Utah Republicans just let Democrats steal a seat they could never win



A Utah judge just turned a safe Republican congressional seat into a near-guaranteed Democrat seat — and she did it in a state controlled top to bottom by Republicans. How does that happen? A generation of weak Republicans in the elected branches handed liberals control of the judicial branch and gave them the ballot initiative system they needed to take over the state piece by piece.

Democrats can’t win statewide office in half the country, so they’ve turned ballot initiatives into their weapon of choice. Pollsters craft soothing messaging, activists gather signatures, and voters — thinking they’re supporting neutrality — unknowingly approve measures that shift power to Democrats.

Supermajority states serve as a control group. The problem isn’t power; the problem is the GOP’s refusal to wield it.

The “nonpartisan redistricting commission” scam remains their most effective tool. These commissions always promise fairness, and they always produce more Democratic seats.

Utah proved the point in 2018, when 66% of voters approved Proposition 4, even though most Utahns don’t want Democrats running the state. The same tactic produced Medicaid expansion and marijuana legalization. None of these measures would have survived the legislature — but they passed once voters encountered them in isolation.

James Madison warned against pure democracy for this exact reason. A republic draws authority from the “great body of the society,” not from a small faction or self-appointed elite. Ballot-initiative commissions flip that logic on its head. They let unelected actors redraw power for themselves.

Here comes the judge

After the 2020 census, Utah’s legislature drew a fourth Republican congressional seat, as the state constitution requires. Democrats and their allies at the League of Women Voters sued to nullify the map and force a Salt Lake-centered Democrat seat.

In August, Third District Judge Dianna Gibson obliged. She declared the legislature’s map unconstitutional because, in her view, it ignored Prop. 4 — even though the constitution explicitly vests redistricting power in the legislature. She ordered a new process for 2026 and told both sides to submit maps.

The GOP-controlled legislature complied, proposing a compromise map and passing SB 1011 to impose “partisan fairness” tests on future redistricting so the commission couldn’t hand Democrats a permanent advantage.

Gibson ignored all of it. On Nov. 10, she tossed the legislative map, sidelined SB 1011, and adopted the map drawn by the very activist groups suing the state — the same groups that engineered Prop. 4.

Plainly unconstitutional

Nothing in Utah’s constitution supports what Gibson did. Article IX, Section 1 states that the legislature “shall divide the state” into congressional districts. A commission cannot do it. A judge cannot do it. Activists certainly cannot do it.

Yet Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson signed off on Gibson’s map, even though state law required her to certify only lawful maps. That decision reflects a deeper problem: Too many Utah Republicans treat constitutional violations as minor inconveniences and concede ground to Democrats who never reciprocate.

Democrats defend Gibson’s ruling by citing Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission (2015), when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg reinterpreted the word “legislature” to include ballot initiatives. Even if you grant that tortured reading of the U.S. Constitution, Utah’s constitution is far more explicit. Only the legislature draws maps.

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Eric Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Make impeachment great again

At the federal level, impeachment has become an empty threat. Senate math makes convictions nearly impossible. But red states with Republican supermajorities don’t face that obstacle.

Utah’s legislature holds a 61-14 majority in the House and a 22-6 majority in the Senate. Rep. Trevor Lee (R-Utah) on my show last week called for the impeachment of both Judge Gibson and Lt. Gov. Henderson for violating the state constitution. Republicans have the votes to do it — and the constitutional duty to rein in judicial usurpation.

Other states have shown it can be done. In 2018, West Virginia impeached all five members of its Supreme Court for corruption and removed them. Red states such as Oklahoma, Montana, Missouri, and South Carolina face the same problem Utah now faces: liberal judges empowered by timid Republicans.

A perilous path

Utah proves a point conservatives hate to admit. Republicans in Washington often claim they can’t implement the party’s agenda because they lack power. But in Utah, Republicans hold all the power — and still refuse to use it. They allow commissions to override them, courts to embarrass them, and Democrats to seize ground they could never win through elections.

Supermajority states serve as a control group. The problem isn’t power; the problem is the GOP’s refusal to wield it.

Unless Republicans act with conviction, Utah will follow Colorado’s path. Democrats chipped away at Colorado one institution at a time while Republicans shrugged. Now Colorado is a Democratic Party fortress.

Utah is heading down the same trail — unless Republicans use the constitutional tools they still possess.

