The White House says immigration policies backed by the Democratic Socialists of America would cost American taxpayers up to $613 billion over the next decade.

The number comes from a Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) report detailed Thursday, which puts the ten-year range at $440 billion to $613 billion. To get there, the council assigned every illegal immigrant a lifetime net fiscal cost of $166,716. Run across the illegal alien population already in the country, that works out to between $1.4 trillion and $1.9 trillion.

Fox News measured that per-person figure against the price of a degree, pointing to College Board data that puts a four-year in-state public education, room and board included, at roughly $124,000.

Most of the projected cost is benefits. Opening food stamps, federal housing assistance and Medicaid to illegal aliens who would be legalized under a mass amnesty would add $361 billion to $475 billion over ten years. Medicaid alone accounts for as much as $40 billion a year, with food stamps adding $3.6 billion to $4.7 billion annually and housing assistance another $2.3 billion to $3 billion.

The council estimates that unwinding the current crackdown would wipe out $227 billion to $287 billion in projected taxpayer savings. Subtract what Washington would no longer spend on enforcement, and the net ten-year cost lands between $79 billion and $139 billion.

The same report prices out eight policy pillars the administration attributes to the DSA, including Medicare for All, universal rent control, the Green New Deal, a 32-hour workweek, and a billionaire wealth tax. Added up, the council puts the net cost at roughly $49 trillion over ten years, or about $355,000 per American household. Seven of the eight could be scored against the federal budget. The eighth, abolishing the police and the prison system, was measured through its effect on crime instead.

White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis told Fox News Digital that President Donald Trump had given ICE the resources to deport criminal illegal aliens, and that radical Democrats now want the border reopened and amnesty extended to the illegal aliens they released.

The administration says it has gone 16 consecutive months without releasing illegal immigrants at the southern border.

The report is landing less than three weeks out from the midterms, with socialist candidates on ballots around the country, including Colorado’s First Congressional District. Fox News Digital said it contacted the DSA for comment on the costs tied to its immigration platform.

The Department of Homeland Security has reported that more than three million illegal migrants have left the U.S., including about 2.2 million who self-deported since the president returned to office in 2024.

DHS announced that it has deported nearly 900,000 illegal immigrants and taken another 900,000 into custody since May, Fox News reported.

“In President Trump’s first year back in office, more than 3 million illegal aliens have left the U.S. because of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration including an estimated 2.2 million self-deportation,” the DHS said in a statement.

DHS added that the president’s policy of offering migrants a cash payout to self-deport costs significantly less than the regular deportation system.

In March of 2025, the Trump administration announced the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) mobile app that can be used by illegal aliens looking to self-deport from the United States rather than wait for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to detain and deport them.

The department also noted that the Trump administration has created the most secure U.S. border in history.

The White House said in a statement on Thursday:

While radical Democrats push open-border policies, President Trump and Republicans are putting Americans first—securing the border, deporting the WORST OF THE WORST dangerous criminal illegal aliens, and restoring law and order. The American people voted for secure borders and rejected the radical Democrats’ lawless agenda that threatens public safety, economic security, the rule of law, and our way of life.

The White House also laid out some of the successes of the administration’s immigration policies.

The list of successes includes the fact that not one illegal migrant has been released at the border for sixteen consecutive months. Also border apprehensions are down 94 percent in August, CBP seized 73% more drugs this year through August than during the same period of 2024, ICE has arrested more than 10,000 gang members and 2,100 known or suspected terrorists, and ICE has increased its agent count from 10,000 to 22,000.

The White House also noted that “More than 157,000 migrant children — many of whom were lost by the Biden Administration and were victims of sex and labor trafficking — have been located.”

DHS has instituted several policies to speed up deportation, including large fines meant to convince illegal migrants to leave the country.

In July DHS announced $84 billion in fines against 103,000 illegal migrants.

The fines are part of the Trump administration’s multifaceted campaign to implement the deportation mandate he was given in November 2024. The forced departure of economic migrants will help younger Americans win higher wages and cheaper rents and will pressure politicians and elites to sympathize with ordinary Americans instead of with employers and migrants.

In a win for election integrity, a federal appellate court upheld on Wednesday a Kansas law prohibiting third-party groups from sending voters pre-filled absentee ballot applications.

“Kansas acted after error-filled, prefilled mail-ballot applications flooded voters and overwhelmed county election officials in 2020. Protecting voters from confusion and keeping elections orderly is commonsense, not suspect,” said Honest Elections Project Executive Director Jason Snead, whose group filed a brief supporting the Sunflower State in the case.

In its unanimous ruling, the three-judge panel for the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals found that the Kansas law barring “private parties from partially prefilling applications for mail ballots before those applications are sent to registered voters” passes legal muster. The panel was comprised of Judges Timothy Tymkovich (Bush 43 appointee), Joel Carson (Trump appointee), and Senior Judge Michael Murphy (Clinton appointee).

The GOP-controlled Kansas Legislature passed the contested law in 2021, negating the veto of Democrat Gov. Laura Kelly. Two left-wing organizations — VoteAmerica and the Voter Participation Center (VPC) — subsequently filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the statute’s provisions violated the First and 14th Amendments.

Senior District Judge Kathryn Vratil, a Bush 41 appointee, initially granted a temporary injunction blocking the law from taking effect that same year. She later issued a complete decision in 2023, in which she agreed with the left-wing groups that the law’s restrictions unlawfully “chilled” their speech under the First Amendment.

The 10th Circuit reversed Vratil’s decision and, upon remand, instructed her to use a lower form of scrutiny to assess the law unless she found that the legislature had “enacted it with improper motives.” The Bush 41 appointee said she found such motives, prompting the state to once again appeal to the 10th Circuit for relief.

Writing for the majority in Wednesday’s decision, Tymkovich ruled that Vratil “found an improper purpose without evidence from the prohibition’s justifications, text, or legislative history,” and “instead inferred an improper purpose from the national political debate on mail-in voting.” “That finding,” he said, “was in error.”

“Because the prohibition was enacted without an improper purpose, we apply intermediate scrutiny and find the prohibition constitutional,” Tymkovich wrote.

The appellate judge went on to note that the law “is ‘unrelated to the suppression of free speech’ because it was not ‘adopted by the government because of disagreement with the message the speech conveys.’” He observed that Kansas’ reasons for implementing the law, such as to prevent confusion among voters, “are unrelated to viewpoint suppression.”

“VPC fails to show that Kansas enacted the prohibition to suppress its pro-mail-voting viewpoint. The district court’s reliance on cultural antagonism against mail-in voting to infer the Kansas legislature enacted the prohibition with an improper purpose — when the law’s justifications, text, and enactment history reveal no such purpose — was in error,” Tymkovich wrote.

[RELATED: Why Did This Left-Wing Elections Group Send An Iraqi Refugee A Voter Registration Form?]

While marketing itself as “nonpartisan,” VPC has regularly operated as a vehicle for leftists’ voter registration and get-out-the-vote machine. Not only does the organization send pre-filled mail-in ballot forms to prospective voters, but it also specifically targets demographics likely to pull the ballot box lever for the Democrat Party.

A new proposed amendment to Missouri’s constitution that would prohibit abortion and sex-rejecting procedures for minors with gender dysphoria is polling close ahead of November’s election day.

According to polling posted by The New York Times, 44% of likely Missouri voters said they oppose the adoption of abortion safeguards, follow by a close 43% who support it. In contrast, 47% of likely Missouri voters said they support a ban on gender transition procedures for children while 40% oppose it.

