Cross-Examination

• Justice Jackson’s constitutional consternation: On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in Murthy v. Missouri, a case that directly deals with the question of whether the Biden administration infringed on Americans’ free speech rights when it pressured social media sites to remove posts it deemed problematic for the furtherance of its agenda. During the questioning, Joe Biden’s affirmative action hire, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, displayed a disturbing level of either constitutional misunderstanding or consternation when she stated, “So my biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods.” She then added: “I mean, what would — what would you have the government do? I’ve heard you say a couple of times that the government can post its own speech, but in my hypothetical, you know, ‘Kids, this is not safe, don’t do it,’ is not going to get it done.” Hamstringing is a good turn of phrase, and to Jackson’s credit, she is correct to observe that the First Amendment does, in fact, limit the power of the federal government. The problem is that Jackson sees this as a problem and not a feature worthy of praise. Keeping the power of the state in check is why we have the Bill of Rights. This is as fundamental as it gets. Apparently, it is these fundamental questions that Jackson struggles with the most. No word yet on whether she has learned what a woman is.

• New York’s ridiculous Trump bond: Anyone have a spare $454 million lying around? Asking for a friend. That’s the ridiculous judgment rendered last month against Donald Trump in his no-harm, no-foul New York civil fraud case, and it’s due next Monday. As the New York Post reports, Trump has “filed papers in an appeals court seeking to get out of having to post the bond as he fights the massive judgment from February — which accrues $112,000 in interest daily.” But if the appeals court doesn’t put a halt to this leftist lawfare run amok, Trump-hating New York Attorney General Letitia James says she’ll go after Trump’s real estate assets, perhaps including the iconic Trump Tower in Manhattan. An indignant Trump took to Truth Social yesterday, denouncing “Crooked Joe Biden and his Maniac Persecutors” and “Corrupt, Racist Letitia James,” and calling the judgment “unconstitutional, un-American, unprecedented, and practically impossible for ANY Company, including one as successful as mine.” Trump’s legal team has rightly appealed, and as constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley notes, the law is on Trump’s side. “They could appeal this all the way to the Supreme Court,” Turley says. “On occasion, the Supreme Court has intervened in state actions — for example, on punitive damages. This is falling into that extreme category, in my view. I find it appalling. It shocks the conscience that you have to pony up this type of money just to get someone to look at what you believe — and I believe — is an excessive ruling by this judge.” New York had better be careful what it wishes for because this is penny-wise, pound-foolish behavior, even for leftists. As The Wall Street Journal warned on Monday, “Anyone who does business in New York ought to worry about how Ms. James could likewise twist the screws on them.”

• Dirty Dems hid even more J6 evidence: By now, it’s clear that anyone who still thinks the Democrats’ January 6 “select” committee was a legitimate congressional exercise is either an ultra-low-information Democrat voter or an immediate family member of Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger. Now, as The Federalist reports, it appears that those J6 Committee Democrats deleted troves of information, including “hundreds of video recordings,” in addition to covering up “critical evidence that undermined the Democrats’ narratives amid the 2022 midterms.” As Georgia Republican Congressman Barry Loudermilk, who chairs the House Administration’s Subcommittee on Oversight, tells us, “For nearly two years, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s January 6th Select Committee promoted hearsay and cherry-picked information to promote its political goal — to legislatively prosecute former President Donald Trump [rather than] the security failures and reforms needed to ensure the United States Capitol is safer today than in 2021.” In addition to failing to archive a terabyte of digital data, Loudermilk says: “The Select Committee also deleted or failed to turn over more than 100 digital documents from the hard drives the Select Committee provided to the Subcommittee. This included numerous password and encrypted files, and in some cases, these files were deleted just days before Republicans took over the majority in January 2023.” This, of course, is on top of the Democrat duplicity we noted last week regarding one of their star J6 witnesses, former low-level Trump hearsay specialist Cassidy Hutchinson. And we wouldn’t know about any of this cover-up and corruption and obstruction of justice had the Republicans not narrowly retaken the House in 2022. The question now is: Will there ever be any accountability?

• Serially deported illegal arrested for sexual assault: The illegal alien assaults keep a-comin’, and we have Joe Biden’s open borders to thank for it. The latest comes from the deep-blue state of Maryland, where a teacher accused of sexually abusing children as young as six is an illegal immigrant from El Salvador who’d been previously deported not once but twice by ICE. As the Post Millennial reports: “Ervin Jeovany Alfaro Lopez, 33, has been accused of sexually abusing at least three minors between the ages of 6 and 12 years old. Police said the abuse occurred between 2016 and 2018 at the Elim Gaithersburg Church he had been teaching at in Maryland. … Court documents state that Lopez inappropriately touched his students when their eyes were closed for prayer and when they were watching movies. He allegedly admitted to his pastor that he had touched a girl inappropriately and that the issue had been ‘dealt with internally.’” Well, then. At least this crime had been dealt with internally. We wonder: What kind of background check had been done on this sicko before ostensibly responsible adults placed him in proximity to American children?

