Author: Charlotte Hays

While it was very far from a “mission accomplished” speech, President Trump’s 19-minute address to the nation last night emphasized that U.S. goals have been substantially achieved. The Federalist’s Eddie Scarry sums it up:

There are another two or three weeks of fighting the war in Iran, President Trump said Wednesday in a nationally televised address.

Trump said Iran is “really no longer a threat” after more than a month of combat. Trump also stated that in a short time the U.S. would withdraw from the conflict and leave the still-imperiled Strait of Hormuz in the hands of other countries to “take it” and “cherish it” on their own.

The Hormuz Strait, a key passage for global energy shipment, is currently choked off as Iran threatens to target cargo ships attempting to flow through.

The imperiled Strait of Hormuz is a gift that other nations really did not want. The Editors of National Review question whether leaving Hormuz to be sorted out by other nations is in U.S. interests. Unlike many other countries, the U.S. gets only a small portion of its energy through the Strait. Interestingly, Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal suggested before the speech that Hormuz would “solve itself when the shooting stops” in a column headlined “Hormuz, Shmormuz.”

Meanwhile, an editorial in the Wall Street Journal praises the president for finally making his case for war (I guess 47 years of Iran’s bloody regime wasn’t persuasive enough?) and saying that the U.S. won’t end the war until our goals are accomplished.

The Free Press’ Eli Lake also observes that the U.S. isn’t folding its tents. “Trump’s Speech: No TACO This Time,” is Lake’s headline. Lake argues, “The pundits thought the president would declare that he was winding down the war. Instead, he said it was still full speed ahead.” Eye of the Beholder: Susan Page of USA TODAY, meanwhile, saw in the speech “a head for the exits in Iran [that] leaves complications behind.”

The market wanted a speedier exit with Hormuz open. Oil prices are up, and stocks tumbled. Iran issued threats. Survivor Derangement Syndrome: Fans of the CBS show were outraged that the president’s speech cut into their favorite show. Before we leave Iran, there’s NATO to be considered. In an editorial headlined “Bomb Iran but Blow Up NATO?” the Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board is sympathetic to the president’s frustration with European allies but counseled that the end of NATO would be a boon to Moscow, Tehran, and Beijing.

Victor Davis Hanson is blunter in “A Foolish NATO Was a Big Loser in the Iran War.”

We’re Back in Space! “Artemis II Completes First Day of Its NASA Lunar Mission” is a New York Times headline:

A towering orange-and-white NASA rocket blasted off from Florida on Wednesday evening, lifting four astronauts toward space and transporting spectators’ imaginations to a future in which Americans may again set foot on the moon.

As they did during the heyday of the Apollo program, which first put men on the lunar surface, spectators squeezed onto the beaches along Central Florida’s Space Coast. The crowds cheered when the powerful rocket launched into the clear sky at 6:35 p.m. Eastern time. It traveled eastward, over the Atlantic Ocean, on a journey that will take astronauts around the moon but not land there.

Going to the Moon Is Cool. There are strategic reasons to go to the Moon. Boots on the Moon: Axios sums up the dazzling achievement:

Artemis II’s planned crewed lunar flyby is set to mark the closest humanity has come to the Moon since the Apollo days.

It’s also a key step towards NASA’s grand ambition to return human boots to lunar soil, and the Trump administration’s dreams of a permanent Moon base.

In a way, going to the Moon is Back to the Future.

The Supreme Court, the press seems to think, is leaning towards birthright citizenship, even for children born to transient people in the U.S. illegally. “It turns out that the Constitution is a suicide pact, after all,” Powerline’s Bill Glahn writes in a post headlined “Birth Tourism.” Glahn does the math and observes:

And the birth tourists don’t even have to live here. They can vote absentee for life from overseas. And they get to pick which state to vote “from.” And I can guarantee you, given the nations of origin, none of those absentee votes are coming back marked “Republican.”

The Washington Post suggests in an editorial that the Court could take a middle path on birthright citizenship:

The first path is a sweeping constitutional ruling that the 14th Amendment of 1868 requires automatic citizenship for anyone born to immigrants in the country illegally, for now and all time. The second is a narrower ruling that blocks Trump’s unilateral effort to rewrite U.S. citizenship rules but leaves the door cracked for Congress to legislate on the subject in the future.

