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Sunday, November 1, 2026

Absurd court farce on noncitizen ballots leaves Voter ID as the only cure

Absurd court farce on noncitizen ballots leaves Voter ID as the only cure

That’s the only reasonable conclusion from Sunday’s extraordinary hearing at the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

A three-judge panel heard the Trump administration’s case against non-citizen voting in California.

Earlier this month, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) gave California a thumb drive with 20,000 names on it, ostensibly containing the names of suspected non-citizens who had registered to vote in the state.

State and county officials, who had already sent ballots out by mail, refused to open it.

So the DOJ sued in district court, hoping to force California to set aside those 20,000 ballots if and when they came in.

Time is of the essence: ballots are already being mailed back, and counted. And once they are in, it’s almost impossible to fish them out again.

The district judge set a hearing date eight days after the case was filed. Normally, that’s quick. But in the middle of a vote-by-mail election, it meant that hundreds of thousands of ballots would be counted in the interim.

So the Trump administration appealed to the Ninth Circuit to intervene.

The judges — two Trump appointees, one Biden appointee — seemed skeptical of the DOJ’s case, at first.

After all, the Constitution’s Elections Clause leaves it to the states to decide how to run their election.

Sure, federal law prohibits non-citizens from voting — as does state law in California — but normally it’s up to California to figure out how to enforce that.

And if California decides not to make voters prove they are citizens — if it just asks them to “attest” that they are — that might be lame, but it might also be within California’s right to do so.

The Tenth Amendment — important to conservatives — also prevents the federal government from forcing the states to enforce federal laws.

That’s called “commandeering” — and Trump can’t force California to enforce federal laws against non-citizens voting. Nor can Trump make the state enforce its own laws, either.

The judges — including the Trump appointees — were also worried about stepping into the lower court case too soon.

Why the rush? And if the federal government was concerned about votes being counted before non-citizen ballots could be separated, why hadn’t it acted sooner?

The DOJ, represented by Matthew Donnelly, said that the administration didn’t have a reliable list of non-citizen voters until recently.

Whether the judges buy that explanation remains to be seen.

But the judges also had one lingering question for the State of California’s lawyers that they could not answer.

If it’s illegal for non-citizens to vote in California, how does the state stop them from voting?

California’s lawyers seemed to have no answer.

“Your Honor, I honestly don’t know the answer to that.”

The state seemed to argue that anyone could challenge a non-citizen’s ballot as it was being cast.

(How are you supposed to do that — hide in a mailbox?)

Suppose someone does challenge a ballot. The judges asked how the state would verify the accusation.

“There could very well be a verification process,” a lawyer for the state replied.

Could be? You mean, they don’t know?

Well, he said, he was sure that a losing candidate could bring some kind of challenge. But he’d have to have overwhelming evidence, and there would have to be enough non-citizen votes to make the difference in the election.

Good luck finding that evidence after an election. Especially when California takes several weeks to count the votes.

Here’s where things stand.

California bars non-citizens from voting. But it doesn’t require anyone to prove citizenship when they register.

If a non-citizen casts a ballot, there’s almost no practical way to challenge it.

The State of California set the system up this way — on purpose.

They say that very few non-citizens vote — but they make it impossible to know.

And they’re proud of it. Smug, even. What are you going to do about it?

Well, there is one thing to do about it.

There’s Proposition 39, which would require voters to have valid ID to vote.

It’s the only way to make sure that only citizens vote in California’s elections.

It’s curious that Democrats are so determined to stop it.

Joel Pollak is Opinion editor of The California Post.

https://nypost.com/2026/10/25/opinion/absurd-non-citizen-voting-farce-leaves-voter-id-as-only-cure/

Obama Admits the Truth About Obamacare

Obama Admits the Truth About Obamacare

The Heartland Institute

While campaigning in Detroit this past Saturday, former President Barack Obama might have inadvertently slipped and spilled a long-held secret: The Affordable Care Act was a Trojan horse for single-payer healthcare.

Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed “will finish the job we started with the Affordable Care Act and guarantee quality, affordable healthcare to every single American!” Obama exclaimed.

So, Obama sought to put the nation onto a path to single-payer healthcare when he signed the Affordable Care Act into law after all!

However, Obama knew that the United States was not ready for a single-payer system when the Affordable Care Act was being crafted.

