Laken Riley Act Is Not Enough
Legislation named after the dearly departed Laken Riley, a victim of a heinous illegal alien crime, should secure our border and empower President Trump to deport dangerous immigrants without judicial interference. But the bill named the Laken Riley Act accomplishes neither.
Instead, this Democrat co-sponsored legislation tries to authorize courts to rule in favor of state Attorneys General who might sue the federal government to enforce immigration laws. The recent election gave that mandate directly to President Trump, beginning January 20, and Congress should be strengthening his hand rather than diffusing power elsewhere.
Democrats are all-too-happy to support this bill and breathe a sigh of relief at how Republicans on Capitol Hill are failing to enact the strong policies against immigration crime that Trump campaigned on. In this narrow window of time when GOP strength is at its zenith, fresh from winning an election based on this issue, congressional Republicans are not pushing for strong border security legislation.
Nursing student Laken Riley was the victim of a horrible, despicable crime, brutally raped and murdered by an illegal alien while she was taking a morning jog on the nearby University of Georgia campus. House Republicans initially designed, introduced and approved this legislation last year in an attempt to counter Biden rather than empower Trump.
Riley’s killer was previously caught after he illegally crossed our southern border, but then released into our country under Biden Administration policy. Subsequently he was arrested but released by New York officials after being charged with attempting to harm a minor there, and he later murdered young Laken Riley while she was innocently jogging in Georgia.
This Laken Riley Act was the first bill taken up for a floor vote in the new 119th session of the House, but it is far weaker than it should be in light of the election results in November. This legislation is nothing like the strong campaign speeches given by Trump to his record-breaking audiences, and this new law will give more power to liberal judges rather than to the incoming President Trump.
This bill gives new authority to state Attorneys General, but half of them are against Trump on this all-important issue. Officials in sanctuary or pro-immigration cities can easily circumvent the new requirements in this legislation, and already California has allocated $25 million to frustrate Trump’s deportation of dangerous illegal aliens.
Democrats co-sponsored this misnamed (because it is too weak) Laken Riley Act in the Senate, and 48 Democrats in the House voted for this when it passed in early January as H.R. 29.
Democrat senators may dilute this legislation further by amendments that the Republican Majority Leader, John Thune (R-SD), has pledged to accommodate. In its current form this bill requires the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to detain illegal aliens who have been arrested for burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting.
Courts often side with illegal aliens, and the litigation envisioned by this legislation could take years to resolve. Our country cannot wait, and Trump could order DHS to begin deporting dangerous illegal aliens on Jan. 20 if Republicans in Congress would stand up now on this issue.
Congress should be withdrawing jurisdiction from courts over immigration issues to prevent rulings like the recent one by Obama-appointed federal Judge William Kuntz, which requires the Suffolk County, New York, sheriff to pay $60 million for complying with federal detainer requests issued by ICE. The illegal alien criminals were represented pro bono in federal court by a major law firm funded by large corporate clients.
The crimes targeted by H.R. 29 are offenses against property, even petty shoplifting. People who are in our country illegally committing property crimes should be detained, but this bill fails to prevent the monstrous violent crimes that are being committed by illegals.
Unleashing lawsuits against the federal government could mean allowing new use of the courts by liberal states against the Trump Administration. Congress has this completely backwards to expect federal courts to be fixing the flaws in our immigration system, when Congress itself should be doing that.
The U.S. Supreme Court held on June 23, 2023 that Texas and other states lack Article III standing under the Constitution to compel enforcement of federal immigration laws, and no bill enacted by Congress can specifically overcome that. Reports in the media that this law would overturn that ruling are false, because Congress lacks authority to overturn Supreme Court rulings based on the Constitution.
Congress should be enacting a bill to construct a border wall and to withdraw jurisdiction from federal courts to interfere with any deportations by President Trump. Something called the “Laken Riley Act” should include meaningful protections against repetition of the unspeakable crime committed by an illegal alien against her.
