Former Vice President Kamala Harris claimed that the Virginia Supreme Court "ignored the will of the people" by killing the Democrats' plan to redraw the state's congressional maps in their favor ahead of the midterm elections.

The post Kamala Harris Claims Virginia Supreme Court ‘Ignored the Will of the People’ by Killing Democrat Gerrymander Plan appeared first on Breitbart.

A two-month undercover Drug Enforcement Administration investigation exposed what federal authorities say is a Sinaloa Cartel-linked drug trafficking operation funneling fentanyl and methamphetamine into Los Angeles through MacArthur Park.

On Wednesday, federal and local law enforcement officers raided the South Los Angeles park as part of “Operation Free MacArthur Park,” arresting 18 individuals, executing multiple search warrants, and seizing roughly 40 pounds of fentanyl with an estimated value of $8 million to $10 million.

In contrast to the park’s description by the Los Angeles Conservancy as a “vibrant place of music, art, and community,” locals know Macarthur Park as a place filled with brazen drug use and homeless encampments.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli shared with Fox News his plan for the area. 

“This park has been overtaken by gang members—by drug dealers, drug users. It’s zombieland, and we’re taking it back. So today we’re executing 25 arrest warrants, eight federal search warrants, and we’re hitting the businesses along Alvarado here that are used to stash the drugs.” 

Footage shared by Fox News showed federal agents moving in on businesses Wednesday morning.

In a press release, the department said it’s dedicated to ending these cartel-fueled crimes. 

“This is a criminal organization operating in our country, and we are not going to stand for it anymore today. So, they have been put on notice. MacArthur Park belongs to the people of Los Angeles again,” said Anthony Chrysanthis, a special agent in charge with the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The same day, while at the Los Angeles mayoral debate, incumbent Mayor Karen Bass was asked by moderators to comment on the raids.

Republican Spencer Pratt, one of Bass’ two opponents in the race for mayor, criticized both Bass and City Councilmember Nithya Raman for the problems in the park.

“Raman and Bass are so bad, MacArthur Park was raided by the Feds YESTERDAY and it’s already occupied again today,” Pratt shared on X.

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—With U.S. Sen. Jon Husted officially the Republican nominee against former Democrat Sen. Sherrod Brown, Americans for Prosperity Action is ramping up efforts for this special election in Ohio.

After endorsing him in March, the group is doing an ad campaign for Husted.

With the new $750,000 ad buy, AFPA has now spent $1.25 million in Ohio. The ads, which will run until May 31, will reach around 1.7 million Ohioans and play across connected TV, YouTube, and Meta.

“With the economy at a crossroads, Ohio families are feeling the pressure,” the ad states.

AFP says the ad aims to highlight Husted’s role in having “passed the largest tax cut in American history,” in addition to slashing regulations.

It concludes with, “The Ohio way, not Washington’s, that’s Jon Husted.”

During an exclusive interview with The Daily Signal last September, Husted claimed he is the “Ohio guy” and Brown is the “D.C. guy.”

Another ad criticizes Brown and his record for having “repeatedly backed extreme progressive policies that drove up prices.” Policies cited include higher taxes and spending and job-killing regulations.

Notably, the ad features an image of Brown with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

“Sherrod Brown puts his party’s extreme agenda over Ohio families, putting Washington politics first, and hurting Ohio. We just can’t afford Sherrod Brown,” it warns.

According to Donovan O’Neil, AFPA senior adviser, the group wants to “hyper-target their message to voters,” chiefly on the issue of affordability.

“[Husted] has a record of getting things done and being focused on the issues that Ohioans care about,” O’Neil told The Daily Signal. “He’s part of the solution to the decades of D.C. dysfunction that Sherrod Brown has been a part of his entire career.”

He added he’s clear-eyed about the uphill battle candidates face with a Republican president in office.

“The reality is, voters will want to know what individual candidates seeking their vote are going to do to address the affordability challenges that they’re facing, and I think we can win on that,” O’Neil said.

Ohio has long been a bellwether state, which means voters can expect both parties to allocate resources there in mid-October ahead of the election.

The latest ad campaign follows an April 30 memo from AFPA Senior Adviser Emily Seidel and Executive Director Nathan Nascimento, in which the pair stressed affordability and warned that Republicans could lose the Senate if they don’t focus on the right issues.

“As it stands today, our view is that the Republican Senate majority is at risk. But there is still time. The window to act is now,” the memo stressed.

The Daily Signal’s Senior National Security and Legal Analyst Mehek Cooke warned after the May 5 primary vote that Ohio’s status as a Republican state is more fragile than many voters assume, saying that Democrats are organized and working to reclaim ground ahead of critical midterm elections.

Appearing on “The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show,” Cooke said that complacency among Republican voters could open the door for a shift back toward swing‑state status.

Ohio is “a red state” but “could easily shift back to purple,” Cooke said, pointing to recent voting patterns and Democrat enthusiasm. While Republican entrepreneur and gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy received support across the state in his primary victory, Cooke noted that Democrat Senate candidate Sherrod Brown ultimately secured more total votes, highlighting the importance of turnout in the midterms.

Cooke said that when she was voting in Franklin County, Democrat turnout appeared strong. “Every single individual around me had Democrat ballots,” she said, warning that Ohioans are underestimating the momentum and energy behind the Democrat base.

She also pointed to the substantial financial advantages Democrats have deployed in past races, noting that Brown raised more than $100 million in the 2024 Senate race against now‑Sen. Bernie Moreno. According to Cooke, upcoming races—particularly involving Republican Sen. Jon Husted—could see even more aggressive spending and mobilization efforts.

“This is an election of a lifetime for us,” Cooke said. “Democrats are going to be pushing strong.”

Beyond electoral politics, Cooke addressed national security concerns in the interview, emphasizing the need for a renewed “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran by the United States. She argued that the Iranian regime is unlikely to negotiate in good faith during peace talks and warned that ongoing delays of an agreement could allow Tehran to continue advancing its nuclear ambitions.

“We will need a maximum pressure campaign,” Cooke said, adding that “Iran should understand the scoreboard—that President [Donald] Trump holds all the cards.”

The United States, Cooke argued, still holds significant leverage, including strategic influence over the Strait of Hormuz, a key global oil corridor. However, she called for stronger coordination with Gulf allies and major energy‑consuming nations such as India, Japan, and China.

“This won’t end well for Iran. They won’t negotiate in good faith,” Cooke said, adding that Trump must be prepared to use decisive leverage.

On gas prices, Cooke noted that if the U.S. increases pressure on Iran, it must also expand domestic drilling and energy production—steps she said could help stabilize prices and strengthen U.S. economic resilience.

Without decisive action abroad and vigilance at home, Cooke warned, both national security and electoral outcomes could face heightened risks.

President Donald Trump plans to dismiss U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday. 

Makary, whose firing was rumored by news organizations over the preceding week, has been a prominent public advocate of the administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda.