So, under the strategy of incrementalism, Obamacare was rolled out.

It must be noted that President Obama promised that Obamacare would bend the healthcare cost curve down. He specifically said deductibles and premiums would decrease under the law.

None of that occurred. Healthcare is more expensive than ever. This year, monthly premiums on the Affordable Care Act Marketplace are up nearly 60 percent, on average.

Nevertheless, the abysmal performance of Obamacare is not causing people like Obama to humble themselves and ponder that maybe they don’t know how to micromanage the healthcare sector.

Wrong.

The new strategy is endless empathy.

“Wanting everybody to have health care, how is that radical?” Obama asked. “Abdul shares my values of wanting everybody to get healthcare.”

I want everybody to have healthcare. I think almost everybody wants everybody else to have healthcare.

But wanting something cannot manifest it into existence. The real question should be whether the government can deliver high-quality healthcare to everybody for “free.”

Based on history, the verdict is a resounding no. The Soviet Union could not do it. Canada cannot do it. The United Kingdom cannot do it. And neither can the United States.

This is why I get incensed when people like Obama, who absolutely know that single-payer does not mean unlimited access to healthcare, mislead voters into believing that Medicare for All is a viable solution to their healthcare cost woes.

First, Obama well knows that Medicare does not offer comprehensive coverage for “free.” Second, he surely knows that Medicare is already on the brink of insolvency and that offering Medicare to all Americans would be the nail in the coffin for a program intended to help senior citizens.

I wish Obama were more transparent and honest and described single-payer as Medicaid for All because that would be a much more apt comparison.

Medicaid is government-run healthcare, which means Medicaid comes with strings attached. Namely, you can only go to providers covered by Medicaid.

Empowering the federal government to become the sole payer means that the federal government determines who gets access to what and when.

The federal government is already $40 trillion in debt with $2-trillion annual deficits for years to come. The money to pay for universal healthcare, which is not “free,” does not exist.

President Obama knows this, but as he did during the debate and discourse about Obamacare, he is not telling the whole truth.

https://redstate.com/heartlandinstitute/2026/10/28/obama-admits-the-truth-about-obamacare-n2208664?utm_source=rsmorningbriefingvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

Quote of the day

Quote of the day

by Scott Johnson in California, Taxes

A highly destructive wealth tax is on the ballot in California. We have covered it in several posts. The editors of the Wall Street Journal take it up in “California’s Wealth Tax and the French Economist.” They write:

* * * * *

If nothing else, the debate over the California wealth tax on the Nov. 3 ballot is exposing the dishonesty of the case for it. Consider the intellectual gyrations of Gabriel Zucman, the French economist now at Berkeley and a leading Prop. 40 proponent.

Monsieur Zucman is frantically, if fruitlessly, trying to discredit the Hoover Institution paper we told you about last week [i.e., in this editorial]. Prop. 40 supporters say the supposedly one-time 5% tax on residents with more than $1 billion in net worth would raise $100 billion in revenue. But that estimate ignores that many billionaires will leave the state.

Hoover economists Benjamin Jaros and Joshua Rauh estimate that the wealth tax would raise only $30 billion after taking into account that courts are likely to block some of its provisions and billionaires will leave the state. They also estimate that the decline in annual income-tax payments over time will exceed this wealth tax revenue by $38.9 billion.

Mais non, says M. Zucman, claiming that the Hoover economists wrongly think billionaires will vamoose because they think the tax will be extended. “Economics students around the world are taught this is not an appropriate way to model behavior,” he wrote on X.com.

Well. As Obama economic adviser Jason Furman says, the standard way to estimate the revenue effect of tax policies is to account for the “behavioral consequences from that law.” And here we thought left-wing economists believed in the “nudge” of behavioral changes.

M. Zucman and his fellow French celebrity economists, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, don’t believe high taxes and a generous welfare state materially affect the incentives to work and invest. When people respond predictably to the perverse incentives that politicians create, French economists claim they are acting irrationally. So with a wealth tax.

But is it really irrational to flee a wealth tax? As the Hoover economists explain, Prop. 40 removes the state constitutional cap on intangible personal property tax. “Once that cap is lifted, future ballot initiatives and legislative action can build on the authority this amendment creates to impose additional wealth taxes at any rate, on any threshold,” the Hoover duo write. Prop. 40 would also let a two-thirds majority of the Democratic Legislature extend the tax and lower the income threshold.

