Cross-Examination

• Arizona’s new/old abortion ban: The Democrats continue to get lucky on abortion, which is their only winning issue this election season. The latest “good news” for Joe Biden’s party came from Arizona yesterday, where, as The Washington Post reports, the state’s conservative Supreme Court “revived a near-total ban on abortion, invoking an 1864 law that forbids the procedure except to save a mother’s life and punishes providers with prison time.” The pro-Biden political ads practically write themselves, with those Neanderthal Republicans seeking to undo a century and a half of progress on women’s rights. Donald Trump has attempted to carve out a pragmatic middle ground between the absolutes, but that won’t stop the Left from demagoguing the issue. As the Post continues, “The 4-2 decision supersedes the previous rule, which guarded the right to end a pregnancy by the 15-week mark, resetting policy to the pre-Roe v. Wade era and adding Arizona to the roster of 16 other states where abortion is virtually outlawed.” The electoral politics here are unseemly, but they’re impossible to ignore. Biden “won” Arizona by less than a third of one percent in 2020, and while Trump now enjoys a 4.5-point lead in the Grand Canyon State, Team Biden’s pro-abortion zealots know that a ruling like this will energize the young single female vote that’s so critical to their electoral success. Indeed, this was Arizona’s dim-witted but dutiful governor, Katie Hobbs, yesterday: “To the people across Arizona who are concerned about the future of abortion rights in our state … you can make your concerns known at the ballot box, and I encourage you to do so.” Speaking on behalf of the state’s Republicans, Congressman Juan Ciscomani said this: “Today’s ruling is a disaster for women and providers. In Arizona, our 15-week law protected the rights of women and new life. It respected women and the difficult decision of ending a pregnancy — one I will never personally experience and won’t pretend to understand.” Clearly, Republicans struggle with making life a winner.

• Idaho jihadi: An 18-year-old was arrested in Idaho on Saturday by federal law enforcement over his plot to attack Christian churches in the state on behalf of ISIS. The FBI first began investigating the young man back in 2021 when it found that he was fundraising for the Islamic terrorist organization. He told an FBI informant that he had pledged allegiance to ISIS and that he needed to “respond to the call to the caliphate by killing Jews and Christians.” According to court documents, he planned to “walk to the church, pull out the pipe to light it on fire on one end, hit people in the elbows and kneecaps, force them to the ground, slit their throats with a knife or machete, start small fires, use gas cans to throw at the small fires to cause an explosion and when the police respond he will hide in a corner and attempt to grab the gun of an officer to use.” This story hardly made the mainstream media headlines and has quickly descended down the memory hole, likely due to the fact it does not play up the Left’s popular DEI narrative elements. Had the foiled attack targeted minority groups or religions, then it would have been headline news for days.

• Teenage Michigan shooter’s parents sentenced: A somber history was made yesterday in a suburban Detroit courthouse, where a Michigan judge sentenced the parents of a teenage school shooter to 10 to 15 years in prison on four counts of unintentional homicide for the 2021 murders of four students at Oxford High School. This marks the first time that the parents of such an assailant have been held directly responsible for the act. James and Jennifer Crumbley had been convicted in separate trials that ended in February and March, while their son had earlier pleaded guilty to four counts of murder and is now serving life in prison. “These convictions were not about poor parenting,” said Judge Cheryl Matthews. “These convictions convey repeated acts or lack of acts that could have halted an oncoming runaway train.” This was a preventable tragedy — one that hinged on the parents’ unwillingness to respond immediately to their son’s clearly dangerous and deteriorating emotional condition. As the Detroit Free Press reports: “On the morning of the school shooting … the Crumbleys were summoned to the counselor’s office over a violent drawing their son had made of a gun, a human body bleeding, and the words, ‘The Thoughts won’t stop. Help me.’ The meeting ended with the Crumbleys returning to their jobs and promising to get their son help within 48 hours.” School officials also dropped the ball, concluding that the boy wasn’t a threat to himself or anyone else and letting him return to class.

• NY migrant flights: While New York City Mayor Eric Adams has heaped blame for the Big Apple’s illegal migrant crisis on Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott over his migrant bussing program, he should instead focus his ire on the bigger source of the problem: Joe Biden. Indeed, not only have Biden’s de facto open-border policies allowed millions of illegal aliens into the country, but his administration has been secretly flying them into the U.S. and releasing them in places like New York City. According to a recent report from the Center for Immigration Studies, the Department of Homeland Security has flown roughly 33,000 illegal aliens, whom it dubiously classifies as “asylum seekers,” into New York. These migrant flights account for 22% of the illegal alien influx into the city. Meanwhile, of the migrants bussed into NYC, roughly 37,000 of them came from Texas, which represents 25% of the total influx of illegals into the city. But maybe Adams shouldn’t be blamed for not knowing. “It is secret because [DHS officials are] not telling anybody,” observed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. “They don’t tell us anytime somebody comes in. They don’t give us any information on it. They are not coordinating with state government at all. If they throw six people on a commercial flight coming from a foreign country, there’s no acknowledgment at all to state or local authorities. That’s just a fact.”

