WND

Ex-CIA chief John Brennan, evidence now shows, suppressed intelligence that Americans should have been given, wildly claimed there was no spying on the 2016 Donald Trump campaign, has been known to unleash untruths, and even was accused by a counter-terrorism expert of treason.

Now, he’s gone ballistic over the routine housecleaning decisions being made by President Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.

It’s all from his outrage that she is not keeping in place the intelligence officers who worked for Joe Biden.

Gabbard, in fact, recently announced the firings of Mike Collins, who was on the National Intelligence Council, and Maria Langan-Riekhof, his deputy.

According to reports, both have been named by whistleblowers as having political biases, acting on them, and undermining President Trump.

One Daily Fetched report identified them as “Deep State” operatives. And Fox News had reported they were “radically” in opposition to President Trump and his actions.

Brennan commented on the staff changes in an interview in which he was “visibly angry.”

Gabbard’s stated goals have been to prevent the politicization of intelligence, which has happened under Barack Obama and Biden.

For example, ex-CIA Director Michael Morrell was accused of helping organization a letter signed by dozens of intel operatives that claimed the scandal-proving laptop computer abandoned by Hunter Biden at a repair shop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

Actually, the laptop provided documentation of real scandals involving the Biden family.

And officials knew when they signed the letter that the evidence was factual.

Collins had been accused by whistleblowers of deliberately undermining Trump, and Langan-Riekhof was known for her advocacy for the now-discredited DEI agenda.

On MSNBC, Brennan unleashed his rage:

“This whole thing just makes me livid.”

A commentary by David Harsanyi, in fact, discussed the Durham report that reviewed the FBI’s political scheme to attack Trump over the “Russia” claims.

The column explained, “The just-released Durham report confirmed that the FBI not only failed to corroborate the Steele dossier, Hillary Clinton’s oppo-doc against former President Donald Trump, but it regularly ignored existing, sometimes dispositive, evidence to keep the investigation alive. Some officials were credulous. Others were devious. But no one ‘stole’ our democracy – other than perhaps intelligence officials and the journalists who helped feed the collective hysteria over Russia.

“John Brennan, Hamas-loving authoritarian and partisan propagandist, almost surely knew it was a con from the start. Yet he spent four years on television sounding like a deranged subreddit commenter. Even after privately admitting he knew there was no collusion, Brennan kept lying and using his credentials to mislead the public.”

John Durham, himself, concluded after a years-long investigation of the origins of the FBI war against Trump and the Trump campaign, “CIA Director John Brennan and Deputy Director David Cohen were interviewed by the Office and were asked about their knowledge of any actual evidence of members of the Trump campaign conspiring or colluding with Russian officials. When Brennan was provided with an overview of the origins of the Attorney General’s Review after Special Counsel Mueller finding a lack of evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian authorities, Brennan offered that ‘they found no conspiracy.’”

But Brennan later went on television to insist that he “suspected there was more” to collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian President Vladimir Putin than [special counsel Robert] Mueller had let on.”

 

Rep. Shri Thanedar, a 70-year-old Michigan Democrat drowning in primary challenges, introduced seven articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump late last month, citing “a sweeping abuse of power, flagrant violations of the Constitution, and acts of tyranny that undermine American democracy and threaten the rule of law.”

On Tuesday, he implored his colleagues to support his articles of impeachment, stressing, “It’s never the wrong time to stand up for our Constitution.” Thanedar’s fellow Democrats appear, however, to have convinced him it was actually a bad time.

Thanedar was set to call up the resolution for floor consideration on Wednesday, but backed down at the last moment in an apparent effort to spare himself further embarrassment.

It’s a “sweet baby boy” for Tiffany Trump, who’s announcing the birth of her first child.

“Welcome to the world our sweet baby boy, Alexander Trump Boulos,” the 31-year-old daughter of President Trump wrote Thursday on social media.

“We love you beyond words!” she said in a note to her son with her husband, Michael Boulos.