Prop. 40 supporters claim the wealth tax is needed to offset supposed cuts to Medicaid by last year’s GOP tax bill. But federal Medicaid payments have increased 14% over the last year. Most of the budget savings from 2025 GOP reforms don’t kick in for several years, so the wealth-tax revenue will get baked into more Medicaid spending in the meantime.

After the “one-time” revenue is spent, wealth-tax supporters will demand an extension. C’est la vie in California. In 2012 Democrats convinced voters to raise income taxes on high earners temporarily. Four years later, they asked voters to extend the hike through 2030. This year they are seeking to make it permanent….

Read the whole thing here.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2026/10/quote-of-the-day-151.php

Saturday, October 31, 2026

Modern Democrats Really Should Swap Out the Donkey for a Swastika

Modern Democrats Really Should Swap Out the Donkey for a Swastika

Stephen Kruiser Follow @stephenkruiser

Top O' the Briefing

Happy Tuesday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing fans. Deszbuügwythh was quite open about his unease around people who deviated from traditional deviled egg presentations.

The Democrats have a long, ignoble history of taking reliable voting blocs for granted and never really doing anything for them. For reasons that remain a mystery to those of us who have never traveled over to that side to vote, these blocs have largely remained loyal to them.

OK, it's not all a mystery, but that's a lengthy and different column.

Jewish-Americans make up one of those groups. They have been voting for Democrats in large numbers for years. One would hope that this year might change that. I think a lot of us are long past hoping for common sense to frequently prevail in American politics, though.

All American leftists have been on a raging antisemitism jag ever since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel. The ugliness began almost immediately after, when indoctrinated Brown Shirts on college campuses began protesting to "Free Palestine" and insisting that the terrorists were the real victims.

Leaders in the Democratic Party were rather weak in responding to the disgusting displays. Flash forward three years, and they've got a terrorist-supporting communist running for Senate in Michigan. As the kids are fond of saying, that escalated quickly.

This is still about the Democrats in general, but it's Abdul El-Sayed who is at the center of this tawdry tale. This is from Catherine:

A vile new ad for the Michigan Senate race leans into Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s antisemitism and blames Israel and Republicans for the price of U.S. groceries. Which side has the crazed conspiracy theorists and racists again?
Israel only strikes Palestinian terrorists if they strike first, and the only attempted genocide was the one Hamas attempted on October 7 and is trying to finish now. Furthermore, America spends far more on welfare fraud and illegal aliens than it does on Israel, and Democrats are the ones who deliberately fuel inflation and fraud. All of that is information that Jew-hating Muslims and lefties in Michigan hope voters don’t know.

The ad is in the post, and it's yet another low in an election cycle full of lows for the Democrats. It's more of the garbage about Israel being the root of all evil in the world and caterwauling about its alliance with the United States.

There are only two ways to look at this. Either the paste-eating idiots on the left have never pondered the real consequences of the U.S. not having any friends of democracy in the Middle East, or they have.

At this point, I am leaning towards the latter. Western leftists seem to be all-in on a Muslim takeover of all of the countries that Jihadis have been talking about taking over for decades. It's not hard to get there when you're self-loathing and have been badmouthing your own country forever.

The Dem establishment may still harbor fantasies about pitching the idea that moderates still exist in the party and El-Sayed, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and their Democratic Socialists of America ilk are outliers. That's a lot tougher to do now that El-Sayed spent the weekend chilling with Barack Obama. I'm not privy to the inner workings of the Democratic National Committee, but I'm pretty sure that they're not going to dismiss Obama as an extremist.

Because they're all extremists. Even the centrists in the party are somewhere left of Fidel Castro's corpse.

And they're not friends of the Jews. Virulent hatred for Israel is fueled by antisemitism. The anti-Israel rhetoric leads to things like a crazed Manhattan woman attacking two Jewish men with a syringe, which my HotAir friend and colleague John Sexton wrote about.

Maybe my headline today was a bit over the top.

They could just put a swastika on the donkey.

https://pjmedia.com/stephen-kruiser/2026/10/27/the-morning-briefing-modern-democrats-really-should-swap-out-the-donkey-for-a-swastika-n4958712/?utm_campaign=nl_pm&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pjmediambvip