Supreme Court hands Trump a BIG victory on White House ballroom — for now



Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts ordered Friday that the Trump administration could restart construction on the White House ballroom.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation had filed the lawsuit to stop the ballroom on the basis that it violated environmental laws and other restrictions on construction at the nation's capital.

'They are trying to stop one that is vital to our National Security, and the Safety of all Presidents of the United States, both current and future, their families, staff, and Cabinet members.'

Construction had been blocked by an injunction from the D.C. District Court, but Roberts issued a temporary administrative stay of the injunction, allowing construction to continue, "pending further order of the Chief Justice or of the Court."

However, the chief justice did not opine on the legality of the construction.

President Donald Trump has argued that the construction of the ballroom is necessary for security reasons after the assassination attempt in April at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in his petition to the justices that the ballroom was "vitally required by national security" and called the injunction "extraordinary and unlawful."

He went on to call for an end to the injunction "for the sake of the president's safety, the continuity of government, and the separation of powers."

Originally the administration said the $400 million price tag for the ballroom addition would be completely privately funded, but it has since asked for public funds after the cost ballooned to at least $600 million.

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About $352 million in taxpayer dollars was funneled to the project through Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The president had blasted the members of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in a post on Truth Social a week ago after they were able to obtain the injunction.

"They are very bad for our Country. They stop many projects that are worthy, and hurt many others. In this case, they are trying to stop one that is vital to our National Security, and the Safety of all Presidents of the United States, both current and future, their families, staff, and Cabinet members."

He also called them "TREASONISTS" for filing a lawsuit against the military complex.

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SCOTUS Pauses Blockade On Trump’s White House Ballroom Construction

The U.S. Supreme Court temporarily paused a lower court blockade on President Trump’s White House ballroom construction on Friday. After initial consideration, Chief Justice John Roberts issued a stay on an injunction by D.C. District Court Senior Judge Richard Leon from earlier this year. That order effectively halted the White House’s above-ground construction on the […]

Big Tech gets the network. You get the bill.



The Federal Communications Commission’s latest broadband report makes two things clear: America has made real progress, but the rural job is far from finished.

The number of Americans lacking access to fixed terrestrial broadband with download speeds of 100 Mbps and upload speeds of 20 Mbps fell roughly 23% in one year, while rural gaps shrank more than 44% over two years. Prices for the mid-tier plans most households buy have also fallen in real terms.

The path is simple: Make the biggest users and beneficiaries of Universal Service Fund-supported networks help pay, without raising prices for consumers.

Yet the FCC still says deployment is not “reasonable and timely” for all Americans, especially in rural areas and tribal lands. For many families, broadband is now one of the rare essential services that is both faster and more affordable than it was a few years ago.

That’s why the Universal Service Fund remains indispensable. It connects an estimated 130 million Americans each year, supporting low-income and rural households, schools, libraries, students, and health care providers. At roughly $8.5 billion annually, USF underwrites a crucial piece of America’s digital infrastructure. It also supports the infrastructure beneath an internet economy measured in the trillions of dollars.

The problem is how we pay for it. Consumers bear a monthly surcharge on legacy voice services, while the largest internet platforms, which depend on broadband to generate enormous revenues, contribute nothing.

Congress knows the system needs reform. In 2023, Senators John Thune (R-S.D.) and Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) launched a bipartisan Universal Service Fund Working Group. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) now shares leadership with Luján, joined by Reps. Richard Hudson (R-N.C.) and Doris Matsui (D-Calif.), and the working group has heard from hundreds of stakeholders. Its assignment is straightforward: preserve a program that works while replacing a financing mechanism that does not.

Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Netflix, and TikTok all depend on broadband networks to reach Americans. Each USF-connected household generates an estimated $3,000 annually in revenue for these companies, which collectively consume roughly two-thirds of U.S. broadband capacity. Data-center expansion will only increase that traffic. As more data centers come online to support AI, cloud computing, streaming, and other digital services, the demands placed on those networks will only grow.

Broadband providers, meanwhile, must keep investing in the networks that carry it. Without USF support, many networks would not be built, and broadband could become unaffordable for millions.

Don’t put the bill on consumers

Congress should not solve the problem by adding another fee to household broadband. Affordability remains politically and economically sensitive, and even modest price increases can push consumers out of the market. Broadband has remained relatively stable in price even as Americans have absorbed years of inflation elsewhere in the household budget.

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monticelllo/iStock/Getty Images

Economists Hal Singer and Ted Tatos found that a 5% increase in broadband prices could cause roughly 10 million households to cancel service. Their review found a different dynamic for large digital advertising platforms, where end users generally do not pay subscription fees and companies are better positioned to absorb assessments.

Former FCC Chairman Brendan Carr suggested assessing digital advertising revenue from the largest platforms. Congress could also consider certain transmission services — cloud interconnection, backhaul, content delivery networks, satellite transport, and wide-area networking — that depend heavily on the broadband ecosystem.

