RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/06/injunction-dysfunction-is-a-threat-to-our-system/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

Nationwide rulings by judges in single districts distort American politics

Nationwide injunctions — or perhaps, as Justice Neil Gorsuch has acidly observed, we should call them “universal” or even “cosmic” injunctions — are a distortion of our constitutional order. Alas, they are proliferating because of other, more deeply seated distortions.

A nationwide injunction occurs when a single unelected judge, seated in just one of 94 federal districts throughout the nation — say, the District of Hawaii, home to just 0.4 percent of our population — issues a ruling that binds the entire country, forbidding the government (most often, the president through subordinate executive agencies) from executing a policy, regulation, or statutory interpretation.

A judge’s role in our system is vital but modest. As Chief Justice John Marshall admonished in Marbury v. Madison (1803), establishing the authority of courts to review the constitutionality of congressional statutes: “It is emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is.”

To say what the law is. Not to write or enforce it. The courts are the nonpolitical branch. It is not for them to make policy, the prerogative given to the political branches accountable to the people whose lives are affected. The judge’s burden is to dispose of cases or controversies — justiciable claims of concrete harm brought by a plaintiff allegedly aggrieved by the defendant — by saying what the law is. Because a court merely interprets the law within the four corners of the dispute, it settles the legal rights of the parties and nothing more.

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/5253634-yellen-trump-manufacturing-pipedream

Former Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told the crew at CNBC this week that President Trump’s goal of bringing manufacturing back to the United States was a “pipedream.”  

It was an odd remark, given how her former boss, Joe Biden, ran for president on the prospect that he could revive manufacturing in the U.S. — the central pillar of his promise to rebuild the economy “from the bottom up and middle out.” 

Did Yellen not believe Biden’s campaign pitch? Was she not on board with the CHIPS Act, which threw tens of billions of dollars at semiconductor firms to encourage their shifting production to the U.S.? 

Yellen also claims she does not understand the rationale for Trump’s tariff war, which she calls   a “self-inflicted wound.” When Biden ran for president in 2020, he promised to do away with tariffs President Trump had imposed on China. Not only did he keep those tariffs in place, he added to them in 2024, trying to protect America’s industries by putting a 100 percent tariff on imports of Chinese electric vehicles and slapping solar panels with a 50 percent duty, among other assorted products. Did Yellen protest those taxes on imports from China?  

In short, is Yellen pessimistic about U.S. manufacturing and negative on tariffs because it is Trump at the helm or because she has strongly held convictions that the U.S. cannot compete? If the latter is true, she should have gone public instead of insisting that billions of taxpayer dollars be thrown at an impossible cause. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/mahmoud-khalils-letter-from-a-louisiana-jail/

Persecuted by a diabolical regime simply for believing a certain way, deprived of every possible right, including the right to a blankie, by a police state that, if it can suppress the rights of the brave truth-teller Mahmoud Khalil, will soon be setting up concentration camps from sea to shining sea for those who will emulate him, Mahmoud Khalil is — as he repeatedly assures us — a profile in courage. His stirring letter, smuggled out of jail, will no doubt be seen by future historians as a foundational document in the universal march for freedom. It made a deep impression on me. It should do the same for you.

My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices under way against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.

Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.

Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities.

On March 8, I was taken by DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] agents who refused to provide a warrant, and accosted my wife and me as we returned from dinner. By now, the footage of that night has been made public. Before I knew what was happening, agents handcuffed and forced me into an unmarked car.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-tariffs-trade-consumption-production

Behind all the drama of President Donald Trump’s tariffs lies the hope that they serve some clear purpose for American and global trade. But Trump’s signature inscrutability makes it hard to discern what that purpose is—or whether one even exists.

Either way, his actions threaten to unravel the global trading system that has been in place for the past 80 years. That unraveling would bring economic and financial pain—but also potential upside, given that the current system is ultimately unsustainable.

The current system emerged from a set of relatively narrow foreign policy priorities in the years following World War II. Washington focused on rebuilding Europe and Japan after the war’s devastation. Part of that motivation was humanitarian—but more importantly, it was a strategic effort to use rising prosperity in those regions to counter the spread of Communism.

