Category: Politics

In a beautiful victory for President Trump, the usually liberal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals just ruled for the President in the ongoing sanctuary city battle.

Los Angeles sued after President Trump decided that any city harboring illegal immigrants via sanctuary policies would no longer receive certain federal funds.

Looks like he was right and now everyone hopes that this may get these cities to start following the law.

The Hill reported that on Friday the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the Trump administration’s efforts to prioritize federal dollars for local policing to towns and cities that complied with certain immigration policies.

The court ruling, a split 2-1 decision, said the Department of Justice (DOJ) has the rights to withhold Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) grants from sanctuary cities and states over their refusal to work with federal immigration enforcement authorities and instead prioritize agencies that focused on unauthorized immigration and who agreed to give ICE access to jail records and immigrants in custody.

The city of Los Angeles first sued Trump’s administration after it was denied a $3 million grant on the grounds that it did not receive the money because it didn’t focus on immigration for its community policing grant application. The decision reversed a district court’s ruling.

“The panel rejected Los Angeles’s argument that DOJ’s practice of giving additional consideration to applicants that choose to further the two specified federal goals violated the Constitution’s Spending Clause,” wrote Judge Sandra Ikuta, joined by Judge Jay Bybee.

“The panel held that DOJ did not exceed its statutory authority in awarding bonus points to applicants that selected the illegal immigration focus area or that agreed to the Certification,” she wrote.

Judge Kim Wardlaw also wrote in dissent that the Justice Department’s efforts to prioritize immigration in determining the awarding of COPS grants was “Orwellian” and said the majority’s ruling goes “astray.”

“The majority goes astray by finding no meaning in Congress’s use of the term ‘community-oriented policing’ and then deferring under Chevron to DOJ’s Orwellian effort to define ‘community-oriented policing’ to include ‘partnering with federal law enforcement to address illegal immigration,’ ” she wrote.

“Congress did not authorize COPS grants for anything other than placing additional state and local cops on the beat and promote community partnerships,” she wrote.

Paul Ryan made headlines this week when he slammed President Trump and whined that he had to escape him by retiring.

Ryan wants to have it both ways – he wanted to ram through unpopular and swampy provisions into bills that President Trump was going to sign and now wants to trash Trump to set up his political or economic future.

He was never on the right side of any issue and President Trump mostly ran against everything Ryan had ever done or believed.

The Hill reported that House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows, whose group was often at odds with Paul Ryan, stated that while Ryan may have attempted to tamp down policies he didn’t agree with, President Trump’s instincts on policy resonated more with GOP voters.

“Paul Ryan’s advice typically served to push the president in a direction that would make the swamp happy but most of the people who voted for Donald Trump unhappy,” Meadows said. “The Speaker missed the real reason why the president consistently enjoyed higher approval ratings than anyone in Republican leadership.”

“I’d remind people that Paul Ryan was never a Trump supporter and he bailed out on our conference,” one Trump ally told The Hill. “He is no longer relevant.”

Other members also slammed Ryan and dismissed his assertion in the book that Trump “didn’t know anything about government.”

Scalise, who highlighted the accomplishments Paul Ryan and President Trump achieved despite “not seeing eye to eye” on certain issues — defended Trump’s understanding of government by citing the President’s remarks on different policy areas during a trip to Camp David and their discussions while working on the 2017 GOP tax law.

“I wouldn’t agree with that assessment if that’s what Paul said, because I was in meetings with Paul, and the president, on a number of issues and the president is well versed on domestic policy,” he told reporters.

Rep. Tom Reed claimed that while President Trump’s approach at governing may be unconventional and in his own style, he doesn’t see his decision to break the status quo as a negative.

“I think, you know, the power of President Trump is he’s a disrupter,” Tom Reed said. “The status quo of D.C. has to change and the president was changing it. And I’m a big fan of a disrupter in this town, because this town, if you think it’s working, then you’re in the wrong business.”

This Friday, Colorado authorities restored an American flag to its place after protesters demonstrating outside ICE facility pulled down the star-spangled banner and flew the flag of Mexico in it’s place.

Local media also reported that the protesters also removed the “Blue Lives Matter” flag, that honors law enforcement, and spray-painted it with the words “Abolish ICE,” then raised the flag upside-down again, on a pole next to the Mexican flag.

Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the federal facility that holds illegals, in Aurora, Colo., to protest ICE raids planned to begin on Sunday in major U.S. cities including Denver, FOX 31 Denver reported.

The protest is part of a network of #LightsForLiberty events, also dubbed the “March to Close Concentration Camps,” and it called for detention centers at the southern border to be closed and for all illegal immigrants being held in those facilities to be granted entry to the U.S., according to the event’s Facebook page.

Despite the fake news campaign being pushed by left-wing media, the ICE raids are not targeting random illegal aliens, but illegals who have been ordered to be deported by federal immigration judges.

The protesters are open-borders leftists who demand that ICE detention centers at the southern be closed. They also want amnesty for the millions of illegal aliens currently in the country.