• Biden keeps playing to his pro-Hamas base: “I think what he’s doing is a mistake,” said Gaza Joe Biden yesterday on Spanish-speaking Univision. He was speaking, of course, about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who continues the prosecution of his country’s existential war against the terrorist hordes hell-bent on the Jewish state’s utter destruction. Biden continued: “I don’t agree with his approach. I think it’s outrageous that those three vehicles were hit by drones. … What I’m calling for is the Israelis to just call for a ceasefire, allow for the next six, eight weeks total access to all food and medicine going into the country.” Biden clearly doesn’t understand how wars work. In this case, Hamas started it, so Israel has the right to finish it. How nice it would’ve been, for example, if the American president had at least mentioned the cause of the fighting — namely, the barbaric October 7 attack by Hamas on innocent Israeli civilians, some 1,200 of whom were murdered. How nice it would’ve been if Biden had demanded the immediate release by Hamas of the more than 100 hostages it’s still holding, and perhaps denounced the repeated sexual assaults by Hamas animals upon the Israeli women among the captives. But who are we kidding? This is Joe Biden, and he needs to win Michigan in November. And he likely can’t win Michigan without the Jew-hating pro-Hamas vote. In a related story, the White House reluctantly kinda sorta denounced those “Death to America” chants coming out of the Detroit suburb of Dearborn at a recent anti-Israel rally. Dearborn is home to one of the world’s largest Arab populations outside of the Middle East — but, disappointingly, it’s a population that doesn’t see fit to shout down the America-hating rabble in its midst.

• $600M East Palestine settlement: Norfolk Southern, the train company responsible for the train wreck and subsequent environmental disaster in East Palestine, Ohio, in February 2023, has settled a class-action lawsuit. Norfolk Southern has agreed to pay out $600 million in the settlement, which will go to all involved in the lawsuit within a 20-mile radius of the wreck. “The agreement is designed to provide finality and flexibility for settlement class members,” the company explained. “Individuals and businesses will be able to use compensation from the settlement in any manner they see fit to address potential adverse impacts from the derailment.” The settlement does not mean Norfolk Southern is admitting any wrongdoing, as the Atlanta-based company is still facing a lawsuit from the Justice Department and Environmental Protection Agency to finance the cleanup of the disaster.

• Red states sue Biden over student loan vote-bribe scheme: Thank goodness for Missouri. The Show-Me State has shown itself to be a leader in taking the legal fight to Joe Biden for his nakedly unconstitutional actions. First came Murthy v. Missouri, the First Amendment lawsuit against the Biden administration for its speech-suppressing collusion with Big Tech and the social media giants. And now comes a lawsuit by Missouri and six other Republican states, which are suing to block the administration’s latest scheme to transfer billions of dollars in student loan debt. As National Review reports: “The joint lawsuit, filed by Missouri attorney general Andrew Bailey, targets President Joe Biden’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) repayment program, which will cost Americans $475 billion over the next ten years. This amount is $45 billion more than the price tag attached to the White House’s previous student-loan forgiveness plan that the Supreme Court struck down last June.” The language of the 62-page lawsuit assails Biden for trying to ram through a scheme that he could never get through Congress. “This latest attempt to sidestep the Constitution,” the suit reads, “is only the most recent instance in a long but troubling pattern of the President relying on innocuous language from decades-old statutes to impose drastic, costly policy changes on the American people without their consent.”

• New State Dept. DEI chief is a race hustler: Even as Americans increasingly reject the woke and inherently racist ideology of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the Biden administration is effectively doubling down. A case in point is the State Department’s newly appointed diversity chief. Secretary of State Antony Blinken last week named Zakiya Carr Johnson to the role, touting her as bringing “expertise and a fresh perspective on how we build a workforce that reflects America.” So, who is Carr Johnson? Well, she previously worked as Barack Obama’s first director of the Race, Ethnicity, and Social Inclusion Unit at the State Department. She has become infamous for her radical leftist views, including the claim that the U.S. is a “failed historical model” with a “colonizing past.” She calls for doing “the work of dismantling that traditional structure at every juncture." Carr Johnson identifies as a feminist and champion of critical race theory who demands "intersectionality in all spaces.” She coauthored a Fair Share guide titled “Feminist Leaders for Feminist Goals,” which argues: “Feminist leadership must change power structures. In order to achieve transformative change, we must analyze and question existing power structures and how they affect decision-making. How can we redefine, value, use, share and distribute power differently?” In short, Carr Johnson is little other than a feminist race hustler with an alarming level of disdain for America.

Headlines

• NPR editor rebukes own outlet’s coverage of Hunter Biden laptop, COVID lab leak, and Russiagate (Fox News)

• Salon goes full Jussie Smollett, blames men punching women in the streets on Trump supporters (Not the Bee)

• Consumer prices rose 3.5% from a year ago in March, more than expected (CNBC)

• Florida woman sentenced to a month in prison for theft of Ashley Biden’s diary (ABC News)

• House delays sending Mayorkas impeachment to Senate (Roll Call)

• EPA imposes first national limits on “forever chemicals” in drinking water (NBC News)

• U.S. funneled nearly $1 million to Hamas-linked charity that hosted terror leader’s son (Washington Free Beacon)

• Spaced out: Sheila Jackson Lee tells Texas students “planet” moon is “made up of mostly of gases” (Fox News)

• Scottish police overwhelmed by 8,000 reports of “hate crime” in first week of new law (Not the Bee)

• Humor: Biden announces student loan forgiveness to help people afford all his taxes and inflation (Babylon Bee)

For more editors’ choice headlines, click here.