Like the weather, everyone complains about Pentagon spending and mismanagement, but no one does anything about it. Leaders of the world’s most expensive military have refused to conduct or failed to complete every internal financial audit since Congress first demanded such accountability in the 1990s. The Department of Defense owns over 70% of the nation’s assets and can’t account for half of them. In fairness, military brass has had plenty of enablers in its failures to tame wild and sometimes blindfolded spending, with a special boost from political leaders who consistently block reform.

Although the Pentagon budget has grown by 50% over the last 10 years, President Trump wants to add another 12% to the Pentagon’s budget for fiscal year 2026, a move that for the first time will boost defense spending to over $1 trillion.

That number will almost certainly end up higher because, by law, no matter how generous the president’s request is, the Pentagon is required to ask Congress for even more money. The chief of staff of each military branch must put together an unfunded priority list – nicknamed a “wish list” – requesting money for items not included in the president’s budget.

This has been routine since the 1990s, and the procedure became federal law in 2017. The lists don’t need to include lengthy justifications of why the money is needed, as is the case for most budget requests to Congress.

These “Dear Santa” letters totaled at least $30.8 billion in fiscal year 2025, $17 billion in 2024, and $21.5 billion in 2023. Some of the items the Defense Department “wished” for in those three years include:

• $6.8 million for an Air Force dog kennel
• $10.2 million for a “high altitude balloon”
• $22.5 million for “mobile kitchen trailers”
• $106.6 million for a power plant in Djibouti
• $8.5 million for the Space Command to renovate its temporary base while it waits for its actual base to be built
• $20 million for a Great Lakes icebreaker that can sail through frozen water – 10 years from now
• $398 million for classified Space Force programs

The practice persists even though the Defense Department isn’t always happy about it. The Biden administration’s Pentagon Comptroller, Mike McCord, publicly supported ending the requirement. He wrote in a 2023 letter to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) that unfunded priority lists are “not an effective way to illuminate our top priorities.”

The opportunities to spend go beyond even the wish lists. Members of Congress often add “Congressional increases” to the Pentagon budget – de facto earmarks for programs neither the president nor Pentagon officials thought were important enough to include even in their dream spending plans.

Congressional increases added at least $22.7 billion to the military budget in 2024. The dollar total is likely even higher because the public report lists only increases of $20 million or more. Auditors at the government watchdog group Open the Books filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the missing information, but were told that no record exists.

The largest single addition last year was $1.8 billion for the Navy to buy ten extra planes. Other add-ons have little direct connection to defense, such as $110 million for prostate cancer research.

Although Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency to signal his commitment to reducing and streamlining government, the president is sending mixed signals on Pentagon spending. On the one hand, the president said in an April 9 executive order that he wanted the Defense Department to compile a list of programs more than 15% behind schedule or 15% over cost so they can be assessed for possible cancellation. The (soft) deadline was last week.

At the same time, however, Trump has been receptive to the complaints of lawmakers like Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who lamented in February that defense spending was “near record lows as a percentage of our gross domestic product, and all aspects of our military forces are now in dire need of repair or replacement.” (Defense spending in 2023 was 3.4% of GDP, in line with the last 10 years but well below the Reagan-era high of 6.8% in 1982, before the end of the Cold War.)

Trump’s planned increase of the military budget would go a long way to wiping out the $160 billion that DOGE claims it’s saved taxpayers with its government-wide cost cuts.

The added resources don’t mean the military is getting stronger or better at equipping its warfighters. It means there’s more bureaucracy to feed. In 2000, the Defense Department spent roughly $150 billion on its active personnel, adjusted for inflation. Since then, that number has only inched upward, to $166 billion in 2024. Active forces made up just 21% of the 2025 budget request. Most of the rest is eaten up by “operations and maintenance,” the conducting of day-to-day business, which has increased sharply. In 2000, the military spent roughly $175 billion 2024 dollars on O&M. For 2025, the Pentagon requested $338 billion, a 93% increase.