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'I thought we didn’t want kings'

Trump DOJ charges another pair of Big Balls' suspected attackers, blasts judges who kept thug on streets



Edward Coristine, the young engineer known as "Big Balls" who previously worked for the Department of Government Efficiency, was beaten to a pulp by a group of 10 young suspects during an attempted carjacking on Aug. 3 in the national capital.

One week after a Biden-nominated judge cut two of the attackers loose and spared them from jail time, the Trump Justice Department announced charges against another pair of suspects.

Background

After the attack, during which Coristine stood his ground and defended his girlfriend, police apprehended two suspects at the scene — a 15-year-old male and a 15-year-old female of Hyattsville, Maryland — and charged both with unarmed carjacking.

'We're not going to be happy until we get every person who was involved.'

While the attack was so savage as to prompt President Donald Trump to federalize the Metropolitan Police Department and deploy the National Guard, Kendra Briggs, a Biden-nominated associate judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, treated two of the attackers with kid gloves.

First, Briggs decided it wasn't worth keeping the thugs in custody, telling one of Coristine's attackers, "I don't want to put hardship on your family."

After instructing both thugs to refrain from possessing weapons or entering into other people's vehicles unless they have permission from the owners, Briggs directed the male attacker to hang out at his mother's home and the female attacker to move from the secure Youth Services Center to a youth shelter house.

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Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

Obliging the request by prosecutors last week, Briggs decided ultimately not to incarcerate the two attackers.

The male attacker, who pleaded guilty to four counts related to a robbery and the separate beating of Coristine, received one year of probation. The female attacker, who pleaded guilty to a count of simple assault for pepper-spraying someone during the robbery, was sentenced to nine months of probation.

Briggs emphasized that the goal of juvenile court was "rehabilitation, not punishment."

"To this day, they’ve only caught two out of the ten. Eight of them remain on the street. That night could’ve gone far differently. Think of your daughters and mothers. The same group attacked people before and after us, breaking ribs and stomping heads," Coristine noted last week. "This senseless crime must be stopped."

Another two

The Trump DOJ revealed on Monday that it was charging two more teens in connection with the attack on Coristine and the corresponding attempted carjacking.

Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, indicated that Laurence Cotton-Powell, 19, and Anthony Taylor, 18, face charges including assault with intent to commit robbery and robbery — not only in connection with the attack on Coristine but in connection with a separate attack on another individual just minutes earlier at a nearby gas station.

Whereas Taylor, a teen from Maryland, has no known criminal history, Cotton-Powell is apparently a seasoned thug who has benefited from bleeding hearts in the judiciary.

Pirro claimed that despite committing crimes while on probation for a previous felony conviction, Cotton-Powell was nevertheless free to attack Coristine and Ethan Levine, the second victim who was stomped ruthlessly by a mob of thugs, because of the leniency of the D.C. Superior Court.

"On April 3 of this year, Laurence Cotton-Powell was sentenced for a felony attempted robbery. My office asked for jail time. Judge [Carmen] McLean, a judge sitting in the criminal part in Superior Court with no criminal background, made a decision to give Cotton-Powell probation in spite of his conviction on a felony attempted robbery," said Pirro. "Within 31 days, by May 4, Powell reoffends. He's re-arrested while he's on probation from the felony, and he's charged with simple assault and possession of a prohibited weapon B."

Pirro indicated that the court subsequently refused her office's request to revoke the thug's bail and released Cotton-Powell. Although Cotton-Powell was later sentenced, "on July 25, another judge suspends his sentence and decides that he should be on probation," said the attorney.

"So after a felony of attempted robbery conviction, after a violation of probation, after a second crime, after a second conviction, after no compliance with [the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency], the judges say, 'Do better,' and they let him go," said Pirro. "And guess what? Within 10 days, he's at it again with Ethan Levine and Edward Coristine."

Pirro credited the Metropolitan Police Department with going above and and beyond to track down suspects Taylor and Cotton-Powell.

MPD Chief Pamela Smith said, "These arrests send a very strong message to our community: If you commit violent acts in our community, you will be found, you will be held accountable, and you will face justice."

"We're not going to be happy until we get every person who was involved in the assault on these two individuals," said Pirro.

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Second chances kill innocents



Republicans might finally take me seriously after years of warning: America suffers not from mass incarceration, but from mass under-incarceration. The system needs tougher sentences, not softer ones.

The brutal murder of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, allegedly at the hands of career criminal Decarlos Brown Jr. on a Charlotte commuter train, didn’t reveal anything new. It shocked the nation precisely because it put on camera what has become routine in our cities since the bipartisan “criminal justice reform” wave dismantled Reagan-era tough-on-crime policies.

