that because “Returning the Favor” is owned by Facebook, he’s not at liberty to simply re-up the series under the same name. “However, celebrating people who have impact, gratitude, and find solutions to society’s biggest problems is not owned by anyone in particular,” he said, adding, “So we are back.”
The new moniker is “People You Should Know,” and it premiered last Friday on Rowe’s YouTube channel.
Rowe is candid about not having the financial resources he had under the Facebook umbrella. So in terms of bells and whistles, the new show will be less grandiose. He is doing it on his own dime. But in truth, as an avid viewer of the show, the bells and whistles were nice, but they were never the reason I sat down to watch it. For most viewers and me, it was always about the heart and aspirations of fellow Americans.
The first six honorees include Hotz, and all are extraordinary and command attention. The first episode showcases a single mother who not only overcame her addiction but also found a way to keep her family together and her kids out of the foster care system. The production scale is spectacular, the people real and driven to a life that exists outside of self.
For Rowe, “Dirty Jobs” worked for so long because it was one of the few topics that hadn’t been completely owned by one side or the other.
“It’s the dignity of work. It’s the fun of making a buck. We had 2 million people on the ‘Returning the Favor’ page who were literally watching the show on the edge of their seat every single week. They programmed everything. It was the most engaged group I ever saw,” he said.
When it was canceled, Rowe said it took him a while to accept that fact. But viewers let him know he needed to find a way to bring it back.
“I would receive calls constantly asking to please bring it back. Or ask what am I waiting for because the country needs it. So we changed the name, figured out a budget because there is no big sponsor or network or studio behind us, and I called my friend Sarah, who produced the show in the past, and now she’s sort of my co-host on camera,” he said.
Rowe describes her as Pollyanna meets Mary Poppins: “She’s fun and she’s much nicer than me, not nearly as bitter or broken, and she’s terrific to work with.”
The show is a true love letter to the neighbors you wish you had: regular people with big ideas, whether they are taking on homelessness, the foster care system, PTSD, or illiteracy.
Rowe said of Hotz that there was something appealing about bending metal and making something useful out of something busted.
“I mean, the metaphor itself is huge, and he’s so unassuming. He’s a guy who literally saved himself by going in, figuring it out. And when he saw what it did for other people, it became his life’s work,” he said.
“That’s the show. Great big ideas, really modest individuals trying essentially to prove that they can move the needle. And they do. We’ve done it with foster care, we’ve done it with illiteracy, and we’ve done it with homelessness. So it’s a micro-macro kind of approach. It’s really a love letter to bottom-up solutions.”
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After decades of partnering with the U.S. government to serve refugees, The Episcopal Church ended
the relationship this week, because the Trump administration asked them to serve refugees whose plight contradicts the woke Left’s grand narrative.
Episcopal Migration Ministries had resettled almost 110,000 people across the U.S., and the church had touted its assistance to “undocumented immigrants”—read “illegal aliens”—but serving 59 desperate white South Africans who came to the U.S. legally was apparently a bridge too far.
Now, the Episcopal Church is finally cutting its relationship to the U.S. government, because these refugees are white and they’ve suffered at the hands of the African National Congress, the South African party of the sainted Nelson Mandela.
According to Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe, serving whites who escaped danger at the hands of black South Africans would cut against the church’s “steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation.”
Apparently, “racial reconciliation” only cuts one way for The Episcopal Church.
While I find the church’s double standard on immigrants utterly disgusting, I can’t exactly say I’m surprised.
In the last few decades, the Episcopal Church has proven itself one of the most flaccid and spineless of the dying mainline Protestant denominations, and I am glad to be part of the Anglican movement opposing its watered-down bastardization of Christianity.
Faithful Christians can disagree on many matters of public policy, but the Left has increasingly taken positions that are hostile not just to common sense but to good Christian doctrine. The Episcopal Church reliably positions itself with the Left, even when it means a clear rejection of the Bible.
In 2022, the church adopted a resolution
to “advocate for access to gender affirming care in all forms (social, medical, or other) and at all ages as part of our Baptismal call to ‘respect the dignity of every human being.”
Forgive me if I don’t think that pumping kids full of experimental drugs
to make them resemble members of the opposite sex in a futile attempt to disavow their biological sex is a form of “respecting” a person’s “dignity.”
