In 2009, South Carolina representative Joe Wilson shouted “You lie!” as Obama addressed Congress’s concerns that health-care reforms would mean providing coverage to illegal immigrants. The congressional chamber booed Wilson, and Obama quickly responded, “That’s not true.” Fast forward to September 30, when California explicitly petitioned the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to grant illegal immigrants access to Obamacare. If approved, it will become the first state to offer such a program.

California’s intent to grant illegal immigrants access to the Obamacare marketplace, also known as the Exchange, became undeniable in June when Governor Jerry Brown signed into law Senate Bill 10. The new law gave Covered California, the state’s health insurance exchange, permission to request that the federal government waive restrictions on illegal immigrants from purchasing insurance. If the Obama administration accepts California’s request, Obamacare will be accessible to any illegal immigrant willing to pay the heavy price — they will not be “eligible to receive federal advanced premium tax credit, federal cost-sharing reduction, or any other federal assistance for the payment of premiums or cost sharing for a California qualified health plan.”

The waiver would give 390,000 illegal immigrants an opportunity to purchase health insurance; meanwhile, Covered California made the predictable defense for its irrational petition: The Obamacare restriction is “a barrier for these residents who make a significant contribution to the economy, paying more than $3 billion a year in state and local taxes.” They also argued that nearly 50 percent of these illegal immigrants are home-owners and have resided in the U.S. for over a decade, so they should have access to purchasing health insurance.

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Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson’s candidacy has gone from comical to pitiable. His latest foreign-affairs gaffe? He couldn’t even name the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-Un, who just yesterday vowed to attack the United States should the Obama administration make “preemptive attacks” on his nation’s capital.

Johnson’s Aleppo gaffe last month (when asked about the crisis in Aleppo, Syria, he responded, “What is Aleppo?”) was inexcusable, but his reasoning was not that he did not know the city of Aleppo. Rather, Johnson explained that he “immediately thought about an acronym, not the Syrian conflict.” He “blanked.” Flubs on the campaign trail are common, and if anything, his comments were comedic.

Shortly after, Johnson successfully made light of his second campaign gaffe when he failed to name a foreign leader he admires. With a blank stare, Johnson said that he was “having an Aleppo moment” and “a brain freeze.” He joked about the remarks later, tweeting, “It’s been almost 24 hours…and I still can’t come up with a foreign leader I look up to.” Again, Johnson drew a fine line between exposing his ignorance and freezing in the national spotlight.

Since then, however, Johnson has demonstrated that he did not “blank” on the topics of Aleppo and foreign leaders — he’s simply clueless with regard to foreign policy.

Read More at National Review

Despite all the hype, Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson has earned less than 10 percent of the electorate’s support. He has also failed to convince elected representatives that the Johnson–Bill Weld ticket is worthy of an endorsement, even when framed as an alternative to Clinton and Trump — two of the most unfavorable candidates in history. With 33 days until the election, Johnson’s support among elected representatives is nearly nonexistent.

In fact, Republican representative Scott Rigell of Virginia is the only current member of Congress, or governor for that matter, to endorse Johnson. And if all current state legislators are included in that tally, Johnson has a mere ten endorsements. One may assume that Johnson’s endorsements stem from his home state of New Mexico, but this is not the case. Of the 112 representatives in the New Mexico Legislature, only one state senator — Republican Lisa Torraco — has endorsed Johnson. The lack of endorsements does not determine Johnson’s public support, but it does provide evidence that he has failed to gain traction even in his home state, the only state where he is averaging 20 percent in the polls.

Johnson has also struggled to earn endorsements from those in his own party, such as former Libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul. When asked about Johnson, Paul argued that Johnson “does not come across with a crisp libertarian message.” Paul even suggested that Green-party candidate Jill Stein is “probably the best on foreign policy.”

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Last Friday, California governor Jerry Brown signed into law Assembly Bill 2888, which mandates a minimum three-year prison sentence for those convicted of rape. The bill was inspired by the case of former Stanford University swimmer Brock Turner, who received a six-month sentence behind bars after sexually assaulting an unconscious woman.

Brown and the state’s majority-Democratic legislature previously have sought to remove mandatory minimums in the state’s criminal justice system; they argue that one-size-fits-all sentencing leads to mass-incarceration and disproportionately targets minorities. But after Turner’s case, these same politicians have now signed into law more mandatory minimums as their best solution.

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Mayor Bill de Blasio’s campaign promise to curb homelessness across New York City has been a failure. When de Blasio entered office in 2014, there were 50,689 people sleeping in homeless shelters. But during his first year in office, the count increased by 15 percent, and now, less than two years later, there are nearly 60,000 people — that’s including 23,600 children.

Rather than admit that the city’s homelessness-prevention programs have failed to reverse this upward trend, the de Blasio administration opted to make excuses based on hypotheticals: If the programs weren’t implemented, city officials told the Wall Street Journal, there would have been 7,000 more people in homeless shelters.. By this metric, the 18 percent increase in homelessness under de Blasio’s watch somehow represents the success of the administration’s policies.

