Columnist.
Anonymous law-enforcement sources are telling the media that up to 10 states have had their voter registration databases "probed or breached" by hackers — most likely Russians, according to cybersecurity experts.
When it comes to upholding concealed-carry rights, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has been the only federal appellate court to apply the Second Amendment correctly. Until now. In Culp v. Madigan, a case involving the concealed-carry rights of out-of-state citizens in Illinois, a three-judge panel of the court has now gone the wrong way over the vigorous objections of dissenting Judge Daniel Manion.
Speaking at a partisan fundraiser in Florida last month, President Barack Obama touched on a number of issues near and dear to the hearts of liberals. It was part stump speech, part farewell-tour stop — and part chance to knock efforts at ensuring election integrity one last time.
The College Fix is reporting that the politically correct Rutgers University student newspaper, the Daily Targum, has fired columnist Aviv Khavich for trying to use the term "illegal alien" in a column about illegal immigration. After he complained to his editor that she had changed illegal alien" to "undocumented immigrant" in a column he submitted, he was fired.
Eric Holder will chair a new 527 political action committee, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC). With that announcement, Holder revealed the deep partisanship that he tried to obscure while serving as attorney general. Yet, that partisanship drove him throughout his tenure as the nation's top law enforcement officer.
Why do media polemicists such as Jeffrey Toobin continue their uninformed, unfair, and vitriolic attacks on Justice Clarence Thomas as he celebrates his 25th anniversary on the Supreme Court?
Vanita Gupta, the acting head of the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, apparently has been working in violation of federal law for more than a year and a half.
To stem the tidal wave of illegal immigration engulfing America, the most important first step that Donald Trump can take is to order the Department of Homeland Security to enforce our existing immigration laws.
Shirley Anne Conners, aka Faragalli, was arrested last week. A Canadian citizen living in this country illegally, she had voted in more than 20 elections — including the April presidential primary in New York.
A few weeks ago, we reported on a lawsuit in California brought by a resident and taxpayer against the Board of Regents of the University of California. Earl De Vries claimed that by giving in-state tuition benefits to illegal immigrants at all University of California schools, the regents were in violation of federal law. A state appeals court heard the case yesterday, and based on reports from those who attended the oral argument, De Vries (and the taxpayers of California) had a good day in court.
In an otherwise unremarkable opinion over the federal Freedom of Information Act, a federal appellate court judge has issued a sharp rejoinder to the Obama administration over an issue that has been discussed in the news — the almost complete lack of Syrian Christian refugees being brought over to the U.S. The Heartland Alliance's National Immigrant Justice Center, a progressive liberal advocacy organization "dedicated to ensuring human rights protections" for immigrants and asylum seekers — including apparently terrorists — filed a FOIA lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security.
The next front in the battle over in-state tuition rates for illegal immigrants will play out in a California appeals court on Nov. 3 in a lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch on behalf of California resident and taxpayer Earl De Vries. The issue there is not whether the California Legislature can authorize in-state tuition to illegal immigrants — courts have held that they can — but whether the University of California Board of Regents, an independent body from the state Legislature, can lawfully authorize in-state tuition for illegal immigrants at all University of California campuses in direct violation of federal law.
Exxon Mobil Corp. is fighting back against New York's Democrat attorney general who is demanding decades' worth of documents about the company's position on global warming and climate change. On Oct. 17, Exxon asked a federal judge in Texas, Ed Kinkeade, to stop the abusive behavior of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman by tossing out the subpoena that Schneiderman served on Exxon as part of a investigation of the company for supposedly lying to the public about catastrophic, man-induced climate change.
The Constitution has long been subject to attacks from individuals hostile to its guarantees of freedom, economic opportunity, and limited government, but in recent days no other provision has been as widely and intensely attacked as the First Amendment. From the IRS targeting conservative groups to those trying to limit the ability of Americans to freely practice their religious beliefs, to membership organizations being forced to disclose their donors, the First Amendment is being assaulted on all sides.
No matter how small the number, ineligible and zombie voters have no place in our voting rolls or ballot boxes.
Is a right to straight-ticket (also known as straight-party) voting guaranteed under the Constitution or the Voting Rights Act? Any ninth-grader who has taken a civics course can tell you there's no such right in the Constitution (even if they couldn't tell you what straight-ticket voting is), but a federal district court in Michigan has ruled that eliminating straight-ticket voting is a restriction on the fundamental constitutional right to vote and a violation of the Voting Rights Act. The U.S. Supreme Court's recent denial of a stay (over the objections of Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas) of that erroneous decision means that Michigan residents must have a straight-party option in November, despite the Michigan legislature's law stating otherwise. Straight-ticket (or straight-party) voting allows a voter to mark one bubble on a ballot indicating a vote for all the candidates of a particular political party rather than individually selecting a candidate for each office.
Virginia state legislators have filed a motion with the Virginia Supreme Court asking for an order requiring Gov. Terry McAuliffe to "show cause" why he should not be held in contempt for violating the court's July 22 order that vacated McAuliffe's executive orders restoring the voting rights of 206,000 felons. The court ruled that the governor's clemency and pardon power could only be exercised on an individual, case-by-case basis and that the voter registrations of felons who had registered as a result of McAuliffe's orders had to be canceled. Being held in contempt by a court can occur if a party to a lawsuit deliberately disobeys a prior order of the court. A governor being held in contempt by a state supreme court for such behavior is rare and would be a history-making event in Virginia.
The Supreme Court concluded in 2008 that voter ID is constitutional and doesn't impose an unreasonable burden on voters. But the recent decisions of three federal courts throwing out voter-ID laws in North Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin as discriminatory have put opponents of common-sense election reforms in raptures. These erroneous rulings twist the Voting Rights Act from a law intended to stop racial discrimination into one that transfers the power to determine routine election procedures — which the Constitution delegates to the states — to the judiciary.
On Monday, a three-judge panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused without comment to stay a Wisconsin district court opinion in One Wisconsin Institute v. Thomsen that threw out changes the state legislature had made in early voting rules as well as other changes such as the residency requirement for new voters. However, the state's voter ID law will remain in place for the November election because the district court judge, James D. Peterson, a President Barack Obama appointee, stayed his earlier ruling against the ID law on Aug. 11. Peterson didn't have much choice on that issue: The same three-judge panel that refused to stay his overall ruling had issued a stay on the voter ID issue on Aug. 10 in a second district court case in Wisconsin, Frank v. Walker.
It looks as if Texas, the Justice Department, and all of the other parties, including the NAACP, involved in the challenge to the state's voter ID law have worked out an interim settlement — and the district court judge approved the deal [yesterday] after a telephonic hearing Wednesday morning. That deal is probably about the best deal Texas could expect to get given the circumstances and personalities in the case. In Veasey v. Abbott, Texas (and the cause of election integrity) suffered a blow three weeks ago when the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that the voter ID law violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act because it supposedly had a discriminatory effect, despite the fact that there was no evidence that the ID law had diminished turnout in Texas elections.
