Cross-Examination

• Maine’s not-so-popular vote: Maine Democrat Governor Janet Mills announced that she would not sign the Democrat-controlled state legislature’s recently passed bill joining the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. However, Mills would not veto it either, thereby allowing the bill to become law. Thus, Maine will become the 17th state to join the anti-Electoral College contingent of blue states, as the legislation will send Maine’s electoral vote to whichever candidate wins the national popular vote irrespective of the state’s own popular vote. This is what Democrats’ preservation of democracy looks like — subordinating Mainers’ vote to the national collective. All Democrats are doing in these blue states is setting themselves up for a major backfire. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that Donald Trump could win the popular vote, and then these 17 blue states in the compact that voted for Joe Biden would have their Electoral College votes tallied for Trump. Imagine the outrage as Trump’s election victory would go down in history as a landslide. But it may take exactly this scenario for this blatantly un-American Compact to be exposed for the undemocratic farce that it is. However, the above scenario will likely not happen this election year due to the fact that in order for the compact to be triggered, enough states have to sign on to hit the Electoral College-winning threshold of 270 votes. Currently, the 17 states signed on represent 209 Electoral College votes.

• Bank of America debanks Trump attorney Eastman We’ve got to hand it to these leftist scumbags — it’s a brilliant strategy: Attack your political opponent by attacking those who work with him. In this case, we’re talking about John Eastman, one of the nation’s leading constitutional authorities and a man who’s been in the Left’s crosshairs ever since he advised Donald Trump in the wake of the 2020 election. We recently noted that the FBI illegally snatched his phone, and the Trump-deranged Left has overwhelmed him with legal bills. It doesn’t matter that Eastman has a law degree from the University of Chicago. Or that he clerked for Clarence Thomas. Or that he served for decades as professor of constitutional law and dean of Chapman Law School. Or that he founded the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence at the Claremont Institute. Doesn’t matter that he was an Eagle Scout, a former Boy Scout troop leader, and that he sang in the church choir. In fact, these credentials probably only make the target on his back bigger. As The Daily Caller reports, Eastman was debanked by the sniveling cowards at Bank of America last September, so he moved his finances to USAA, an institution that he figured to be far fairer than Bank of America, given how patriotic and pro-military its TV advertising and website purport to be. “And then two months later,” Eastman says, “we get a similar letter from USAA saying that they’ve decided that they’re going to close your account and they did like three weeks later. And so that was where all of our automatic payments were coming out of, all our automatic deposits. So it was a real pain to shift everything. We had to get a new bank account opened and shift everything over.” We wish Dr. Eastman well, but these are ominous developments. As The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson rightly warns: “Pay attention to this. Banking is increasingly going to be used as a political weapon against opponents of the regime. We already saw this in Canada with the trucker protests. we’re going to start seeing it here more and more often.”

• Biden’s uncle was eaten by cannibals? It’s no secret that Scranton Joey Baggadonuts Biden has been making things up all his life. From his supposedly high IQ to his academic excellence to his father’s 1950s-era lesson on homosexual tolerance to his U.S. Naval Academy appointment to his arrests during the Civil Rights protests here in the U.S. and in South Africa while trying to see Nelson Mandela. After a while, it gets a bit off-putting, no? Well, no — at least not if you’re the one spinning the yarns. And so it was on Wednesday, during a stop in Pittsburgh, where our Mittyesque president told a gathering of United Steelworkers that his uncle, Ambrose Finnegan, had vanished in a plane over New Guinea during World War II and had likely been consumed by cannibals. We can’t make this stuff up. “He was a hell of an athlete, they tell me, when he was a kid,” said Biden, adding that his uncle was in the Army Air Corps. “He flew those single-engine planes as reconnaissance over war zones, and he got shot down in New Guinea. They never found the body because there used to be, there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea.” As it turns out, Uncle Ambrose wasn’t a pilot, and the plane in which he was a passenger crashed at sea, where he likely perished. But other than that, the yarn was accurate. Which leads us to wonder: Maybe Thomas Jefferson was thinking of someone just like Joe Biden when he said some 235 years ago, “There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible, and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time, till at length it becomes habitual.” Because when it comes to lying, Joe Biden is nothing if not habitual.

• Laken Riley’s killer was illegally paroled into the U.S.: As if the circumstances surrounding the murder of Laken Riley weren’t awful enough, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham posted to his X account: “DHS just confirmed to me that the man charged with Laken Riley’s murder was paroled into the U.S. illegally, ‘due to detention capacity at the Central Processing Center in El Paso, Texas.’ He wasn’t granted parole because he provided a significant benefit to the country or that he had a humanitarian need, as the law requires. The Biden Administration is breaking the law at the expense of innocent Americans.” It’s true, whether refusing to enforce our laws or refusing to hold the likes of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas accountable for their willful failures. Sadly, Laken Riley’s needless death is just one example. Yesterday, we learned that an illegal immigrant has been charged in a car crash that killed an adviser to Nevada Democrat Senator Catherine Cortez Masto earlier this month. Will this wake up the open-borders Democrats? Somehow, we doubt it.

