Not all Unionists believed that war was inevitable.

On Monday, February 2nd, the Senate Transportation, Infrastructure, and Public Safety Committee will hold a hearing on House Bill 1061, regarding firearms non-discrimination.

'A pit of despair and chaos'

Federal immigration authorities arrested more than 650 illegal aliens across West Virginia during a two-week statewide enforcement operation carried out with the support of state and local law enforcement — and without any reported protests, officials announced.

Emboldened by protests and anti-immigration enforcement actions in other Democrat strangleholds, New York Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul is moving to block agreements that would allow local police to assist federal immigration enforcement...

Federal authorities arrested two more suspects in the Minnesota church invasion, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Monday.

“If you riot in a place of worship, we WILL find you,” Bondi wrote on X.

“We have made two more arrests in connection with the coordinated attack on Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota: Ian Davis Austin and Jerome Deangelo Richardson,” she added.

Both Austin and Richardson appear in the indictment that a federal grand jury handed down Thursday.

Minnesota Public Radio reported that authorities arrested Austin on Friday.

The group of anti-ICE agitators interrupted a Sunday service last month at Cities Church, a non-denominational Christian church in St. Paul. 

According to the indictment, Austin and Richardson met with Nekima Levy-Armstrong and Chauntyll Louisa Allen before invading the church.

Former CNN host and independent journalist Don Lemon told Richardson, “Don’t give anything away” while speaking to his online audience as he livestreamed the invasion.

Both defendants allegedly joined Levy-Armstrong, Allen, and Lemon in the church and the group engaged in “menacing and threatening behavior” toward those in the church service, such as “physically obstructing them attempted to exit and/or move about within the church.”

Austin allegedly “stood with other agitators in and around the main aisles in the church to intimidate the church members and obstruct and interfere with their freedom of movement, approached the pastor and congregants in a menacing manner, and, near the end of the operation, loudly berated the pastor with questions about Christian nationalism and Christians wanting to have their faith be the law of the land.”

Richardson allegedly joined Lemon and independent journalist Georgia Fort as they “surrounded” the pastor.

On Friday, Bondi announced the arrests of Lemon, Fort, Trahern Crews, and Jamael Lundy.

The week before, law enforcement arrested Levy-Armstrong, Allen, and William Kelly, the man who posted videos of the incident online under the handle “DaWoke Farmer.”

The grand jury indicted the nine defendants for allegedly violating the Ku Klux Klan Act and the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act earlier this month when they entered Cities Church in St. Paul amid an invasion of the service.

The Klan Act criminalizes the deprivation of rights, and the Justice Department has claimed the church invaders deprived worshippers of their First Amendment right to religious exercise. The FACE Act protects access to houses of worship.

The Church Invasion

Between 30 and 40 anti-ICE agitators interrupted the Jan. 18 service at Cities Church. They shouted, “Justice for Renee Good!” as they surrounded members of the congregation. 

Videos of the incident show the pastor and others repeatedly asking the agitators to leave, and the agitators chanting, “Who shut this down? We shut this down!”

According to the charging document, a member of the congregation said worshippers were “terrorized, our children were weeping.” One woman broke her arm. Agitators blocked about 50 members of the congregation from exiting, making it “nearly impossible for parishioners to get out and leave.”

The document also mentions that agitators prevented congregants from getting to their children, and one of the agitators reportedly told young children, “Do you know your parents are Nazis, they’re going to burn in hell?”

Levy-Armstrong, leader of the Racial Justice Network and a former president of the Minneapolis chapter of the NAACP, told Democracy Now that she does not regret helping to lead the protest.

The post BREAKING: 2 More Arrested in Minnesota Church Invasion appeared first on The Daily Signal.

There are now 650 fewer illegal aliens on the streets of West Virginia after federal officials partnered with state and local law enforcement to arrest them.

The post ICE: 650 Illegal Aliens Arrested in West Virginia with Help from State and Local Police appeared first on Breitbart.