In 2024, Missouri voters passed Amendment 3, to codify “the fundamental right to reproductive freedom, including abortion,” according to Ballotpedia. November’s proposed amendment would reverse the 2024 amendment, adding “a new section that would prohibit abortion, except in cases of medical emergency, fetal anomaly, rape, or incest. … For cases of rape and incest, the abortion could only be performed before 12 weeks. It would prohibit abortions based on a fetal disability diagnosis, except in cases of fetal anomaly. It would require parental or guardian consent for minors seeking an abortion and prohibit fetal organ harvesting. The amendment would also provide for the ability of a woman to access healthcare in cases of miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy.”

Three cities and a group that provides legal services to immigrants came to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to pause an agreement between Texas and the Department of Justice that they described as the product of “egregious collusion.” A ruling in the challengers’ favor would temporarily restore a Biden-era regulation, adopted through notice-and-comment rulemaking, that allows immigration judges to suspend some deportation proceedings – when, for example, a crime victim or witness is seeking immigration relief, such as asylum – while the challengers’ appeal in the lower federal courts is ongoing.

The Executive Office for Immigration Review, which is part of the Department of Justice, adopted the regulation at the center of the dispute, which provides what is known as “administrative closure,” in 2024.

In 2026, Texas filed a lawsuit in the Wichita Falls division of the Northern District of Texas, where it alleged that the EOIR does not have the power to adopt the administrative-closure rule. The case was assigned to the only federal judge in that division, Chief U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor.

Within hours after the case was filed, the U.S. Department of Justice and Texas filed a motion to have O’Connor enter a final judgment in the state’s favor. The federal government also asked O’Connor both to throw out the rule altogether and to issue an order making clear that the EOIR could not adopt a similar rule in the future. O’Connor granted those requests.

Three cities with substantial immigrant populations – Baltimore, Maryland; New Haven, Connecticut; and Columbus, Ohio – sought to join the case to defend the administrative-closure rule on appeal, along with Centro Legal de la Raza, which provides legal services to immigrants. O’Connor denied their request on the ground that they lacked a legal right to sue, known as standing. In particular, he rejected the cities’ contention that the elimination of the rule would cost them money because their taxpayers are likely to be deported.

After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit turned down their request to block the consent judgment between Texas and the Department of Justice and thereby reinstate the administrative-closure rule while their appeal continued, the challengers came to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to intervene.

Lawyer Joshua Salzman of Democracy Forward, representing the challengers, called the consent judgment “indefensible.” “If a judgment procured through such open collusion is allowed to remain in effect,” he wrote, “any agency can avoid the strictures of the” federal law governing administrative agencies “by advertising its unwillingness to defend a disfavored regulation and by immediately acquiescing to nationwide relief.”

Salzman noted that five years ago, the Supreme Court had granted review to decide a related question – whether states should be allowed to intervene to defend a rule when the federal government has opted not to do so – but ultimately never weighed in on that issue, instead dismissing the case without deciding it. “There is a substantial continuing need,” he said, “for this Court to address whether litigation tactics can be substituted for the … requirement that a federal regulation adopted through notice-and-comment rulemaking may be rescinded only through notice-and-comment rulemaking.”

Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN) cellphone has been seized by federal investigators as part of the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) and Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) immigration fraud investigation into the Somali-born congresswoman.

This week, agents with the Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) unit raided Omar’s Washington, DC, residence after a federal judge approved a search warrant.

Fox News Digital now reports that HSI agents have seized Omar’s phone, in addition to the DOJ issuing subpoenas to the congresswoman’s relatives.

“Federal authorities seized a cellphone belonging to Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., during a Monday raid on her Washington, D.C., home as part of a criminal fraud investigation into her immigration paperwork,” Fox News Digital reports.

The raid on Omar’s home is related to an immigration fraud investigation, with rumors circulating that the probe centers on whether the congresswoman lied about her age when immigrating to the United States in 1995.

Omar became a naturalized American citizen in the year 2000.

Along with the immigration probe into Omar, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro revealed this week that her office has opened a financial investigation into the congresswoman, perhaps picking up an investigation that the Biden administration had started into her reported multimillion-dollar net worth.

“There are several investigations going on, and I don’t think there’s any question, but if there was a crime that was committed, it will be prosecuted,” Pirro told Fox News in an interview.

Justice Clarence Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court 35 years ago today. In May, he became the second-longest-serving justice in Supreme Court history. At the Court

On Wednesday, the justices heard oral argument in Salazar v. Paramount Global, on whether and how the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act, which was enacted after the Washington City Paper reported on Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s video rental history, applies in the internet era. It was the final argument of the October sitting.

Later on Wednesday, the Supreme Court granted a request from the Federal Communications Commission to block a ruling by a federal appeals court that would have required the FCC to rule quickly on a challenge to its “public notice” extending favorable advertising rates to political parties and joint fundraising committees. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson indicated, without explanation, that they would have denied both requests. For more on the decision, see the On Site section below.

Tomorrow, the justices will meet in a private conference to discuss cases and vote on petitions for review. Orders from Friday’s conference are expected on Monday at 9:30 a.m. EDT.

On Sept. 28, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to clear the way for the Federal Bureau of Prisons to implement its new policy on healthcare and accommodations for transgender inmates, which would prevent such inmates from obtaining gender-transition surgeries, hormone therapy, and “social accommodations.” The dispute is now fully briefed, and the court’s decision could come at any time.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court added Blanche v. Ozurumba, a case on whether someone who worked as a cook for a terrorist organization is eligible for asylum protections, to its oral argument docket for the 2026-27 term. Even before that grant, however, the docket was dominated by immigration issues.

Since late April, the court has granted review in seven immigration-related cases. One of those was dismissed as moot (that is, no longer a live controversy) last month, but, including Ozurumba, six remain, meaning that around one-fifth of the cases currently on the oral argument docket involve immigration. What’s more, the justices will soon consider several more high-profile petitions for review in this area, including one that covers the same essential ground as the case dismissed last month.

As I reported last year, it’s not unusual for the justices to hear multiple immigration cases in a single term, because both Republican and Democratic administrations routinely spar with noncitizens and immigrants’ rights groups about how to interpret and apply federal immigration law. However, the second Trump administration’s heightened focus on immigration issues – and reinterpretation of certain detention and deportation policies – has fueled a surge in immigration lawsuits at all levels of the legal system, which explains why the 2026-27 docket has a particularly high number of immigration disputes (that may grow even higher).

Here’s a brief overview of the immigration-related cases already on the oral argument docket, as well as a few pending petitions that may be worth watching.

Third-country removals

Perhaps the highest-profile immigration case set for oral argument this term is Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D., a challenge by a group of immigrants to the Trump administration’s practice of deporting noncitizens to countries not identified in their removal orders – a process known as “third-country removals.”

This issue arrived on the oral argument docket via the interim docket, where it has been addressed by the court three times over the past 17 months. The Trump administration first asked the justices to clear the way for third-country removals to continue in May 2025, after a federal judge in Massachusetts barred the government from deporting noncitizens to third-party countries without first providing them with, among other things, a written notice of where they would be sent and an opportunity to raise their concerns about facing torture there. In June 2025, the Supreme Court agreed to put that order on hold. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

One day after the court issued that decision, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer returned to the interim docket, asking the justices to allow the administration to remove a group of immigrants being held on a U.S. military base in Djibouti to South Sudan, a move that had been blocked by the same federal judge. On July 3, the Supreme Court granted the administration’s motion for clarification, explaining that its June order allowed the deportations to South Sudan. Sotomayor and Jackson again dissented. Kagan wrote a concurring opinion, reiterating her opposition to the court’s June decision but adding that she did “not see how a district court can compel compliance with an order that this Court has stayed.”

Last month, after the federal judge in Massachusetts issued a final judgment blocking its third-country removal policy, the Trump administration brought the issue back to the interim docket yet again, asking the justices to put the new decision on hold. On Sept. 29, the court – over objections from Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson – agreed to temporarily pause the lower court’s ruling. However, it also took up the dispute for oral argument in December. The justices asked the litigants to brief several questions, including whether the administration’s third-country removal policy is unlawful.

