RealClearInvestigations'
Picks of the Week
March 16 to March 22, 2025 In RealClearInvestigations, Ben Weingarten examines the movement to reform universal injunctions, judicial orders issued at record rates to hamper President Trump in both of his terms in office. Such orders allow any of the nearly 700 federal judges to prevent the president from enforcing policies not only against those bringing a case but against anyone, anywhere. The injunctions come in response to the 100-plus lawsuits that, critics argue, blue states, progressive nonprofits, and ex-government officials have deliberately brought before sympathetic judges – a tactic known as “forum shopping” or “judge shopping” that both parties have employed. Democrats and progressive legal scholars argue these injunctions are a necessary brake because Trump is creating what they call a constitutional crisis by pushing the bounds of his office. So far, the Supreme Court has been unwilling to resolve the conflict, despite past pleadings from Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch and the Biden administration. In one blistering dissent, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that he was “stunned” that the court’s majority had affirmed the "unchecked power" of "a single district court judge." Frustrated, congressional Republicans are moving to pass legislation to curtail universal injunctions while making it harder to “judge shop.” They are even pursuing the more extreme measure of impeaching judges. In RealClearInvestigations, James Varney examines the EPA’s $7 billion Solar for All program, a Biden administration grantmaking entity whose awards one critic calls “the most blatant instances of self-dealing I’ve ever witnessed.” Solar for All is a little-scrutinized part of the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which touched off a political firestorm when it was revealed that $20 billion of it was spirited to Citibank in the waning days of President Biden’s term. Solar for All was the money left behind, which the new Trump administration immediately froze on Jan. 20. A RealClearInvestigations review of Solar for All's records reveals a tight circle of publicly funded environmental outfits and government agencies, with the lion’s share of the now-frozen funds slated to go to Democrat-run states. The biggest award to a green nonprofit, $311.4 million, was won by Grid Alternatives, one of whose co-founders, Tim Sears, was named a “White House Champion of Change for Solar Deployment” during the Obama administration in 2014. Another award recipient is Hope Enterprise Corp. of Jackson, Miss., which reported $19 million in total revenue in 2023 while paying $5.2 million in salaries. This included $582,826 to its president and CEO, William Bynum, who reported working 27.6 hours per week. The firm is located in a district represented by House Democrat Bennie Thompson for more than 30 years. The $7 billion Solar for All program was more than double what the Environmental Protection Agency spent on hazardous substance superfunds and roughly $3 billion more than the EPA dedicated to “environmental programs and management.” In RealClearInvestigations, Ana Kasparian shines a light on Los Angeles' failure to control the spread of homeless encampments and its contribution to the city's frequent wildfires. While LA’s leaders have been quick to blame climate change and faulty power lines for recent historic fires blazes, critics say they have intentionally downplayed the role played by the city’s swelling homeless population: A new investigation based on fire department data found that since 2019, the number of fires connected to a homeless person has increased by thousands. In 2024 alone, there were nearly 17,000 such fires. A separate investigation tallied nearly 14,000 homeless fires a year earlier. The report found that some of the fires were sparked as a result of encampments illegally tapping into the city’s electrical system. Visitors to the city’s Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Reserve are worried about the fire risk posed by squatters' makeshift multi-story structures, propane tanks, and construction materials they’ve discovered. Commonly, the squatters seem mentally unbalanced – like the screaming man waving a machete during a recent field trip for around a dozen third-grade students. Fire officials are rarely publicly outspoken about the problem. The head of the firefighters’ union described responding to fires at the same encampment site over and over again. In the latest episode, a dozen firefighters were injured in a sudden explosion as they battled the blaze. “Where is the outrage for what’s happening in the city?” he said. Waste of the Day
by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books $651 Million of EPA Grants Are Untraceable, RCI
$41M Mystery as University President Exits, RCI
Federal Buildings Need $370B of Repairs, RCI
Signs Warn That Hurricanes Are Dangerous, RCI
Spending Soars at Another Batch of Federal Agencies, RCI Trump 2.0 and the Beltway Workers Lived ‘Like Reigning Kings’ at Now-Shuttered Agency, Daily Wire
Doxing Website Shows Personal Details of Tesla Owners, New York Post
Members of Congress Driving Cars on the Taxpayer Dime, Free Beacon
Architect of Project 2025 Is Ready for His Victory Lap, Politico
First They Said Science Was Racist; Now It Can't Be Cut, City Journal
Trump Declares Biden’s 11th-Hour Pardons ‘Void’, National Review
After Crying Poverty, Hunter Takes Fancy Vacay With Guards, New York Post
Trump Revokes Security Details for Hunter and Ashley Biden, New York Post
JFK Files Illuminate Statecraft, Not Assassination, Washington Post