The precise mechanism matters less than the principle: Broaden the contribution base so consumers carry less of the burden. Bipartisan legislation already points in that direction. The Lowering Broadband Costs for Consumers Act would extend contributions to large internet service providers, with thresholds aimed at companies of significant scale.

The rural job is not done

Some argue that low-earth-orbit satellite services have largely solved rural broadband and made subsidies unnecessary. They have not. Satellite is valuable where terrestrial networks are uneconomical, but it remains capacity-constrained and is not a full substitute for high-capacity terrestrial broadband in every household or community.

A rural family with several people working from home, taking virtual classes, or using telehealth can need sustained high-speed service and reliability that satellite cannot always guarantee as cell density grows. Prices have also risen, weakening the case for satellite as a cheap universal backstop. Satellite belongs in the mix, but it cannot carry the entire rural-connectivity burden by itself.

Big Tech should pitch in

Big Tech benefits from some $200 billion annually in USF-supported broadband investment, yet the companies oppose contributing to the fund by calling such payments a “tax.” That evades the basic question: Why should the largest users and beneficiaries of broadband infrastructure be the only major participants paying nothing toward its cost?

Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta spend billions building their own data centers, cloud networks, and related infrastructure because infrastructure has economic value. They would never give unlimited use of those facilities away for free. Yet they expect private broadband networks to reach their customers without contributing to the universal service system that expands access to those networks.

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Tamer ALKIS/iStock/Getty Images

The contradiction is especially striking because 13 bipartisan governors recently joined major technology companies at the White House, where the firms pledged to cover the cost of infrastructure upgrades needed for their data centers while protecting consumers from higher electricity bills. The Ratepayer Protection Act would codify those pledges. Congress should apply the same logic to broadband.

How Congress can act

Universal service already enjoys bipartisan support. In Consumers’ Research v. Federal Communications Commission, 29 lawmakers and working-group members filed an amicus brief defending USF before the Supreme Court. They warned that dismantling the fund would harm millions of Americans, particularly low-income and rural households. Congress established universal service in 1996 and has repeatedly recognized the need to adapt it as communications technology changes.

The Supreme Court upheld the program’s constitutionality. Congress defended USF in court; now it should make the funding system fair and sustainable in statute.

The path is straightforward: Broaden the contribution base to include the largest users and beneficiaries of the networks USF supports, while protecting consumers from rising costs. The companies that profit most from ubiquitous broadband should help ensure that ubiquitous broadband continues to exist.

Who’s afraid of the Amish data?



Nothing scares the vaccine establishment more than a meaningful control group. Some vaccine trials do use inert placebos, but most compare a new product with an existing vaccine or another formulation. What we almost never get is long-term randomized evidence comparing children who receive the full schedule with children who receive none of it.

Thanks to ubiquitous mandates, cultural taboos, and pressure from pediatricians, truly unvaccinated children are also increasingly difficult to find in large numbers. That is why the Amish data are so revealing — and why they should be studied rather than waved away.

Why treat a naturally occurring unvaccinated cohort as an inconvenience rather than an opportunity?

Last year, the Supreme Court vacated a shocking Second Circuit decision siding with the state of New York against Amish parents who declined to vaccinate their children. In Miller v. McDonald, the parents argued that forcing the Amish to violate their religious beliefs in their own private schools violates the First Amendment. Yet after the Supreme Court sent the case back for reconsideration in light of its recent religious-liberty precedent, the Second Circuit last month again ruled for New York.

The legal fight continues and so does the coercion.

Putting aside the legal and moral issues at stake, the facts presented during discovery about the health of the unvaccinated Amish should be newsworthy across the world, especially as we debate both the new mRNA flu shot and the discovery that Anthony Fauci was aware of COVID vaccine injuries from the beginning.

Siri & Glimstad LLP, which represents the Amish families, provided the federal district court in New York with sworn expert medical evidence about the health status of 168 students in the three Amish schools targeted by the state for financial penalties.

The doctor’s declaration states: “I am advised that there are 26 families across the three Amish schools at issue, which have a total of 168 unvaccinated children (meaning they have received no vaccines) and that none of them have any health issue that arose after birth.”

The declaration then compares those 168 children with national background rates for allergies, autism, asthma, and ADHD. Using those rates, a random sample of 168 U.S. children would be expected to include several cases of each condition. According to the declaration, however, there were no documented cases of autism, ADHD, asthma, or food allergies among the 168 Amish children.

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Adam Glanzman/Bloomberg/Getty Images

No, that does not magically turn 168 Amish children into a randomized clinical trial. The Amish differ from the broader population in diet, lifestyle, environment, genetics, health care use, and countless other ways. But it does make them a rare, naturally occurring cohort of completely unvaccinated children — exactly the kind of population serious researchers should want to examine.

And the court filing does not rely only on the Amish. It also presents records from 99 unvaccinated children who had religious exemptions in four contiguous school districts in Ulster County, New York. Those records were drawn from state school health examination forms completed by physicians. Here is the comparison presented in the filing:

The numbers are striking. The filing reports zero cases of autism and diabetes in the Ulster County group, lower rates of ADHD and allergies, and a much lower asthma rate than the cited background figures.