Access to bond hearings

Another closely watched case on the Trump administration’s approach to deportations is Rhoney v. Barbosa da Cunha. It addresses the administration’s policy of detaining noncitizens who have been apprehended within the United States under 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b)(2)(A), a section of federal immigration law that mandates detention of applicants for admission into the country who are “not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to be admitted” and does not provide for bond hearings.

Past administrations have applied Section 1225 only to noncitizens who were apprehended crossing the border or soon after they entered the country; noncitizens who were apprehended within the U.S. years or decades after they arrived in the country had been detained under a different statute, Section 1226, which does authorize bond hearings or conditional parole. By shifting to Section 1225 detentions, the Trump administration has sought to detain noncitizens apprehended within the country without bond while they await removal proceedings.

In recent months, judges across the country have delivered thousands of rulings against these detentions, and most federal appeals courts to address the issue have decided that Section 1225 does not apply to noncitizens apprehended within the country. On Oct. 1, the justices took up Rhoney, agreeing to clarify the scope of Section 1225.

Genalo v. Black, the case that was dismissed from the oral argument docket last month, also addressed access to bond hearings. Specifically, it asked whether immigrants detained under a law targeting noncitizens who commit certain crimes have a due process right to a bond hearing once their detention becomes “unreasonably prolonged.” The Trump administration had also asked the justices to determine what the government must show to justify continued detention if such a hearing is indeed required.

The case was dismissed after Sauer notified the court that the administration agreed with the immigrant, Keisy G.M., that the case no longer presented a live controversy because he had been pardoned by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and was therefore no longer eligible to be detained under the law at issue. In his letter requesting dismissal, Sauer said that the Justice Department aimed to soon bring a new case presenting the same questions to the court so that the justices could still answer them during the 2026-27 term. (More on that later.)

Asylum issues

As noted above, the justices granted review on Tuesday in Blanche v. Ozurumba, agreeing to clarify what type of support an immigrant must have provided to a terrorist organization to be ineligible for various immigration benefits, including asylum protections.

The case involves Izuchukwu Ozurumba, a Nigerian man who worked as a cook in a camp run by a separatist organization called the “Unknown Gunmen” “for about six months” before escaping, according to the government’s petition. He traveled to Venezuela and then to the United States, where he applied for asylum, but an immigration judge and the Board of Immigration Appeals concluded that his work in the camp amounted to “material support” for terrorism and that he was, therefore, ineligible for asylum and subject to removal under a provision of federal law that deems anyone who provides “material support” for a “terrorist organization” ineligible for a visa or entrance into the United States.

Ozurumba appealed his case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which agreed with him that his work as a cook in the camp did not represent “material support” for a terrorist organization. “Cooking meals using food and supplies purchased by the organization may have ‘sustained’ the organization in the broadest possible sense ... but provided nothing that the organization could use or readily divert to plan or carry out its terrorist activities,” concluded Judge James Wynn in the majority opinion. The Supreme Court will now review the 4th Circuit’s ruling.

Asylum policy is also at the center of Wassily v. Blanche, which is set to be argued on Nov. 30. The case asks whether a noncitizen whose asylum protections have been terminated remains eligible to become a lawful permanent resident, also known as a green card holder.

Wassily was appealed to the Supreme Court by two men who lost their asylum protections after being convicted of multiple crimes. They assert that they remain eligible for adjustment to a green card, because the text of the law addressing such adjustments refers only to someone who has been “granted asylum” and does not explicitly address what is to happen if this grant is later terminated.

In the government’s response to the petition, Sauer did not oppose Supreme Court review. He defended the lower court’s decision, arguing that it was correct when it held that immigration law “allows only noncitizens with current asylum status to adjust to lawful permanent resident status.” But, after highlighting a conflict between the federal courts of appeals on the issue, Sauer described the case as a “suitable” one with which to resolve “the disagreement on an important and recurring legal question.”

In an August column for SCOTUSblog, Duncan Fulton contended that “Wassily is of considerable significance,” because “recent policy changes by the Trump administration have” put more asylum beneficiaries at risk of losing their asylum protections. And columnist César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández recently wrote that the case “highlights the tension between a law enacted half a century ago that seems to let people who had been granted asylum, only to lose it later, obtain a green card despite a conviction for a long list of crimes, and today’s prevailing political sentiment that can’t contemplate doing anything of the sort.”

Other immigration-related cases

The justices will also hear argument in two cases that stem from immigration disputes but don’t raise what we would typically think of as immigration questions.

The first, Department of Labor v. Sun Valley Orchards, addresses the H-2A program, which enables U.S. employers “to bring foreign nationals to the United States to fill temporary agricultural jobs.” The justices agreed to decide whether the Department of Labor has the power to hold hearings to collect money from employers who violate the terms of this visa program.

The second, Montoya Palacios v. Liggins, asks whether a habeas petition challenging civil immigration detention qualifies as a “civil action” under the Equal Access to Justice Act. If it does, a detainee who prevails in such a case could be eligible for attorney’s fees if the government’s position was not “substantially justified.”

Notable pending petitions

In the coming weeks and months, the justices will have several more opportunities to add immigration-related cases to the oral argument docket, when it weighs petitions for review addressing other aspects of the Trump administration’s policies on asylum, immigration detention, and deportation.

Genalo v. D.C. is the Trump administration’s substitute for Genalo v. Black. Notably, Sauer is asking the Supreme Court to take up this dispute before the federal appeals court weighs in. He emphasizes that the justices have taken this approach in the past to “to allow a case to replace one that was dismissed.”
Mullin v. Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services asks whether the federal government may remove immigrants who cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally without first giving them a chance to seek asylum and whether the lower courts properly allowed the challenge to speedy removals to move forward as a class action. This petition for review is scheduled to be considered by the justices at their private conference on Nov. 6.
Trump v. Suri addresses whether district courts have the authority to hear claims brought by a noncitizen challenging the validity of his detention while he awaits removal proceedings. The Trump administration contends that federal immigration law “channels all challenges that go to the validity of an alien’s removal” to the federal courts of appeals, and “strips district courts of jurisdiction over nearly all claims ‘arising from’ removal proceedings.” The case involves scholar Badar Khan Suri at Georgetown University, who was detained amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian activists. (Another pro-Palestinian activist, Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, is expected to file a petition for review by Oct. 19 raising the same question about district court jurisdiction.)

A petition typically needs to be granted by late January to make it onto the oral argument docket for the current term. And even if none of these pending petitions are taken up for argument, the 2026-27 term will likely be remembered for its immigration-related rulings.

As the Trump administration forces pediatric transgender facilities to close, a new reality is becoming clear: It’s a game of whack-a-mole.

In Pasadena, California, an infamous pediatrician named Johanna Olson-Kennedy who provides transgender intervention procedures for children was forced to close her medical office at the end of September (as The Federalist reported), after a pro-trans parent corporation read the political climate and switched to an adults-only operation. It was the second time in two years Olson-Kennedy was driven out of business, as Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles closed her first practice in 2025.

The Pasadena office reopened a few days later, at the same address, with a new sign on the very same front door. (If you need to use the bathroom, that patients-only sign about using the key has yet to reappear.)

This development comes at an unusually important moment, as California just changed the way it funds sex-rejecting procedures for minors, as of October 13. You can read a detailed discussion of those changes here, on the website of the California Department of Health Care Access and Information. Following recent federal guidance, California will no longer pay for pediatric gender mutilation through Medi-Cal, the state’s version of the federally funded but state-administered Medicaid and CHIP.

Ending federally funded sex-rejecting procedures, California is switching to a more limited grant program funded only with state dollars. The state legislature has budgeted three pools of money, totaling $66 million, that can be used to pay for sex-rejecting procedures, with $10 million specifically designated for doctors who butcher children.

Defunded, pediatric transgender facilities are refunded. Closed, they reopen.