However, even Jeh Johnson — the secretary of Homeland Security under former President Obama — claimed that there is nothing unusual or illegal about the upcoming ICE raids that are targeting illegal immigrants who have orders for deportation.

“Deportations occur all the time,” Johnson told MSNBC. “Of those who have been ordered deported by an immigration judge, we simply have to enforce the law, particularly if someone has been ordered deported. They’ve exhausted all their appeal rights. Enforcement actions themselves are not extraordinary.”

Jeh Johnson, a life-long Democrat and a Trump-hater, also clapped back at the left-wing media and members of his own party, saying this sensationalized leftist talking point of “children in cages” didn’t start the day President Trump took office.

“Chain link barriers, partitions, fences, cages — whatever you want to call them — were not invented on Jan. 20, 2017, OK?” Johnson said. He also blasted the Democrats’ proposals to decriminalize illegal border crossings, saying that “is tantamount to declaring publicly that we have open borders.”

Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) slammed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and her squad. Lacy Clay is a member of the on Congressional Black Caucus and he called out the freshman representative for using the race card.

“Their ignorance is beyond belief,” Clay started.

“What a weak argument, because you can’t get your way and because you’re getting push-back you resort to using the race card? Unbelievable.” Clay said as The Hill reported.

“That’s unbelievable to me,” He continued. “I could care less. I could really care less. I agree with the Speaker. Four people, four votes out of 240 people, who cares.”

Rep. William Lacy Clay is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus and is considered a centrist Democrat. The progressive group Justice Democrats has endorsed his primary challenger Cori Bush, and Clay took time to bash Justice Democrats as well.

“They’re missing the fact that we have a very thin margin of a majority that we’re operating under and apparently it doesn’t matter to Justice Democrats, they just want to get skins.” He said.

“They want to score points for whatever reason. But I find it juvenile, their tactics, I find their ignorance to be beyond belief about American history and about who are really segregationists.” Clay added.

“And so how dare they try to play the race card at this point, it shows you the weakness of their arguments.” He concluded.

Former President Obama did face a crisis at the southern border, and he did deal with a mass influx of immigrant families and unaccompanied minors, and Obama did what he thought was best.

Trying to paint President Trump as evil for taking similar actions as former President Obama was always a dumb move and was always bound to backfire, but we didn’t know how dumb until now.

The Huffington Post reported that after an hour and a half of protesting in the building’s lobby using megaphones and signs, Philadelphia police arrested 6 activists from the group. When police arrived, undocumented families left the building to avoid being arrested and potentially sent into ICE custody. The protest continues in front of the building, but so far, no one from Joe Biden’s campaign has responded to the group.

PREVIOUSLY: A group of families whose loved ones were among the 3 million people deported under the Obama administration will hold a sit-in at Biden’s campaign headquarters in Philadelphia on Wednesday, saying they’ll refuse to leave until they receive an apology from the former vice president.

The group counted roughly 40 families and is organized by New Jersey-based immigrant rights group Movimiento Cosecha. They plan to ask Joe Biden’s presidential campaign to commit to a progressive immigration platform and acknowledge the pain caused by deportations under Ex-President Obama.

Obama set a record for deportations, although he narrowed his focus later in his presidency to removing convicted criminals, people previously removed from the U.S. and recent border-crossers. (A change in how removals were counted also accounts for some of the record.)

Although Obama also pressed for immigration reform and took steps to broaden protections for some migrants, at the time activists criticized his administration for its deportation figures and expansion of detention, including for families.

“We can’t ignore the fact he was complacent to Obama’s vicious deportation machine,” claimed Catalina Santiago, the media coordinator at Movimiento Cosecha. “He is shamelessly ignoring the countless families he destroyed.”

In an effort to paint President Trump as a monster, the House Democrats just indicted Barack Obama instead.

The Democrats tried to bash the President with a picture of children in cages except that the photo was from 2014 when Obama was President.

The New York Post reported that the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have deleted tweets that promoted an upcoming hearing on “kids in cages” on Wednesday afternoon after being called out for using Obama-era photos of immigrants in detention to highlight current conditions at the southern border.

“Last week, members of our committee visited a detention center at the southern border and discovered grotesque treatment of children,” read the first tweet, posted on Tuesday. “This week, we are examining the inhumane treatment of the children in these detention centers.”

But the tweet included a picture taken by the Associated Press in 2014, during the Obama administration, showing immigrants in detention in Arizona. President Trump’s campaign flagged the soon-deleted tweet and noted the photo comes from a time when current Democratic presidential primary front-runner Joe Biden was vice president.

“House Democrats are promoting their ‘civil rights’ hearing on ‘kids in cages’ and ‘inhumane treatment’ with a photo from 2014, when Joe Biden was Vice President,” the tweet read. “So dishonest!”

According to The Daily Caller, House Democrats then posted a new tweet with a different image — and again, it turns out, from the Obama years. That tweet was soon deleted as well, after it was noticed by their Republican counterparts on the committee.