Legislators will have a choice when they reconvene: Pass strong reforms like these or watch more innocent people die.

For every man like Brown who slipped through the cracks, at least 10 more walk free when they should be locked up for life.

Brown had been arrested 14 times since 2007. His record included assault, felony firearms possession, robbery, and larceny. He didn’t see the inside of a prison until 2014, when an armed robbery conviction earned him a mere four years. He racked up more arrests after his release in 2020, but neither prison nor psychiatric commitment followed. The justice system looked the other way.

The result was predictable. Brown’s obvious mental instability made him even more dangerous than an ordinary criminal. Yet over the last 15 years, Republicans and Democrats alike embraced “reform” that made second chances for the violent and insane a top priority. They weakened sentencing, gutted mandatory minimums, downgraded juvenile crimes, eased up on drugs and vagrancy, and abandoned broken-windows policing. Hard-won gains against crime and homelessness evaporated.

The final insult: Brown was last released on cashless bail by North Carolina Magistrate Judge Teresa Stokes, allegedly affiliated with a pro-criminal “second chances” group. But violent offenders don’t just get second chances. They get third, fourth, and 15th chances. Most criminals never even face charges. Prosecutors downgrade cases. Convicts skate on early release. The cycle spins on.

Look at the numbers. In 2024, the FBI’s incident-based reporting system logged over 12.2 million crimes. Strip away drug and gun cases, and the picture remains grim: 2.4 million violent crimes with no arrest. Another 1.25 million serious property crimes — arson, burglary, motor vehicle theft — with no arrest. Every year, more than a million offenders escape justice. Meanwhile, the nation’s prison and jail population sits at roughly 1.9 million.

Even when police make arrests, punishment rarely follows. In 2021, only 15,604 people went to prison for robbery despite 121,000 reported incidents. Just 4,894 went away for car theft out of 550,000 cases. Even homicide convictions lag far behind — just 6,081 murderers entered prison against more than 15,000 killings.

This isn’t a statistical fluke. It’s a system that fails to punish violent crime year after year.

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Screenshot/Charlotte Transit Authority

So what needs to change? Here’s a checklist every state legislature should adopt in the next session:

  1. Ban public encampments on streets, sidewalks, and public property; allow lawsuits against localities that fail to enforce.
  2. Elevate porch piracy penalties, following Florida’s lead.
  3. Impose stiff punishments for organized retail theft and flash mobs.
  4. Tighten “truth-in-sentencing” laws to ensure violent offenders serve their full terms.
  5. Pass anti-gang statutes that cross county lines, fund prosecutions, and mandate enhanced sentences for gang-related crimes.
  6. Let prosecutors, not judges, decide whether to try violent juveniles as adults.
  7. Set mandatory minimums for carjackings, especially for repeat offenders.
  8. Impose harsh sentences on felons caught with firearms, and harsher still when they use them.
  9. Require parole violators to finish their sentences.
  10. Hold repeat offenders without bond; revoke pretrial release when new crimes are committed.
  11. Fund prosecutors’ offices to clear the backlog of violent felony cases.
  12. Strengthen “three strikes” laws to eliminate loopholes.
  13. Apply the death penalty to fentanyl traffickers.
  14. Mandate quarterly public reporting of judges’ sentencing records in a searchable database.
  15. Criminalize squatting and streamline removal.

Legislators will have a choice when they reconvene: Pass strong reforms like these or watch more innocent people die.

Social media outrage won’t fix this crisis. Neither will empty calls for “accountability.” As Iryna’s grieving family warned, “This could have been anyone riding the light rail that night.”

That’s the truth — and unless lawmakers act, it will be the truth again tomorrow.

Democrats crown judges while crying about kings



“In America, we don’t do kings.” That was the message of the leftist protesters who swarmed the streets nationwide on June 14 in opposition to President Donald Trump and his agenda.

“Trump must go now!” they chanted, waving signs that likened the president to a dictator and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to his “Gestapo.” Their complaint was alleged despotism. But if Democrats really opposed authoritarianism, they wouldn’t be celebrating its emergence in the courts.

There are no kings in the United States — just a bunch of black-robed activists who seem to have forgotten the difference between ‘Your Honor’ and ‘Your Majesty.’

When U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani brazenly overstepped her authority on July 7 to block Congress from stripping Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid funding through the budget reconciliation bill — a clear usurpation of the legislative branch’s power of the purse — the response from the left wasn't outrage. It was praise.