California has yet to distribute its new transgender funding, and is searching for a private third-party administrator to run the funding program. A spokesman for the California Department of Health Care Access and Information told The Federalist that Olson-Kennedy has not received any of the new state funding, because the program is not yet up and running.

Alongside the funding changes, the Trump administration is mounting an aggressive legal effort to close sex-rejecting facilities for children. That project follows President Trump’s January 28, 2025 executive order, “Protecting Children from Medical and Surgical Mutilation,” which committed the federal government to ending pediatric transgender procedures. Pressured, hospitals all over the country have agreed to close their pediatric sex-rejecting medical facilities.

Clearly, though, the example of Olson-Kennedy’s new Axiana Youth Care shows what happens next: Shuttered clinics that had mainstream medical ties just go independent, operating under the direct control of trans zealots who refuse to quit.

It’s unclear how any of that ends, and it’s unclear what transgender procedures for children Olson-Kennedy believes she can sustain in the current law enforcement climate. The Federalist asked the Department of Justice if it’s aware that Olson-Kennedy has opened a new facility, but hasn’t received a response. The Federalist also spent several days sending and resending a long list of questions to an email address on the Axiana Youth Care website, asking about topics like funding and the DOJ’s determination to close pediatric sex-rejecting centers. Axiana has not responded to The Federalist’s questions.

This will be the long moment when we find out if sex-rejecting medical procedures for children can be sustained or ended. What happens next?

The execution will not be televised.

President Trump announced Thursday he was scrapping plans to livestream the Dec. 3 execution of Fort Hood mass shooter Nidal Hasan by firing squad, concluding that “good people” don’t want to view the killing.

Trump caveated that survivors and family members of the victims of Hasan’s Nov. 5, 2009, rampage will be able to watch him die if they choose.

“I think streaming the execution for all to see might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan but, many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device,” the president posted on Truth Social.

“He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed,” he added.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth revealed plans last week to showcase Hasan’s death, drawing bipartisan outrage.

“It’s going to be soldiers with rifles executing the firing squad. It hadn’t been since World War II, since we’ve done that,” a giddy Hegseth told conservative influencer Jack Posobiec. “I kind of like the mentality we had in World War II, which was ‘win.’”

“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it — that it’s public — because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth added.

The US hasn’t staged a public execution since the 1930s.

Hasan, who has been paralyzed from the chest down since being shot by first responders on the day of the shooting. He was sentenced to death in 2013 by a military jury comprised of 13 officers.

After Hegseth’s initial announcement, Trump told reporters Oct. 9 that he “absolutely” authorized it, but later clarified that he “will make a decision ultimately” about whether to broadcast the punishment.

Several top Republicans, including Vice President JD Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), made clear that they would not watch a livestream if it was offered.

“The concern would be that you would create a video that then would be a recruiting tool for future terrorists,” Johnson told CBS News earlier this week. “We’ve got to think through the policy implications of all that. I wouldn’t be watching it if it was aired, but there’s a lot of opinions on that.”

Elsewhere in his post, Trump made sure to blame former President Barack Obama for the Fort Hood shooting.

“Barack Hussein Obama’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) intercepted electronic communications between Hasan and the radical Yemeni-American cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki,” he noted in his Truth Social post. “When reviewed by his FBI terrorism task force, investigators concluded that Hasan’s emails were not a threat.”

The Trump administration is building a case that could lead to the deportation of Rep. Ilhan Omar, with federal agents seizing the Minnesota Democrat’s cellphone, notebooks, personal computers and her passport on Monday, according to a new report and people familiar with the investigation.

Omar has long maintained that she became a US citizen at the age of 17 when her father was naturalized in 2000, but sources with direct knowledge of the federal raid on her DC bungalow said the Department of Justice is looking for evidence that claim is a lie.

If the Somali-born Omar’s citizenship was procured by the concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation — either by herself or by her father, Nur Omar Mohamed — on immigration paperwork, then the feds will seek to denaturalize and deport her, one of the sources confirmed.

The 44-year-old congresswoman was at home with her husband Tim Mynett when agents executed a search warrant and removed the items, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Criminal charges could only be brought if the alleged immigration fraud occurred within the past 10 years, while if it concerned false statements there would be a five-year statute of limitations, according to federal defense attorney Todd Spodek.

Securing a criminal conviction for “knowingly procuring naturalization unlawfully requires revocation of citizenship,” Spodek said, though a member of US Congress has never been denaturalized before.

There’s no similar statute of limitations if civil denaturalization is pursued. President Trump’s DOJ has pursued a record-breaking number of civil denaturalizations, with almost 200 cases filed since the beginning of the president’s second term in January 2025.

Of those cases, just 20 have been closed with the defendants put into deportation proceedings, according to an analysis by the left-leaning group Democracy Forward.

The Post confirmed Wednesday that prosecutors in Minnesota are leading the immigration fraud probe into the “Squad” member, while the office of DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro is pursuing an inquiry into Omar and Mynett’s finances.

Some records list Omar’s birthdate as Oct. 4, 1981, while others give the same date in 1982. If the former date is accurate, Omar would have been of legal age at the time her father received citizenship and thus would have been ineligible for the minor benefit.

The Journal reported Thursday that Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) officials were tipped off about the potential date fudging during the Biden administration, but opted not to move forward due to a lack of evidence.

The Post reported Tuesday that in the spring of 2019, following Omar’s initial election to the House of Representatives, her staff pressed the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library, the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, and Wikipedia to record her birth as happening in 1982 rather than 1981.

Months earlier, in the fall of 2018, Omar’s campaign had told the Associated Press that she didn’t have a birth certificate due to her family’s displacement by the long-running Somalia civil war.

Omar has repeatedly denied any wrondoing, with her office insisting in a statement to the Journal Wednesday: “President Trump would love to eliminate one of the most effective progressive voices in Congress. There is no basis for this.”

The Omar family emigrated first to Kenya during Somalia’s bloody civil war in the early 1990s, eventually arriving in the US in 1995. Omar’s father died of complications from COVID-19 in 2020.

More than a dozen grand jury subpoenas have also been issued to family members of the Minnesota congresswoman, including her sister, Sahra Noor.

Trump said Monday that he had “nothing to do” with the probe of Omar but called her a “totally crooked” politician and “a terrible person.”

“Just a complainer,” he told reporters. “She comes from a country that is a non-country. And then she comes over here, and she complains about our Constitution.”

James Talarico knows his Texas as well as he knows his Bible, which is apparently not at all.

Less than one week after Talarico reappeared following a mysterious absence from the campaign trail and media due to what he claimed was a “nasty flu,” he appeared on a CNN and Jubilee town hall to Lone Star State voters about his faith and politics.

This “Change My Mind” was supposed to be an opportunity for Talarico to soothe his skeptics’ fears about his radicalism, including describing God as “nonbinary” and expressing love of “trans children.” Instead, it further proved that the “Christian who hates Christianity” has no business holding authority in church or state, specifically the U.S. Senate.

The biggest clincher of the night came when Jodi Hunt, a smiling “farmer and professor” from Burleson, Texas, asked Talarico to “convince me as a Catholic voter that I can trust you that you would protect the most innocent among us.” It’s a fair question, considering Talarico’s track record in the Texas House of repeatedly voting against pro-life protections, against resources for women and babies in crisis, and against prohibitions on unpopular taxpayer-funded abortion.

Instead of touting the theological truths that any biblical pastor and Christian cling to about the sanctity of life, however, Talarico opted to finger-wag Hunt about her biblical understanding of abortion.

“We may come to different moral and ethical conclusions when it comes to the question of should abortion be legal or not. It sounds like you and I do come to a different conclusion. That’s okay. We’re both Christians, and the Bible is silent on the issue of abortion. It means you and I both have to look at at different scriptures to try to come to a conclusion,” Talarico claimed.

