Category: The Hill
Jasmine Crockett leads James Talarico in first poll post-announcement
U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, leads the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate according to a new poll, with 51% of likely voters indicating support for her, while State Rep. James Talarico, D-Round Rock, has 43% support.
Wisconsin redistricting lawsuits may get ruling after 2026 elections
Two lawsuits urging Wisconsin to redraw its congressional maps that currently favor the GOP may not be resolved until after the 2026 midterm elections, which could help President Trump’s push for red state redistricting in order for Republicans to keep control of the House of Representatives. Julie Zuckerbrod, an attorney representing Democrats in one of…
A demilitarized zone in Ukraine? Zelensky appears open
Welcome to The Hill’s Defense & NatSec newsletter {beacon} Defense &National Security Defense &National Security The Big Story A demilitarized zone in Ukraine? Zelensky appears open Ukraine included the establishment of a demilitarized zone in the Donbas region as part of its latest proposal to end its war with Russia. © Ukrainian Presidential Press…
Pritzker Signs Law Welcoming State-Sanctioned Suicide To Illinois
State-sanctioned euthanasia not only pressures patients to choose suicide, but also inevitably ends in health care systems forcing suicide on patients.
Trump’s DOT claims 53% of New York’s non-domiciled CDLs were issued illegally
President Donald Trump’s Department of Transportation announced new action against another Democratic-led state that it claims has been illegally issuing non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses.
On Friday morning, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy revealed that an audit from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration found that over half of New York state’s non-domiciled CDLs were issued illegally. The audit sampled 200 records and discovered that 107, or 53%, were issued in violation of federal law.
‘What we uncovered in New York is not an administrative oversight.’
There are reportedly 32,000 active non-domiciled CDLs that were issued by New York.
According to the DOT, the New York Department of Motor Vehicles defaulted to issuing eight-year licenses to foreign drivers who applied for non-REAL ID licenses, regardless of when their legal status expired.
“This systemic failure allows the state to blindly grant long-term commercial driving privileges to foreigners that expire long after the expiration of their lawful presence in the country,” the DOT stated.
Additionally, the department claimed that New York failed to provide any evidence that it had verified the lawful presence of foreign individuals before issuing them commercial driver’s licenses. In some instances, New York allegedly relied on expired lawful presence documents to issue licenses.
Sean Duffy. Photo by Eric Lee/Getty Images
As a result of the concerning findings, the DOT has demanded that New York immediately pause the issuance of new or renewed non-domiciled CDLs and commercial learner’s permits.
The state has also been asked to conduct an internal audit to identify licenses that were issued in violation of federal regulations. The DOT warned that the state risks losing $73 million in federal highway funding if it fails to revoke all illegally issued licenses held by foreign drivers immediately.
“When more than half of the licenses reviewed were issued illegally, it isn’t just a mistake — it is a dereliction of duty by state leadership. Gov. [Kathy] Hochul must immediately revoke these illegally issued licenses. If they refuse to follow the law, we will withhold federal highway funding,” Duffy stated. “This administration will never stop fighting to keep you and your family safe on our roads.”
Photo by GEORGE FREY/AFP via Getty Images
During a Friday morning press conference announcing the findings, Duffy explained that states that illegally issue CDLs endanger American drivers nationwide, since the licenses allow interstate operations.
Duffy described New York as the worst offender for issuing licenses in violation of federal law. The DOT has given New York 30 days to come into compliance.
California and New York account for half of the non-domiciled CDLs issued in the nation, Duffy stated.
“What we uncovered in New York is not an administrative oversight,” FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs stated during the press conference. “It’s a systematically, grossly unacceptable deviation from a federal safety regulation that has been on the books for a long period of time.”
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If Time Magazine Weren’t So Corrupt, It Would Have Made Charlie Kirk Person Of The Year
TIME could have used the credibility that choosing him would have helped restore.
Mexico has cartel armies. Blue America has cartel politics.
Detroit is synonymous with autos, Los Angeles with motion pictures, and Texas with oil. Pittsburgh still conjures steel. When a product or service anchors a region’s economy, that sector has power. Politicians court industry. Industry demands representation and, ideally, protection.
What’s true regionally is just as true nationally. That’s why K Street exists and lobbyists make big bucks. Fortunes rise and fall, but if our GDP slips even 3%, the usual talking heads sprint to the cameras to declare the American economy on the verge of collapse — and always under whichever Republican is in office. When a Democrat presides over a faltering economy, the political media prefers to drive the getaway car.