The Manhattan Institute’s Ilya Shapiro writes in the New York Post that the issue is not going to go away:

But we could end up with a splintered decision, with plenty of concurrences on the finer points of ratification debates, precedent — especially Wong Kim Ark, the 1898 case granting citizenship to the children of noncitizen permanent residents — and statutory interpretation.

President Trump won’t like that at all, but it could be a winning issue for Republicans in the midterms, energizing not just the base but those many independents for whom immigration is a decisive issue.

Guess which Justice stood out yesterday? Of course, it was KBJ. I positively pant for her dazzling obiter dicta. What other Justice would compare birthright citizenship to losing your wallet in Japan? Brilliant! PJ Media’s Matt Margolis spotlights the Justice in a post subtly headlined “This Might Be the DUMBEST Argument Justice Jackson Has Ever Made.”

Meanwhile, Hot Air’s David Strom steps into the arena with a post headlined “Ketanji Brown Jackson Is Not the Idiot You Think She Is.” Well, you just don’t get KBJ:

A lot of people have been noticing that even her liberal colleagues are exasperated with Jackson, who speaks by far the most in oral arguments, and often seems to make absurd and self-contradictory arguments. …

Given how stupid this LOOKS, how could I argue that it is not stupid in fact?

Insert Critical Theory, or Critical Legal Theory in this case, which is a subset of CT, just like Queer Theory and CRT. All of them assert that words and, in particular, the law, are all about power structures. The current legal system is designed to preserve the power of the ruling elite, or white supremacy, or colonialism, or some form of oppression or another. 

George Washington University Law Professor and Fox Contributor Jonathan Turley addresses Justice Jackson’s “narrow view” of the First Amendment.

I’ll Believe It When I See It. The Senate passed by voice a bill to fund most of DHS. The House will vote when it returns from the Easter holiday.

No Trouble Believing This. James Carville says that after midterms, the Dems will “go after” President Trump and his “stupid, jack— kids.” Karl Rove tips us to the midterm races to watch—the ones that will guide Dem presidential hopefuls as to how far left to go.

There’s one country the International Criminal Court isn’t messing with. It’s Iran. “The ICC’s silence reveals its politicization and the urgent need for tougher American sanctions,” says a WSJ op-ed.

“Anti-Trump catastrophism is the real menace to the West,” writes Brendan O’Neill in Spiked Online. O’Neill finds the elite’s dream of an American defeat in Iran scares me far more than Trump’s premature claims of victory.

Teflon Hair Gel? “Gavin Newsom’s Empire of Fraud” in City Journal reports that California has lost at least $180 billion to fraud, according to officials and experts.

What’s missing in the presidential libraries of former President Obama and President Trump? Books.

Be good. It’s Maundy Thursday!

All eyes are on SCOTUS today.

The Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments on the fraught matter of birthright citizenship today after handing down a major free speech ruling yesterday.

The Court will address the constitutionality of President Trump’s Executive Order to exclude from automatic citizenship the children of illegal aliens. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal argues that the Trump EO would “change the settled meaning” of the Fourteenth Amendment.

On the same page, Georgetown University’s renowned constitutional lawyer, Randy E. Barnett, argues that “Trump is right on birthright citizenship”:

President Trump’s executive order denying birthright citizenship to U.S.-born children of nonresident aliens goes before the Supreme Court Wednesday, and conventional wisdom has it that the president will lose in Trump v. Barbara. If the court stays true to the original meaning of the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, however, the conventional wisdom will prove wrong.

The constitutional debate is about the original concept embodied in the text that explains these exclusions and whether that concept embraces or excludes children born on U.S. soil to parents who are unlawfully or temporarily in the U.S. The court has never squarely addressed this question.

Dan McLaughlin of National Review argues that the “constitutional case against birthright citizenship is strongest when dealing with the children of transients through the country.” The respected Civil War historian Allen C. Guelzo raises the specter of “larger questions about blood, soil,” in the Washington Monthly. Fox Digital has an exhaustive and highly recommended report on “the issues at stake.” President Trump is threatening to attend oral arguments, which would be a first for a sitting president.