Congress Should Stop Funding Woke Teachers
Beginning January 1st, public school teachers in New Jersey will be less literate but just as liberal under a revision to the state’s certification requirements. Teachers there no longer have to pass a basic skills exam required in roughly 40 states which ensures literacy and simple math aptitude.
This is a travesty in K-12 education, and Congress should not continue to fund it without strings attached. Congress spends a shocking $119 billion annually on K-12 education, which as of 2022 comprised 14% of its overall funding.
Three decades ago, the Supreme Court plainly held that “Congress is free to attach reasonable and unambiguous conditions to federal financial assistance that educational institutions are not obligated to accept,” in its Grove City College v. Bell decision. As Mark Twain quipped, “Everybody complains about the weather, but no one does anything about it,” and Congress should act on this issue now.
Test scores have not recovered to pre-Covid levels, and students are still chronically absent. There is a shortage of public school teachers not because few want these jobs, which feature many vacation days along with excellent health care and pension benefits, but because cumbersome liberal indoctrination is required for mandatory certifications demanded by teachers’ unions to protect their own power.
Regulatory reform by the incoming Trump Administration will be challenged in court on every issue, and likely blocked before taking effect. Liberals will obtain injunctions by activist federal courts in D.C. against every new administrative rule that goes against their playbook, and the D.C. Circuit is controlled by Democrat-appointed judges as seen in the lawfare against Trump and his supporters.
Reforms should be in spending legislation, similar to how Congress ended discrimination by liberal universities against military recruitment by attaching strings to federal funding. The law schools quickly complied to keep the federal money flowing, after the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the condition of accepting military recruitment on taking federal money in Rumsfeld v. FAIR (2006).
Congress should condition its funding of public grade and high schools on giving parents more control, such as choosing or firing the principals in their schools and having veto power over objectionable DEI or transgender indoctrination. Schools should be required to inform parents immediately of any transgender requests by their children.
School choice is not a cure-all, as it just failed in three recent ballot initiatives due to opposition by rural Republicans who do not want to divide their limited resources among multiple schools in sparse populations. Voters just rejected taxpayer funding of private schools in Colorado, Nebraska, and Kentucky.
But classical schools, which are thriving in Florida and Texas, are winning. Florida has established an alternative certification process for teachers at these schools, which emphasize the subjects on which Western civilization was built such as basic skills plus advanced topics like Latin, physics, and calculus.
There are 250 classical schools that have opened nationwide since 2020, and this approach has become so popular that last year a school board in south Florida voted to convert a campus into a classical school. Florida enacted a new law last April to make it easier for these classical schools to bypass the union-controlled certification process, overcoming opposition by Florida’s largest teachers’ union.
With conservative teacher certification, there are more than 50 classical Florida schools teaching 13,892 students. Florida’s Education Commissioner, Manny Diaz Jr., pointed out in support of classical schools that “I have yet to find a school that is going to put teachers in the classrooms that are not going to be in the best interest of students, and certainly not going to be in the best interest of the performance of their school.”
Meanwhile in New Jersey public schools teachers must complete a Leftist preparation program, as accredited at only liberal-controlled schools, plus a burdensome requirement of 175 field hours. This typically takes an unreasonable one to two years, which means that successful STEM professionals cannot retire or take time off to teach immediately in public schools.
As in New Jersey, a few years ago Democrat-controlled New York State also ended its requirement that public school teachers pass the basic skills exam, known as the Praxis Core Test. New York eliminated this in order to promote DEI in its hiring of teachers, in contrast with McDonald’s that just abandoned the DEI agenda for its huge workforce.
Half of science and math majors indicate their interest in becoming a teacher, and high school pay in these high-demand subjects is better than many college faculty salaries. Yet a severe shortage of high school STEM teachers persists due to union-demanded certification burdens.
Rather than cut the red tape hindering certification of competent teachers, liberals drop testing requirements for basic proficiency skills. The Republican Congress should end this woke approach to education.