A surgeon and researcher, he rose to public prominence as a critic of COVID-19 vaccine mandates under former President Joe Biden’s administration. The Senate later confirmed his nomination as commissioner in March 2025.

However, Makary has also been at the center of highly controversial debates. For example, he received harsh criticism from pro-life groups and Republicans in Congress who alleged he was slow walking the safety review of mifepristone abortion pills.

As commissioner, Makary played a major role in implementing Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s policy agenda, negotiating with corporations to remove petroleum-based food dyes from food and removing black box warnings from hormonal treatments for menopause. 

The Food and Drug Administration also has overhauled the “food pyramid” dietary guidelines during his tenure.

This week, the FDA authorized the sale of fruit- and menthol-flavored vaping products—a reversal of years of aggressive regulation. The Wall Street Journal had reported that Makary’s reluctance to approve their sale was a cause of friction in the administration.

After the Supreme Court struck down congressional redistricting done solely on the basis of race last week, Republican officials in Mississippi are split over whether to redraw the state’s congressional map ahead of the midterm elections.

“It’s time for Mississippi to redraw the lines and eliminate the racially gerrymandered district that exists solely to protect Bennie Thompson,” Mississippi State Auditor Shad White told The Daily Signal. “I’m not scared to say it: Bennie Thompson is the worst member of Congress, and we need to redraw his district so we can send President [Donald] Trump more allies in Congress.”

White is currently the only statewide Republican official publicly calling for redistricting before November. As of Friday, none of the Republican gubernatorial candidates or state lawmakers had called for the Legislature to take up congressional redistricting ahead of the midterms.

Other Republican leaders, including Mississippi House Speaker Jason White, have expressed interest in redrawing the map but argued that the effort should wait until after the election.

Unlike Tennessee and Florida, which each convened special legislative sessions within the past two weeks to enact new congressional maps, Mississippi officials have so far declined to pursue similar action. Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann has said he plans to call a special session in the near future, but it would focus exclusively on redrawing districts for the state Supreme Court—not Congress.

“I’m disappointed that I’m the only statewide official in Mississippi calling for the state to redraw these lines,” White said.

White accused his fellow Republicans—whom he described as “establishment politicians”—of avoiding the issue because they do not want to “make anyone mad” and are “terrified of being called a racist by Bennie Thompson.”

White pointed to Indiana as a cautionary example for Mississippi Republicans.

In Indiana, GOP lawmakers failed to approve a new congressional map during the previous legislative session that would have added two Republican-held House seats ahead of the midterms. That decision later drew the ire o Trump and his allies, including Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., who directed millions of dollars to the primary campaigns of challengers running against those lawmakers.

As a result, Republican state Sens. Travis Holdman, James Buck, Greg Walker, Linda Rogers, Dan Dernulc, and Rick Niemeyer were defeated by candidates backed by Trump and Banks.

White warned that Mississippi could face similar political consequences if it declines to redraw its congressional map before the midterms.

“If Republicans lose control of the House by only a handful of seats, then the weak Republicans who refuse to do anything to fight against the Democrats will be partially responsible for the president’s agenda being halted,” White said.

While redistricting efforts stalled in Indiana, Democrats moved forward with redrawing congressional maps in California on the basis of race, potentially adding as many as five House seats for the Democratic Party.

House Democrat Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York has since called on the New York State Assembly to pursue similar redistricting efforts.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. We talk about the Democratic Party as if it’s the Democratic Party of, say, the last century. We know what that Democratic Party was. It believed in an equality of result. It was not socialist or Marxist for the most part. It just believed in big government and good and generous entitlements, supportive of unions. 

It had thrown off its racist pedigree for a century, and by the 1960s it was the forefront of civil rights for the most part by isolating the Democratic segregationists in the South. So, there was a positive role to play for the Democratic Party. But there is no more Democratic Party. There’s the name Democrat Party, or Democratic. 

People on the right tend to prefer the word Democrat Party, people on the left Democratic because they feel it is, you know, truly a democratic operation. But it’s really a Jacobin party. Jacobin refers to a group of radicals that hijacked the French Revolution of 1789, and they met in a Dominican monastery that was called the Jacobin, and they took that name, and they thought that a constitutional monarchy with a parliament, as was transpiring in Britain earlier, was a sellout to the revolution. 

So, they wanted to get rid of the kings, the monarchy, and they attacked organized religion. They executed people with a guillotine, well over 2,000. They were most infamous for the Reign of Terror, where they accused almost anybody of being a counterrevolutionary who was to the right of them, until finally the Robespierre brothers themselves suffered a counterrevolution brought by the Thermidors, and they were eliminated. 

But they were a very radical, violent group, and they’re very similar to the Democratic Party. They thought the world was reinvented when they came on, just like the 1619 idea. They toppled statues. They went after organized religion. They destroyed property. They were at war with what they called the bourgeoisie and the rich, and they wanted a radical redistribution of property. 

They believed in secularism. In other words, they were radical humanists that did not believe in a higher power. And if you look at what the Democratic Party has become, this new Jacobin organization doesn’t believe, for example, in borders at all. 

Now, Alejandro Mayorkas may have said the border is secure, but what he really meant is there is no border, because 10 to 12 million people, including 500,000 criminals, just marched across into the United States as part of a Jacobin idea of altering the demography. And we do have now 53 million people who weren’t born in the United States, of all legal status and illegal statuses. 

And 16%, a new record, of the United States population was not born in the United States. They didn’t believe in fossil fuels, and had their agenda been actualized to its full extent, given what’s happened in the world today with the scarcity of oil, we would be broke. It’s only the efforts of conservatives and [President] Donald Trump in particular that got us up to 14 million barrels. 

But they didn’t believe that. They had an almost religious ideology, the Al Goreism, the John Kerryism, that said that the United States has to suppress, if not eliminate, fossil fuels, while China and India were building coal plants each month. They had this strange cultural agenda, like the Jacobins in France, that was a rejection of all prior norms and traditions. 

The Democrats don’t believe that, as Bill Clinton said, that abortion should be rare and safe, but legal. They believe in abortion on demand up to the moment of birth. In fact, if you look at the Democratic Convention manifesto in 1992 and 1996 on immigration, on trying violent 17-year-olds as felons, on balancing the budget, today the Jacobins would call that Democratic Party of just three decades ago racist or fascist. 

Another element of the Jacobins is that with this DEI, they have replaced class by race, and they’re fixated on race, antithetical to Martin Luther King’s dream that the content of our character, and not the color of our skin, would matter. They’re a violent party. when Donald Trump was almost killed three times, Democrats rushed to social media and either said that Donald Trump had staged those near-death experiences, or they lamented the fact that the three shooters had missed their target. 

The [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] demonstrations are bizarre. You have grown adults, many of them in their 60s and 70s, and they are mocking law enforcement officers that are trying to enforce the law. They stick plastic phalluses in their face. They throw excrement at them. They throw bottled water at them. They try to stop the enforcement of federal immigration law. 