Shortchanging personnel has consequences. A March report from the Government Accountability Office found “shortages in trained maintenance personnel” compromised the ability of the Army, Navy, and Air Force to meet mission-capable goals for many aircraft. It reported that “the Navy EA-18G Growler – an aircraft with advanced electronic warfare capabilities … [and] the Army CH-47F Chinook – the Army’s only heavy-lift cargo rotary wing aircraft” failed to meet their “mission-capable rate goal in any year from fiscal year 2015 through fiscal year 2024.” The GAO also found that “the Air Force C-130H Hercules and C-130J Super Hercules – performing airlift support and aeromedical missions” met its goal just once during that period and the B-2 Spirit – the Air Force’s “stealth bomber that can deliver both conventional and nuclear munitions by penetrating an enemy’s defenses” met its mission-capable rate goal just four of the 10 years.

Similar problems plague the military’s marquee weapons. The F-35 Lightning II, an impressive bit of high-tech hardware, can move at supersonic speed, maneuver against enemy aircraft, hit ground targets, and, in stealth mode, evade radar. One variant can even hover. The Air Force, the Navy, and the Marine Corps all have their versions of the fighter; there are more than 700 F-35s deployed in bases and on carriers around the world.

By the 2040s, the Defense Department plans to acquire 2,470 more F-35s for an estimated total cost of about $442 billion, and to keep them flying into the 2080s. The cost of maintaining the F-35 fleet over the next six decades is the real budget-killer. It soared to $1.58 trillion in 2023, 44% more than the $1.1 trillion in 2018.

Even with that price tag, the F-35 has availability problems, according to the Government Accountability Office. The GAO’s litany of concerns includes a shortage of spare parts, inadequate training of mechanics, and an overreliance on contractors to repair the jets, leaving the military at their mercy. The result is a disappointing level of readiness, which the GAO defines as “the percentage of time during which these aircraft are safe to fly and able to perform at least one tasked mission.”

The F-35 might be a test case for military spending because it could be seen at odds with Trump’s noninterventionist, “America First” philosophy, according to Richard Aboulafia, managing director of the consulting firm AeroDynamic Advisory. “It was developed in partnership with our allies, and it’s meant as an expeditionary force, meaning it’s good for defending U.S. interests in Europe or Asia, but not as effective at home,” he said. On the other hand, the pricey plane is built in Texas with an engine from Florida.

Sky-high costs also afflict Naval housing. Soon after John Phelan was sworn in as Secretary of the Navy in March, he reviewed the bill for a new set of barracks to house his sailors. Phelan, a longtime investment executive without military experience, said he had trouble believing it. “I see numbers on things that are eye-opening to me,” Phelan said at an April 9 public appearance. The barracks cost $2.5 million a key (per room), he said. “My old firm, we built the finest hotel in Hawaii for $800,000 a key, and that has some pretty nice marble and some pretty nice things in it, and I’m trying to understand how we can get to those numbers.”

Another chronic concern is the time and expense it takes the Navy and its shipbuilding contractor, Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII), to put together a fleet of battle-ready fighting vessels. The planned July delivery of the newest aircraft carrier, the $12.9 billion USS John F. Kennedy, will likely need to be rescheduled. The ship is 95% complete, but there are issues with the elevators used to move munitions from below deck and aircraft launch and recovery systems. Similar problems plagued the USS Gerald R. Ford, which was delivered 32 months late in 2017 without functioning elevators. The next carrier on the assembly line, the $13.5 billion USS Enterprise, is running more than two years behind schedule.

Delivery delays of as much as 18 months are also expected for the lead boat in the Columbia class of nuclear-armed submarines.

Delivery of the first frigate in the Navy’s Constellation class has been changed to 2029 from 2026, and its cost has swelled to $1.4 billion from an initial estimate of $1 billion. Frigates are armed fighter vessels often used to escort other ships through treacherous waters.

The Air Force was singled out for criticism in the April 9 White House order. The first flight of the Sentinel, the Air Force’s new intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, is two years behind schedule and its costs have slopped 37% over what was initially promised.

“With adversaries like China and Russia rapidly advancing their own military technologies,” the executive order said, “it is essential to prioritize speed, flexibility and innovation to deliver cutting-edge capabilities to our Armed Forces.”