In yesterday’s landmark ruling, the Supreme Court struck down a Colorado ban on therapists even discussing conversion therapy with patients. An editorial in the Washington Post hails the ruling for repelling “an egregious assault’ on the First Amendment.” “Conversion Therapy Is Controversial. It’s Also Free Speech” is a headline at The Free Press. Jed Rubenfeld led off TFP story this way:

Can a state permit therapists to assist in “transitioning” the gender of minors but bar them from assisting kids who want to “detransition”? Can therapists be stopped from encouraging kids who feel unsure about their gender to become more comfortable with their biological sex? In an 8-1 decision Tuesday, the Supreme Court answered those questions with a resounding no. It’s a victory for free speech—and, to be perfectly honest, for sanity.

Some news outlets described the ruling as “almost unanimous.” It was Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson who produced a lone dissent. Fox Digital:

Jackson’s fiery 35-page dissent, which she read from the bench when the high court announced the opinion, was longer than the majority opinion and Kagan’s concurrence combined.

“Professional medical speech does not intersect with the marketplace of ideas: ‘In the context of medical practice we insist upon competence, not debate,’” Jackson, a Biden appointee wrote, later adding, “Treatment standards exist in America.”

Gentle Reader, can you paraphrase Justice Jackson’s highlighted sentence above? I know I can’t. I wonder if Jackson can. More from the linked Fox Digital story:

Fellow liberal Justice Elena Kagan criticized Jackson for failing to acknowledge case law that governs when speech can be regulated in the medical field, marking a rare public break between two justicestypically aligned in cases centered on high-profile cultural issues. 

Justice Sotomayor agreed with Justice Kagan. Perhaps the Babylon Bee has the final word:

KBJ: ‘How Can a Law Be Unconstitutional If I Like It?’

President Trump is set to address the nation tonight on the Iran War. The president told reporters yesterday in the Oval Office that the U.S. will leave Iran “very soon.” He mentioned a timeline of two weeks. What the president says to our allies tonight will be interesting. From NBC:

President Donald Trump has urged allies who didn’t join the war but are facing fuel shortages to “build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT.” The United States “won’t be there to help you anymore,” he said, adding that “Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil!”

Meanwhile, the U.A.E. wants the Strait of Hormuz open and is prepared to join the U.S. in the fight. Former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino advanced the shocking notion yesterday that President Trump may not care that much about the midterms:

“He’s not running for president again. If it’s the midterms, I don’t know if he cares that much. He is going to do what he can, but he understands history and knows that it’s probably likely that the Republicans won’t be able to hold it even if they try,” she added, noting that the “political price” is not weighing in on some of Trump’s “tough decisions.”

The stock market appears to be happy with an end (perhaps) in sight. In other news, Secretary of State Marco Rubio asks why the U.S. is in NATO if NATO allies did not permit the U.S. to use their air bases for the Iran war, and President Trump issues an Executive Order aimed at tightening rules for mail-in voting.

“Will the Insane Shutdown Ever End?” is the headline on Examiner Chief Political Correspondent Byron York’s latest offering. York’s lead is a humdinger:

It seems weird to say, but Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., appears to believe Democrats have honored the memory of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by withholding the pay of Transportation Security Administration workers at the nation’s airports for more than six weeks. …

The short version is that Schumer and his colleagues took aim at ICE and hit TSA. Some 50,000 TSA airport officials across the country found their paychecks stopped because Schumer was unhappy with another agency’s enforcement of federal immigration law.

“Is ‘White Supremacy’ Causing an ‘Epidemic’ of Transgender Murders?” is the headline on a City Journal story. Huh? City Journal notes:

The problem is that many of these claims just don’t add up. Transgender people are less likely to be murdered than the rest of the population, most transgender people are murdered by members of their own race, and intimate partner violence—not hate—is the leading identified motive for most such murders….