Jacobin Democrats, governors, senators, they all have created 600 sanctuary cities in the spirit of the old Confederacy that says federal law does not apply to any of these places, that the state itself can pick and choose which federal laws it chooses to obey. Another thing, so they’re violent as well. 

Besides the three attempts on Donald Trump, we had the execution, really the assassination, of Charlie Kirk by a lunatic that was praised by the Jacobins. And of course, we’ve had the House leadership, a few years ago, was playing baseball in Washington, D.C., and was almost taken out by James Hodgkinson, another former Bernie Sanders aide. 

The final thing that’s weird about the Jacobins. The Robespierre brothers and their cohort were wealthy people, highly educated, products of the French aristocracy and the professional classes. So is the new Jacobin Democratic Party. If the Republicans have ostracized Nick Fuentes for his extremist and repugnant views, the Democrats have welcomed Hasan Piker. 

He’s this influencer who poses as a socialist communist and a man of the people, but in fact, his parents are multimillionaires. He’s a multimillionaire. He drives a Porsche, and he acts as if he’s on the barricades, enacting a communist revolution. I say that because he said there’s going to have to be blood in the streets. 

He has praised Luigi Mangione for killing Ryan Thompson, the head of UnitedHealth corporation. He said that was a social murder, that socialists like himself can pick enemies of the people. No trial, no cross-examination, just name them as arbitrary enemies and then execute them with impunity. 

Is anybody in the Jacobin Party objecting to that? No. He’s an iconic hero. He was at Stanford University lately. He was at Harvard. He’s touring all the major universities where he’s given a rousing welcome by the new Jacobins. 

You look at Zohran Mamdani. He’s a Jacobin. He’s an open, you know, pro-Hamas mayor. He’s anti-Semitic in the way that he’s treated Jews. He’s a socialist or worse. He’s trying to tax the wealthy into making them leave New York. 

Recently, at a research hospital that Ken Griffin, the billionaire, had generously endowed with $400 million, these Jacobin organizations protested why young kids were being treated for cancer inside the hospital, as if they’d like to shut that down. 

And Mamdani, of course, was born to millionaire parents in Uganda. His family are multimillionaires, with an endowed professor as a father, a subsidized filmmaker as a mother. 

Then we get to Ilhan Omar. She can’t decide how much she’s worth. She says on one day she’s worth $30 million. Next day she says it was all a mistake when people point out her hypocrisies. 

We have AOC and Bernie Sanders, the two socialists flying to rallies on private jets. That’s typical Jacobinism. 

So, let me just conclude. We talk about a Democratic Party as if it’s the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Bill Clinton. It doesn’t exist. It’s gone. It’s gone forever. 

What has replaced it is a radical agenda that wants to remake the United States into a social welfare state and to completely redirect the course of Western civilization. It doesn’t like the United States, the Jacobin Party. At least it says it likes the United States, but not the United States that was envisioned by the Founders and the following 250 years. 

They feel, as Barack Obama had said, that they want to fundamentally transform America. And they just might. 

Thank you very much. This is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. 

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s hypocrisy knows no bounds.

Not only was the SPLC allegedly boosting members of the hate groups it says it exists to oppose while demonizing mainstream conservatives, but it also reportedly settled a racial discrimination lawsuit as recently as 2024.

Michael Edison Hayden, who worked as a senior investigative reporter at the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, wrote a tell-all article on Substack last month.

Hayden faulted the SPLC for not attacking conservatives enough; for harassing members of the SPLC’s union; for responding poorly to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and its aftermath; and for engaging in racial discrimination against him.

Insufficiently Anti-MAGA

Hayden joined the Intelligence Project—the branch of the SPLC that puts out a “hate map” plotting mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits alongside chapters of the Ku Klux Klan—in December 2018. Yet he said the SPLC had gone weak at the knees in opposing the Right since then.

Hayden blamed then-CEO Margaret Huang—whose lavish salary earned her the moniker “Half-a-mil Mags.” SPLC leadership at the time “seemed to love spending donor money on retreats, and they seemed to hate publishing anything, especially pieces that might upset MAGA,” the Make America Great Again movement.

During the 2022 midterms, “while the organization warned donors about threats to democracy, it sent our editorial team on a retreat to a pricey, wine-centric hotel with no clear agenda,” he wrote.

He faulted the SPLC for delaying the release of the 2022 “hate map”—released on June 6, 2023—in order to help Senate Democrats confirm SPLC lawyer Nancy Abudu to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Union-Busting

A few months after Hayden started, the SPLC fired its co-founder amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal. During the scandal, employees formed a labor union, and Hayden took a leadership position in the union in 2022. When he did so, management turned on him “overnight.”

He said SPLC’s leadership called him into “Kafkaesque disciplinary meetings, issuing verbal warnings over incidents that never occurred.” He even accused leadership of writing down “quotes of mine that they had fabricated wholesale.”

His criticism echoes the union’s 2024 accusations against Huang and SPLC leadership at the time. The SPLC Union voted to demand Huang resign, and she ultimately left in July 2025.

Israel

Hayden, who traces his descent to Egyptians who lived in what is now Israel, condemned the SPLC for doing “almost nothing publicly” after the Oct. 7 attacks.

He helped draft the union statement condemning Israel for launching “the beginnings of a genocide” in Gaza. Apparently, the statement would have been even worse without Hayden, who says he insisted that the union at least mention antisemitism.

Rabbi Yaakov Menken, managing director of the Coalition for Jewish Values, told The Daily Signal that the union’s statement was “laced through with antisemitic bigotry.”

Even though the SPLC Union, not the center itself, had released the statement, Hayden recalled that “pro-Israel donors threatened to pull their funding.” This confirmed my suspicions about the Left’s generational divide over Israel.

Hayden and his colleague, Hannah Gais, also signed an open letter demanding a ceasefire in Gaza and calling Israel an “apartheid” state. When The Washington Free Beacon reported on the letter, Hayden condemned it as a “racist attempt” to target him.

The SPLC disciplined Hayden.

“Maybe I had alienated a wealthy donor,” he speculated. “Whatever it was, the SPLC’s leadership still went through the motions, dressing up the discipline in different justifications because they couldn’t say outright what they were doing. They were a civil rights group, after all.”

The SPLC punished him, an Arab American, but not Gais, a woman of Jewish heritage. The American Civil Liberties Union lawyers were “eager” to represent him and “go after the SPLC,” but ultimately backed down due to conflicts of interest.

The SPLC fired Hayden amid a difficult struggle with mental illness, and he threatened to sue the SPLC for discrimination.

“Rather than let the story become public, they settled in the spring of 2024,” he wrote.

Yet the story is public now, and it does not reflect well on the SPLC.

Not only did the SPLC allegedly not stand up for Jews in the aftermath of Oct. 7, but it also stood accused of applying a racial double standard in punishing staff who spoke out. The SPLC did not respond to my request for comment, and neither did the ACLU.

