Justice Clarence Thomas, writing 32 years ago, on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act:

"A review of the current state of our cases shows that by construing the Act to cover potentially dilutive electoral mechanisms, we have immersed the federal courts in a hopeless project of weighing questions of political theory-questions judges must confront to establish a benchmark concept of an "undiluted" vote. Worse, in pursuing the ideal measure of voting strength, we have devised a remedial mechanism that encourages federal courts to segregate voters into racially designated districts to ensure minority electoral success. In doing so, we have collaborated in what may aptly be termed the racial "balkaniz[ation]" of the Nation."
Justice Clarence Thomas laid out clearly back in 1994 how the evolution of Voting Rights Act jurisprudence ended up putting the judiciary -- wrongly -- in the role of the legislative branch.

Yesterday's decision in Louisiana v. Callais did not do away with this view of the Act and the judiciary's role, despite correcting for its excesses when it comes to racial gerrymanders.

Read Justice Thomas' concurrence in Holder v. Hall:

"If one surveys the history of the Voting Rights Act...one can only be struck by the sea change that has occurred in the application and enforcement of the Act since it was passed in 1965. The statute was originally perceived as a remedial provision directed specifically at eradicating discriminatory practices that restricted blacks' ability to register and vote in the segregated South. Now, the Act has grown into something entirely different. In construing the Act to cover claims of vote dilution, we have converted the Act into a device for regulating, rationing, and apportioning political power among racial and ethnic groups. In the process, we have read the Act essentially as a grant of authority to the federal judiciary to develop theories on basic principles of representative government, for it is only a resort to political theory that can enable a court to determine which electoral systems provide the 'fairest' levels of representation or the most 'effective' or 'undiluted' votes to minorities."

..."Vote dilution cases [like districting cases such as Louisiana v. Callais] have required the federal courts to make decisions based on highly political judgments-judgments that courts are inherently ill-equipped to make. A clear understanding of the destructive assumptions that have developed to guide vote dilution decisions and the role we have given the federal courts in redrawing the political landscape of the Nation should make clear the pressing need for us to reassess our interpretation of the Act."

Oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara -- the critical birthright citizenship case -- commence.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer begins by explaining what "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" means.

And he lays out the perverse incentives and outcomes the misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment has created. Sauer: Discussion around Citizenship Clause was about newly freed slaves and children having domicile relation to U.S.

"Allegiance is what the word 'jurisdiction' means."

"Reside" was understood to mean "domicile."

Text presupposes citizen is domiciled in U.S.

As the left and Islamic supremacists jointly wage war -- both information war and kinetic war -- on the Judeo-Christian West today, the following explainer, adapted from my book on this subject, American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party, may be helpful.

***

The left and Islamists seemingly have little in common on paper.

The former is largely anti-religious, while the latter is religiously fundamentalist.

The former accepts lifestyles and condones conduct that the latter considers intolerable and blasphemous.

But they are able to set aside their differences and partner in a bid to triumph over common foes who stand in the way of their respective totalitarian visions.

The biggest stumbling block for each has been traditional, Judeo-Christian Western civilization, of which Judeo-Christian America is the “Great Satan,” and Jewish Israel is the “Little Satan.” Anti-Americanism has always gone hand in hand with anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism.

The Ideological Basis for Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism
Legitimate criticism of a government does not constitute hatred of the people it represents. Anti-Zionism however seeks to legitimize hatred of Jews under the guise of targeting the Jewish nation-state. It manifests itself in the harassment of, and holding of Israel to, an unreachable double standard to which no other nation is held. This double standard proves ruinous by privileging and effectively sponsoring those who seek its destruction. At root, it denies to the Jewish people their theological, legal and historical claims to the homeland in which they have maintained a continuous presence—bases on which other claimants cannot compete. This in spite of the fact that Jews have been a maligned minority since antiquity, which would otherwise seem to have made them a favored cause of “progressives.”

Anti-Zionists do not criticize Israel in good faith, but rather out of prejudice, which separates them from critics whose positions in this author’s view may well be wrongheaded and naive, but who genuinely wish to see Israel not only survive but thrive. And what is best for Israel—living in peace and prosperity in a part of the world marked by hostility towards it, and the West that it represents—would indeed be best for the U.S. and all free nations, given the dangers in the region, Israel’s strategic importance, and the remarkable contributions Israel has made to the world’s progress in spite of the perilous position in which it finds itself. Anti-Zionism in actuality plays out as a cudgel not only against Jews and Israel, but against all Americans, and the West itself, who, even setting aside moral and spiritual considerations, richly benefit from its existence.