While every death is doubtless a tragedy, we think the evidence is clear: the “epidemic” narrative has no basis in reality. Continuing to point the finger of blame at white supremacy and hatred will do nothing to serve the transgender people whose lives are taken every year for different—and preventable—reasons.

Hot Air has a nice post by John Sexton headlined “LA Times: Leaving California is Golden”:

It’s a pretty simple idea. You’re doing well enough to have a decent life in California but you’re always going to struggle to cross that line from renter to homeowner. The mortgage on that first house is just a bit more than you can comfortably afford. However, if you move to a nearby state like Arizona or Texas, your same salary will go a lot farther and you’ll be able to buy a nice house for the price of renting in California. So why stay?

Meanwhile, Jason Riley weighs in on what he considers “The Tragic Tale of Tiger Woods.” Unlike the rest of us, sports celebrities have to deal with their demons in public. But would it be too much to ask Tiger to hire a driver to keep the rest of us safe?

Unherd’s promo email this morning features a picture with the caution: “Warning: the below image is not an April Fool’s joke.” It is a grotesque, busty picture of poor Byron Noem, whom the U.K. Daily Mail has ousted as a crossdresser. The New York Post put Mr. Noem on the cover and has an extensive story:

Noem addressed shocking photos in a statement to The Post, saying she is “devastated.”

“The family was blindsided by this, and they ask for privacy and prayers at the time.”

A simple “no comment” would have been sufficient, Ms. Noem. Poor man.

President Trump has shared the video of a “fiery blast” that occurred after the U.S. dropped a 2,000-pound bunker buster on an Iranian ammo depot. Here’s more on the bunker busters. Meanwhile, today’s question is: To Hormuz or not to Hormuz?

President Trump is telling aides that he’s willing to end the Iran war without reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Time is of the essence:

In recent days, Trump and his aides assessed that a mission to pry open the chokepoint would push the conflict beyond his timeline of four to six weeks. He decided that the U.S. should achieve its main goals of hobbling Iran’s navy and its missile stocks and wind down current hostilities while pressuring Tehran diplomatically to resume the free flow of trade. If that fails, Washington would press allies in Europe and the Gulf to take the lead on reopening the strait, the officials said. 

About a fifth of the world’s energy supplies go through the Strait of Hormuz, but considerably less for the United States. President Trump has been blunt to one of our oldest allies:

Donald Trump told the United Kingdom to “get your own oil” as he urged US allies to reopen the Strait of Hormuz themselves….

“Number 1, buy from the US, we have plenty, and Number 2, build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT.”

The president has got to be worried that Wall Street is finishing the worst quarter for stocks in four years. Spain is blocking U.S. planes from its airspace. Yikes, Italy has blocked our use of an airbase in Sicily. Who’s winning this thing? Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker comments on the absolute certainty of commentators on both sides. Baker’s headline is “You May Already Have Won the Iran War” but the subhead suggests you may already have lost:

I am not against bold opinion commentary, as you might have noticed, but this level of certainty about a war that is four weeks old and with plainly many more phases to come, is simply unsupportable. As we stand, the outcome isn’t knowable with any level of confidence; it surely rests on events at a tactical and strategic level in coming weeks and months that we can’t know.

USA TODAY’s Nicole Russell does not want to see U.S. ground troops in Iran. “I do not want a country like Iran to have nuclear potential. But the war seems to be escalating and President Trump needs to get control of it,” Russell argues. Hugh Hewitt, on the other hand, writes that President Trump is on the cusp of a historic achievement.

Lebanon expelled the Iranian ambassador, but he refuses to leave. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal says the message is clear: We own you. But Lebanon’s future depends on expelling Iran, the Editorial Board says.

Lebanon’s future depends on the expulsion of Iran’s regime, not merely its ambassador. This war provides the best opportunity in years to do so, and the U.S. and Israel can help. But if Lebanon wants independence, the country will have to seize it.

I’m still thinking about the “No Kings” protests. The Wall Street Journal’s Meghan Gurdon clarified something that vaguely bothered me. Gurdon wrote about the placards (“Fighting Fascism with Arts and Crafts“):

The ignominious truth can be seen not in the abusive placards waved by groups of like-minded people, but in the lonely obedience of their production. A number of Americans, and it’s impossible to know how many, appear to have given themselves over so entirely to political antipathy guided by remote strangers that it has become for them a hobby, like ceramics. Some go to rallies and draw energy from the company of others who share their ire. Others appear more solitary and monomaniacal….