Two officers were shot, one fatally, Sunday morning in what Gwinnett County Police Chief J.D. McClure described as an "unprovoked attack."

The post Two Officers Shot, One Fatally, in ‘Unprovoked Attack’ appeared first on Breitbart.

The annual fusion of music and politics known as the Grammy Awards left President Donald Trump singing a song of vengeance. Trump said host Trever Noah crossed a line while […]

The post Trump Vows Legal Action Against Trevor Noah After Grammys Turn Political appeared first on The Western Journal.

In just one weekend, Melania’s $7 million, three-day weekend haul has already out-grossed the entire domestic run of five 2025 movies nominated for this year’s Academy Awards.

The post Nolte: ‘Melania’ Has Already Out-Grossed Five 2025 Oscar Nominees appeared first on Breitbart.

'$12 billion in startup capital'

This week, multiple committees in Annapolis will hear legislation impacting the rights of law-abiding gun owners, including proposals to ban common semi-automatic pistols, prohibit lead ammunition for hunting, and advance a long-overdue reform to Maryland’s seven-day waiting period. Please use the TAKE ACTION button below to contact members of the appropriate committees and urge them to OPPOSE the semi-automatic handgun ban and lead ammunition ban and SUPPORT the waiting period exemption.  

'I thought my daughter was safe here. I guess not'

When Fox Varian thought she was a boy, the answer a psychologist and surgeon gave her was a double mastectomy. Now, years later, she made history by winning a $2 […]

The post Detransitioner Wins Multi-Million Dollar Medical Malpractice Case That Could Lead to the End of So-Called 'Gender Affirming Care' appeared first on The Western Journal.

The Biden administration’s Justice Department interacted with Democrat state attorney general’s offices that prosecuted or considered prosecuting 2020 alternate electors, according to public record responses. 

These contingent electors were in place to back Donald Trump if any of his election challenges were sustained in states that Joe Biden won. 

In November, Trump pardoned the alternate electors among more than 70 people involved in challenging the 2020 election. However, Democrat state attorneys general from Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin vowed to continue their state prosecutions of the electors. 

Presidential pardons are generally for federal charges. However, defendants have argued the federal government effectively outsourced the prosecution regarding a federal election. Charges in each state against alternate electors involve forgery, impersonating a public official, and attempting to file false documents.

In December, former special counsel Jack Smith, who charged Trump with conspiracy in the election case, told the House Judiciary Committee in a closed-door deposition that he didn’t talk to state attorneys general, but his staff may have. 

What Documents Show

Documents obtained by The Daily Signal through public records requests show interaction between the federal and state prosecutors on these cases. 

On Jan. 7, 2022, Tim O’Shea of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Wisconsin assured Wisconsin Deputy Attorney General Eric J. Wilson that federal prosecutors did not plan to pursue a case against the contingent Trump electors in Wisconsin. 

“The attorney I spoke with confirmed with his supervisor that no federal investigation existed into the persons who held themselves out as Wisconsin electors as described in the attached complaint,” O’Shea wrote Wilson in what appears to be a response to a question. 

The Wisconsin Department of Justice did not provide the attached complaint referenced in the email. A department spokesperson did not respond to inquiries for comment last week or early Monday.

Jim Troupis, a former state judge and Republican lawyer in Wisconsin who was charged for advising the alternate electors, said it’s “utterly inconceivable” that the state and federal government did not collaborate on the case.

“Jack Smith’s report shows his team came into Milwaukee and interviewed dozens of people and collected evidence,” Troupis told The Daily Signal. 

Troupis said his defense has sought multiple documents from both Democrat Attorney General Josh Kaul’s office and Gov. Tony Evers’ office regarding the state’s coordination with the federal government. 

New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez ultimately decided against bringing charges against contingent electors in his state.

However, Gregory Buhl, a special agent for the Special Investigations Division in the Office of the New Mexico Attorney General, wrote a letter to Smith on Sep. 7, 2023, seeking details.