Wrong About H-1Bs
The two “Steves” in Trump’s orbit, Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, have rebuked Big Tech’s promotion of H-1B visas, which bring in foreign workers to do entry-level engineering and other jobs. Bannon, who refers to Elon Musk and similar pro-Trump tech advocates as “recent converts,” points out that there should be “zero H-1B visas.”
There is no shortage of Americans with science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) degrees to fill jobs at high-tech companies. In 2022 there were 17.2 million working-age Americans, mostly men, holding STEM degrees, but only half of them were employed in STEM jobs.
Half of the millions of STEM-trained Americans are unemployed, underemployed, or retrained in another field. Moreover, inflation-adjusted wages for STEM workers have barely increased since 2008, despite the high-tech boom that has made Rockefellers out of hundreds of executives at these companies.
According to Ken Cuccinelli, who served in the first Trump Administration, last year the top 30 American employers for H-1B visas, including Musk’s Tesla, laid off 84,556 workers while also seeking 34,414 new foreign employees under the H-1B program.
It’s hogwash to pretend foreigners must be brought in on visas to fill entry-level positions in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. The motivation for this theft of American jobs is how foreigners become like indentured servants of centuries ago, bound to their employers with less mobility and lower wages that depress salaries for Americans, too.
People from India and China like these visas because it gives them a path to permanent residency in the U.S. along with chain migration for their extended families. Democrats like the visas, in part because new citizens typically vote for Democrat Party candidates for president and other offices.
MAGA is for Americans to fill American jobs, not foreigners. This requires the termination of, or at least a sharp reduction in, visa programs that bring in hordes of foreigners to fill positions here and who ultimately end up running top American companies.
Nearly 100% of the many thousands of H-1B visas sought annually by Google are approved for jobs that many American engineers aspire to obtain, but are passed over in favor of foreigners. The CEO of Google is himself foreign-raised, in India, and attended college there before coming to the United States on a student visa.
Everyone who is against the offshoring of American jobs should likewise be opposed to giving many of the best jobs in our country to foreigners. The stunning America First victory in the recent election is a mandate for letting Americans have American jobs.
There is no shortage of engineering talent in the United States, where “Yankee Ingenuity” is the source of much of the prosperity today. More than 90% of the most important inventions have been by Americans, while the rest of the world copies us in their attempt to keep up.
President Trump’s uncle John, to whom Donald referred with great admiration during campaign rallies, was an American inventor and longtime MIT professor of electrical engineering. He improved X-ray technology for the benefit of many future medical patients.
Displaying the same pluck that Trump himself is adored for, in 1936 John Trump demonstrated for the media a new million-volt X-ray machine. While operating the machine two high-voltage sparks shot out and smacked him right on his nose.
Yet Professor Trump was unfazed by this attack, and kept on going with his presentation. Because the machine was electrically grounded, he declared, the sparks could not be fatal.
Elon Musk compares tech company visas to professional sports teams bringing in foreigners, but that is also harmful to Americans. The highest-paying baseball salaries are going to foreigners now, while many college basketball scholarships are granted to foreign players hoping to play in the NBA here.
Many of these foreigners do not speak English and have no desire to assimilate into our culture. These foreign athletes are not role models for American youth to play in Little League, or on high school teams.
College sports have long been beneficial in attracting young men to improve their education while partaking in healthy activities that teach them the value of hard work and sportsmanship. But when college sports scholarships go to foreign athletes instead, the result is a decline in young American men benefiting from the college experience.
Black athletes may be harmed the most by this trend to prefer foreigners over Americans in sports. In three decades the percentage of Major League Baseball that is black has declined from 19% to only 6.3% today, and fewer still are receiving the top salaries in contrast with a generation ago.
In addition to bringing jobs back to America from foreign countries, we need to end the practice of importing foreigners to take jobs away from Americans here.