When the SPLC settled with Hayden, someone in management reportedly told him that the SPLC leaders had given “buyouts” to the people who treated him harshly. The lawyers reportedly told him that “the SPLC had become too wary of MAGA’s litigiousness and vengefulness to continue confronting the movement.”

A Bone-Chilling Complaint

I find Hayden’s major complaint against the SPLC rather curious.

If anything, the SPLC proved more aggressive during Huang’s leadership. That 2022 “hate map” included Moms for Liberty and other parental rights groups alongside chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. The following year, the SPLC added groups of doctors who oppose transgender ideology to the map. Last year, it added PragerU, Focus on the Family, and Turning Point USA to the map. A few months later, Charlie Kirk got a bullet in the neck.

Hayden’s story reveals yet more dysfunction and corruption at the SPLC, but his suggestion that the SPLC should grow even more aggressive in demonizing conservatives is bone-chilling.

Let’s hope the new leadership doesn’t follow his advice.

Undersecretary of Education Nicholas Kent slammed congressional Democrats for attempting to block a rule that would lower higher education costs for Americans.

“Democrats are hypocrites,” Kent told The Daily Signal in an exclusive interview. “For years, they have purported to care about student debt, but now they’ve reaffirmed what we’ve all been saying, which is, it was never about helping students, but rather about buying votes.”

On April 30, the Department of Education announced a rule taking effect July 1 to put new caps on student loan borrowing. The rule implements changes passed in President Donald Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act.”

On Thursday, a group of House and Senate Democrats introduced a Congressional Review Act resolution to repeal the rule. The Democrats argue that it will “force future nurses, social workers, teachers, firefighters, physical and occupational therapists, and many others to turn to often predatory, high-interest private lenders to complete their degrees.”

“While working families struggle to buy groceries and put gas in their cars, the Trump Administration is sending a clear message to aspiring nurses, health care providers, social workers, teachers, and firefighters: If you can’t afford a high-interest loan, then you can’t serve your community,” said Rep. Lauren Underwood, D-Ill. 

But Kent says most graduate programs are not affected: 78% of graduate-level nursing programs, 94% of graduate-level teacher programs, and 100% of graduate-level fire service programs are not impacted by the loan caps.

“Unlike Democrats, we’re trying to fix the problem without buying votes or saddling other taxpayers with debt that they did not take on. These Democrats are attempting to repeal our well-thought-out rule,” he said. “They’re hypocrites, and they’re using lies and scare tactics.”

Democrats’ effort to repeal the rule would allow institutions to continue overpricing students, Kent said.

He touted savings for students since the loan caps launched. The University of California, Irvine, cut tuition by more than 20%.

The University of Kansas will offer new scholarship opportunities to law students following the administration’s announcement. The law school will also use its endowment to offer student loans at a lower interest rate than the government provides. 

Santa Clara University Law School launched the “Pledge Scholarship,” a $16,000 tuition scholarship to every incoming first-year student joining its J.D. programs.

“Some Democrats don’t actually care about helping students, and they certainly want to keep students in debt,” Kent said. “They want to keep colleges fat and happy and then cry wolf during election time that loan forgiveness is the only option to help borrowers.”

A number of professional associations or advocacy organizations endorsed the Democrat effort, but Kent said it’s because they care about dues.

“These associations are working together with institutions of higher education, and they actually don’t care about helping students,” he said. “They don’t care that these students are taking on unmanageable debt.”

While Democrats want to forgive student loans, Kent said he wants to fix the root cause of the problem, so debt forgiveness is not necessary.

“The previous administration always wanted to solve the problem at the end of the story,” he said.

“They wanted to saddle those individuals that never went to college with the debt of someone who did, and the American people overwhelmingly said that they did not accept that,” he said.

Kent called it “unconscionable” that Democrats want to stop the rule from taking effect.

“When you see really irresponsible members of Congress, like the ones who introduced this resolution,” he said, “what it signals to institutions is to pause the initiatives that they have in place to make those changes.”

Some of the biggest higher education institutions collectively have endowments of over $950 billion. That money should be used to lower the cost of higher education for students, Kent said.

“Institutions recognize that the gravy train is ending,” he said. “Students and families live within their needs. Institutions need to as well.”

Brian Kemp lacks urgency.

Georgia’s Republican governor is like a man who learns that the Chattahoochee River is about to breach its banks, and then rather than surround his home with sandbags, he naps in the basement. 

Republicans are bracing for a potential flood of Trump-hating Left-wing voters who could hand Democrats the U.S. House of Representatives and perhaps the Senate. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s April 29 Louisiana v. Callais ruling, racially gerrymandered, Democrat-leaning districts are now unconstitutional. Republicans now have the opportunity, indeed the obligation, to create constitutional, race-neutral, GOP-friendly districts. This should happen swiftly, long before November 3’s mid-term elections.

Peach State Republicans are begging Kemp to call a special session for this purpose.

What’s the rush? Kemp responds. He prefers to ignore redistricting and extend this injustice for two more years.

“The Supreme Court’s decision,” Kemp stated, “allows states to pass electoral maps that reflect the will of the voters, not the will of federal judges.” He added: “Voting is already underway for the 2026 elections, but it’s clear that Callais requires Georgia to adopt new electoral maps before the 2028 election cycle.”

Kemp moans about early voting in Georgia’s May 19 primary elections. However, Louisiana’s U.S. House primaries were set for May 16, three days earlier. After Callais, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry suspended that vote, so legislators in Baton Rouge could craft color-neutral maps. House primaries will resume thereafter.

Under the steady leadership of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida lawmakers handled this April 28-29. No fuss. No bother. Done. 

Tennessee’s Legislature and GOP Gov. Bill Lee did likewise on Thursday. 

“It’s a form of Jim Crow terror,” Democrat state Rep. Justin Jones whined as Republicans split the majority-black 9th Congressional District. Underscoring the absurd immorality of racial redistricting, Democrat Steve Cohen has represented this “black constituency” since 2007. Cohen is white. 

Kemp is no stranger to special sessions. Indeed, on Oct. 26, 2023, a federal judge found Georgia’s districts insufficiently black. That very day, Kemp ordered state lawmakers to convene that Nov. 29 and redraw political maps. Kemp got busy in 2023. But in 2026, with the entire Trump/GOP agenda at stake, Kemp snores.

Kemp should postpone May 19’s primary elections; tap state legislators to redraw constitutional, color-neutral districts; and reschedule the primary for, say, six weeks hence: Tuesday, June 30.

Convenient? No.

Constitutional? Yes. 

Make no mistake: Kemp’s betrayal will trap Georgia’s citizens this November inside legislative lines that the Supreme Court has deemed racially discriminatory—and unconstitutionally so. Does Kemp savor unconstitutional racial discrimination? His proposed two-year interval of injustice embodies institutional racism, something every Republican should treat like a peanut allergy.