The historical roots of anti-Zionism are integral to understanding today’s “Islamo-Left” of France, “Corbynization” in the United Kingdom, and its Ilhan Omar incarnation here in America. The original purveyors of anti-Zionism introduced it to make anti-Semitism viable in a post-Holocaust world, as part of a broader anti-Western project. It appealed to and linked the Left and the Islamists, who again share sometimes-overlapping worldviews and ambitions, but perhaps most importantly today, common enemies. They will stay allied in their mutual quest to overcome their enemies at least until the point at which they collectively triumph, when they will logically turn on each other given their multiple points of departure.

Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn made the connection between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, and the Left and the Islamists, several decades ago, predicting the threat that has now metastasized. Professor Alan Johnson’s 2019 report on anti-Semitism in the British Labour Party notes that Hobsbawn:

…issued a warning in 1980 that a new form of antisemitism was emerging. Across huge tracts of the world, he noted, antisemitism had never gone away, surviving in two major regions in the post-war years – ‘under Islam and, unfortunately, in some countries committed to an ideology which rejected racism, notably the Soviet Union.’ Today, almost all the cases of antsemitism (sic) are Islamist or Stalinist in inspiration, whether the perpetrator knows it or not. Though he was a lifelong member of the Communist Party, Hobsbawm pointed out that in Stalinist Eastern Europe, ‘antisemitism ... was ... tolerated and sometimes encouraged’ after the Holocaust, ‘albeit now dressed up as anti-Zionism’ in the era of the Jewish state. Hobsbawm predicted that this ‘new’ form of antisemitism – antisemitism ‘dressed up’ as anti-Zionism as a camouflage in a post-Holocaust world – would grow in influence.

This “dressing up” of anti-Semitism as anti-Zionism conforms to the rhetoric of modern Leftists, Islamists, their mutual admirers and defenders, and the subject of this book. Writes Professor Johnson:

…Antisemitism ‘dressed up’ as anti-Zionism has three components: (i) a political programme to abolish the Jewish homeland (and no other homeland); (ii) a discourse to demonise it as evil and ‘Nazi’ (and only it); and (iii) a movement to make it a global pariah state so it can be ‘smashed’ (an anathema applied to no other state in the world). The old antisemitism – which has not gone away, but is co-mingled with the new form – believed ‘the Jew is our Misfortune’. The new antisemitism proclaims ‘the Zionist is our misfortune’. The old antisemitism wanted to make the world ‘Judenrein’ – free of Jews. The new antisemitism wants to make the world ‘Judenstaatrein’– free of the Jewish State, which all but a tiny sliver of world Jewry either lives in, has family members living in, or treats as a vitally important part of their identity.

As several scholars have argued, Israel has come to represent the collective Jew, with all this entails. How did the Left and the Islamists coalesce around the “new anti-Semitism?”


On Left-Wing Anti-Semitism
Jew-hatred has a long history on the Left. The cruel irony is that this is true in spite of the fact that Jews have often been leading leftist thinkers, and proponents of leftist causes. Karl Marx himself was the descendant of a long line of Rabbis, yet vacillated between virulent anti-Semitism and, to put it politely, unsympathy to Judaism—himself personifying this seeming paradox. Beyond self-hating Jews like Marx, for others, revolutionary socialism became their religion. This is akin to more secular Jews today who effectively equate their faith with progressivism, in large part on the basis of a flawed view of the concept of tikkun olam, which they translate as “healing or repairing the world one central planner at a time.” Socialism was also—seemingly ironically given the dominant strain of Jew-hatred in Leftism—bound up in the Zionist cause. Haters of Jews justified their views on any number of bases, often varying by country. Those who espoused universalist materialist ideologies like socialism may have rationalized their hostility to Jews based on their predominance in “capitalist” fields—ones to which they were ironically relegated due to discriminatory policies—or at a far more fundamental level on the basis of envy of and hatred towards achievement, combined with Jewish particularism. And of course, as an often insular minority community, Jews could easily be scapegoated and attacked on secular grounds as easily as Jews’ great tormenters of yesteryear had done on religious ones. Regardless of how Jew-haters justified their views, the key point is that as Adolf Hitler explained in 1920: “If we are socialists, then we must definitely be anti-Semites—and the opposite, in that case, is Materialism and Mammonism, which we seek to oppose.”