The Supreme Court gave Republicans a win on Wednesday in a court battle over access to favorable broadcast advertising rates. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the court’s decision.

In its per curiam ruling, the high court granted an emergency application for stay filed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to temporarily stay a recent decision by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. That decision sought to compel the agency to finalize its review of new rules permitting political parties and fundraising committees to qualify for the low-cost ad rates. Prior guidance only permitted candidates to access such rates.

Several Democrat congressional candidates filed a lawsuit challenging the new rules after the FCC announced them in March. These candidates — which includes Senate Democrat candidates Roy Cooper (North Carolina) and Sherrod Brown (Ohio) — alleged that the guidance “could have advantaged Republicans, whose party committees tend to raise more money than individual candidates,” as described by Courthouse News.

The 4th Circuit granted Democrats’ request to block the rules in an Aug. 25 order. Upon appeal to SCOTUS, the high court granted the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) and National Republican Senatorial Committee’s request to temporarily pause the lower court’s order in early September. The justices ruled that the 4th Circuit likely lacked jurisdiction on the matter, and that the petitioners would likely suffer “irreparable harm” if the lower court’s blockade were left in place.

The same 4th Circuit panel came back with another ruling a month later, in which it ordered the FCC to finalize its guidance within a two-day period. The court reasoned that doing so was “the only means to finally move forward with . . . judicial review” on the matter.

The NRCC and NRSC once again asked the Supreme Court to pause that ruling. Chief Justice John Roberts — who oversees emergency applications from the 4th Circuit — agreed to do so the following day to give the full court time to consider the issue.

The high court said in its Wednesday ruling that the 4th Circuit’s “decision to issue an ‘extraordinary’ writ [of mandamus] was inappropriate under the circumstances.” The majority noted that while the federal Communications Act mandates the FCC to “act on every application it receives,” the law “does not obligate the Commission to act within a particular timeframe.”

“The Commission may exercise its discretion to set its own procedures and schedule for resolving such applications,” the ruling reads. “Undeterred, the Fourth Circuit issued a mandamus order requiring the Commission to issue a final decision on the candidates’ application just five months after it was filed and within just 48 hours — all while the Commission’s deliberation process was still ongoing.”

“Our system of separation of powers does not allow the Judiciary to meddle in ‘the workings of a coordinate branch of the Government’ in this manner,” it added.

Similar to its prior ruling, the Supreme Court went on to note that the FCC would likely suffer “irreparable harm” if the 4th Circuit’s decision were allowed to take effect. The majority highlighted how, in order to comply with the lower court’s order, the FCC would have to “triage its ongoing deliberation process and prepare a final order on an extremely expedited timeline.” “That the mandamus order requires the FCC to abandon its deliberation process is itself an injury that cannot be remedied after the fact,” the court said.

Justices Sotomayor and Jackson did not provide a reason for their dissent.

According to Wednesday’s decision, the 4th Circuit’s order is “stayed pending the filing and disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari, if such a writ is timely sought.” The Supreme Court’s pause will terminate if a petition to SCOTUS is denied by the high court or if SCOTUS agrees to consider the matter and issue a judgment on the merits of the case.

The Timothy Two Project International’s mission is to do as the Apostle Paul instructed his protege Timothy: Teach others to teach the Gospel. TTPI has for more than 15 years reached indigenous pastors in some 70 countries — in some of the more impoverished places on Earth where there is little or no formal biblical and theological training available.

In 2020, Bank of America canceled the nonprofit’s account, an account the Timothy Two Project had held since 2011. Suddenly, inexplicably, TTPI was “operating a business type we have chosen not to service,” according to the financial services titan.

Steve Curtis, TTPI’s international director, explained in the Washington Examiner in 2023 that the notice came out of the blue.

“We opened our Bank of America account in 2011, and used it to make small grants and pay our largely U.S.-based staff members. Our ministry focus has stayed consistent in whatever may qualify as a ‘business type’ since we started our bank account, and we are accredited with the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability,” Curtis wrote. “So we were surprised and confused by the bank’s decision.”

Major financial institutes were “debanking” all manner of right-of-center individuals and organizations during the Biden years, a scary era of prosecution and persecution of the left’s political enemies.

Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, U.S. Bank, Citibank, Wells Fargo, and several other mammoth U.S. financial institutions cited “reputation risk” in denying service to American consumers between 2020 and 2025, according to a damning new report issued by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The 45-page report titled, “Debanked: Guaranteeing Fair Banking for All Americans,” is an indictment on the left’s cancel culture fury and the Goliath banks that were “willing or unwitting accomplices” in the sweeping silencing treatment, said Jeremy Tedesco, special counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom. ‘Now We Have the Goods’

ADF and other First Amendment defenders had for years warned of a growing debanking effort targeting “disfavored” organizations and industries — aka the left’s ideological enemies. Tedesco said critics scoffed. They said the red flag raisers “didn’t have the goods.”

“Well now we have the goods,” the civil rights attorney says in an upcoming episode of The Federalist Radio Hour. “We have the biggest banking regulator in the U.S. government saying, ‘This is happening, and it’s happening at a wide scale at the biggest banks in the country.’”

ADF has represented several clients that have had their bank accounts shut down “unexpectedly with minimal or hollow explanations.” Its website provides a page for victims to report debanking incidents.

ADF’s clients include Indigenous Advance Ministries, a Christian organization akin to the Timothy Two Project that serves Uganda faith communities. The organization received similar letters in 2023 from its financial services provider, Bank of America, notifying the ministry that its accounts would be closed. Why? The big bank determined Indigenous Advance was “operating in a business type we have chosen not to service.” After an eight-year relationship, why did BOA suddenly decide not to provide financial services to the Christian organization?

The answer is manifold. But in many cases, according to the OCC report, the banks succumbed to public pressure from far-left groups like the notorious Southern Poverty Law Center. SPLC, now under federal indictment on fraud allegations, has spent years falsely accusing conservatives and right-of-center groups of being “hate groups,” white supremacists, terror organizations. It’s all done in the name of “reputation risk.”

“The banks relied on various sources to inform these decisions, including the results of negative news and other background screenings aimed at searching public and nonpublic sources for unfavorable information,” the report states.

“They also relied on non-traditional sources to inform risk determinations. Examples of these sources included the opinions of advocacy organizations, like the Southern Poverty Law Center, third-party environmental and social governance reports, and complaint data. Reliance on these sources added another layer of potential subjectiveness and bias to an already speculative determination,” it continued.

The SPLC has falsely declared Alliance Defending Freedom a “hate group”. As ADF summed up, the disgraced leftist SPLC, itself a hate group, used “hate” labels and its “Hate Map” as “little more than a smear tactic … to reputationally harm anyone who dares to oppose its radical ideology.”

Democrats insist that noncitizens voting is a nonissue. They’re wrong. And they’re lying.

In the parlance of the autopen president, it’s a big (expletive deleted) deal.

Even one illegally cast ballot robs the rightful vote of legal voter. We’ve seen a lot of robbing of late.

Joe Biden’s Autopen Has Written A Memoir

You need look no further than New Jersey. In July, Democrat Gov. Mikie Sherrill was forced to admit that the Garden State’s dirty voter rolls included 6,600 noncitizens that had been registered to vote in 2023 and 2024. Sherrill said about 340 of the foreign nationals went on to vote in elections.

At least those are the numbers the leftist governor gave. She’s been less than cooperative in providing the receipts. GOP lawmakers and activists who pushed Sherrill to disclose New Jersey’s voter registration “glitch” believe there are a lot more noncitizens in the system.

“Now, election officials are hiding the records that would tell voters how it happened,” Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters said in a statement. “The RNC won’t stand for it. Garden State voters deserve the truth, and we’re taking these left-wing officials to court to demand answers.”