The Pentagon wrings its hands over one of the roots of this predicament – the lack of competition for contract work – but it’s partly its own fault. At a 1993 dinner party now known as the “Last Supper,” then-Defense Secretary Les Aspin urged defense companies to merge with each other. In the afterglow of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the conventional wisdom at the time was that without the antagonism of its main rival, the U.S. military would be spending less.

The subsequent consolidation of the defense industry was a marvel of corporate wheeling and dealing. What were 51 separate companies during the Clinton administration are now the “Big Five” defense contractors – Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon Technologies, and Northrop Grumman. Together, they account for 15% of the Pentagon’s contract spending, which, defying experts of the early 1990s, has ballooned since the end of the Cold War. The companies’ exalted status doesn’t mean they’ve skimped on PowerPoint presentations, wining and dining, and the occasional arm-twisting. Defense companies spent $70 million on lobbying in 2023, with the Big Five making up the bulk of that.

There’s also the issue of resources that the Pentagon should have been allocating but failed to. The U.S. is responsible for 40% of the world’s military spending, or roughly as much as the next nine countries combined, but somehow little of the cash has gone to keeping up with technology. Astonishingly, the software revolution of the 21^st century pretty much bypassed the Pentagon procurement offices. That finally seems to be changing. A March 6 order from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, “Directing Modern Software Acquisition to Maximize Lethality,” requires the Pentagon to adopt new, tech-enabled buying practices.

“While commercial industry has rapidly adjusted to a software-defined product reality,” Hegseth wrote, the Defense Department “has struggled to reframe our acquisition process from a hardware-centric to a software-centric approach. When it comes to software acquisition, we are overdue in pivoting to a performance-based outcome and, as such, it is the Warfighter who pays the price.”

Artificial intelligence promises to make Pentagon procurement leaner and meaner, an evolution that could be made easier by the Trump administration’s friendly relationship with Silicon Valley. For years, tech bros treated defense contracts as if they spread the avian flu – both Microsoft and Google stepped away from collaborating with the Pentagon, in 2018 and 2019, respectively, after employees revolted. The Defense Department had almost $2 billion budgeted for AI in 2024 but couldn’t “fully identify” how it planned to use the money, the GAO found. Now, a political alliance between Trump and tech entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks could soothe the perceived stigma of tech startups focusing on building weapons systems, making troops safer, and fixing cost overruns and delivery delays in Pentagon purchasing.

Alexander Karp, CEO of defense surveillance software contractor Palantir Technologies and co-author of “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West,” has emerged as head cheerleader of the new relationship. He has said he hopes it yields new and better ways for America’s war fighters to find and kill their enemies. “If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it,” he said in the book. “And the same goes for software.”

Put that on the wish list.

The DEI ideology, for “diversity, equity, inclusion,” largely was banished by President Donald Trump where he could because it bases hiring or qualification decisions on the sex, race or even “gender identity” of individuals.

Many schools and corporations divested themselves of the concept when Trump took office.

But it is coming back now, little bit at a time, and sneakily, according to a new survey.

Polling by Resumetemplates reveala that one in seven business leaders now sees scaling back the ideological agenda as a mistake, made because of political pressure.

And one in five companies that “rolled back” the race- and sex-based processes are “quietly” bringing them back.

The pollsters explained, “In recent years, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives have become highly politicized. What began as a widespread corporate commitment after the 2020 protests has faced growing backlash. Some critics have questioned the effectiveness of DEI efforts, while others have framed them as divisive or exclusionary. Facing political pressure, some companies have scaled back or eliminated their DEI programs.”

The backlash from leftists who supported the programs, however, has brought concerns about “consequences” from the effort to minimize the agenda, the report said.

A survey of 750 U.S. business leaders has confirmed the nominal return of the ideologies.

“The plurality of respondents (30%) say the consensus among business leaders at their company is that the decision to scale back DEI was a necessary response to external pressures. Additionally, 23% say they see it as a positive move that aligns with company values, while 18% say the company’s leaders overall consider it a neutral decision with minimal impact,” the survey found.

