Cross-Examination

• House rejects bad DC laws: The House voted last Thursday to overturn two laws the DC city council passed last year. The two laws in question were a provision to go easy on crime with reduced sentences on everything from carjackings and burglary to more serious felonies, and a law granting voting rights to non-U.S. citizen residents of the city. Both votes to overturn were bipartisan; the House rejected the soft-on-crime measure 250-173, with 31 Democrats crossing the aisle to join Republicans, and the noncitizen voting went down 260-162, with 42 Democrats joining Republicans. The district’s law allowing noncitizens to vote would effectively add some 50,000 people to the voter rolls in a city with a population of 700,000. It’s not like Democrat-controlled Washington is in any way up for grabs, given that Democrat voters outnumber Republicans by nearly nine to one. The aim is for Democrats to push the issue of expanding voting rights to illegal aliens more generally. The two measures will now go before the Senate, but with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer running the show, it’s not certain that either of them will garner enough Democrat votes to overcome the filibuster. Therefore, the DC city council’s radical leftist bills may be allowed to become law.

• Biden renominates speech suppressor Gigi Sohn: Judging by his administration’s actions and who he nominates, Joe Biden doesn’t believe in free speech. Following the revelations from the Twitter Files, one would think Biden would be cautious to avoid appearing to want to blatantly censor Americans, but we are talking about Biden and the modern Democrat Party. In 2021, Biden nominated radical leftist Gigi Sohn to sit on the five-member Federal Communications Commission. Sohn, a partisan hack if there ever was one, was exposed for making disparaging comments toward conservatives and Fox News, which she claimed was “dangerous to our democracy.” But it wasn’t just her controversial comments that tanked her nomination the first time around; it was her failure at transparency. When a Senate committee requested documents for a legal settlement she signed while on the board of a now defunct company, she effectively evaded and never produced it. Several Democrat senators were reticent of Sohn, but evidently Biden is hoping that this time around he can get this radical leftist onto the FCC while giving the Democrats a 3-2 majority and allowing the promulgation of greater speech censorship regulations online.

• Part of the sun breaks off: NASA scientists recently witnessed a remarkable phenomenon on the surface of the sun. The unusual event was captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. Dr. Tamitha Skov described it: “Material from a northern prominence just broke away from the main filament & is now circulating in a massive polar vortex around the north pole of our Star.” It’s the unusual location of the phenomenon on the sun’s surface — above 55 degrees latitude — that caught the scientists’ attention. These types of solar tornado-like swirls usually occur only once every 11-year solar cycle. As solar physicist Scott McIntosh explained: “Once every solar cycle, it forms at the 55-degree latitude and it starts to march up to the solar poles. It’s very curious. There is a big ‘why’ question around it. Why does it only move toward the pole one time and then disappear and then come back, magically, three or four years later in exactly the same region?” The sun is on its way to reaching its peak solar activity level in its current cycle, which will arrive in 2025. How this recent sun activity will impact the climate on Earth is not fully understood, but it will have an effect. The concern is that sizable solar flares could impact communications on Earth, disrupting GPS, radio signals, and power grids. There is much about the sun that is still being learned and discovered.

Headlines

• “Unacceptable”: Lawmakers demand accountability from Biden admin after fourth flying object shot down by military (Fox News)

• What we know about the uptick in mystery objects being shot down from U.S. airspace (Washington Examiner)

• Schumer claims China was “humiliated” by spy-balloon scandal (National Review)

• National Archives apologizes for telling March for Lifers to remove or conceal pro-life attire (Washington Times)

• Illegal U.S.–Mexican border crossings fall to lowest level in two years (National Review)

• Turkey-Syria earthquake death toll likely to surpass 56,000, UN emergency aid chief says (Fox News)

• Kate Bedingfield to depart as White House communications director (The Hill)

• In 2020, China privately told Biden ally it wanted Joe to win (Free Beacon)

• Why 65% of fourth graders can’t really read (PJ Media)

• Eagles’ Super Bowl LVII defeat marks Philadelphia’s third straight major sports championship loss (Fox News)

• Satire: Philadelphians preemptively burn city down in preparation for winning or losing Super Bowl (Babylon Bee)

For more editors’ choice headlines, click here.