Had Callais gone the other way, try to imagine a Democrat governor saying, “Relax. Forget about 2026. We’ll bolster our race-based districts in 2028.”

Inconceivable!

“Georgia voters are already being asked to vote on a QR-coded voting system that violates three Georgia statutes, the Help America Vote Act, and President [Donald] Trump’s March 25, 2025, Executive Order 14248 issued to the Election Assistance Commission,” says Garland Favorito, co-founder of VoterGA. “Now we are being asked to vote in unconstitutionally drawn voting districts. When does this madness end?”

“It is incomprehensible,” sighs Cleta Mitchell, senior legal fellow with the Conservative Partnership Institute. She observes that Georgia’s legislature adjourned on April 3 without replacing prohibited QR-code-reading voting machines. 

“So, the governor must call a special session to select a legally approved system for the 2026 general election,” Mitchell explains. “If Governor Kemp and the moronic Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger cared about conducting elections in accordance with the laws and constitutions of the U.S. and Georgia, the congressional primaries would be postponed, just as they were in 2020 due to COVID. Kemp would call a special session immediately to solve both problems—lawful congressional districts and lawful voting systems. Instead, they do nothing. Governor Kemp’s hostility to doing the right thing is shocking , but is nothing new.”   

​We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

Mehek Cooke, senior national security and legal analyst at The Daily Signal, warned that the growing fraud scandal in Ohio is not an isolated case but part of a systemic failure across welfare programs nationwide.

Appearing on “The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show” Thursday, Cooke said she discovered widespread health care fraud last December that is allegedly draining billions in taxpayer dollars. She brought this evidence to government officials, but many failed to take it seriously.

“This was the tip of the spear,” Cooke said of Ohio, pointing to similar fraud cases in other states. “Any time you have a welfare program, there’s going to be fraud because government is so complacent.”

Cooke described her firsthand efforts to investigate suspicious activity in Ohio’s home health care system, including making door-to-door inquiries in areas receiving significant taxpayer funding in Franklin County. Several whistleblowers alerted Cooke in December to alleged home health care fraud in Ohio, claiming that patients were entering doctors’ offices, claiming they needed home health care services. Upon evaluation, providers determined that they did not qualify for those services, but some of these individuals then threatened that if the paperwork was not rubber-stamped, they would return to providers who would approve it.

After receiving this information, Cooke said she brought the alleged fraud to the Ohio attorney general’s office and the Department of Medicaid.

Cooke also visited close to 100 home health care offices. What she found raised serious concerns about whether services were being legitimately provided.

“So, when you knock on doors, most of these people are in the Somalian community. They don’t speak English, so I’m wondering how they’re even providing services,” Cooke said. “It’s hidden behind closed doors.”

Cooke pointed to the concentration of funds in specific areas as a major red flag. Ohio has spent approximately $1 billion to $1.6 billion on home health care, she noted. Franklin County alone accounts for 38% of that spending, and within the county, roughly 40% is disproportionately concentrated in just two ZIP codes, amounting to about $243 million, based on statistics from Ohio Auditor Keith Faber.

“At some point, the state has to ask, what’s going on in these two ZIP codes?” she said. “But they didn’t. Our governor came out and said it’s the cost of doing business.”

Cooke criticized state leadership for failing to provide transparency, saying key agencies have not released basic funding data despite repeated public records requests.

She said the lack of enforcement is not due to a lack of authority but a lack of political will. “Prosecutors need evidence of fraud, and that responsibility starts with the governor’s office and the attorney general’s office,” Cooke said. “But if leadership won’t provide the information, cases can’t move forward.”

Cooke highlighted Faber as one of the few officials actively investigating potential fraud, but she warned that audits take significant time.

“People are complacent in the state of Ohio and in so many of these agencies,” Cooke added. “It’s not their tax dollars. It’s ours. They don’t care about Ohioans. They don’t care about Americans. They just want to keep funneling money out the door as long as they get paid.”

Without immediate accountability, Cooke warned, taxpayers will continue to fund a system vulnerable to exploitation.

An earthquake occurred today in the Commonwealth of Virginia that was felt at the highest levels of power in the U.S. House of Representatives, particularly shaking the minority leader of the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries. On Friday, the Virginia Supreme Court rejected the unconstitutional push by the Democrat majority in the Virginia General Assembly.

The Virginia high court voided the proposed constitutional amendment and “temporary” partisan gerrymandering by Democrats that would break up the current congressional district map from its current representation of six Democrat and five Republican congressional seats to 10 Democrat and one Republican to represent the Commonwealth of Virginia in the U.S. House.

The Virginia Supreme Court ruled that “the legislative process employed to advance the proposal” violated the state constitution and the integrity of the referendum vote, which “incurably taints” the referendum. As a result, the Virginia Supreme Court directed that the district maps issued by the court in 2021 after a partisan deadlock remain in place for the upcoming congressional elections until 2030.

The author of the opinion, Justice D. Arthur Kelsey, noted that “under the proposed new map approximately 47% of Virginians that voted for representatives of one of the major political parties in the last congressional election would now be represented by 9% of Virginia’s delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives — while the approximately 51% of Virginians that voted for the other major political party would now be represented by 91% of Virginia’s congressional delegation.”

Because the General Assembly passed the proposed constitutional amendment for the first time well after voters had begun casting ballots during early voting in the previous 2025 election, the court majority noted “that 1.3 million Virginians were denied their constitutional rights to have a voice in the debate over whether their Constitution should be amended — thereby eroding one of the core rights that Article XII, Section 1 was intended to safeguard.”

The aftershocks of this political earthquake in Virginia will shake Democrats in the District of Columbia and across the nation. The Democrats will no longer be able to rely on the additional four seats they have been counting on to blunt GOP gains and help take over the House of Representatives in 2026. And with the recent case of Louisiana v. Callais that outlawed racial gerrymandering, the Democrats are on their heels, having counted on California and Virginia to withstand losses in other states.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent end to race-based gerrymandering has upended the legal framework for political districting that had been in place for the past 50 years. As a result, Florida and Tennessee have already moved to adjust their maps, while lawmakers in Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi are reviewing the ruling and weighing swift action to bring their districts into compliance with the Constitution.

Momentous political events have happened over the past month since the ground-breaking Callais decision. Despite the delay in the issuance of the opinion by the Supreme Court minority, conservatives and GOP legislators have started the late push for fair and constitutional district lines across the country.

Just prior to the Callais decision, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called a special session to redraw the congressional lines and added four additional Republican-leaning seats to represent the state in Congress. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee was next to call the state Legislature into session, and the Legislature promptly passed a new map over opposition that eliminated the seat of Rep. Steve Cohen in Memphis.

Alabama lawmakers are now likely to vote on new district maps to comply with the Voting Rights Act, a change that would shift representation from five Republicans and two Democrats to six Republicans and one Democrat and could trigger new elections. Because South Carolina and Mississippi also have racially focused congressional districts, they may be next to revise their maps and ensure maximum representation under the law.