In August, the governor claimed elections officials had removed more than 5,000 ineligible registrants from the voter rolls and referred another 1,450 registrations to county election offices for review.

Wouldn’t you know it, more ineligible voters have popped up. Funny what you find when you bother to look. But Wait, There’s More …

Last week, Sherrill provided an update on the investigation into the voter registration debacle. She noted that another 750 registrations were sent through to the state’s voter rolls even though the registrants noted on their forms they were not of age to vote. The review found that the individuals were in fact old enough to vote but selected the wrong button on the registration PIN pad. But the errors further expose a flawed system that has allowed thousands of noncitizens and other ineligible individuals to land on the voter rolls.

The review caught another 340 improperly registered individuals. Some 60 were “serving a sentence of incarceration for an indictable offense,” Sherrill acknowledged.

“My Administration continues to move aggressively to fix the serious system error at the Motor Vehicle Commission (MVC) left behind by the previous administration to ensure our elections remain free, fair, and secure,” the governor said in a press release. “I promised we would be thorough to ensure that no one who is ineligible remains on the voter rolls, and that every eligible voter has their voice heard.”

Republicans aren’t so sanguine about the Sherrill administration’s efforts.

“Every time they look, they find more. New Jerseyans deserve a full accounting of what happened to their voter rolls — not a press release that spins a growing problem as a victory,” the New Jersey Assembly GOP shot back on its Facebook page. ‘One Too Many’

New Jersey’s messy voter rolls scream for voter identification, according to the vast majority of Garden State residents. A Rutgers-Eagleton poll released on Tuesday finds more than four in five respondents support or strongly support requiring photo identification to vote in person and documentary proof of citizenship to register.

The results mirror national sentiments.

But Democratic Party politicians stridently stand against the will of the people. And RINOs in the U.S. Senate refuse to fight for the SAVE America Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship to register and vote in U.S elections.

While Democrats keep pushing the talking point that noncitizens rarely show up on voter rolls, a Reuters review last month found states have added more than 30,000 noncitizens to their registration databases since 2000. Election integrity advocates say that’s an extremely conservative estimate.

ince 2004, the political precedents Barack Obama sought to establish have already been in motion, and now, in 2026, newcomers Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani appear to be advancing his unfinished mission in exactly that direction. That may be why Obama seems to be playing the role of a proud father, secretly smiling in approval as his well-schooled children venture out to harvest the seeds he’s spent more than 20 years sowing.

As these wet-behind-the-ears political successors seek to establish themselves as the new face of what Obama has long hoped would take shape, Obama appears to be tacitly passing the torch to trophy-kids El-Sayed and Mamdani and seems to have no problem publicly supporting their efforts. By standing side by side with El-Sayed and Mamdani, the former president reinforces policies associated with democratic socialism and positions and agendas that extend beyond what he publicly championed during his two terms as a supposed capitalist Democrat. The association further undermines Obama’s moderate persona and highlights his role in propelling the Democrat Party down the path of left-wing extremism.

Recently, in an article titled “Barack Obama Looks Left,” The Atlantic examined the former president’s shift toward and support for younger leftist politicians, including Mamdani and El-Sayed. A week later, in a political ad, a gray-haired Obama, speaking on behalf of El-Sayed’s hopes to represent Michigan in the Senate, used inclusive language, emphasized shared purpose, and employed pugnacious innuendo, saying, “Michigan is where we fight back.”

Remember, tough-guy Obama is the one who said, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”

By volunteering as the smiling face on El-Sayed’s Oct. 24 campaign poster, the implication is that Obama believes far-left policies reflect the direction America should take. If that weren’t true, the former president would never stump for El-Sayed or delight preschoolers (including a girl draped in toddler hijab) at a Bronx day care center by singing the Wheels on the Free Bus with smiley Mamdani.

When Barack Obama officially sashayed onto the political stage in July 2004, he was roughly the same age as El-Sayed is now. At the time, El-Sayed was just shy of 20, and Mamdani was turning 13. Amazingly, both young men had ties to Egypt, and all three would eventually connect, in different ways, with Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsi.

Here we have three politicians with Muslim family origins, overlapping progressive political bents, and an ever-increasing public relationship with one another. In fact, when Obama delivered his “fundamental transformation speech,” he did so in Columbia, Missouri, the Midwestern town where El-Sayed’s mother, nurse practitioner Fatten Fathy Elkomy, had worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA). In 2004, the U.S. Treasury Department designated IARA a specially designated global terrorist organization for allegedly supporting terrorism.

The U.S. military last executed a convicted criminal on April 13, 1961. But if anyone deserves the death penalty, it is former U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan. On Nov. 5, 2009, Hasan murdered 13 people and an unborn baby and wounded or injured 32 others at Fort Hood, Texas. The Trump administration has now scheduled his execution for December 3.

Hasan is hardly the only murderer whose crimes raise questions about capital punishment. President Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 federal inmates, including people like drug kingpin Kaboni Savage, who murdered 12 people, including four children.

The death penalty debate has rekindled after Christa Pike’s recently botched execution in Tennessee. After initial concerns, she has regained consciousness and her ability to speak. By Oct. 8, she had started walking again with assistance, and she was released from the hospital on Oct. 10.

Some people support the death penalty because they believe it delivers justice. Others argue that it deters murders and saves lives. But we don’t have to rely solely on statistical studies to see that murderers fear execution more than life without parole. Just look at the choices they make when facing trial.

Time and again, accused mass murderers plead for life without parole to avoid execution. Without the threat of the death penalty, prosecutors would lose a powerful incentive for defendants to negotiate.

In 2025, Bryan Kohberger, accused of brutally murdering four University of Idaho students in 2022, accepted life in prison rather than risk the death penalty, just weeks before his trial. Other notorious murderers have made similar choices.

Patrick Crusius, who murdered 23 people in a racially motivated shooting at an El Paso Walmart in 2019, wanted a plea agreement in March 2025 that spared him execution. Other killers who requested plea agreements or pleaded guilty in efforts to avoid the death penalty include:

Jared Lee Loughner, who murdered six people and wounded 13 others, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, in 2011.
Eric Rudolph, who carried out the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing and other attacks.
Francisco Oropeza, who murdered five neighbors in San Jacinto County, Texas, in 2023.
Joseph James DeAngelo Jr., the notorious Golden State Killer, who pleaded guilty in 2020 to 13 murders and multiple rapes across California to avoid execution. He received 11 consecutive life sentences without parole.

Other notorious mass murderers also sought, if unsuccessfully, to avoid execution. James Holmes, who murdered 12 people and injured 70 in the 2012 Aurora, Colorado, theater shooting, offered to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence, but prosecutors rejected the proposal. Dylann Roof, who murdered nine people at a Charleston church in 2015, offered to plead guilty if prosecutors dropped the death penalty.

Every good story needs a villain. In the story of America’s health care system, that villain has long been the insurance companies and the executives who run them. They deny claims, impose burdensome prior authorization requirements, restrict access to care, and routinely insert themselves between patients and the physicians treating them. When Americans receive an inexplicable medical bill or are told that a treatment their doctor recommended will not be covered, the villain seems obvious. But what if there is another villain in this story — one hiding in plain sight?

Much of the debate over American health care centers on who should pay the bill. Far less attention is paid to those generating the bill in the first place. Much of America’s health care spending originates from physicians, of whom I am one, making decisions about what tests to order, which specialists to consult, which procedures to pursue, and whether a patient should be sent to the ER or admitted to the hospital. With that authority comes a responsibility not only to first and foremost care for our patients, but also to steward health care resources wisely. Yet somewhere along the way, American medicine cultivated a culture in which doing more became synonymous with doing better. Another test is reassurance; another consultation is thoroughness; another admission is caution. With taxpayer-funded government programs financing a substantial share of American health care, patients have less financial incentive to question costly tests and procedures ordered by their doctors. When patients are insulated from the true cost of medical care, the motivation to scrutinize its necessity becomes significantly diluted.