But, “Fifteen percent say it’s believed to be a mistake that created new challenges. The remaining say the company’s leaders are either divided in their perspectives (9%) or unsure (4%).”

The reasons the agendas were ditched include political pressure, public scrutiny, budget limits and leadership turnover.

But two-thirds said they saw various “negative” results, such as damage to brand perception, loss of customers or boycotts, after they ditched the beliefs.

“Consumers, employees, and job seekers are more aware than ever of corporate policies and decisions, and they vote with their dollars and career choices,” said ResumeTemplates’ Chief Career Strategist Julia Toothacre. “When organizations dismantle DEI efforts, it sends a message that they don’t care about being fair and equitable. For many customers and workers, that doesn’t sit well. Word spreads fast, especially on social media, and I’m not surprised to see companies now rethinking those decisions.”

It also speaks to the power of the leftists who are publicizing issues, spreading information, or disinformation, about the agendas, and those political and media people in key positions who lobby for the agendas.

Significant, 21% of those companies that left the DEI initiatives behind now are “quietly reintroducing or re-expanding them.”

Another 12% are doing so publicly.

Just why go back to the sexism and racism?

“Of respondents, 75% say that whether or not their company has a DEI program ultimately comes down to what’s best for the bottom line, rather than being rooted in values or social responsibility,” the survey organizations said.

Toothacre claimed that DEI programs actually create “a safer, more respectful workplace,” and that produces “higher morale, better productivity, and fewer HR complaints.”

A report at WTOP said the results also show that companies are bringing back DEI, but are calling it “inclusive culture” or “culture of belonging” to get away from the stigma of DEI.

Also, 40% of companies said they are avoiding new DEI activism.

 

 

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has reposted an artificial-intelligence “baby” video arguing for liberty – without noting the speech is one from his father, beloved former Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas.

WATCH:

This baby is onto something. ? https://t.co/rzM8xhSEu1

— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) May 15, 2025

An unsound study alleging that white doctors are responsible for worse clinical outcomes with black newborns because of “spontaneous bias” serves as a tentpole propping up diversity, equity and inclusion in academic medicine, a new report by nonprofit Do No Harm argues.

The disparity in mortality rates between black newborns and white newborns declines by 58% if the black newborns are under the care of black physicians, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in August 2020. Hundreds of media outlets, which were gripped at the time by the Black Lives Matter movement, covered the “debunked” paper, which ranks in the top 5% of studies over the last five years in terms of impact in the lay press, according to a data aggregator used by scholars called Altmetric.

But the coauthors of the study made a major methodological error, according to the Manhattan Institute, finding that controlling for very low birth weight newborns nullified the apparent effect of racial concordance on infant mortality. The authors buried an inconvenient data point in the appendix, a Freedom of Information Act request by Do No Harm further revealed in March 2025. Finally, one of the coauthors – a star academic heading a new center for health equity – left her university in April amid accusations from her staff of plagiarism and incompetence.

Now, the new report by Do No Harm shows the lasting impact of the study in the scientific literature despite its serious flaws. The flagship journals of prestigious medical associations often cited the paper in articles that advocate for affirmative action in medical school admissions and DEI programs for physicians, according to Do No Harm, which opposes identity politics in medical research and clinical practice.

In all, the study has received 786 citations in the scientific literature, Google Scholar shows. Sixty-six citations occurred this year.

The study is far from the only one to argue that a diverse workforce improves clinical outcomes through what may be commonly called cultural competence, but which the scientific literature describes as “racial concordance.” Yet the PNAS study is undoubtedly among the most influential.

The study provides a case study in how unsound science that serves a predetermined policy goal can permeate the scientific literature, the halls of academia and the media, the report argues. Its centrality to the scientific literature justifying DEI in academic medicine should provoke a second look at that scientific literature, according to Ian Kingsbury, director of Research at Do No Harm.

“This was holding up much of the DEI enterprise. It’s the foundational study in racial concordance mythology,” Kingsbury said.