To call these positions antithetical to the clear teachings of scripture would be a vast understatement. The Bible clearly teaches that human beings are made male and female (Genesis 1), that marriage is between one man and one woman (Genesis 3, Matthew 19:5-6), and that homosexual activity is sinful (1 Corinthians 6:9-11, 1 Timothy 1:8-11, Romans 1:24-27). While the Bible clearly teaches that Jesus’ mercy is for everyone who repents, it does not celebrate homosexual acts or condone the idea that men can become women and vice versa.
Yet The Episcopal Church loudly champions the LGBTQ agenda. I remember listening to a sermon at the National Cathedral in which the pastor condemned “the sin of heterosexism.” If “heterosexism” is a sin, then the Bible itself is guilty.
Watering Down the Resurrection
My greatest concern about The Episcopal Church is the way its current and former leaders watered down a central teaching of the gospel: the bodily Resurrection of Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:12-19).
In the 2010s, two high-ranking Episcopal bishops—former head of the U.S. Episcopal Church Katherine Jefferts-Schori
and Bishop Mariann Budde
(who notoriously lectured Trump earlier this year)—suggested that belief in the physical Resurrection is not necessary.
“While we are unable to comment on the sermons from previous decades that you reference, we can confirm that The Episcopal Church affirms the bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ,” the church’s chief of strategy, Rebecca Wilson, told The Daily Signal
. She noted that Episcopalians recite and affirm The Apostle’s Creed and the Nicene Creed every week, and that all clergy must make a Declaration of Consent stating belief in the scriptures.
Jeff Walton, Anglican director at the Institute for Religion and Democracy, told The Daily Signal that “the Resurrection is somewhat loosely defined and policed within The Episcopal Church.”
While the vows require adherence to the bodily Resurrection, “you sometimes run across clergy who use a lowercase-r ‘resurrection’ and it’s possible that they are making it into some sort of allegory.”
Even Walton noted, however, that some data shows “mainline Protestant clergy today are much more likely to affirm the literal bodily Resurrection of Jesus than they were two generations ago.” He attributed this to a growing acceptance of the supernatural, aligning with post-modernity.
The Episcopal Church Weathervane
The Episcopal Church seems to resemble nothing more than a weathervane, following the leftist culture.
It echoes the Left’s rhetoric on race, suggesting “institutional racism” pervades America. The church released a “framework for anti-racism
and racial reconciliation training” that implements Critical Race Theory, a lens of seeing America as inherently and institutionally racist. This Marxist lens spawns the notion of “intersectionality,” where different ostensibly oppressed groups—women, racial minorities, people who identify as LGBTQ, and more—intersect with one another, forming a hierarchy of aggrieved groups that claim a right to political power.
The church has also embraced concepts such as “environmental justice
” and “environmental racism,” which tie together the notions of Critical Race Theory and climate alarmism—the belief that human burning of fossil fuels will cause a catastrophic disaster.
These ideologies coalesce to form a cohesive worldview I describe as “woke.” (I explain this more in my book, “The Woketopus
: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.”) In some cases, the Left seeks to silence those who dissent from this worldview.
This worldview sees Nelson Mandela as a black hero fighting white oppression, and it refuses to acknowledge that the African National Congress in South Africa might commit or contribute to racist violence against white people. That’s why serving a comparative handful of white refugees was a bridge too far for The Episcopal Church.
I have long considered the Southern Poverty Law Center—which puts mainstream conservative and Christian groups on a “hate map” with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan—to be the tip of the spear on demonizing conservatives. My first book, “Making Hate Pay
: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” explains why this organization has no moral credibility.
Yet the Episcopal Church’s website
cites the SPLC “hate map” as a “resource” for “racial justice, healing, and reconciliation.”
My Own History With The Episcopal Church
I was baptized in an Episcopal Church in Colorado and married in an Episcopal Church in Maryland. I have fond memories of the incense and hymns at the historic church I attended growing up in Golden.
I am now a member at the Falls Church Anglican, which officially separated from The Episcopal Church in 2006. The Episcopal Church refused to allow our congregation to keep the building, and we lost the case after appealing all the way to the Supreme Court. We worshipped in a high school auditorium for many years until we could build our own church home.
A massive ideological civil war is taking place within the global Anglican Communion—with The Episcopal Church on one side and the Anglican Church in North America on the other. Yet this same ideological civil war is dividing Catholics, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and those outside Christianity, such as Jews.
Those who hold to the traditional understanding of Christianity (and Judaism), especially its sexual morality, find themselves confronted by a hostile culture, and institutions like The Episcopal Church are betraying the faithful in order to kowtow to the world.