Ask the doctors themselves. In a 2014 national survey, nearly three-quarters of physicians called unnecessary tests and procedures a serious problem, while 72 percent said the average physician orders an unnecessary test or procedure at least once a week. In another 2017 survey of more than 2,000 physicians, doctors estimated that roughly one-fifth of all medical care was unnecessary — including nearly one in four tests and more than one in ten procedures. Even more troubling, nearly 71 percent believed that physicians were more likely to perform unnecessary procedures when they stood to profit from them.

In Access Independent Health Services v. Wrigley, abortion providers and physicians challenged North Dakota’s abortion law. They argued that the North Dakota Constitution protects a right to abortion and that the law’s exceptions were too unclear for doctors to know when they could legally provide an abortion.

The district court agreed with the challengers and struck down the law. The state appealed, bringing the case to the North Dakota Supreme Court.

Justice Jerod Tufte played a central role in the Supreme Court’s decision. In an extensive opinion joined by Chief Justice Jon Jensen, he rejected the argument that the state Constitution protects a broad right to abortion. He examined the Constitution’s text and the meaning North Dakotans would have understood when they adopted it in 1889. He also concluded that the law did not violate the Constitution’s due process protections.

In the dissenting opinion, Justice Jerod Tufte, joined by Chief Justice Jon Jensen, wrote that the state constitution did not broadly protect abortion rights.

Under our republican system of government, the states are laboratories of democracy. They can try all kinds of policies to see how well they work.

Currently, 16 states have total control of state government: the house, the senate, and the governor. They can do whatever they want, and most have, making messes of their states, damaging their middle classes, and driving citizens out in droves. Most give free healthcare and many other benefits to illegal immigrants, and many are being exposed as facilitating vast Medicare fraud.

So why haven’t these Communist/Islamist laboratories of tyranny done what they threaten to do? Why haven’t they implemented a “human right”: universal, government-managed healthcare—“Medicare for all”? None of those states have, and why isn’t their media propaganda arm asking that obvious question?

Even the wild-eyed socialists in California said, ‘We can’t afford it.’

Why?

‘Because if we do it, the job creators will flee California like they’re doing already and they’ll come to Texas where they can actually make a profit, create a business … create jobs.’

Why haven’t they enacted socialized medicine in Vermont, [Democratic Sen.] Bernie Sanders’ home state?

Abdul El-Sayed, the communist Islamist running for Senate in Michigan, ought to ask ‘Why hasn’t Gretchen Whitmer enacted socialized medicine in Michigan?’

By the way, he was [a health] official, El-Sayed, why haven’t they put it there?

Because every state that’s looked at it realized it would bankrupt the state and destroy their health care system.

So, what is their proposal instead?

They say, ‘Well, look, if people can flee and get away from the disaster that is socialized health care, let’s put it on the whole country so there’s no place to flee. The only way we can afford it is, let’s jam it down the throats of red states like Texas and Florida and make it so, unless you’re prepared to head off to Bangladesh or Australia or New Zealand, you ain’t gettin’ away.’

Why have Democrats not implemented socialized medicine in California?

They have the governor's office. They have a supermajority in the House and a supermajority in the Senate.

Nobody is stopping them.

But we can just tax all the billionaires, even take every penny they have. That will provide more than enough money to fund universal health care. Not so much. In 2011, the invaluable Bill Whittle posted Eat The Rich on YouTube. It was in partial response to a Michael Moore rant proclaiming there was plenty of money out there for every leftist boondoogle. The evil rich were hoarding it, and if we took it all, free everything for everyone! With the help of Iowahawk, Whittle proved that if we took everything--all the money and holdings of the wealthy and not-so-wealthy--we could fund the federal government for a single year. And then what? It would all be gone: all the money, and the mechanisms that produce it. What about every year thereafter? That fiscal reality remains:

Nor can the federal government afford it. The White House estimates that over ten years — from 2027 through 2036 — that, absent additional taxes or revenue, Medicare for All would increase federal deficits by $47.4 trillion. So, unless federal income taxes were hiked dramatically, the national debt would more than double over the next decade just to pay for health care alone.

Raising taxes on “the billionaires” would fall far short of covering the price tag for socialized medicine. Despite Sanders’ incessant demands that they pay more, the United States has just 989 billionaires, with a combined net worth of $8.4 trillion, according to Forbes’ 2026 list.

Even if the government were to confiscate every dollar of their wealth, it would cover less than 18% of the estimated cost.

Fortunately, we have examples of the utter failure of socialized medicine: Canada and England. Their “free-care-for-all” systems are deadly disasters. Government health care means rationing, sub-standard care, and interminable waits for appointments and treatment that often kill patients. Canadians routinely cross the border to pay out of pocket for American health care.

The worst part of such “care” is that it gives the government total control over lives. Costs are so out of control in Canada, they’ve taken to killing people rather than treating them. Anger the government, become a financial burden, and sorry, comrade, no life-saving or life-extending treatment for you!

That’s really the point of the Democrat—Communist—push for Medicare for all. They have to know it would bankrupt the country, but they don’t care because it would give them the control they need to impose the rest of their agenda, one that would send America to the ash heap of history like every past Communist state.

A federal judge has ordered the State Department to open registration for the 2027 diversity visa lottery.

U.S. District Judge Jinsook Ohta, a Biden appointee who immigrated from South Korea at age six, granted the preliminary injunction Wednesday, directing Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the department to run the green card lottery on a court-set timeline. The order came in a lawsuit brought by a Southern California immigration firm.

The department has to announce the registration period this week, open a 30-day window for electronic entries by Oct. 18, and notify selected applicants by Nov. 19. After that, it must process and award the visas until the 2027 allotment runs out or the fiscal year ends next September.

The diversity visa program, better known as the green card lottery, hands out up to 50,000 immigrant visas a year to people from countries that send few immigrants to the United States. Congress created it in 1990.

The ruling is a turnaround for Ohta. Weeks earlier, the judge denied an emergency bid from the same firm to force the program open, and questioned whether she had the power to do it at all.

“You’re asking me to demand that the government restart this program,” Ohta said from the bench at that hearing.

The suit was filed in July by Red Eagle Law, which sued Rubio over the department’s failure to open 2027 registration. The firm argued the inaction was “arbitrary, capricious, and not in accordance with law,” and said it had lost clients because much of its practice involves lottery applicants.

Government lawyers countered that the firm had waited too long and that the statutory deadline to run the program had already passed, leaving the court no lawful way to order it reopened. The firm called the failure a “de facto cancellation.”

The lottery has been in limbo since December, when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem paused it after the Brown University shooter was found to have entered the country through the program in 2017. The State Department resumed issuing diversity visas in August under a separate court order, and a second federal judge in Northern California has found the department delayed processing in a related case.

The order drew a run of dismissive replies under Josh Gerstein’s X post, where commenters questioned whether a judge can direct the executive branch to run an administrative program, while others seized on the name of the judge who did.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday cleared the way for political parties and joint fundraising committees to continue to receive favorable advertising rates in the run-up to the 2026 election. In a five-page, unsigned opinion, the justices extended a pause on a ruling by a federal appeals court in Virginia that had instructed the Federal Communications Commission to act quickly on a petition by four Democratic candidates for Congress for review of a notice that the parties and committees are entitled to those advantageous rates.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson indicated, without explanation, that they would have denied the requests.

Wednesday’s opinion by the Supreme Court means that the FCC no longer has any obligation to rule on the availability of the favorable rates, which are currently in place, on any particular timetable – and in particular, it does not have to do so before the November election.

This was the second time since late August that the court has been drawn into the dispute over the discounted rates, which under federal election law are available to candidates for federal office during the 45-day-period before the primary election and the 60-day-period before the general. In March, the FCC’s Media Bureau issued a “public notice” indicating that political parties and joint fundraising committees should also receive the favorable rates.