"Good," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) wrote on X. “Democrats will never stop fighting this backdoor abortion ban from the Republicans.”

— (@)

Schumer’s apparent admission that Medicaid funds abortions aside, his comments also belie his party's disingenuous indignation over supposed federal overreach.

Judges above the law

That selective outrage was on full display in April amid the arrest of a Wisconsin judge for allegedly escorting Eduardo Flores-Ruiz — an illegal immigrant who had previously been deported — out the back jury door of her courtroom to help him evade federal immigration authorities.

The ICE agents in question had a valid administrative warrant for Flores-Ruiz’s arrest, yet leftists railed against efforts to hold Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan to account for her alleged obstruction.

"By arresting a sitting judge over routine courthouse management, the Trump regime has signaled its eagerness to weaponize federal power against members of the judiciary who do not align with its political agenda,” writer Mitchell Sobieski fumed in a Milwaukee Independent op-ed.

If impeding federal law enforcement now qualifies as "routine courthouse management," that's a big problem.

Meanwhile, Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson, a Democrat, complained that the Trump administration was “scaring people” by enforcing federal immigration law.

“They’re scaring people in this community; they’re scaring people in immigrant communities all across the United States,” Johnson told reporters.

Never mind the law-abiding U.S. citizens who remain scared that their daughters, sisters, or mothers could be the next Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, or Rachel Morin — all victims of murderers in the country illegally.

Apparently, their fears are irrelevant.

As for Dugan, her claim that “judicial immunity” precludes her from being prosecuted for alleged obstruction of justice is as monarchical as it gets.

Judges are but one facet of the American justice system, and as Democrats loved reminding us all 15 minutes ago: “No one is above the law.”

Democrats love activist judges

Of course, Democrats’ lack of interest in reining in the judiciary is nothing new. After all, the Democratic Party has long relied on activist judges to impose its will on the American public.

With Roe v. Wade in 1973, liberals leveraged a sympathetic U.S. Supreme Court to force nearly a half-century of unregulated abortion onto a country that was — and still is — deeply divided on the procedure.

In 2015, leftists used the same playbook to mandate same-sex marriage nationwide via Obergefell v. Hodges.

In the age of Trump, however, judicial activism has become an even more flagrant problem.

Last year, then-candidate Trump was frequently forced to split his time between the campaign trail and the courtroom as he fended off contrived criminal indictments and lawsuits, nearly all of which were conveniently presided over by liberal judges.

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Liudmila Chernetska via iStock/Getty Images

At the same time, radical judges in Colorado and Illinois, along with Maine’s Democratic secretary of state, attempted to strip voters of their right to decide the presidential election by removing Trump’s name from the ballot.

Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in to quash that authoritarian plot. Unfortunately for the justices, it's a move they've had to repeat several times since the president’s inauguration in January.

In a line of cases challenging Trump’s policy pursuits, rogue district court judges have issued sweeping injunctions blocking him from implementing his agenda nationwide in cases without a class certification — a practice that the Supreme Court has lately admonished as “likely” judicial overreach.

Still, lower-court judges are finding other ways to overstep their authority. U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy, for example, appears to have decided that his court, not the nation's high court, reigns supreme in the land.

Monarchy reaches the highest court

Even after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted Murphy’s nationwide block on third-country deportations in June, Murphy continued to insist that the Trump administration allow six illegal immigrant defendants to challenge their removal before deporting them to a third-party country.

That move even rankled liberal Justice Elena Kagan, who had initially sided with Murphy.

“I do not see how a district court can compel compliance with an order that this Court has stayed,” Kagan wrote, concurring with the majority that the deportations could proceed.

Yet not even the top court is immune to political activism, it seems.

In her dissent from the court's ruling against blanket injunctions, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Joe Biden appointee, described the majority’s decision as “profoundly dangerous.” In her view, containing temporary judicial relief to those requesting it somehow grants the president “unchecked, arbitrary power” and “undermines our constitutional system.”

Jackson’s words were acrimonious enough that Justice Amy Coney Barrett included a stinging rebuke in the court’s ruling.

“We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself,” Barrett wrote. “We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial executive while embracing an imperial judiciary.”

An imperial judiciary, indeed!

No, there are no kings in the United States — just a bunch of black-robed activists who seem to have forgotten the difference between “Your Honor” and “Your Majesty.”

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

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One bad order could undermine Trump’s strongest issue



Thank God President Trump walked back his misguided order to grant de facto amnesty to illegal alien farm workers. Now he needs to kill the policy for good.