That’s the tragedy and embarrassment of No Kings. The participants are entitled to agitate against a president they didn’t want, even though, for all his defects, this one did win the popular vote. The sad thing is that when they’re making handmade signs and smashing up friendships and family relationships on supposedly moral grounds, they think they’re expressing themselves, when in fact they’ve given over their individuality to become dolls dancing on wires in somebody else’s show.

I am still thinking about Sheridan Gorman, the 18-year-old student at Chicago’s Loyola University, who had her life before her when she was allegedly murdered by an illegal alien. Bill writes today about “The Pols Who Failed Sheridan Gorman.” McGurn quoted the Chicago pols who’ve tried to blame Sheridan’s death on Trump and suggests that our political class has lost the ability to talk about a human tragedy without politicizing it.

Wow. The National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, has accomplished a neat trick—cloaking the union’s partisanship and ideology in the mantle of free speech. A City Journal piece describes the NEA’s recent confidential webinar, hilariously titled “Advocacy and Free Speech Rights for K-12 Educators.” Wai Wah Chin writes:

The training’s first agenda item is “Understanding current threats to educator voice and academic freedom, as well as the risks of [sic] educators face when speaking out.” Clunky “educatorese” seems to be the NEA’s preferred idiom to promote its partisan agenda, which apparently includes support for Palestine, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, racialism, transgender ideology, and DEI. It also includes opposition to the Department of Education (accused of being “actively committed to violating civil rights”), the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (mentioned in nine slides), “Red State governments,” and the Trump administration.

The slides portray the risks to educator-activists in apocalyptic terms. “Democracy itself is at stake,” they claim, with an “unprecedented push to criminalize speech and political opposition.” Educator-activists allegedly face termination, arrest, harassment, doxxing, and even violence—not just from Washington and red state governments but also from “reactionary online mobs.”

Some parents take their children to the zoo to look at the animals. Jennifer Siebel Newsom, wife of Gavin, seems to think the red states and normal Americans are the zoo. “Newsom’s Wife Brought Children to Red States to See Racism, Sexism, and Bullying Firsthand” is the headline on a Legal Insurrection item. It refers to a 2023 interview, but it is still telling. Hot Air addresses the same story in a post headlined “Meet the Even More Gruesome Newsom.”

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on birthright citizenship tomorrow. The New York Times endeavors to set the stage with a story on the immigrant backgrounds of several Justices. The story is misleading—none of the stories of the Justices would have been affected, whatever the Supreme Court rules. The Supreme Court case will deal with a Trump Executive Order on birthright citizenship. Daniel McCarthy begins a story headlined “When Birthright Citizenship Goes Wrong” with this acknowledgement:

People born here to at least one citizen parent are automatically citizens, and Trump’s order recognizes the children of lawful permanent residents as birthright citizens, too.

But that’s not enough for those who insist the Constitution’s 14th Amendment establishes a radical definition of birthright citizenship.

As McCarthy goes on to say, the case will deal with children born of what has been dubbed “birth tourism.” It will be a fraught ruling—McCarthy compares it in weightiness to the Dobbs abortion ruling.

Illinois was never a slave state. But why not pay reparations for slavery anyway? Evanston, Ill., is doing just that. Judicial Watch attempted to halt the program, but a judge ruled against the watchdog organization:

The program provides $25,000 direct cash payments to Black residents and descendants of Black residents who lived in Evanston between 1919 and 1969. Evanston was the first U.S. city to pass a reparations plan, pledging $10 million over a decade to Black residents.

Judicial Watch will appeal. “The Constitution forbids race-based government programs like this,” it argues.

Too Terrible to Contemplate. “Can Man-Made Eggs Be the Future of Fertility?” is a The Free Press headline. “A hedge-fund manager and a Harvard biologist are betting that stem cell–derived eggs will transform how humans reproduce,” is the subhead.