If indeed there is a correlation between leftism and Jew-hatred, it would follow that anti-Semitism would be a primary feature in the world’s preeminent leftist regimes. Paul Johnson tells us in his essential A History of the Jews that “anti-Semitism corrupts the people and societies possessed by it.” According to Johnson, “nowhere were its corrosive effects more apparent than in Russia”—the world’s great (terrible) incubator and executor of Leftism. Johnson’s explication of this point is particularly poignant in light of what we are seeing with today’s anti-Semitism on the Left:

The ubiquitous petty corruption engendered by the Tsarist laws against the Jews has…been noted. More important in the long run was its moral corruption of state authority. For in harassing the Jews, the Tsarist Russian state became habituated to a close, repressive and highly bureaucratic system of control. It controlled the internal movements and residence of the Jews, their right to go to school or university and what they studied there, to enter professions or institutes, to sell their labour, to start businesses or form companies, to worship, to belong to organizations and to engage in an endless list of other activities. This system exercised monstrous, all-pervading control of the lives of an unpopular and underprivileged minority and a ruthless invasion of their homes and families. As such, it became a bureaucratic model, and when the Tsars were replaced first by Lenin, then by Stalin, the control of the Jews was extended to the control of the entire population, and the model became the whole.

None of this is to mention the Jew-hatred in the national socialist Nazi regime, or in contemporary Islamist-aligned Leftist regimes like those of Chavez and Maduro in Venezuela, or Islamist regimes that have blended Marxism into their ruling ideologies, like Khomeinist Iran. We will return to this point momentarily.

Talk about chutzpah:

Whether or not the actions taken by applicants’ attorneys are thought to be justified under the circumstances, delivering such an ultimatum to a district court judge (“Act on my motion on a complex matter within 42 or 133 minutes or I’ll file an appeal and divest you of jurisdiction”) represented a very stark departure from what is usually regarded as acceptable practice.
Justice Alito, joined by Justice Thomas, explains why the Court got its decision in the Tren de Aragua deportation case wrong. To wit, it didn't let the lower courts proceed as they should have proceeded.

Strange, isn't it, when SCOTUS rushes to make a decision, and when it proceeds according to "regular order?"

In the past few months alone, we have vacated or stayed district court orders that granted temporary injunctive relief without adequate consideration of the relevant issues...But in this case, a District Court judge is deemed to have constructively denied an injunction by failing to act within the space of a little over two hours on an application that required consideration of important and difficult questions and that was supported by factual submissions that, as I will explain below, were very weak.

🧵Against fierce resistance, the Trump administration is enlisting the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration — leveraging DOGE — in its crackdown on illegal immigration🧵 On April 7, the IRS signed an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that alarmed progressive pro-immigration groups and like-minded advocates – and reportedly prompted the tax bureau’s acting chief to resign in protest.

🧵In a recent Executive Order, @realDonaldTrump declared it the policy of his administration to "commence the deconstruction of the overbearing and burdensome administrative state."

The size, scope, and scale of related efforts -- and the rapidity with which the administration has undertaken them -- represents nothing short of a counterrevolution.

The Trump admin is seeking to take on a fourth branch of government put on steroids over the last century that has usurped and combined the powers of the legislative and judicial branches with those of the executive branch -- the definition of tyranny.

Below, a thread chronicling some of the admin's most significant moves against the administrative state to date.

*Note that this excludes the restructurings of agencies, freezing of programs, zeroing out of contracts, firing of woke and weaponized officials, and mandates for transparency in government spending and operations that represent attacks on the administrative state all their own.
Day One: Personnel is policy.

To that end, on Jan. 20, 2025, President Trump issues three EOs:

1) Freezing hiring, in advance of the executive branch developing a plan "to reduce the size of the Federal Government's workforce through efficiency improvements an attrition."
2) Re-establishing "Schedule F in the Excepted Service," allowing the federal government to make more easily fireable Resistance forces in positions "of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character"
3) Establishing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which will coordinate with OMB and agencies not only on shrinking the federal workforce, but myriad other aspects of the plan to deconstruct the administrative state

The Special Counsel that wasn't supposed to need special counsel authority, David Weiss, calls Joe Biden's comments attacking the prosecution of Hunter Biden "gratuitous and wrong."

Weiss adds that while "[o]ther presidents have pardoned family members...none have taken the occasion as an opportunity to malign the public servants at the Department of Justice based solely on false accusations."

The Pox on Every House Report should be a doozy
Weiss says that Hunter Biden’s money came from “using his last name and connections to secure lucrative business opportunities” from Ukraine, China, etc. for “limited work.”

He says nothing about FARA issues though, nor the nexus to his father, who was managing the China and Ukraine portfolios

Something to remember in reading DOJ IG report clearing feds of involvement with J6 directly/via sources. Beyond fact IGs often appear to be captured by their agencies, consider that one FBI whistleblower's disclosure informants were at Capitol led to massive retaliation. Why?
Decorated Marine Corps veteran and award-winning FBI Staff Operations Specialist Marcus Allen reported up the chain in Sept. 2021 that confidential FBI informants may have been at Capitol on J6 -- calling into question veracity of FBI Director Wray's testimony

Kim Cheatle @GOPoversight Hearing

Secret Service director calls assassination attempt on Donald Trump the "most significant operational failure...in decades" USSS Director Cheatle can't or won't answer @RepJamesComer's first question as to whether Secret Service personnel were ever on the roof from which the assassination attempt occurred.