“Our office requests certified copies of all documentation and evidence related to possible criminal acts committed in the state of New Mexico in regard to the attempt to overturn the Presidential Election conducted in 2020,” the Buhl letter to Smith said. 

A Torrez spokesperson did not respond to inquiries for this story last week or this week.

The office of Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford acknowledged the existence of the documents but declined to release the records.

The Daily Signal asked for, “correspondence to and from the Nevada Office of Attorney General and the U.S. Department of Justice and/or the office of Special Counsel Jack Smith” regarding the Nevada alternate electors.

“The OAG has identified records that may not be released because the requested records are part of an ongoing criminal proceeding,” the response said.

“Under these circumstances, the OAG must balance the interests of all affected individuals. Because the records are directly relevant to the anticipated criminal proceeding and many will be introduced as evidence, the OAG has concluded that release, at this time, will undermine the constitutional guarantees of a fair trial.”

A Ford spokesperson did not respond to inquiries for this story last week or early Monday.

Cleta Mitchell, chair of the Election Integrity Network, said the Trump Justice Department should file a statement of interest in the state cases against the Trump electors and “insist that the pardons be effectuated for the reason that they were brought in the first place at the behest of the Biden Department of Justice.”

“Obviously, the ‘state’ prosecutions were mere proxies for the Biden Department of Justice as part of the massive strategy to prosecute President Trump, his supporters, attorneys, and electors,” Mitchell told The Daily Signal in an email statement.

Jack Smith: ‘Can’t Say That Didn’t Happen’

During Smith’s Dec. 17 deposition, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told Smith, “There’s an allegation made that your office was coordinating with state attorney general’s offices to have prosecutions go on … in the states. Would you say that that did not happen and that would be false if somebody made that allegation?”

“We were not trying to coordinate prosecutions with other offices, no,” Smith replied, according to the transcript. 

Jordan followed, “And you were not trying to encourage prosecutions at the state level? 

Smith replied, “I don’t recall anything like that.”

Upon further questioning about the Wisconsin attorney general, Smith said, “We may have got inquiries from their office, and it could be by phone or by a letter. I can’t say that didn’t happen.”

Smith later added in answers, “I don’t recall us sharing information,” and added, “the number of times an office may have reached out to us and how we replied to that, I really don’t have a recollection of those sort of subjects.”

The post EXCLUSIVE: Documents Show Biden Admin Interaction With Trump Elector Probes appeared first on The Daily Signal.

R.J. Pestritto is right that the removal fight matters. If the president cannot fire executive subordinates, it becomes difficult to see how he can “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” But Pestritto also says near the end of his essay that removal is only a first step, and he cautions against merely substituting judicial power for administrative power. That’s the point I want to pull forward here: restoring presidential control over the executive branch alone does not cure an unconstitutional delegation and a fusion of powers. We need to address the fact that most of the administrative state has no constitutional warrant—and also that restoring such awesome power to the president absent greater reforms might in fact do more harm than good.

The Trump Administration is asking the Supreme Court to overturn its decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935), which held that Congress could limit the president’s power to remove members of “independent regulatory commissions.” In that case it was the Federal Trade Commission, but the principle has been applied to others like the National Labor Relations Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and, biggest of all, the Federal Reserve.

Trump is asserting what has come to be called the unitary executive theory. Its proponents (let’s call them the unitarians) emphasize that the Constitution says that “the executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States.” It does not say “some executive power” or that executive power shall be vested in “a president and whomever else Congress chooses to vest it.” If the president is to meet his constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” he needs to be able to hold his subordinates accountable.

Apart from a few Civil War-era anomalies, the president’s plenary removal power prevailed from the first Congress until 1887, when Congress created the Interstate Commerce Commission, which is usually seen as the first independent agency. Congress created many more of these, especially the “alphabet soup” agencies of the New Deal (the AAA, PWA, WPA, and CCC; just about any three-letter combination will yield a federal agency). After the Court sustained its independence in Humphrey’s Executor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Committee on Administrative Management in 1937 called for an end to “a headless fourth branch of government, a haphazard deposit of irresponsible power. They do violence to the basic theory of the American Constitution that there should be three major branches of government and only three.” Unitarianism joined Trinitarianism in orthodox constitutionalism.