Adam Kincaid, a prominent redistricting strategist serving as the president and executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, summed up the ruling as a fiasco: “Democrats were already at a cash disadvantage. Then they set $70 million on fire in a pursuit of an unconstitutional gerrymander.”

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Sami Winc: So, Victor, let’s turn to California. And recently, the—we know as well a lot of our viewers know—California has a jungle primary, where the primary is all the parties are in. And the last—the two that are on top are on the ballot for November. Well, no surprise, but our chair of the Democratic Party in California, Rusty Hicks, has decided that this does not work as a primary process. 

Victor Davis Hanson: I thought it worked great. It always got the results the law is—they drafted the law. 

They said they had 60% Democrats, so they could ensure that in most all—and it worked. We haven’t had a Republican statewide officeholder since Arnold Schwarzenegger left, what, 20 years ago? We have supermajorities in both legislatures of Democrats. All the old Schwarzenegger judges are all retiring. They’re wonderful judges, but they’re all termed out. That’s not the right word. They’re retiring. And so, they got the judiciary, they’ve got executives, they got the legislative branch, all because of these jungle primaries. And the real cause, 4 million people have left the state the last 15 years. 

And these were Reaganite, Deukmejianite, Pete Wilson-type, Schwarzenegger-types. They’re gone. Vanished. That’s it. 

Winc: And we know why that is. Another thing about this governor’s race is some of the candidates for governor who are on the left are already talking about new taxes that they would impose. The most recent one is—I forget the candidate’s name—but he wants to have a tax on EVs, since they avoid the high gas prices, that they would tax EVs. 

Hanson: Their message to us, the voters, is, well, you know, we lost $240 billion on high-speed rail. And we’ve lost another $250 billion in COVID-19 hospice entitlement fraud. We didn’t really lose it because the money, as Barack Obama said, it’s spread around. We spread the money around. Spread the wealth. So, people got money, but, you know, we need—as for bookkeeping—we’ve lost a half a trillion dollars, so we want you to pay. 

Now, you have the highest income tax in the nation. How high are they gonna go? I don’t know. 13.3%. They go much higher, and they’ve got, I think, the fifth—when you add the county add-ons—fifth-highest sales tax. The highest gas taxes. The highest electricity cost outside of Hawaii. The highest gasoline in the continental United States. 

Everybody’s angry. I was very curious about that. There’s a national crisis because gas, at its lowest point, I think it was $1.88 or $2 national under Trump before the war, and now it’s up to $4. Any time in the last five years I was driving, and I saw $4 gas, I just pulled over and filled up. I just saw it yesterday. It was $6.20. They’re mad that they have to pay California prices, but we in California pay that every day. And it’s even worse than that, Sammy. We pay it every day, and then we keep electing the people who charge us that. 

That’s what’s so weird about that debate stage. I looked at a clip today. Porter—she came up with a brilliant idea that if she self-critiqued like she was in a Korean prisoner of war camp. Would you please critique yourself? So, she said. And she had that—you know—about being mean to people. And then Becerra—poor Villaraigosa didn’t know what he was talking about. Becerra just gave basically, everything is great, and we’re gonna give you more great things. And then Bianco and Hilton were pretty good. And the guy from San Jose, McMahon, or whatever his name is—he was just— 

Winc: Yeah, that was the EV tax guy. 

Hanson: Yeah. I’m not them and I’m not them. I’m in the middle. I’m not Left or Right. I’m just nothing. 

Winc: Would it surprise you that the Palisades arsonist has revealed himself to be left-wing? Some of his social media posts are—or sorry, these are the history of his searches on his computer. Free Mangione and kill billionaires. And it’s— 

Hanson: He did. I mean, if you think about the assessed evaluation of that beautiful Pacific Palisades, it must have been, I don’t know, billions of dollars. He destroyed it. Killed 12 people. And he’s a hero, probably. And the $100 million was raised for private charities. It’s all gone. They blew that on—the NGOs took that money. I mean, there’s nothing there. Boy, I get back to those videos of LA in the ’50s. If you had a guy like Sam Yorty, whom I wasn’t particularly fond of, but he was a good mayor, in the early ’60s—he would have just gone on there—that would have been all rebuilt by now. 

But the subtext was a Leftist burned it down because he hated wealthy people, and he knew a communist mayor. And I say that because she used to visit Cuba—Castro—Karen Bass. And he knew that she wouldn’t rebuild it and would try to have high-density affordable housing. You know what I mean? That’s just a buzzword for we’re going to—look outside Rome or Amsterdam or Paris. We love those high-rises. They have a little bit of lawn. And then the bus picks everybody up. And that’s what they want. Not for them. Not for them. They want a big, beautiful, gracious John Kerry or Elizabeth Warren house. That’s what they want. Or Nancy Pelosi’s three mansions or Barack Obama’s four. That’s what they want. 

Winc: Or Bernie Sanders’ three homes.

Hanson: He has three too. Yes, he does. One on the lake, of course. They have to have one. If you’re a Democrat and you’re a Socialist and you want high-density housing for everybody else, it’s absolutely important one of your many houses has to be on the lake. I think his is on Lake Champlain. 

Winc: Champlain, isn’t it? 

Hanson: And Barack has two. He has one on the Atlantic and one in the Pacific, on the shore. And I don’t know about—Dianne Feinstein had one at Lake Tahoe, a mansion. They usually have them pretty near the sea. 

Winc: Yeah, and doesn’t it seem funny to you that they are offended by billionaires, but they want to take more money from the people via all of these excise taxes and things like that? And they’re just fine with the fraudsters that are taking it from them. Like, that’s OK. They’re spreading money around, but a billionaire doesn’t do that. 

Hanson: They don’t believe it—when money is stolen or wasted, they think, well, who got the money? The people did. So, they don’t mind. And then Hasan Piker, the Marxist pro–Luigi Mangione—he had a new Porsche. So, I just did, before we started, I was curious. I said to Grok—and I’m going to check it with ChatGPT—does Hasan Piker have a Porsche, and how much is it worth? $200,000. Some people say he has Cartier jewelry or something, a watch or something. 

Winc: He looks like he has that kind of stuff on him. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah. So, you have a $200,000 Porsche, and you’re defending the guy who killed a middle-class person who worked his way up. UnitedHealthcare. I have UnitedHealthcare. I had over a million dollars in medical fees. There’s only been one little dispute. One dispute on a PET scan that I may end up having to pay, but I doubt it. I wrote them a very nice note. 

So, when he says that they just poach on people, I don’t know what he’s talking about. They insure millions of people. And they’re in financial trouble, mostly because of the medical fraud on the part of the Left, you know? 