Harassing users did nothing to stop the poison. Blowing up supply at sea does. Every sunken shipment dents the cartels’ profits. Every explosion represents a tangible loss.
If any of us invented a product that added 3% to national GDP, we’d enjoy the influence over policy and legislation that naturally comes with living in a representative republic with a market economy. Innovation and competition fuel prosperity.
So here’s a question the blue-city, blue-state establishment doesn’t want asked: What percentage of its GDP comes from narcotics trafficking?
Recently a member of our self-styled House of Lords, Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, erupted in outrage over the Pentagon’s lethal targeting of drug traffickers in the Caribbean. He said he was “deeply disturbed” by these operations. Was Reed ever equally disturbed by narcotics deaths in Providence or Pawtucket?
Some Democrats insist the traffickers are “impoverished fishermen.” Reed himself defended them on the grounds that “they are just trying to make money,” as if they weren’t waging chemical warfare on our civilian population. And he reassured us that the men killed weren’t running fentanyl — only cocaine. As though cocaine were some kind of civic improvement!
By any honest analysis, an overnight eradication of drug addiction in America would collapse an entire NGO ecosystem — along with the payrolls of the consultants, therapists, and bureaucrats who perpetually “mitigate” our crises of addiction, alcoholism, and dereliction. Given the nature of addiction, that blessed day will never come.
Look south. By my estimation, two-thirds of Mexico’s economy is directly or indirectly tied to narcotics. No, that’s not the Wall Street Journal’s number; nobody has the real statistics because the books are kept on scraps of paper known in DEA argot as “Pay/Owe” sheets. My estimate comes from observing the level of protection the trade enjoys at every tier of Mexican governance — local, rural, national. Narcotics are so economically essential that cartels decide who can run in elections with preordained outcomes. Their influence rivals that of the Democratic Party’s super delegates, if you’ll pardon the comparison.
Big Narco commands private armies, armored vehicles, anti-tank missiles, machine guns, uniforms, rules, and courts. The narcotics sector has effectively stalled Mexico’s political maturation.
And it’s affecting us too.
RELATED: Trump cracks the Caracas cartel code
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
In past administrations, the so-called war on drugs looked more like a war on addicts and their families, with only token strikes on the international criminal organizations moving the product. The Trump administration has reversed that. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is hitting the cartels directly. Harassing users did nothing to stop the poison. Blowing up supply at sea does. Every sunken shipment dents the cartels’ profits. Every explosion represents a tangible loss.
The hysterics from Jack Reed and others suggest these interdictions are hurting the economies of blue cities and states more than they care to admit. You’d think the destruction of cocaine, heroin, and fentanyl — inflicting daily carnage — would spark celebration. In Los Angeles County alone, the coroner processes six dead Americans per day from overdoses. Last year, it was eight. Fathers, mothers, runaway teens, derelict addicts — Americans, dead every day.
And yet Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) — raw with presidential ambition — insists the leading cause of death for young Californians is firearms. This is false of course. But to blue-city politicians, gun control makes for better PR than confronting thousands of overdose deaths. Meanwhile Sacramento’s ruling cabal has passed a thicket of laws, regulations, and policies that effectively protect narcotics trafficking in the Golden State.
Guns hardly register in California’s GDP. Big Narco does.
Media Pout That SCOTUS Could Put The Kibosh On Bureaucratic Sabotage Of GOP Presidents
If you read and watched nothing but legacy media coverage of the Supreme Court this week, you’d come away thinking that a majority of justices are prepared to anoint Donald Trump as king of America. Naturally, it’s all complete garbage. This hyperbolic hullabaloo centers around a case heard by the high court earlier this week […]
Oxford Comms Guru, A Democratic Donor, Very Upset Over Free Beacon Report on Wes Moore
Oxford’s deputy communications chief, Julia Paolitto, was not a fan of the Washington Free Beacon’s report on Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D.), which revealed the potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate boasted about being a “foremost expert” on radical Islam—though nobody can find his graduate thesis from Oxford, where he attended graduate school as a Rhodes Scholar.
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‘Everything Is On the Table’: Trump Admin Weighs Terror Sanctions for UNRWA
The Trump administration says that “everything is on the table”—including terrorism-related sanctions—as it moves closer to taking fresh punitive measures against the Hamas-linked United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), according to three senior officials, who told the Washington Free Beacon that the aid group’s “time playing a role in Gaza is over.”
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