Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Birthright
2. Cancer
3. Comey
4. Waiver
5. Homicides
6. Mideast
7. Ostriches
8. Habeus
1. Birthright. SCOTUS held its hearing on birthright citizenship last week. The case is unfolding on three fronts, the issue itself, nationwide injunctions, and legislation to clean it up. My guess is that we will win the second two, with SCOTUS punting on the first.
- Birthright citizenship is based on an interpretation of the 14th Amendment that states in part:
“all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside”
The Amendment was initially intended to grant citizenship to all slaves and their families following the Civil War. It has been expanded over the years via legislation and SCOTUS rulings to include Native Americans. Immigration advocates have long pointed to an 1898 SCOTUS opinion that found that birthright citizenship extends to all children born in the US. Over the last century, this has turned into a giant scam where pregnant women show up in the US, have their babies, making them instant US citizens, and import the entire extended family over time, which is not what the Founders or drafters of the Amendment intended. A Trump Executive Order (EO) shut this operation down. From here it looks like the EO was intended to force the entire mess back into the courts for SCOTUS to address the question. Most legal scholars think this is a slam dunk loss. I’m not so sure. Even if the worst happens, opinions out of Justices Thomas and Alito should be interesting reading. The hearing was contentious, with Chief Justice Roberts stepping in a time or two asking Justice Sotomayor to allow the Solicitor General to finish responding to her questions before asking another 3-4. In doing this, Sotomayor was reprising a favorite technique of the left, bombarding a target with accusatory questions and never allowing time for a response.
- As usual, the EO was met with an instant nationwide restraining order (injunction) from a district judge, which is the second part of the discussion, one that the Roberts court has been studiously ignoring and allowing to fester. Nationwide injunctions are almost entirely a creation of the district court judges over the last 20 years, exploding in number during the two Trump terms. Justice Thomas pointed this out nicely with a question during the hearing: “So we survived until the 1960s without universal injunction?” They were very limited, very rare until exploding in 2007 when the Ninth Circus started issuing a whole raft of them for cases involving environmental claims. The courts managed to confront the entire civil rights era without them. 6 of them were issued against Bush 43, 12 under O’Bama and 14 under Biden. In contrast, the first Trump term had a whopping 64. There are at least 25 issued so far aimed at the second Trump term in the first 100 days. If SCOTUS doesn’t come down hard on the judges issuing these like so many snowflakes, they are going to be buried in work. I expect some sort of limit on nationwide injunctions to be set by SCOTUS, and if they refuse or punt the problem down the street a way, I expect congress to get involved sooner rather than later, as the injunctions are also attacks on congressional authority.
- The final piece of this is legislative, with Marsha Blackburn offering legislation intending to dismantle the multi-million dollar birth tourism industry that allows foreign nationals to use the immigration system and birthright citizenship to secure automatic citizenship for their children.
2. Cancer. Two health announcements last week, both advanced, Stage IV prostate cancer. The first from Joe Biden, the second from Scott Adams. Biden’s announcement coincided with Jake Tapper’s book tour, where he acknowledged that the media had yes, indeedy missed Biden’s growing infirmity, promising they will get it right (whatever that means) with Trump. We all know how that is going to go. And why. More interesting it how long the Bidens have known about this little difficulty, as this form of cancer is relatively slow moving. While it could be a surprise, most likely it stretched back into Biden’s second term as VP under O’Bama. Treatment (chemo) can account for no small amount of mental decline. Kind of makes you wonder what the plan was should Biden run and be reelected. I suspect it was some version of re-election followed by a quick resignation. Given the self-serving nature of the AutoPen Presidency and its minions, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that everyone was actually using everyone and doing their best Weekend At Bernie’s reprise right up until the point Biden was no longer useful at which point he was discarded. The second announcement was Scott Adams last Monday with the same diagnosis. At the time of the announcement, he said there was no hope for a cure, though he now claims a treatment course that may give him a 30% chance of survival. His useful lifetime is weeks to months. A few of his listeners suspected the cancer due to increasing pain and crankiness during his morning podcasts. I started listening regularly to him following the 2016 election when he was the only one who not only predicted Trump’s win but told us how he did it and what he was going to do next, essentially a Master Class in persuasion. I understand quantum mechanics hardly at all, though I can spell it on occasion, but persuasion is so far out of my experience that it makes the science fiction world of quantum mechanics look reasonable. It has been quite the education. I wish both men good luck and best of health. I won’t miss Biden but will miss Adams a lot.