The PNAS study even made its way into an amicus brief to the Supreme Court by dozens of medical associations led by the Association of American Medical Colleges in favor of affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson cited the study in her dissent in the case.

But many prestigious journals published by major medical associations have also cited the study to support the premise that DEI programs supporting racial concordance improve clinical outcomes, the report alleges, including the American Academy of Pediatrics’ journal Pediatrics, Academic Medicine, the Journal of Neurosurgery and the Journal of Graduate Medical Education.

The study crops up in the policy guidance issued by these professional societies and in the policy papers written by think tanks, the report states.

For instance, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ “Committee on Advancing Equity in Obstetric and Gynecologic Health Care” cited the PNAS study in a 2024 guidance that states physicians should “acknowledge that the current system providing care for obstetric and gynecologic patients causes harm, particularly for marginalized and minoritized communities, and contributes to preventable and premature death.”

American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Academy of Pediatrics did not respond to requests for comment.

Medical associations have been slow to change course on DEI guidance, even as many of their members’ institutions have pulled back or eliminated DEI programs in response to President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order..

“What these organizations say is really important. They set the standards for their field and produce and disseminate policy,” said Kingsbury.

The enduring impact of the study also raises questions about the rigor of scientific journals and exposes the fallibility of peer review, according to Do No Harm. PNAS has not retracted the study.

When it comes to allegations of liberal bias in scientific journals, the racial concordance field may be “ground zero,” Kinsgbury said.

“You can see the ideological bent of this. For some reason it’s completely acceptable for journals – in order to make the claim that racial concordance is beneficial – to cite one or two bad studies, ignoring the weight of the evidence,” he said.

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Capitol Police on Wednesday appeared to remove Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen from the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions’ (HELP) hearing with Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Anti-Israel protesters disrupted Kennedy’s opening statement before the committee, in which footage showed Cohen standing up and being removed by police. Cohen spoke at a pro-Palestinian press conference with Democrat Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib outside of the U.S. Capitol ahead of the hearing.

“You’re killing poor kids in Gaza and paying for it by cutting Medicaid for kids here,” Cohen said, according to an X post that he reposted himself.

WATCH:

As he shouted, an officer grabbed him by the arm and forced him out of the room. Cohen reposted several X posts claiming that he was among the protesters removed.

More footage taken by NBC News’ Frank Thorp showed two officers escorting Cohen out of the room. Police reportedly arrested seven people for resisting arrest and for the assault of a police officer, charging them with 22-1307 Crowding, Obstructing, and Incommoding.

At the press conference, Cohen said that Israel is “literally starving” people in Gaza “to death” by preventing them from accessing food, water and medicine.

“We will not look away, we will not be silenced, we will do everything we can to get our government to stop being complicit in starving little kids to death,” Cohen said during the press conference.

Cohen reportedly introduced Tlaib at the press conference, where she then stated that she wants “aid and food” to enter Gaza, according to The Epoch Times’ Nathan Worcester.

The U.S. Capitol Police did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

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Health and Human Services Secretary (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. brought receipts to correct Democrat Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro on the measles outbreaks around the world.

While questioning whether his agency is cutting funding for “life saving” research conducted by the National Institute of Health (NIH), DeLauro suggested that the U.S. has higher cases of measles than other countries. Kennedy told the Democrat congresswoman that she is “wrong,” pointing to the comparable number of outbreaks in Canada, Mexico and parts of Western Europe.

“The Europe you are referring to is the WHO European region, which has 53 countries in Europe and in Asia, including those with low vaccination rates like Romania that has never eliminated measles. If you compare us to Western European countries that we often compare ourselves to like Great Britain, they have seen no measles deaths this year,” DeLauro said.

“Let me address your issue first, because I want to correct you,” Kennedy said. “We have about 1,100 measles cases in this country. The growth rate last year was 15 additional, so we have plateaued. Mexico has roughly the same number, but one-third of our population and they got 300 extra cases last week. Canada has more measles, 1,500, they have one-eighth of our population. Western Europe has about 6,000 which is ten times the number that we have. You are wrong about what you said earlier.”