Those differences do not prove vaccination caused the higher general population rates. They do raise an obvious question: Why not study the difference rigorously?

The court-filed evidence also notes that the expansion of the childhood vaccine schedule has occurred during the same decades in which autoimmune, developmental, and neurological diagnoses have risen sharply. Correlation is not causation, and anyone pretending otherwise is doing bad science. But correlation can be a reason to investigate — especially when government is mandating the products in question.

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Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images

These retrospective comparisons do not prove that vaccines cause autism, asthma, allergies, ADHD, or any other condition. They cannot control for all the differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. But when government mandates a growing schedule of products for healthy children, shouldn't the burden be on public health authorities to pursue the strongest possible long-term safety evidence?

Why treat a naturally occurring unvaccinated cohort as an inconvenience rather than an opportunity?

That problem remains with the latest mRNA flu vaccine, which is being compared against another flu vaccine rather than an unvaccinated cohort. If officials want to mandate these products, why not demand the strongest possible evidence about their long-term effects? And why did the New York Department of Health decline to engage the data the Amish families placed before the court rather than explain why the comparisons are misleading?

What is self-evident is that vaccine mandates make these questions harder to answer by shrinking the pool of children who remain completely unvaccinated. New York is willing to coerce Amish families in the name of public health? Then public health officials should be willing to confront the data those families have put before them and show their work.

Religious liberty demands no less. Neither does science.

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​DHS is naming names, and the media is melting down



The media melted down last week as the Department of Homeland Security’s top attorney, James Percival, criticized “the worst of the worst” activist judges who are blocking President Trump from securing our borders and our homeland.

The American people should be outraged — not by the rebuke of a top federal official, but by the judges who are overstepping their authority and putting us in danger.

The left’s playbook is obvious: Activist judges usurp power that they do not have to block the Trump administration, and then liberals in the media run interference for them.

President Trump is doing what people re-elected him to do: secure our southern border and deport the tens of millions of illegal immigrants who were allowed in this country by the Biden administration and previous administrations. But a small number of activist federal district judges have issued rulings contrary to the law that have made this a lot more difficult, frustrating the will of the voters.

The examples are especially shocking when you get past the media spin. The Trump administration has now repeatedly won at the Supreme Court on the president’s ability to end Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from specific countries. For example, people allowed to come here temporarily after 1991’s violence in Somalia are still here 35 years later.

Some 50,000 Hondurans were permitted to come here after 1999’s Hurricane Mitch; President Trump ended their temporary status last September. The administration was sued for finally ending TPS for multiple countries, and the Supreme Court upheld the Trump position that temporary means temporary. Yet today, even after the Supreme Court ruling, rogue judges in Massachusetts and Illinois continue to deny the president the ability to terminate TPS.

An even more ridiculous example is that the federal government still has not been allowed to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an illegal alien who has no legal right to be here. Why? Because a district judge ordered Garcia, a suspected gang member, released into the United States. The Trump administration is appealing that ruling too, spending valuable time and taxpayer dollars defeating yet another activist ruling by a rogue judge.

Rather than defend these indefensible judicial rulings, the liberal media are attempting a sleight-of-hand trick and are attacking Percival for criticizing judges by name. This is laughably hypocritical, since U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani targeted Percival directly in an official judicial opinion.

Some of the left’s greatest heroes have said far more bombastic things than the Trump DHS has ever said, and they did so without journalists hyperventilating. President Obama broke centuries of precedent by castigating the Supreme Court in person during the State of the Union Address over the Citizens United case, causing a visible reaction of disbelief by Justice Samuel Alito.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) all but threatened Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh by name that “you will pay a price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” Sure enough, deranged leftists have attempted to murder Justice Kavanaugh and Justice Amy Coney Barrett ever since that hateful speech, yet we never hear the media call for Schumer to exercise civility.

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Alex Wong/Getty Images

By now, the left’s playbook is obvious: Activist judges usurp power that they do not have to block the Trump administration, and then liberals in the media run interference for them, distracting the public with manufactured outrage.

The goal is to run out the clock on the Trump era. The critics tell Percival to simply appeal these rulings without criticizing judges, but the appeals cost the department months of time in a brief four-year presidential term, which is exactly what the left wants. The public needs to know the agenda they voted for is being thwarted by activist judges.

As DHS’ top lawyer, Percival is right to call out rogue district judges and make clear that activist rulings will be appealed and overturned by the higher courts.

I held Percival’s job during the first Trump administration, and I faced many of the same challenges from activist judges. The department has an obligation to correct misinformation and false impressions in the public, especially those that will encourage more illegal immigration, visa overstays, and other lawbreaking.

Judges are public servants with a public trust, and the Constitution says that they are to hold their positions only on condition of “good behavior.” The Trump administration must continue to call them out, continue to get their rulings overturned, and continue to carry out the mandate of the voters.

Either America will finish the fight against illegal immigration or illegal immigration will finish America.

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

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