As part of this effort, the U.S. directed massive aid flows overseas, most famously through the Marshall Plan. To support industrial recovery abroad, Washington also allowed goods from Europe and Japan to enter the U.S. market with minimal restrictions, while permitting those nations to maintain tariffs and other protections for their fragile domestic industries. The dollar’s role as the world’s dominant trading currency—the so-called global reserve—further aided this arrangement by keeping the dollar strong. That, in turn, made foreign goods cheap for American consumers and U.S. exports more expensive abroad.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/04/21/voters-align-with-trump-on-dei-transgender-bans-ii-tipp-poll/

President Donald Trump’s executive orders forbidding transgender athletes from competing against females and eliminating so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in the federal government have been met with political opposition, outrage, and angry ridicule. But who’s winning the debate? Trump is, as the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

In the most recent national online I&I/TIPP poll, taken from Mar. 26-Mar. 28, 1,452 adults were asked: “Do you support or oppose President Trump’s executive order banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s and girls’ sports?”

It wasn’t close. Among those responding, 64% said they either “support strongly” (48%) or “support somewhat” (16%) the move, compared to the 24% who said they either “oppose strongly” (15%) or “oppose somewhat” (9%) Trump’s order.

Only 4% said they were “not familiar” with the order, while 7% answered they were “not sure.” The poll has a margin of error of +/-2.6 percentage points.

Of 36 major demographic groups followed each month by I&I/TIPP Poll, only two showed less than 50% support: Democrats (46% support, 43% oppose) and self-described “liberals” (39% support, 50% oppose).

By comparison, Republicans (88% support, 6% oppose) and independents (61% support, 25% oppose) showed overwhelming backing, as did every other major demographic category.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/18/trumps-courage-to-fight/

When the White House invoked the “Immortal Chaplains” to illustrate the history between the United States and Greenland, it touched on a theme emerging in the second Trump administration: the importance of courage.

On February 3, 1943, the American steamship SS Dorchester embarked with 902 souls – soldiers, merchant seamen, and civilians – bound for a U.S. Army base in southern Greenland to support the buildup of military personnel during World War II. The ship’s captain ordered those on board to sleep in their uniforms and life jackets in case of an attack by German submarines, but many disregarded the order because of heat from the ship’s engine.

Just after midnight, a U-boat’s torpedo slammed into the Dorchester’s starboard side below the water line. Four Navy chaplains — a rabbi, a Methodist minister, a Catholic priest, and a Protestant reverend — gave up their own life vests and guided panicked crewmembers to the lifeboats. The Dorchester sank in 20 minutes. One of the 230 survivors later recalled what he saw as he swam away from the ship: “The bow came up high and she slid under. The last thing I saw, the Four Chaplains were up there praying for the safety of the men. They had done everything they could.”

Courage means feeling fear but behaving in a way that is noble and good, as the chaplains did when they acted on their deepest convictions aboard the Dorchester. Donald Trump once wrote that courage is not the absence of fear but “the ability to act effectively, in spite of fear.”

In 2016, Trump showed moral courage when he spoke the truth to American voters: a parasitic “establishment” of political and corporate interests had been exploiting our workers, farmers, and soldiers. When Trump challenged 16 opponents in the Republican primary, he exposed untruths in a conservative orthodoxy passed down from Ronald Reagan through George W. Bush. Establishment foes hounded him with investigations and impeachment proceedings throughout the four years of his presidency, but Trump refused to compromise his principles or check his ambition to “make America great again.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/mississippi-musk-finds-400-million-in-state-government-waste/

“When the sun goes down, the tide goes out, the people gather ’round and they all begin to shout, ‘Hey, hey, in the dusk, it’s a lift to beat the left with ol’ Mississippi Musk!’” Okay, okay, so it’s not as catchy as the actual song, but one thing that is catching is the Trumpian quest to cut the fat from government spending and make more efficient, and saner, use of the taxpayers’ money. In Mississippi, state auditor Shad White, also known as “Mississippi Musk,” has been hard at work against state government bloat, and what he has found is enlightening.

Ol’ Shad, as I imagine the folks down there in Clarkdale an’ Natchez call him, has found that Mississippi has wasted a staggering amount of money, and he would be the first one to tell you that it is extremely unlikely that Elvis’ home state is alone in this. Fox News reported Monday that White is releasing “a compilation of audits conducted by his office that tabulated a collective $400 million in waste over the course of his tenure.”

That compilation is as sure to be as big a hit as “Heartbreak Hotel,” at least among patriots who are tired of seeing the fruits of their labors devoured among the corrupt, incompetent, and undeserving. (By the way, that wasn’t just an Oxford comma there, folks; that was an Oxford, Mississippi comma.)