"There was a plan in place to provide overwatch."

Says Secret Service prefers "sterile rooftops"

Judge Cannon just absolutely eviscerated Joe Biden's Justice Department:

"Both the Appointments and Appropriations challenges as framed in the Motion raise the following threshold question: is there a statute in the United States Code that authorizes the appointment of Special Counsel Smith to conduct this prosecution? After careful study of this seminal issue, the answer is no. None of the statutes cited as legal authority for the appointment— 28 U.S.C. §§ 509, 510, 515, 533—gives the Attorney General broad inferior-officer appointing power or bestows upon him the right to appoint a federal officer with the kind of prosecutorial power wielded by Special Counsel Smith. Nor do the Special Counsel’s strained statutory arguments, appeals to inconsistent history, or reliance on out-of-circuit authority persuade otherwise." storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco… AG Garland could've been a Supreme Court Justice.

"The bottom line is this: The Appointments Clause is a critical constitutional restriction stemming from the separation of powers, and it gives to Congress a considered role in determining the propriety of vesting appointment power for inferior officers. The Special Counsel’s position effectively usurps that important legislative authority, transferring it to a Head of Department, and in the process threatening the structural liberty inherent in the separation of powers."

Justice Thomas' concurrence in Trump v. U.S. is hugely significant. He questions whether Special Counsel Jack Smith's office is constitutional.

"If there is no law establishing the office that the Special Counsel occupies, then he cannot proceed with this prosecution. A private citizen cannot criminally prosecute anyone, let alone a former President." supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf… Justice Thomas:

"We cannot ignore the importance that the Constitution places on who creates a federal office. To guard against tyranny, the Founders required that a federal office be 'established by Law.' As James Madison cautioned, '[i]f there is any point in which the separation of the Legislative and Executive powers ought to be maintained with greater caution, it is that which relates to officers and offices.' 1 Annals of Cong. 581. If Congress has not reached a consensus that a particular office should exist, the Executive lacks the power to create and fill an office of his own accord."

In SEC v. Jarkesy it appears SCOTUS struck a blow against the administrative state.

"We consider whether the Seventh Amendment permits the SEC to compel respondents to defend themselves before the agency rather than before a jury in federal court," the Majority writes.

It concludes a defendant is entitled to a trial by jury -- not have to go in front of a court where the administrative state plays judge, jury, and executioner What Justice Gorsuch describes in his concurrence reflects the inherently tyrannical nature of the administrative state supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf…

Murthy v. Missouri
Perhaps the most significant statement in the otherwise disappointing but predictable majority opinion comes in a footnote.

"Because we do not reach the merits, we express no view as to whether the Fifth Circuit correctly articulated the standard for when the Government transforms private conduct into state action." The idea that the plaintiffs couldn't prove traceability -- despite overwhelming evidence of government officials and their cutouts working in myriad ways to suppress the very speech at issue reveals a lack of knowledge of the full record IMO from the majority

Greatly enjoyed speaking with, and learning from, @karaafrederick @MikeBenzCyber yesterday @Heritage @OversightPR "Weaponization of U.S. Government Symposium" emceed by @jasoninthehouse and organized by @MHowellTweets youtube.com/live/gSG21eAqc… I wanted to amplify a few points core to the discussion yesterday in a thread.

First, it's critical to understand CISA's role as nerve center of fed-led speech policing. The switch from targeting foreign malign actors to domestic Wrongthinkers; re-characterization of tweets critical of Official Narratives as national security threats to be neutralized via censorship; and the fact the Censorship Regime emerges from the powerful and secretive national security apparatus are all vital points to understand and internalize weingarten.substack.com/p/full-testimo…

🧵My impression walking out of SCOTUS yesterday, having witnessed oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri was demoralization. The Censorship Industrial Complex proved itself in the case to have cajoled, coerced, and colluded with social media platforms to censor Wrongthinking Americans en masse, and yet that the government's "partners" abridged clear protected political speech wasn't clearly presented and argued. Whether we will retain anything resembling a First Amendment likely hinges on Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett. Herein, a thread I will update as I parse the transcript🧵 nypost.com/2024/03/18/opi… Multiple times the U.S. government lamented how the plaintiffs in the case were using the courts to "audit" their efforts to conspire with social media platforms to censor us on the Hunter Biden laptop story, election integrity and outcomes, and COVID. Unmentioned is that without Murthy v. Missouri we would've never known about this conspiracy to kill our First Amendment. Is the government's issue with the audit or with what the audit revealed about its depredations?