WATCH:

Canada reported 1,506 measles cases as of April 26 in seven jurisdictions, according to the Canadian government’s measles and rubella monitoring report. In the U.S., a total of 1,001 confirmed measles cases were reported by 31 jurisdictions, including New York and Texas, as of May 8, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

Nearly 6,000 measles cases have been reported to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), according to Channel News Asia (CNA). An HHS spokesperson confirmed this figure to the Daily Caller News Foundation, stating that this number has been internally reported to the CDC.

The Mexican state of Chihuahua’s health department confirmed 1,041 cases of measles as of Friday.

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Thursday on whether nationwide injunctions violate the Constitution, after lower courts have issued 40 nationwide injunctions against the second Trump administration.

“Universal injunctions exceed the judicial power granted in Article III which exist only to address the injury to the complaining party,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued.

The case, Trump v. CASA, concerns nationwide injunctions that lower court judges have ordered, pausing President Donald Trump’s order interpreting the 14th Amendment as not guaranteeing what is known as “birthright citizenship,” the idea that if someone is born in the U.S. to alien parents (who are not foreign diplomats or enemies in a hostile occupation), they are immediately a citizen.

Critics of birthright citizenship note that the 14th Amendment states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” Emphasis added. “Subject to the jurisdiction thereof” did not apply to aliens who enter the U.S. and then give birth in America, they say, because non-Americans are subject to the jurisdiction of their home countries.

Supporters of birthright citizenship note that the U.S. has extended citizenship to children of aliens born in the U.S. for more than 100 years.

The Supreme Court arguments did not focus on the birthright citizenship issue, but rather the legality of lower courts issuing injunctions that apply to the entire country. Many of the groups filing the lawsuits that result in the injunctions had a great deal of influence in the Biden administration, as noted in my book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.”

New Jersey Solicitor General Jeremy Feigenbaum argued in favor of the legality of universal injunctions, claiming that an injunction that only applied to New Jersey would not address the issues in the case.

Kelsi Corkran, Supreme Court Director at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University, represented immigration groups.

Sauer’s Argument Against Universal Injunctions

While judges have the authority to issue temporary injunctions to protect one of the parties in a case from harm while the court considers the case, the Trump administration claims the judges have abused this power, claiming to protect people across the country who aren’t parties to the suit.

Sauer noted that courts have issued 40 universal injunctions against the federal government, including 35 from the same five judicial districts.

He argued that these injunctions “prevent the percolation of novel and difficult legal questions” through the normal legal process. He also argued that “they encourage forum shopping,” that is, parties filing lawsuits in certain areas, seeking friendly judges who will issue injunctions on their behalf. He further argued that they circumvent Rule 23, the process by which plaintiffs apply for class action.

“They create what [Supreme Court] Justice [William] Powell describes as repeated and essentially head-on confrontations between the life-tenured and representative branches of government,” Sauer added, referring to a justice who served from 1972 to 1987.

??JUDICIAL INSURRECTION

Solicitor General John Sauer explains the judicial insurrection, noting that courts have issued forty nationwide injunctions against the Trump administration so far. He explains why these injunctions are an abuse of the judicial power.

“Universal… pic.twitter.com/VXigYnlXLM

— Tyler O’Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) May 15, 2025

The History of Universal Injunctions

Justice Clarence Thomas asked Sauer about the history of universal injunctions, and the solicitor general pointed to 1963 as the first example.

“We survived until the 1960s without universal injunctions?” Thomas asked.

“Correct,” Sauer responded. “Those were rare in the 1960s. It exploded in 2007. The Ninth Circuit started doing this with a bunch of cases involving environmental claims.”

The solicitor general noted that “the court consistently said you have to limit the remedy to the plaintiffs appearing in your court.”

Important point at the Supreme Court today??

“So, we survived until the 1960s without universal injunctions?” Justice Clarence Thomas asks.