Three candidates for U.S. Senate seats – Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, former Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, and former Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina – as well as Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet, who is running for reelection in Michigan, went to the full FCC in late April, asking it to review the notice. In early June, with their request still pending before the FCC, the candidates went to federal court, where they argued that the public notice was inconsistent with federal election laws.

A divided panel of the 4th Circuit agreed. In his opinion for the majority, Judge Robert King deemed federal law “unambiguous”: it gives the preferential rates only to a “candidate” for his or her personal use, which does not extend to a candidate’s “mere authorization of someone else’s use.”

The National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee, which had joined the case, went to the Supreme Court in late August, asking the justices to put the 4th Circuit’s ruling on hold. They contended (among other things) that the 4th Circuit lacked the power to consider the candidates’ challenge because the public notice was not the kind of final agency action that the court of appeals has the authority to review.

On Sept. 4, the justices temporarily paused the 4th Circuit’s decision, with only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting. In a four-page, unsigned opinion, the court emphasized that the committees were likely to prevail on their argument that the 4th Circuit cannot review the public notice before the FCC does.

The case then went back to the lower court, where the candidates sought an order instructing the FCC to act on their petition for review of the public notice. A divided panel granted that request on Wednesday, Oct. 7, and directed the FCC to issue its decision by noon on Friday, Oct. 9.

Before that deadline, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer came to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to intervene again. Sauer told the court that the 4th Circuit had “seriously erred in trying to short-circuit the Commission’s deliberations.” The National Republican Senatorial Committee and National Republican Congressional Committee filed their own application the same day, seeking to pause the 4th Circuit's order. They told the justices (among other things) that, "[i]f the case for a stay was strong the first time around, it's open and shut now."

Later on Thursday, Oct. 8, Chief Justice John Roberts, who handles emergency applications from the 4th Circuit, immediately paused the 4th Circuit’s order to give justices time to consider the request – a procedure known as an administrative stay. Roberts also took the relatively rare step of instructing the challengers to respond on Saturday.

In their Saturday filing, the candidates urged the justices to leave the 4th Circuit’s ruling in place. They blamed the FCC for the dispute now before the court, accusing the agency of seeking to “engage in blatant procedural trench warfare to stave off judicial review of an unlawful agency directive until it is too late to matter.”

In its opinion, the court explained that although the FCC must “act on every application it receives,” it is not required “to act within a particular timeframe. The Commission may exercise its discretion to set its own procedures and schedule for resolving such applications.” Therefore, it reasoned, the 4th Circuit’s order instructing the FCC “to issue a final decision on the candidates’ application just five months after it was filed and within just 48 hours—all while the Commission’s deliberation process was still ongoing”—violated the “system of separation of powers.”

If allowed to stand, the court continued, the 4th Circuit’s order would also cause irreparable harm, another factor that courts consider in deciding whether to grant emergency relief, by requiring the FCC to “triage its ongoing deliberation process and prepare a final order on an extremely expedited timeline.”

The Supreme Court granted the FCC’s request and put the 4th Circuit’s order on hold while the appeals process plays out. It dismissed the Republican groups’ request as moot – that is, no longer a live controversy – in light of its grant of the FCC’s request.

This is the #1 Rule broken Daily on this Sub!

I want to Personally Thank Everyone Who does NOT break This Simple Rule!

1. Stay On Topic of the Article being presented. Period. Full Stop.
2. Do Not Attack the Source of the Article.
3. Do Not attack the Member presenting the Article for Discussion.
4. Do Not drag the Conversation Off Topic from the Article Main Theme being presented.
5. Mods are the final Authority on This Issue!
6. Continued Violations will cause You to be removed from the Sub.

We have created a society in which asking a basic question about one of government’s greatest powers can itself become taboo

By Maureen Steele, October 14, 2026 3:00 pm

There are easier ways to keep a low profile than founding a school devoted to teaching Americans why you believe they don’t owe federal income tax.

Peymon Mottahedeh chose the other route.

He founded Freedom Law School in 1996. The organization says he has not filed or paid federal income tax since 1993. It publishes his name, photograph, telephone number, teachings and disputes with the Internal Revenue Service for anyone, including the federal government, to see.

And today, after more than three decades of challenging the Federal Income Tax system, he is still doing it.

That doesn’t prove Peymon is right. But it certainly makes him worth investigating.

Peymon’s story begins far from Washington. According to Freedom Law School’s biography, he was born in Iran in 1962, immigrated to the United States at 14, became an American citizen in 1989 and eventually worked in mortgages and financial planning. The organization says that by the early 1990s he had become convinced that Americans were being deceived about the federal income-tax system.

His conclusion was radical.

Freedom Law School teaches that most ordinary Americans are not legally required to file Form 1040 or pay federal income tax. It calls the 1040 a “confession” form and organizes its program around seven steps designed to persuade Americans to challenge conventional assumptions about the tax system.

Peymon isn’t merely arguing tax rates are too high. He is arguing that millions of Americans misunderstand the law itself. And Freedom Law School has put money behind that proposition.

Its website currently advertises a $50,000 challenge to anyone who can identify what Freedom Law School (FLS) considers satisfactory statutory proof that the average American is liable for federal income tax on ordinary wages, salaries or labor. FLS says versions of the challenge have existed since 1999.

That sounds explosive. Then comes the other side of the story.

The IRS says this interpretation isn’t merely incorrect. It categorizes claims that filing and payment are generally voluntary as frivolous tax arguments.

And the statutory language the government relies upon isn’t difficult to find.

Section 1 of the Internal Revenue Code imposes income tax on taxable income. Section 61 says gross income includes “all income from whatever source derived,” specifically including compensation for services. Section 6012 identifies individuals required to file income-tax returns. Section 6151 requires payment when a return is required.

Federal courts have repeatedly rejected arguments that ordinary income-tax filing or payment is optional. The IRS has compiled many of those decisions in its own lengthy response to what it calls frivolous tax arguments.

However, according to Peymon Federal Tax code section 7701 and the regulation 1.1-1 of the Code of Federal Regulations, this applies to only citizens and residents of Washington DC not the people of the 50 United States.

That is an important correction to one impression a visitor could take from Freedom Law School’s promotional material.

Peymon and his then-wife litigated federal income-tax deficiencies for tax years 2001 through 2006. In 2014, the Tax Court determined deficiencies and additions to tax. In April 2023, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the Tax Court’s decision.

Now the battle has moved to Florida.

In July 2025, the United States sued Peymon and April Mottahedeh in the Middle District of Florida seeking to reduce the alleged unpaid liabilities to judgment. The case remained active in 2026, with Peymon defending himself without an attorney.

That complicates the Freedom Law School story enormously.

It also makes it more interesting.

Because FLS doesn’t merely rely upon Peymon’s experience. Its website displays what it calls victories involving liens, levies, assessments, summonses and other IRS actions involving its students. One prominently advertised example involves a claimed $4.6 million IRS matter that FLS says was ultimately zeroed out after administrative and Tax Court proceedings.

Those claims deserve independent examination too. Not dismissal or blind acceptance. Examination. That’s what this series will do. I’ll examine Freedom Law School’s cases. I’ll examine the statutes. I’ll examine Peymon’s litigation. I’ll examine the IRS’s cases against the theories he teaches.

Because something strange has happened in America.

We have created a society in which asking a basic question about one of government’s greatest powers can itself become taboo. The government says the question has been answered repeatedly.

Peymon says Americans have been asking the wrong question.

Fine.

Then let’s put both arguments on the table. The government has lawyers, courts, statutes and nearly unlimited resources. Peymon has had more than 30 years to refine his argument.

I don’t need either side to tell me what to think.

I want them to show me.

And I suspect millions of Americans do too.