🧵On Foreign Interference in U.S. Elections From Mass Illegal Immigration
With America having suffered an invasion by design under President Biden, @elonmusk and others have grown conscious of how the influx of illegal aliens impacts our political system. What follows is a brief thread on this illegitimate practice and how Democrats have fought tooth & nail dating back to the Trump years to maintain it -- including last night in striking down a @SenatorHagerty-led amendment The Constitution calls for a census count to apportion representatives -- to determine the number of House seats and therefore presidential electors granted each state -- based on the "whole number of persons in each state excluding Indians not taxed." That count is also used to allocate hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funding annually. Do illegal aliens count? thefederalist.com/2019/02/21/don…

🧵The Ultimate Thread on Biden’s Betrayal of Israel
The notion that President Joe Biden is a stalwart supporter of Israel, let alone acting in the best interests of the U.S. in the Middle East, is and has been a complete and total canard.

This Big Lie, propagated by the administration and its mouthpieces, provides cover for what amounts to an anti-American plot to put the screws to Israel, as part and parcel of an effort to make the world’s leading state sponsor of terror, Iran, the regional hegemon.

Since Oct. 7th – a Holocaust-in-a-day perpetrated by Iran’s proxy Hamas – despite initial rhetoric to the contrary and the continued provision of munitions (for now), the Biden admin has shown in word and more importantly deed that it is doing everything it possibly can within political reason to slander, stymie, sabotage, and ultimately imperil the very existence of our chief ally in the Middle East.

Now the Biden admin is going in for the kill shot: A push to force the Jewish state to effectively lose the war to Hamas, free hundreds if not thousands of jihadists, and reward a Palestinian Arab population overwhelmingly supportive of the Oct. 7 massacre and Hamas with a state in a bid to “sue for peace” with Iran -- threatening Israel's very existence in exchange for purported "normalization" with Arab powers.

What follows is an effort to chronicle the Biden admin's treachery towards Israel.

This thread should serve as the death knell of the false narrative that Biden supports the Jewish state – and more fundamentally that he is representing the interests of the American people over those of our adversaries with the blood of our countrymen on their hands. 10/7/23: The very day in which Hamas executes the most deadly and barbaric attack on Israel in its modern history – raping, murdering, burning, mutilating, beheading, and taking hostage innocents totaling 1,200 dead and approximately 240 abducted – including among them ~40 Americans – U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs urges “all sides” including Israel “to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks.” It quickly deletes the message, but this reflexive response will prove revealing

https://twitter.com/omriceren/status/1710599560001634458?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1710599560001634458%7Ctwgr%5E21d17914bb03abe247cf314ebbd3bcb55db533f4%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonexaminer.com%2Fnews%2F2436102%2Fus-office-of-palestinian-affairs-deleted-post-suggesting-israel-refrain-from-violence%2F

Surely mere mortals, and Donald Trump would get the benefit of the doubt Joe Biden does here justice.gov/storage/report…
Was Joe Biden's mind going as far back as 2017? justice.gov/storage/report…

Grab some popcorn: Special Counsel Weiss' office has responded to Hunter Biden's claims Delaware gun case should be dismissed:

1) For "selective and vindictive prosecution"
2) Because global immunity get-out-of-jail-free card from failed sham plea deal somehow remains in effect storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…
storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco… Yes, Hunter Biden's legal team really argued that his Dad's Justice Department is selectively prosecuting him because...Republicans are weaponizing the DOJ

The full transcript of the Dec. 5th @WaysandMeansGOP hearing with IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler is out waysandmeans.house.gov/wp-content/upl… .@JasonSmithMO: "Vice President Biden appears to have treated Air Force Two like a corporate jet, traveling to Ukraine and Mexico to advance Hunter Biden's business interests. Evidence from today's documents show right around the time of international trips, like those to Ukraine, Joe Biden was emailing his son and his son's business partner from private email accounts using aliases while Vice President."

So you're telling me that the great-aunt of the youngest American hostage -- and first American -- to be released by Hamas is a buyer of Hunter Biden's art, who was then appointed by Joe Biden to the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad? The swap of hostages for jihadists is likely to prove disastrous for Israel.

What this little girl endured and will endure for the rest of her life is unthinkable -- as is the case for all the hostages and their families.

That the Bidens' corruption makes this fact pattern at all salient is nauseating and disgusting.