But it’s so weird that they’re not even shameless. So, this Piker guy—and you praise murderers that kill what you call enemies of the people, or social murders, because they are social murderers—and then you are so brazen you drive around in a $200,000—wouldn’t a true Marxist say, well, I like that $200,000 Porsche, but let me do the math. Ah, I could buy four or five Honda Civics for the people, and I’d like to help them. And if we all—I suggest we all have a program that nobody on the left buys expensive cars. No. This is nothing about ideology. That’s just the way they gain power for themselves and money. 

ORANGE COUNTY, Calif.—Thousands of gallons of herbicides have been sprayed into flood channels that flow straight into the ocean—right in the same creeks where more than $26 million in taxpayer dollars have already gone toward saving the endangered steelhead trout.

For more than two decades, state and federal agencies have funneled millions into a fish passage project on San Juan and Trabuco creeks. Yet county crews kept spraying the chemicals, including during the steelhead’s spawning season, according to records obtained by local activists.

Save the Fish

In 2003, California state biologists made the first sightings in decades of steelhead trout below the I-5 culvert. By 2004 and 2005, the national nonprofit Trout Unlimited launched efforts to remove barriers at the nearby Metrolink bridge and I-5. 

During that time, the California Department of Fish and Game agreed to fund a roughly $1.2 million fish passage, otherwise known as a “fish ladder,” to open an estimated 13 miles of upstream habitat.

But the ladder was never built because of engineering, flood control, bridge stability, and pipeline concerns.

From the mid-2000s to 2017, planning, studies, modeling, and stakeholder negotiations continued under Trout Unlimited, which raised an estimated $2.4 million. By 2013, the U.S. Forest Service began upstream check dam removals as part of broader habitat work in Cleveland National Forest.

The project shifted in 2017 when CalTrout took over leadership from Trout Unlimited because of stalling. CalTrout raised another estimated $2.1 million by 2021. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife granted the project $9.3 million in 2024.

In conjunction with the state, major federal help arrived in late 2024 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration via the bipartisan infrastructure law, which awarded the project $14.6 million.

Chemical Soup

Just a decade after the first spotting of the rare steelhead trout, Orange County Public Works began an active National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit and Integrated Pest Management program that includes aquatic herbicide applications in San Juan Creek. 

Among the chemicals allowed was glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup, which has faced numerous lawsuits.

County officials turned to aquatic herbicides because “mechanical methods” like mowing or hand-pulling were 10 to 25 times more expensive than spraying.

Despite the permit expiring in 2018, the county—through the Orange County Board of Supervisors—continued allowing herbicide spraying.

By 2024, county records show herbicide use, including glyphosate, to eradicate “nuisance weeds” in the flood control channels, including San Juan Creek.

What About the Fish?

But there was an exception to the spraying. According to the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Public Works stated that it does not spray during bird nesting season or when endangered Southern California steelhead trout may be swimming upstream to spawn, which is from December to April.

However, records obtained by the local activist group Creek Team OC, which blew the whistle on the spraying, showed that OCPW applied glyphosate in January 2025 across roughly 70 acres of the creek channel.

Just months later, in July 2025, outside the spawning season, records show the county conducted a second major spray using triclopyr and imazapyr, with an estimated 8 tons of the diluted chemicals used in the waterways.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife launched a probe into OCPW in April, announcing there is “currently an investigation into complaints of potential violations of the Fish and Game Code in San Juan Creek.”

“We are performing a compliance review to confirm whether OCPW has met all reporting and monitoring requirements under the Agreement,” California Department of Fish and Wildlife spokesman Cort Klopping told the Voice of OC at the time.

“We are also evaluating what changes may be necessary in OCPW’s new Agreement, which is currently in draft form, to ensure that impacts to fish and wildlife resources and protected species (e.g., CESA listed species) are avoided moving forward,” Klopping added.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment on whether the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would be involved in the probe.

In an exclusive interview with the California Courier, Creek Team OC said that when it first raised concerns about spraying during spawning season, it tried to reach out to CalTrout but was dismissed.

“They had no interest in helping us. I asked for their help. They denied it,” Creek Team OC member Brent Linas said.

Bethany Nelms, another member of Creek Team OC, also noted that one of her first approaches was reaching out to the agency, but she quickly realized they had “resistance” to the group’s help.

“That was literally one of my first approaches,” Bethany Nelms told the Courier. “I’m like, ‘I need to tell these people. They must not know this is happening or they’d be really upset.’”

“The resistance and hesitancy was really surprising to see until I realized that they were scared. They didn’t want to lose their funding. They didn’t want to not be able to progress things. They knew the county was going to come back one way or another,” Nelms added.

Endless Money

With more than $24 million in taxpayer dollars already put into the unfinished project, the plan still has no confirmed deadline.

A public post from CalTrout shows that a request for proposals regarding a construction manager was issued in March, with project trackers listing the plans as “current.”

However, with no exact date in sight, the once-under-$2 million project now appears on track to cost an estimated $45 million in taxpayer funds.

During a local town hall meeting with Orange County Supervisor Katrina Foley, a public official was pressed on the timeline for the fish passage project, but no hard deadline for when plans would be available to the public was announced.

A dozen Democrat-led states declared victory Thursday in a legal battle that effectively checked off two priorities from a liberal coalition’s 2024 template for blue states to thwart President Donald Trump’s agenda.

An attachment to a Dec. 13, 2024, email to the coalition Governors Safeguarding Democracy outlined the organization’s priorities to oppose then-President-elect Trump through litigation and policy battles, including opposition to deporting illegal aliens and efforts to prevent the loss of federal funding.

In the Thursday action, the Department of Homeland Security dropped an appeal to withhold Federal Emergency Management Agency funding from sanctuary jurisdictions, which had originally prompted the 12-state lawsuit against the administration.

Governors Safeguarding Democracy, co-chaired by Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, had a broad plan more than a month before Trump’s inauguration that included protecting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and challenging election security policies.

The Daily Signal obtained email records from the group through a public records request with Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs’ office. A frequently asked questions section provided the template:
● Preparing to mitigate the impacts of mass deportation and related operations.
● Securing sensitive data and records maintained by our states.
● Augmenting staffing at the state level, drawing upon federal expertise as desired.
● Protecting federal funding streams.
● Preparing for potential regulatory threats and increased state-level needs.
● Fortifying election processes and procedures.
● Developing a set of aligned democracy protection and advancement actions.

Governors Safeguarding Democracy is part of the Governors Action Alliance, which previously launched the abortion advocacy group Reproductive Freedom Alliance.

Here are areas where states appeared to follow the litigation and policy agenda to oppose Trump.

1. Opposing ICE

On Thursday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a legislative package to prevent mass deportation and oppose Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“States like New York must be a guardrail against ICE, an out-of-control $85 billion agency,” Hochul said in a post on X. “We’re putting those guardrails in place: local cops focused on local crime, protections for sensitive locations, unmasking law enforcement, and real accountability when rights are violated.”

Last month, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed an executive order to block ICE from accessing state property and launched an online portal for residents to report ICE activity directly to the attorney general’s office.