• Biden snubs his granddaughter again: At a Women’s History Month event at the White House, Joe Biden addressed the guests invited for the occasion and stated how much he sees women as integral to the future of America. Biden said, “I see a future for all Americans, a future for my daughter and my four granddaughters — by the way, they’re incredible.” The trouble is that Biden has five granddaughters. That fifth granddaughter is his son Hunter’s, whom he fathered out of wedlock. Her name is Navy Joan Roberts, and it took years of mounting media pressure for “Deadbeat Granddad” to finally acknowledge her existence, which he finally did last year. Yet here we go again, with Biden snubbing the existence of his fifth granddaughter. The question is whether this snub was intentional or due to Biden’s advanced age causing forgetfulness. Either way, it’s a bad look.

• NYT admits Republicans were right: In what comes as a surprise due to the source and not the content, The New York Times acknowledged what many have long been stating: Republicans were right to warn against the closure of schools during the COVID pandemic. The Times writes, “Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting.” Of course, this result was entirely predictable, as Republicans were voicing it early on — when we already knew who was most threatened by COVID. Yet the Times and other Leftmedia outlets not only rejected the concerns of Republicans but smeared them as being unconcerned about the welfare of not only children and their families but of society writ large. Indeed, it was the Times back in August 2021 that ran an opinion piece accusing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis of not caring about how many people died from COVID in his state. Now, the Times is effectively admitting that DeSantis and Republicans actually got it right. Given this reality, will the Times start listening to Republicans? We’re not holding our breath.

• Go woke, get depressed: We take no satisfaction in reporting that dogs bite men and that wokesters are weak. And frankly, we’re surprised it’s taken this long for a study to confirm it. That study, which was published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, revealed that a woke attitude hampers one’s happiness. As the Washington Examiner reports: “Researchers have found that people with ‘woke’ ideas often have a higher risk of depression and anxiety. The new studies were published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology and found that woke attitudes affect people’s happiness levels. The researchers asked more than 5,800 college students and professors about general statements widely believed to be woke, further inquiring whether they agreed with the statements. Researchers found that a lower degree of mental well-being tended to be associated with having a higher ‘social justice score.’” (One of the study’s lead authors pointed out that wokeness is an American export that now infects Europe. They’re welcome.) What to take from all this? First, colleges and universities are wokeness dispensaries. And second, we pay through the nose for the privilege of sending our children off to be exposed to these perverse and destructive attitudes.

• Good news: Another successful airlift: Florida Republican Representative Cory Mills was able to successfully help get 23 people, including 13 Americans, out of Haiti as the island nation has descended into chaos and violence. This is now the third time Mills has helped airlift Americans out of hostile regions, including Afghanistan and Israel. The rescued Americans work at The Hope Faith Orphanage in Haiti. This is what Americans should expect from their government, and it’s what motivates Mills’s actions. “If Americans are abroad and in trouble,” he says, “I will continue to come to their aid.” If only every elected official had this same commitment.

Headlines

• Supreme Court indefinitely extends freeze of Texas law authorizing police to arrest illegal aliens (National Review)

• Illegal causes officer’s heart attack, not charged because he doesn’t speak English (Not the Bee)

• Iraqi immigrant plotted to smuggle assassins through Mexico to kill former U.S. president (Fox News)

• Trump slams “Fake News Media” after spin on auto industry “bloodbath" prediction (Daily Wire) | Biden team "adds context” to Trump’s “bloodbath” comment by, you guessed it, taking it out of context and then adding more out-of-context video (Not the Bee)

• Biden administration set to complete regulations targeting gas-powered vehicles (Daily Wire)

• Would-be homeowners need 80% more income to buy than four years ago (Daily Signal)

• Eric Adams accused of sexual assault when he was police officer more than 30 years ago (Washington Examiner)

• Israel confirms killing Hamas commander, man presumed responsible for planning October 7 terror attacks (National Review)

• Policy: The real obstacle to immigration reform (Daily Signal)

• Humor: Unhinged Trump threatens more violence by promising to trigger a “landslide” on election day (Babylon Bee)

For more editors’ choice headlines, click here.