“Transgender Lunacy” Remains a Big Issue
Transgender activism was on the ballot in November and lost big in the presidential and U.S. Senate races. But there is no sign that Democrats are letting up on this issue, and on December 23 Biden said he “strongly opposes” a restriction on transgender surgeries on kids of service members contained in the defense authorization bill, which many Democrats voted against for that reason.
Under Biden, transgenders serve openly in our military, but Trump can end that along with banning federally funded transgender drugs and surgeries on minors. “I will sign executive orders to end child sexual mutilation,” Trump announced in Phoenix on December 22, and “get transgender out of the military and out of our elementary schools and middle schools and high schools.”
An estimated 1.3 million adults and 300,000 youths in America identify as transgender, and those numbers have been growing rapidly due to encouragement from schools, liberal professionals, and culture. Unfortunately, Democrat-appointed judges rule for the transgender side every time, as no Democrat crosses the agenda of Planned Parenthood which has expanded into the transgender business.
In its final hours, the Senate confirmed the 235th Biden-appointed judge to the federal courts, one more than it allowed Trump to appoint in his first administration. In addition, hundreds of federal judges appointed by Presidents Clinton and Obama are still deciding cases.
Two recent decisions within the same federal circuit illustrate the immense divide between Democrat and Republican-appointed judges on the transgender issue. A Republican-appointed judge in Pennsylvania held in favor of three mothers after a teacher taught transgender identity to first-graders, while a Democrat-appointed judge in New Jersey ruled against a father objecting to transgender facilitation without his consent.
In the New Jersey case, a widowed father was dismayed to learn that the public high school where his daughter was a freshman was using male pronouns for her without his knowledge or approval. He sued in federal court to stop this abuse of his parental rights, but the court ruled against him and in favor of the school.
The student’s interest in transitioning was supported by a school club known as “Students Advocating for Equality,” or SAFE. Its purported purpose is to “promote open discussion and awareness about modern cultures and topics surrounding intersectionality while aiming to make positive contributions to [the] community and school.”
Not only did school officials conceal from the father that they were referring to his daughter by male pronouns, but they also excluded from an email teachers who would be candid with the father. Even though gender dysphoria among teenagers is known to be potentially dangerous, the father was kept in the dark and the Biden-appointed federal judge ruled against his motion for a preliminary injunction, which is now on appeal.
Trump has ingeniously proposed that school principals be elected by a vote of parents instead of by tax-salaried administrators or school boards. “If you have a bad principal that’s not getting the job done, the parents will—under the Trump administration—be allowed to vote to fire that principal,” Trump told Moms for Liberty last summer.
Trump could force that change with strong regulations from his Department of Education, which could tie federal funding to schools that allow more parental control. Similarly, new transgender regulations of schools could deny federal funding where biological males are allowed to compete as transgenders in girls’ sports.
On December 17 NCAA president Charlie Baker appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Republican Senators Musgrave, Kennedy, and Hawley took the opportunity to challenge him about allowing male-bodied athletes to invade college women’s sports. Baker tried to deflect pointed questioning by saying he was just following federal law, but when Sen. Hawley challenged him to identify the law he was following, he could not do so because there is none.
Almost daily a women’s sports team defaults in a scheduled match because an opponent includes a transgender player who is a biological male. Lawsuits are pending over this issue, which the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly dodged while many lower courts are pro-transgender.
At oral argument in early December in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court challenging Tennessee’s sensible ban on transgender surgeries and drugs for minors, which 26 states have enacted, all three Democrat-appointed justices spoke against this good law. Earlier the liberal Montana Supreme Court blocked a conservative Montana law that protected children against transgender procedures.
As boys who say they identify as girls are allowed into girls’ locker rooms, in Westosha, Wisconsin, an outraged father declared “I find it unacceptable that a 14-year-old girl is required to change in front of a 16-year-old boy to complete a required class in school.” In Reno, Nevada, a boy identifying as a girl “gets a front-row seat to view naked females,” complained a girl’s grandmother.
