What Were They Seeking at Rep. Omar’s House? DSA: Fire Jessica Tisch! El-Sayed’s Family Ties. Uh-Oh: We Might Run Out of Billionaires. Bessent’s Liz Warren Bon Mot. More
Oh, brother.
A raid by the feds on a controversial lawmaker’s D.C. residence this close to the midterms can’t help but trigger a firestorm.
The New York Times plays the pre-dawn Monday raid on Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar’s house straightforwardly:
The court-approved search of her Washington-area home comes after Department of Homeland Security officials said in recent months that they were investigating Ms. Omar, a Democrat, over her family’s immigration paperwork. More recently, some federal investigators have also sought to investigate other issues, such as Ms. Omar’s finances, campaign funds and interactions with a foreign citizen, as The New York Times previously reported.
The three people who described the execution of the search warrant spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it.
The search warrant, executed 22 days before Election Day, lists a series of potential immigration crimes under investigation, including false statements and fraud in immigration paperwork, as well as a general conspiracy charge, according to a person familiar with the document.
The New York Post report carried the story forward:
The most likely scenario, multiple people claimed, is that immigration cops are looking into a long-floated rumor that Omar is actually one year older than she has long claimed to be — a tiny detail that may put her citizenship in jeopardy.
“The big picture here is a federal judge in Washington, DC, signed off on a search warrant. That means there’s probable cause that a federal crime was committed, and there would be evidence of that crime in the area to be searched, which in this case was Representative Omar’s home,” former assistant US attorney Jonathan Fahey told The Post.
Rep. Omar, who is running for re-election, charges that the raid was politically motivated and vows, “I will not be silenced.” Meanwhile, “Ilhan Omar’s shady family history gives Trump plenty of reasons to probe her past” is the headline on Rich Lowry’s measured column:
Much of Ilhan Omar’s family story is a black box, but we are presumably about to learn much more about it.
She has always responded with angry, uninformative dismissals, even when the Minneapolis Star-Tribune — not exactly a right-wing news source — has made inquiries.
If she’s being smeared, Omar should sit down with a neutral journalist and walk through the details of all this with as many documents as she can muster.
That seems unlikely.
Here is another analysis of questions about Rep. Omar’s immigration history.
In a snub to New York’s large Italian community, Mayor Zohran Mamdani skipped the Columbus Day Parade. Insulting, yes, but not enough to mollify the Democratic Socialists of America, who seem to be flexing their muscles and have a new demand for Hizzoner: Fire NYPD Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch.
Outside perfervid DSA precincts, Tisch is sometimes seen as “Greatest Police Commissioner of All Time,” who presides over record lows in crime. But the DSA has fallen head over heels in love with criminal illegal immigrant Oscar Belgal, who, with his trusty machete, spent his time menacing the residences of a Washington Heights apartment building before the dear boy had the misfortune of being shot in an encounter with ICE. This led to the DSA’s illogical pressure on Mayor Mamdani to fire Tisch, who runs NYPD, not ICE.
A New York Post editorial urges Mamdani to buck the DSA (“Mamdani would be a fool to fire NYPD Commish Jessica Tisch for keeping NYC safe“):
[DSA leaders] apparently expect cops to arrest feds who are lawfully doing their duty, or at least to get out of the way if lefties want to riot over federal law enforcement.
Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed’s least favorite topic, according to The Free Press, is the Iranian regime. He refuses to answer questions about it. Ms. Must is betting that another not-favorite question is his alleged family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, which El-Sayed flatly denied—and then old posts from his sister touting the family’s close association with the Islamist organization resurfaced.
Meanwhile, Examiner Chief Political Correspondent Byron York examines “The high cost of Abdul el Sayed“: Medicare for All is the item El-Sayed consistently emphasizes. York writes:
But even though he has been short on details, el Sayed has had one all-purpose answer to the question of how he would pay for his high-priced proposals. He says it slowly and clearly, apparently so everyone will know he really means it: “Tax. Billionaire. Wealth.”
“It’s that simple,” el Sayed said at his recent debate with Republican opponent Mike Rogers. …
In any event, el Sayed cannot solve the massive math problem that his proposal raises. Start with this fact: the total combined net worth of every billionaire in America adds up to somewhere around $8 trillion to $9 trillion. That is everything they own — money, property, investments, etc. And then look at those estimates of the cost of Medicare for All — around $32 trillion over its first decade.
Do the math. What that means is that the government could confiscate every penny that every billionaire in America has, and it would not be enough to pay for more than a few years of Medicare for All. And then, there would be no more billionaires with wealth to confiscate.
Let’s do some more math. “Trump’s Census Proposal Is a Big Step in Restoring National Unity” is a City Journal headline:
Eliminating race and ethnicity tabulation from the decennial questionnaire will help dismantle identity politics and the grievance industry. …
The boldness of the proposal seems to have caught the Left off guard, but the Trump administration should hold the line against the inevitable blowback. The proposal is indispensable to the success of his overall project. It must, of course, be accompanied by a return to assimilation and a more rational immigration policy.
Put Your Hands Together for Tertullian. Acknowledging the high brilliance of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s address on Western civ in the shadow of the Acropolis last week, the philosopher Wilfrid McClay nevertheless reminds us this morning that “Western Civilization runs Through Jerusalem, too“:
Marco Rubio delivered a truly masterful speech in Athens last week and has won near-universal and deserving acclaim for it. His resounding affirmation of Western civilization—reminding us how much the West owes to the achievements of the ancient Greeks—feels like the beginning of a civilizational rebirth. May it be so.
But there was something important missing from that speech….
Western civilization is far more than the lengthened shadow of the Parthenon. In fact, the civilization of the West is better thought of as a long conversation whose most important constituent elements are called by the names “Athens” and “Jerusalem,” as first expressed by the Church father Tertullian. Athens stands for the spirit of free rational inquiry undertaken in a fully intelligible world whose contours and dimensions are fully commensurable with our powers of understanding. Jerusalem stands for the spirit of piety, which stresses the weakness of human understanding and the inadequacy of unaided human nature.
Beauty is a classical value, too. In “Ugly in the Name of Safety,” Meghan Cox Gurdon deplores a hideous crosswalk safety contraption. The mania for safety above all destroys beauty. Kudos to Ms. Gurdon for invoking the Rubio speech.
Isn’t it fun to have a witty Secretary of the Treasury? Senator Elizabeth Warren had been writing Secretary Scott Bessent letter after letter on the bond market. Finally, he responded (thanks, Monica Showalter of the American Thinker):
I have received your October 7 letter, which adds to the mounting body of evidence of your complete paucity of knowledge about financial markets. Rather than take my suggestion of studying introductory economics, you have continued your letter-writing crusade and participation in tabloid fodder about the Treasury Department.
Employing Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness, Senator Warren naturally makes me think of indigenous peoples, which in turn circuitously reminds me of Christopher Columbus, whom the sane among us celebrated yesterday. Don’t miss “Columbus Deserves His Day,” by Matthew Hennessey in Free Expression.