The Court should overrule Humphrey’s Executor and restore the unitary executive. But that’s not enough. The more important constitutional point is that Congress has no power to create these agencies in the first place. Even if under presidential control, they still violate the Constitution’s separation-of-powers principle. That was a point made by none other than the author of Humphrey’s Executor, Justice George Sutherland. As a senator in 1914, Sutherland said that Congress could not confer legislative and judicial powers upon the FTC, calling the act “utterly void.” Many other senators saw the same problem, as did many conscientious congressmen who considered the Interstate Commerce Commission. As James Madison put it in Federalist 47, “[T]he accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands… may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

More recently, administrative law professor Gary Lawson described the fusion of powers in the bureaucratic state:

Consider the typical enforcement activities of a typical federal agency, for example, of the Federal Trade Commission. The Commission promulgates substantive rules of conduct. The Commission then considers whether to authorize investigations into whether the Commission’s rules have been violated. If the Commission authorizes an investigation, the investigation is conducted by the Commission, which reports its findings to the Commission. If the Commission thinks that the Commission’s findings warrant an enforcement action, the Commission issues a complaint. The Commission’s complaint that a Commission rule has been violated is then prosecuted by the Commission and adjudicated by the Commission. This Commission adjudication can either take place before the full Commission or before a semi-autonomous Commission administrative law judge. If the Commission chooses to adjudicate before an administrative law judge rather than before the Commission and the decision is adverse to the Commission, the Commission can appeal to the Commission. If the Commission ultimately finds a violation, then, and only then, the affected private party can appeal to an Article III court. But the agency decision, even before the bona fide Article III tribunal, possesses a very strong presumption of correctness on matters of fact and of law.

In Humphrey’s Executor in 1935, however, Sutherland wrote the unanimous opinion that insulated the independent regulatory commissioners from presidential removal. He opined that the commission was not an executive agency under the president. Rather, it exercised what Sutherland now called “quasi-legislative” and “quasi-judicial” powers. It is hard to explain why Justice Sutherland saved the commission that Senator Sutherland had called “utterly void” 20 years earlier.

He has been accused of wanting to spite FDR and thwart his ability to control the new administrative state. Liberals in 1935 favored the unitary executive when the executive was one of theirs. Today they dread it because the executive is Donald Trump. Progressives cheered the growth of presidential power for decades, but when Richard Nixon became president they shrieked about “the imperial presidency.”

It may also be that Sutherland trusted the courts to keep the agencies within constitutional bounds. The Court, which Sutherland joined in 1922, did exactly this to the FTC in the 1920s, and threatened to do the same to the New Deal agencies in the 1930s. Ironically, Humphrey’s Executor, among other decisions, so enraged FDR that he concocted his plan to pack the Court in 1937. Congress became so alarmed at FDR’s assertion of executive power that it defeated not only the court-packing plan but also Roosevelt’s Committee on Administrative Management’s proposal for a unitary executive.

The removal question (who controls these agencies) is much less important than the question of what these agencies do. They are making and enforcing laws that the federal government has no constitutional power to make, which is equally true of non-independent agencies like the Departments of Agriculture, Education, and Health and Human Services. And the answer is not to shift the same unconstitutional power from administrators to judges under the banner of “review” while leaving the bureaucratic regime intact.

Congressional delegation of legislative power is bad enough—but it’s worse when Congress delegates power it does not possess in the first place. The regulation of labor-management relations, for example, belongs to the states, but Congress usurped this power when it created the National Labor Relations Board. The Court’s acceptance of the NLRB in 1937 was the real turning point in the constitutional revolution of the New Deal.

Restoring the unitary executive should be the first step toward restoring constitutional limits to federal power. Ultimately, we must put the genie back into the bottle of enumerated powers.

The post Going Beyond “You’re Fired!” appeared first on The American Mind.