“You all know that’s a picture from 2014, right? Remind us who was President then,” the tweet said.

Ross Perot and President Donald Trump shared many things, most importantly, an anti-establishment political philosophy. The media is talking up this bond, but it was actually closer than most of us remember.

So it is not surprising that one of Ross Perot’s last political act was to donate to President Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign.

Fox News reported that in his last documented political act, billionaire and two-time presidential candidate Ross Perot wrote out two checks to President Trump’s re-election campaign before succumbing to his battle with leukemia at the age of 89, according to a report.

Ross Perot ran for president as a third-party candidate in 1992 and again in 1996. He was also largely credited with providing a road map for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

Just like President Trump, Ross Perot ran as a billionaire populist against the Republican establishment. His focus on the North American Free Trade Agreement – rather than the national debt – and his use of cable news for laying out his agenda were both familiar elements of President Trump’s campaign.

As Democratic strategist James Carville put it in a 2016 podcast: “If Donald Trump is the Jesus of the disenchanted, displaced non-college white voter, then Perot was the John the Baptist of that sort of movement.”

In March, Ross Perot wrote two checks of the maximum legal limit to President Trump’s re-election campaign, including next year’s general election, the Boston Globe reported.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is pushing back against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s criticism against President Trump for wanting to add a question on the 2020 census about citizenship status.

The Supreme Court blocked the President’s efforts on June 27, but Trump is still pressing forward to add the question.

“So important for our Country that the very simple and basic ‘Are you a Citizen of the United States?’ question be allowed to be asked in the 2020 Census,” President Trump tweeted on July 4.

AG Barr told reporters on Monday that “over the next day or two” the decision on what approach taken by the administration for the census citizenship question will be made known, and he believes there’s a legal “pathway for getting the question on the census.”

House speaker Nancy Pelosi, however, claimed that President Trump wants to add the citizenship question because he allegedly wants to “Make America White Again.”

“This is about keeping — you know, Make America, you know his hat — Make America White Again,” Nancy Pelosi said on Monday at a press conference. “They want to make sure that people, certain people, are counted.”

“What they want to do is to put a chilling effect so that certain populations will not answer the form.” Nancy Pelosi added.

Kevin McCarthy appeared on “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday, and pressed that “time is critical” in getting the citizenship question on the census.

“You only do this once every 10 years. It has been on the form, especially the long form up until President Obama took it off. So it is one time you can ask the question, to see who is in this country and ask all the different questions.” He said.

“You can’t go do this next year or the other. That’s why it is so critical to get this done now because they are printing it as we speak.” He added.

When he was asked about Nancy Pelosi’s claim that President Trump is trying to “Make America White Again,” the Republican lawmaker pushed back, calling it “so untrue.” He continued to point to achievements under the Trump administration for Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, and “all of America.”

Bloomberg reported that Attorney General Bill Barr won’t be recusing himself from the Jeffrey Epstein child sex trafficking case.

Justice Department official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitive matter, said that AG Barr made the decision this Tuesday after he consultant with his career ethics officials at the department.

Bill Barr weighed on whether he would have to remove himself from involvement in the case in part because Jeffrey Epstein previously hired lawyers from the law firm Kirkland & Ellis LLP. The same law firm Bill Barr served as counsel before becoming attorney general.

But AG Barr has recused himself from any retrospective review of the Justice Department’s decision more than 10 years ago letting Jeffrey Epstein avoid prosecution on federal sex-trafficking offenses in Florida and the decades of prison time that he could have faced if convicted.

Labor Secretary Alex Acosta was the top federal prosecutor in southern Florida who approved the widely criticized deal under which Jeffrey Epstein was permitted to plead guilty to two state charges of soliciting a prostitute. He served 13 months in a Florida state prison while being released during the day to conduct his business.

Some former federal prosecutors have expressed their concern that AG Barr might interfere in the New York case if he didn’t recuse himself.

While President Trump socialized with Jeffrey Epstein at times in the past and once referred to him as I he told reporters at the White House on Tuesday that he had a falling out with the financier and hasn’t spoken with him in about 15 years. “I was not a fan of his,” he said.

Still, former federal prosecutor Mimi Rocah wrote in an opinion column for the Daily Beast that she has concerns that the attorney general may intervene in the case “given Barr’s conduct in the past acting more as a defense attorney for Trump than an overseer of justice.”

A former administration official claimed that Acosta will be put against more and more pressure as new documents are released in the Epstein case, especially if some of the documents go into what Acosta knew when the plea deal was made.

On Monday Clinton released a statement confirming that he had taken a total of four trips on Epstein’s plane, but said he “knows nothing” about the “terrible crimes” linked to him.

Trump banned Epstein from his Mar-a-Lago estate “because Epstein sexually assaulted an underage girl at the club,” according to court documents filed by Bradley Edwards, the lawyer who has represented several Epstein accusers.