“Correct. Those were rare in the 1960s,” John Sauer responds. “It exploded in 2007.”https://t.co/QhpJ0kFFg2 pic.twitter.com/Izh1DLyUFJ

— Tyler O’Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) May 15, 2025

In response to questions from Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Sauer brought up the history of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, where “there were passionate challenges to nationwide policies,” but when judges held New Deal policies illegal, they issued “hundreds of injunctions protecting individual plaintiffs.”

Solicitor General John Sauer compares the Trump administration to the New Deal?

Even when judges held New Deal policies illegal, they issued “hundreds of injunctions protecting individual plaintiffs,” rather than nationwide injunctions, he says. pic.twitter.com/Qti8QdyXeI

— Tyler O’Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) May 15, 2025

New Jersey Solicitor General Jeremy Feigenbaum cited the English common law practice of a “bill of peace,” which judges used to settle multiple related claims against a defendant in a single lawsuit. The practice allowed the court to bind all members of a “multitude” with the outcome, even if they didn’t directly participate in the lawsuit. Sauer argued that a “bill of peace” most resembles class-action lawsuits, not universal injunctions.

Feigenbaum also cited cases from before the 1960s, which Sauer claimed do not represent universal injunctions.

Corkran argued that if the court ruled in Trump’s favor, it would reject “the status quo all three branches of government have ratified and operated under for over a century,” warning that “catastrophic consequences would result for the plaintiffs and our country” if the government can “execute an unconstitutional citizenship-stripping scheme simply because the court challenges take time.”

Here’s Kelsi Corkran’s opening statement. She claims that restoring the 14th Amendment to its original meaning represents an “unconstitutional citizenship-stripping scheme.”? pic.twitter.com/JkV26U8hlg

— Tyler O’Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) May 15, 2025

Alternatives to Universal Injunctions

Sauer argued that judges have alternatives to universal injunctions, such as class-action lawsuits.

Feigenbaum noted many practical considerations that would make unworkable an injunction that only applied to New Jersey.

He noted that if children of illegal aliens don’t have U.S. citizenship in other states but do gain it when they move to New Jersey, that introduces serious problems with New Jersey’s legal obligations to provide benefits, such as Medicaid, to citizens.

“They did not get Social Security numbers because they would not have been eligible for the enumeration at birth,” Feigenbaum said. “They are going to arrive and seek benefits that we administer. Federal law requires that they have Social Security numbers for the administration of these benefits.”

New Jersey Solicitor General Jeremy Feigenbaum argues that an injunction that only applies to New Jersey would be unworkable. pic.twitter.com/BkTyqrZzPI

— Tyler O’Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) May 15, 2025

Elena Kagan Taunts Sauer

Justice Elena Kagan taunted Sauer, noting that many judges have ruled against the Trump administration.

“This is not a hypothetical. This is happening. Every court ruled against you,” she said.

Sauer argued, however, that nationwide injunctions encourage “forum shopping,” so the success of nationwide injunctions in courts that plaintiffs target because judges are more likely to side with them may illustrate bias, as well as legal concerns.

Justice Kagan taunts Sauer:

“This is not a hypothetical. This is happening. Every court ruled against you.”

Well, that’s because leftist groups are judge-shopping, suing in jurisdictions where they’re most likely to get a friendly judge. https://t.co/QhpJ0kFFg2 pic.twitter.com/DyBjREvjvA

— Tyler O’Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) May 15, 2025

Good for the System?

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Joe Biden’s appointee, suggested that universal injunctions might be healthy for the judicial system.

“It seems to me that when the government is completely enjoined from doing the thing it wants to do, it moves quickly to appeal that,” bringing the case to the Supreme Court.

Sauer responded that the courts are supposed to work more slowly, methodically considering cases and not rushing them through emergency dockets to the Supreme Court. The “percolation” of cases through lower courts up to the Supreme Court is “a merit of our system, not a bad feature of our system,” he responded.

Are universal injunctions good for the system??

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson suggests it’s helpful for the government to have an incentive to appeal for emergency relief to the Supreme Court over and over again.

Solicitor General John Sauer defends the normal process against… pic.twitter.com/JpBwWkuQI4

— Tyler O’Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) May 15, 2025

[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]