IRS Lawyer Warned Trump Firings Were 'Fraud' on Courts, ProPublica Other Noteworthy Articles and Series James Goulding endured perilous circumstances while serving as a sergeant in a Marine Corps battalion known as The Walking Dead, which suffered one of the highest casualty rates of the Vietnam War. This article reports he never sought professional help to process his experiences but his wife says he referred to the war in the suicide note he left on the 40th anniversary of the day he left Vietnam. “It started on this day,” he wrote in his suicide note. “I’ll end it on this day.” This article reports that his wife fought the Veteran’s Administration for years to receive dependent death benefits. She is not alone: A CNN investigation found that even as the VA has invested hundreds of millions of dollars addressing the veteran suicide crisis, agency officials have denied crucial benefits to hundreds of families of veterans who killed themselves after being discharged from active duty. ... Strict VA rules require families applying for benefits to submit medical documentation showing their loved ones’ death stemmed from their time in the military. But as the agency itself has acknowledged, many troubled vets never seek professional help for their mental health problems, making that proof all but impossible for some families to obtain after a suicide. CNN found that even some families that could show their vet had been diagnosed by doctors inexplicably had their claims denied. This article reports that “on average, families spent five and a half years appealing their denials. More than 230 families spent more years fighting for death benefits than their veteran served in the military.” Surprise no-knock warrants – in which police use battering rams and pry bars without first knocking and identifying themselves – gained notoriety especially after Breonna Taylor was shot and killed in Louisville, Kentucky, during a March 2020 raid. This article reports that Taylor’s death “ultimately amplified longstanding, bipartisan demands for reform of no-knock raids. Several states limited no-knock searches, including Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia.” Reform has been slower to come in the state that this this focus of this article, Mississippi: The Supreme Court has ruled that to obtain a no-knock search warrant from a judge, police must show that the search target is dangerous or might try to run away or destroy evidence. … [Since 2015], judges in six courts across the state have approved at least 62 no-knock search warrants that failed to show that they met basic constitutional standards, an investigation by The Marshall Project - Jackson and the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal found. The news organizations showed copies of the warrants from across the state to legal experts including attorneys, law professors and former federal magistrates. The experts agreed that most of the search warrants and affidavits showed no written legal justification for the no-knock warrants. This article reports that these shortcomings have led to the death of innocents, including a man named Ricky Keeton. Fearing intruders, he was shot to death in 2015 after he came to the door with an air pistol as SWAT team members forced their way into his trailer home at 1 A.M. As Syria’s now fallen Assad regime sought to snuff out resistance, it often separated children from their families. This article reports on the unknown fate of hundreds of Syrian children referred to as "security placement" kids – those handed over to an orphanage while their mothers remained in detention. Now, this article reports, those families are trying to track down their missing children: An investigation by NPR suggests that by 2014, Syria's most notorious intelligence agency had decided to move the children of women they were detaining to at least four orphanages across Damascus. After gathering data from orphanages NPR found that the Air Force Intelligence Directorate hid more than 300 children in these institutions. … The number may have been even higher. One person with knowledge of the largest orphanage in Damascus, where at least dozens of children may have been placed, told NPR that she suspected the orphanage took in many more. … Orphanage directors told NPR that most of these children tended to be under 10 years old; some were born while the mother was in detention. … Detained pregnant women had to hand over their babies just weeks after they gave birth. Orphanage directors said they had to take the children – often malnourished, screaming for their mothers and sick – turned over by a notoriously violent arm of the Assad regime: the Air Force Intelligence Directorate. "They would have put us through a mincer if we asked them anything," said Rana al-Baba, director of an orphanage run by the Muslim Women's Charitable Association. "They would have turned me into kebab. Or a hamburger. Do you really think we could challenge them?" Saudi Arabia seems like a land of opportunity for many Kenyan women. Spend two years in Saudi Arabia as a housekeeper or nanny, the pitch goes, and you can earn enough to build a house, educate your children and save for the future. That's why, this article reports, on any given day dozens if not hundreds of women buzz around the Nairobi international airport’s departures area. Some, however, never make it back home: At least 274 Kenyan workers, mostly women, have died in Saudi Arabia in the past five years – an extraordinary figure for a young work force doing jobs that, in most countries, are considered extremely safe. At least 55 Kenyan workers died last year, twice as many as the previous year. Autopsy reports are vague and contradictory. They describe women with evidence of trauma, including burns and electric shocks, all labeled natural deaths. One woman’s cause of death was simply “brain dead.” This article reports on many women who have alleged abuse and slave-like arrangements. Margaret Mutheu Mueni, for example, said that her Saudi boss had seized her passport, declared that he had “bought” her and frequently withheld food. When she called the staffing agency for help, she said, a company representative told her, “You can swim across the Red Sea and get yourself back to Kenya.” More than two dozen Wikipedia editors allegedly colluded in a years-long scheme to inject anti-Israel language on topics related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to a new report by the Anti-Defamation League. This article reports: The rogue editors, at least 30 of them, flooded one of the world’s most popular sites with “antisemitic narratives, anti-Israel bias, and misleading information,” according to the report by the ADL’s Center for Tech and Society. … Editors deleted reports of sexual violence by Hamas from Wikipedia content, while others systematically removed references to terrorist violence from pages on Hamas, the report said. In another example, edits to the Wikipedia page for Samir Kuntar – a Lebanese-Palestinian Liberation Front member who participated in the deadly attack in Nahariya, Israel, in 1979 – removed his murder conviction on terrorism charges. This article reports that the battle between the ADL and Wikipedia heated up last year when Wiki editors declared the ADL an “unreliable source of information” about the Israel-Gaza war. In a separate article, the Jewish Journal reports that “an obscure Discord chat room, ‘Tech For Palestine,’ infiltrated Wikipedia, the world’s largest information database, to spread anti-Israel propaganda.” | 