• NC high school student suspended for writing “illegal alien”: One of the statists’ most effective avenues of power and control is the language: Control what words the people are allowed to use, and you can control the narrative. Such was the case in the purplish-red state of North Carolina recently, where The Daily Wire reports a high school boy “was suspended for three days because he used the term ‘illegal alien’ on a vocabulary assignment.” Heavens to Mergatroyd. What else are we supposed to call these lawbreaking noncitizens — new arrivals? “Leah McGhee’s 16-year-old son, who attends Central Davidson High School in Lexington, was given a list of vocabulary words by his teacher, one of which was the word ‘alien,’” the Wire adds. “She said her son was trying to clarify exactly what the term referred to, asking, ‘Like space aliens or illegal aliens without green cards?’” Apparently, this question offended another student so much that he wanted to fight McGhee’s son. And the school, finding the term offensive to Hispanics, suspended the kid. “I didn’t make a statement directed towards anyone,” said McGhee’s son. “I asked a question.” Wow.

• ALA’s bogus book “bans”: The American Library Association (ALA) has been exposed as little other than a group of leftists pushing a Marxist political ideology. It’s the reason several states have broken with the ALA in recent years. Recently, the ALA published its annual list of “Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2023.” With this most recent list, the ALA made the dubious claim that 4,240 books had been “targeted for bans” in libraries and schools across the country last year, a total that represented a 65% increase over the prior year. But is that the truth? Well, as the expression goes, the devil is in the details. The ALA uses the term “targeted” to give the impression of banning when, in fact, no such thing is occurring. Rather, when it comes to books being “targeted,” what it actually means is books that have been tagged due to their content for three primary reasons. First, they contain adult content and, therefore, need to be moved out of the children and young adult section to the adult section to ensure children are not exposed to age-inappropriate books. Second, a “parental consent” restriction is placed on the book. Third, the book is removed entirely from the library as it is deemed inappropriate for taxpayer funding because it is effectively pornography. In other words, the ALA is being disingenuous. But conveniently, the ALA’s framing lines up with Leftmedia assertions that conservative politicians and parents have been on a book-banning crusade in recent years due to anti-LGBTQ bigotry. Even more significant, it’s the attempt to falsely paint conservatives’ legitimate complaints over speech censorship in the public square as hypocritical.

• Biden targets country’s largest Christian university: During a recent House Appropriations Committee hearing, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona responded to a question regarding the for-profit Christian school Grand Canyon University by saying, “We are cracking down not only to shut them down but to send a message to not prey on students.” The Biden administration recently leveled an unprecedented $37.7 million fine against the school over claims that it had engaged in predatory behavior by supposedly deceiving students as to the total cost of its doctoral program. However, GCU challenges that claim. “The Secretary’s comments to the House Appropriations Committee were so reckless that GCU is demanding an immediate retraction, as they do not reflect the factual record in this case,” the school said in a statement. “He is either confused, misinformed or does not understand the actions taken by his own agency.” The American Principles Project (APP) is charging that the Biden administration is intentionally targeting Christian colleges because they have not conformed to leftist ideology. Jon Schweppe, APP’s policy director, states: “The scrutinize-and-penalize campaign against faith-based institutions is not about students’ interests or well-being. Rather, it’s part of a concerted effort to snuff out education choice and promote far-left values. It’s critical that Americans be aware of this shameful campaign and that we do all we can to put a stop to it.” The Biden administration has gone after both GCU and Liberty University, leveling large fines against both schools. Meanwhile, the Biden administration appears entirely unconcerned with the rampant anti-Semitism being fomented on the campuses of Ivy League schools.

• Google fires leftist rabble-rousers: Even at the left-wing Big Tech giant Google, going too far left can get one fired. On Wednesday, the day after a number of employees staged a 10-hour sit-in at the tech giant’s New York City and Sunnyvale, California, offices, 28 of them were handed their walking papers. The 28 now-former employees were protesting against Google’s business dealings with Israel. In explaining the firings, Google’s vice president of global security, Chris Rackow, stated in a company-wide email: “They took over office spaces, defaced our property, and physically impeded the work of other Googlers. Their behavior was unacceptable, extremely disruptive, and made co-workers feel threatened.” Rackow further added, “Behavior like this has no place in our workplace and we will not tolerate it.”

Headlines

• Schumer succeeds in killing off Mayorkas impeachment trial before it can begin (Washington Examiner)

• “Squad” member Cori Bush spending campaign cash on husband amid DOJ investigation (Washington Free Beacon)

• Columbia University prez won’t say if “hurtful” slogan “from the river to the sea” is anti-Semitic (NY Post)

• Pro-Palestinian protests could foreshadow a summer of upheaval (Washington Post)

• Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoes “Women’s Bill of Rights,” Ten Commandments bills (Fox News)

• U.S. water supply targeted by Russian hackers (Newsweek)

• Satire: Oops: Columbia University president accidentally gives Nazi salute when being sworn in for congressional testimony (Babylon Bee)

For more editors’ choice headlines, click here.