Trump won in 2016 — and again in 2024 — on two core promises: lower the cost of living and stop the third-world invasion of the United States. Since he shows no interest in cutting deficits in a way that might restore pre-COVID price levels, immigration remains the battlefield that will define his presidency. And unless he corrects course, he risks failure on that front too.

No more half measures or donor-driven compromises. No more weakness. Only total war on the policies, programs, and pipelines that keep America under siege.

To his credit, Trump moved quickly to shut off the surge at the southern border during his first week in office. But he did the same in 2017, and the long-term results didn’t last. A future Democrat administration will simply escalate. If Biden brought in 10 million, the next one will aim for 20 million.

Temporary border control and modest deportation numbers won’t solve the crisis. Fewer than a million removals over a four-year term won’t reverse the demographic or economic damage — especially while legal immigration, foreign student visas, and guest worker programs continue at record highs.

Unforced errors

Trump must go beyond symbolic border enforcement. That means neutralizing judicial interference through must-pass legislation — or ignoring illegitimate court rulings outright. He should authorize maritime deportations using ships, suspend most of the 1.5 million foreign student visas — especially from China and Islamic countries — and permanently empower states to enforce immigration law.

Instead, Trump recently unveiled a set of policies that undermine those very goals.

He announced continued access for Chinese nationals to U.S. universities — just as a spy ring was uncovered at the University of Michigan. He expanded his support for white-collar visas for Indian nationals and revived his “golden visa” scheme, which allows wealthy Chinese Communist Party elites to buy their way into U.S. citizenship.

Worst of all, Trump issued an order halting removals of illegal aliens working in farming and hospitality. He later reversed course — but the damage was done.

In pushing for more illegal labor, Trump handed leftists a talking point they had already lost. He lent moral weight to one of their core claims: that America needs illegal immigrants to do the “jobs Americans won’t do.” That argument, long peddled by George W. Bush, John McCain, and the donor-class GOP, was the very reason millions turned to Trump in the first place.

Ten years after calling for a moratorium on illegal immigration and a drastic cut to legal migration, Trump now echoes the talking points he once dismantled. If he keeps this up, he won’t just squander his mandate — he’ll cement the invasion he was elected to stop.

Five points Trump should heed

  1. You can’t re-onshore manufacturing and offshore the workforce. Trump champions tariffs to bring jobs home — but what good is that if those jobs go to foreign nationals here illegally? Patriotism means putting Americans to work on American soil — not just moving the factory.
  2. This isn’t about labor shortages. It’s about labor suppression. Trump wants more white-collar visas even as tech jobs disappear. He supports handing green cards to foreign students. This isn’t policy — it’s donor-class economics wrapped in populist branding.
  3. You can’t modernize with AI while subsidizing human labor. Trump wants to “win the AI arms race” with China. Great. Start by automating farm work instead of importing cartel-affiliated field hands. Cheap labor delays innovation — and the status quo keeps us dependent.
  4. The welfare state distorts the labor market. Trump refuses to shrink entitlements and yet complains that Americans won’t work. Maybe that’s true — but the welfare state is the push, and illegal labor is the pull. Cut both, and you raise wages and get people off the couch.
  5. Illegal labor invites cartel exploitation. Agricultural guest labor provides the perfect cover. In 2019, an exposé by the Louisville Courier Journal revealed how Mexican farm workers served as mules for the Jalisco New Generation cartel. One man, Ciro Macias Martinez, groomed horses by day at Calumet Farm — and ran a $30 million drug ring by night.

The cash-based, transient, and legally vulnerable workforce offers a logistical gold mine for transnational criminal organizations. Cartels use job scams to traffic humans, set up safe houses, and move product. Rural communities lack the law enforcement resources to push back. The result: strategic sanctuary zones for America's most dangerous enemies.

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Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

When Trump says these workers are “hardworking” and “not criminals,” he ignores the obvious fact that every illegal alien is a criminal. Amnesty for farm workers isn’t just a policy mistake — it’s an operational gift to America’s foreign adversaries.

No room for ambiguity

Trump knows immigration is his strongest issue. The polls prove it. But if he wavers, even slightly, on mass deportations or illegal labor, he opens the door for his political enemies to sow doubt — and for cartel operatives to sow chaos.

He reversed the farm worker carve-out. Now he must bury it. Then, he needs to go farther. No more half measures. No more donor-driven compromises. No more weakness. Only total war on the policies, programs, and pipelines that keep America under siege.

His base expects it. The country needs it. The future depends on it.