This followed legislation California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed in September requiring ICE agents to unmask. Last month, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the law, citing the supremacy clause.

2. Stopping the National Guard

The Governors Safeguarding Democracy emails showed Zoom webinars training governors and staffers on how to combat the deployment of National Guard troops to their states.

Both California and Illinois filed separate lawsuits over the deployment of National Guard troops for the protection of ICE detention facilities.

3. Protecting Federal Funding Streams

Beyond the aforementioned lawsuit over FEMA dollars, in May 2025, some of the same 20 states, led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, sued over a Transportation Department policy withholding billions of dollars from the state over its sanctuary policy.

4. DEI Litigation

The emails further included suggestions for governors to maintain federal funding if the forthcoming Trump administration withheld it over state DEI policies.

In April 2025, a coalition of 20 Democrat-led states sued the U.S. Department of Education after the Trump administration ordered states to certify they were not using DEI practices or risk losing federal education funding. Maryland federal Judge Adam Abelson halted the funding freeze by issuing a temporary injunction.

5. Opposing Trump Election Integrity Measures

In April, 23 Democrat attorneys general sued in federal court in Massachusetts over Trump’s executive order instructing the U.S. Postal Service to verify citizenship for people sending mail-in ballots.

This came a year after an April 2025 lawsuit in which 20 Democrat attorneys general sued over a Trump executive order that attempted to get the Election Assistance Commission to verify the citizenship of voters and not count mail ballots that arrive after Election Day.

6. Sensitive Data Lawsuit

In February, 19 Democrat-led states sued the Treasury Department in federal court in New York, alleging the department violated federal law by granting Elon Musk’s aides in the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency access to a federal payment database.

The states claimed that DOGE’s access increased the likelihood that confidential information about recipients of the payments could be exposed publicly.

Spokespersons for Governors Safeguarding Democracy did not respond to inquiries for this story. The Daily Signal also contacted the offices of governors and attorneys general for Arizona, Colorado, and Illinois for this story. None responded by publication time.

While it remains unclear whether the Council on American‑Islamic Relations will testify, a House Judiciary subcommittee is set to hold a hearing Tuesday examining how CAIR and similar organizations are promoting Sharia law and other efforts lawmakers say are “incompatible with Western civilization” in the United States.

“Sharia law has no place in the United States, and these hearings are about exposing it, defending the rule of law, and protecting the values that make America strong,” Rep. Chip Roy, R‑Texas, told The Daily Signal.

To The Daily Signal, Roy has previously accused CAIR of having a “30‑year history replete with associating with terrorist groups and individuals who want to undermine the security and values of the U.S. and its allies.”

CAIR has also come under renewed scrutiny following allegations that it supported a controversial housing development in Texas that lawmakers have said would enforce Sharia law. On Thursday, a federal judge ordered CAIR’s Texas chapter to turn over a list of foreign donors, along with documentation of trips one of its officials took to eight Middle Eastern countries before the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack.

Roy chairs the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government, which will host the hearing titled “Sharia‑Free America: Why Political Islam and Sharia Law Are Incompatible With the U.S. Constitution, Part II.” According to a subcommittee announcement, the hearing will examine “the role organizations like CAIR play in promoting and funding” efforts that conflict with American law and constitutional principles.

The hearing follows a February session in which Roy’s subcommittee examined whether Sharia law is incompatible with Western civilization and the U.S. Constitution.

“In our first hearing this February, we exposed how Sharia law and Islam are being pushed,” Roy told The Daily Signal. “This follow‑up hearing will highlight new incidents unfolding throughout our nation and examine the role organizations like CAIR play in promoting and funding these efforts. Islam is incompatible with Western civilization.”

Roy has also introduced legislation to designate CAIR as a Specially Designated Terrorist Organization. He previously told The Daily Signal that the group, which describes itself as a civil rights organization, “has harbored ties to terrorist organizations including Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other extremist groups while operating under the guise of a nonprofit and reaping the benefits of 501(c)(3) tax status.”

Last fall, Roy and Rep. Keith Self, R‑Texas, founded the Sharia Free America Caucus to oppose efforts to advance Sharia law in the United States. The caucus now includes more than 65 members from both chambers of Congress, representing more than 20 states.

In March, following a wave of deadly attacks carried out by radical Islamists who pledged allegiance to Iran and ISIS, members of the caucus delivered speeches on the House floor condemning radical Islamic ideology.

During his remarks, Roy read from a 1991 Muslim Brotherhood memorandum that he said outlined a strategy of “civilization jihad” against Western nations. The State Department designated certain elements of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations in 2025.

“Their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within,” the memorandum states, according to Roy. “The process of settlement is a civilization jihadist.”

“These attacks, clustered in just a few weeks, show that the enemy is inside the gates,” Self said during his remarks.

“We cannot allow that here in the United States,” he added. “According to Islam, many non‑Muslims like me are regarded as infidels, and those who leave Islam are labeled apostates. Under Islamic law, both are punishable by death.”

CAIR has yet to respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment on whether it is willing to testify before Congress. However, the organization redirected The Daily Signal’s request to previous press releases from the group, where it designated the Sharia Free America Caucus as an anti-Muslim hate group.

“This is the first time in CAIR’s 32-year history that the organization has designated a congressional caucus as an extremist organization,” the group wrote.

In an opinion written by Justice D. Arthur Kelsey, the Virginia Supreme Court has today ruled that the controversial redistricting referendum—narrowly approved by voters on April 21, 2026—was unconstitutional.

The court determined in a 4-3 vote, with no dissenting opinion, that the Democrat-led General Assembly violated key procedural requirements under the Virginia Constitution when it advanced the amendment during a rushed special session, bypassing proper public notice and timing mandates. As a result, the proposed congressional maps, which would have dramatically shifted the state’s delegation toward a 10-1 Democrat advantage, have been invalidated.

This ruling is unequivocally the best outcome for Virginia.

For years, the Commonwealth has prided itself on competitive elections and balanced representation, reflecting its status as a purple state with diverse communities from the suburbs of Northern Virginia to the more rural areas of Shenandoah Valley and Tidewater. The rejected maps were a blatant partisan power grab, designed not to ensure fair districts but to entrench one party’s dominance ahead of the 2026 midterms.

By striking them down, the court has preserved the integrity of the redistricting process and prevented the erosion of competitive districts that allow voters—not mapmakers—to decide elections.

Virginia’s maps should be drawn through transparent, constitutional means, not backroom maneuvers that ignore the state’s foundational rules. This decision upholds the principle that no legislature, regardless of its majority, can rewrite the rules midstream to favor itself. It protects minority-party voices, encourages broader accountability, and reinforces trust in our democratic institutions.

The fight is not over. According to Ken Cucinelli II, former attorney general of Virginia, four constitutional challenges have already been teed up, but for now, this is a huge win for good governance, the rule of law, and the long-term health of Virginia and the country. 

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.