3. Comey. The looming doofus that is James Comey is also on a book tour. He decided to grab a few headlines by posting a photo on Instagram of seashells he “found” on the beach spelling out “86 47,” essentially a death threat aimed at Trump. He was quite pleased with himself for a few minutes until the FBI / Secret Service contacted him, which triggered an immediate takedown of the post. We were then treated to an endless discussion of what “86” means, what Comey may or may not have known, and if it were a threat on the president at all. As I am not able to read minds, I won’t. But the fact the he took down the post, disabled his Instagram comments, made an apology tour on friendly media and finally blamed the entire mess on his wife tells me everything I need to know. The boy knew what he was doing. He knew it was wrong. And he appears to think it was a great way to poke at Trump while riling up his supporters. Comey has been at the center of anti-Trump lawfare and weaponized law enforcement aimed at him since at least 2015. The most infuriating thing is that he has managed to walk away untouched so far. Each time he pulls a stunt like this, it emboldens him to do worse next time around, a challenge he is silly enough to gladly accept. Someday he will go too far. Perhaps this is that someday.
4. Waiver. One of the unreported stories of this congress has been the use of the Congressional Review Act to reverse Biden-era rules, regulations and waivers. Apparently, senate approval on these is not subject to filibuster, which is good news. The latest of these was a 51 – 44 vote in by the senate to revoke EPA waivers that allow California to set strict vehicle emission regulations, essentially an EV mandate by 2035, for the nation. Cali’s plan was to ban the sale of all gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles by 2035. As Cali is one of the largest states in the nation, this rule allowed them to render sale of all non-EV vehicles nationwide. Other states hated the rules as did the auto manufacturers. The House passed legislation to revoke the waiver followed by the Senate last week. The legislation is on its way to the president’s desk for Trump’s signature. As usual, Cali plans to sue. To date, this congress has addressed 44 Biden-era rules, regulations and waivers. 17 resolutions have passed the house, 15 passed the senate, with 9 signed into law. Good job, guys.
5. Homicides. When you round up and deport the criminals invited into the US by Harris – Biden over the last four years, crime rates drop. A lot. Last week’s example comes from Denver, a blue sanctuary city in a blue sanctuary state, where homicides are down 58% in the first three months of 2025 despite the best efforts of democrat judges to stop arrests and deportations. Axios reports this as part of a year’s long trend of dropping crime rates following the spike in crime rates during the COVID shutdown. Aurora, which was overrun with Tren de Aragua, is down 36% this year. NYC is down 34% this year, so it appears that down a third is probably the real number. Tom Homan should be very proud as it appears his plan to grab the worst of the worst and deport them before targeting slightly less bad actors seems to be working despite Axios’ protests to the contrary.
6. Mideast. President Trump’s Mideast trip was a tour de force as he was welcomed as a conquering hero. The most important thing he did was reset US foreign policy from the interventionism of the Bush – Clinton – O’Bama era. His full speech follows. He reached out to both Syria and Iran, though on “trust but verify” terms. As I’ve mentioned previously, his worldview is transactional, with foreign policy based on what is good for the US rather than some vague notion of imposing our governing style on nations and people who neither asked for it nor want it. His stated preference is for peace and partnership.
7. Ostriches. One of the public health “solutions” to disease in an animal population is simply to kill everything that moves on a particular ranch or farm regardless of what the disease is actually doing. This week’s example is a Canadian ostrich ranch with 300 – 400 birds ordered to be destroyed due to an outbreak of bird flu five months ago. The ranch ended up losing 69 birds, the last of them I in January. But no matter, a Canadian judge ordered the entire flock destroyed and is refusing to consider any new evidence such as the flock no longer being infected. Sounds like this judge was appointed by the same clowns who came up with the Biden, O’Bama and Clinton judges currently running rampant on this side of the border. HHS Secretary RFK Jr even got himself involved with a request to reconsider the ruling. One of the new pieces of new evidence is the notion that birds that survived an infected flock then can be used to source vaccines to protect against future infections. But no matter to the judge, who is far more interested in compliance than justice. If you keep the birds around, you may be able to figure out how they develop successful immune responses to the flu, silly little things like herd immunity.
8. Habeus. One of the little games being played by the Roberts Court over immigration is the notion of Habeus Corpus, literally, show me the body. This is used to force the government to provide lawyers and full legal treatment for any arrest and deportation. Note that as always, there was no concern by the same court system when Harris – Biden essentially threw the borders open and allowed 15 – 20 million illegals to enter the country. Note also that the federal courts are not manned to handle 15 – 20 million simultaneous deportation hearings. One way around this is via existing immigration laws, laws that the federal courts are busily rewriting on the fly. Another way is to treat the illegals as groups, allowing them to be handled collectively rather than individually. Democrats and their pet judges are demanding they be handled individually. And why all this is being played out in the courts, SCOTUS, which used to believe that the Constitution is not a suicide pact, is all but demanding it be rewritten into one. Essentially, they are attempting to bait Trump and congress into suspending Habeus Corpus for deporting illegals. Lincoln revoked Habeus during the Civil War. For his part, Trump is acting like he knows and expects the game and is pointedly refusing to take the bait. So far. Expect this game to continue as Trump boxes the Roberts court into something they will be unable to escape from while generating sufficient political will for congress to step up and put some real limits on the lower courts. Will he be successful? Unknown, though he will get a lot closer than anyone on the political left expects. We will see if the Roberts court has the cojones to see this flight through to the end.
More later –
- AG