City officials still blame de Blasio’s predecessors for today’s crisis. “My frustration is that the kinds of common sense investments that we’ve made in prevention and rental assistance were not made 20 years ago when this trajectory began,” Steve Banks, New York City’s Human Resources Administration commissioner, said. New York City’s homelessness problem may have begun 20 years ago, but de Blasio’s comprehensive plan has done nothing but throw money at the problem, not fix it.

Read More at National Review

Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey has willfully abused the power of her office to push a progressive gun-control agenda. In July, she unilaterally expanded the state’s assault-weapon ban by reinterpreting it to include guns that duplicate or copy assault weapons. Gun retailers are expected to comply with two vague tests: “If a gun’s operating system is essentially the same as that of a banned gun, or if the gun has components that are interchangeable with those of a banned weapon,” it is now illegal in Massachusetts. But since even two months later no one knows which guns Healey has in mind, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) and four Massachusetts gun retailers have filed a lawsuit challenging her ambiguous directive.

Rather than specify which guns are now banned, Healey has issued an interpretation of the law so nebulous as to give her incredibly broad authority to ban any gun she sees fit. The directive could mean that all banned types of guns, even if they have been modified to abide by state law, are now illegal. (“In other words, it could mean that all AR-15s that have been modified to comport with Massachusetts law are now illegal purely because they are AR-15s,” as National Review’s own Charlie Cooke put it.) Or it could mean that all semi-automatic weapons are now banned in Massachusetts, since nearly every such gun has characteristics similar to those of a banned gun that would fall under the copycat test.

Healey has made no effort to clarify the directive, which gives her the power to criminally charge retailers. NSSF’s lawsuit, however, could force her to establish legal boundaries.

Across the state, gun retailers made numerous “attempts to get clarification” from Healey’s office regarding the directive, Mike Bazinet, NSSF’s director of public affairs, tells NR. But every time retailers reached out to Healey’s office for clarification, they got a similar response: The office “did not know the answer, and they did not have a list of what would be prohibited assault weapons,” according to the NSSF’s court filing. When pressed for answers, Healey’s office simply told retailers to use their “best judgment.”

Why leave it up to retailers to interpret the directive? Because Healey hasn’t devised a way to enforce it herself without violating the due-process protections in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, as well as the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms. The directive, according to the court filing, is “arbitrary and capricious and an abuse of discretion or is not otherwise in accordance with law.”

In the meantime, gun retailers have had to “err on the side of caution,” Bazinet says. No one wants to face criminal charges for unwittingly selling a now-illegal gun, and the only solution is to pull off the shelves any model that might violate the directive. The court filing describes IWI–Tavor model rifles, Smith and Wesson M&P .15-.22 rifles, and other firearms being taken out of stock at various gun shops in response to the threat of criminal prosecution, even though the guns were legal before.

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Charter schools have grown exponentially in recent years, with nationwide enrollment more than tripling between 2004 and 2014. The publicly funded but privately run institutions have a mixed record, but overall they have proven to be a viable alternative to the current failing public-education system. Partly owing to this success, teachers’ unions and their political supporters remain adamantly opposed to charters (which typically do not have unions), and they are eager to pounce on any chance to discredit them. A controversy over a $71 million federal grant to the state of Ohio to fund charter schools has become the latest bone of contention in this dispute.

When the Department of Education announced its competitive charter-school grants last fall, the news that Ohio had won the largest share of the $249 million awarded to eight states faced an immediate backlash. Ohio, critics said, had been a poster child for everything that can go wrong with charters – from misspent funds to failing schools. Ohio Democratic senator Sherrod Brown called on the Obama administration to take another look at Ohio’s programs before releasing the grant money. This month, the administration announced that Ohio would get the funds, with some strings attached. The news was met with scathing media reports.

“It remains an open question why a charter sector with this record deserves a grant at all,” Washington Post reporter Valerie Strauss wrote. She cited Innovation Ohio, a left-leaning think tank, which found that 37 percent of Ohio charter schools that received federal funds either closed down or failed to open. Strauss also highlighted the state’s charter-sector scandals, saying that it had “misspent tax dollars more than any other [state sector], including school districts, court systems, public universities hospitals, and local governments.” However, this narrative is not entirely accurate.

First off, the Innovation Ohio statistics are not as troubling as they seem. Charter schools are designed to be able to shut down – that’s one reason why parents like charters, since their children are not stuck attending an F-grade institution in their district. “Some are going to close,” Chad Aldis, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Vice President for Ohio Policy and Advocacy, told National Review. “And that’s okay. Those that are not serving the kids well should close.”

Compared with traditional public schools, charter schools are run more like businesses. They can begin to operate after an agency – which can be a nonprofit, a university, or a school district – outlines and approves a school’s objectives, standards, and more. And if a school fails to meet the proposed objectives or standards? In stark contrast with traditional public schools, those failures are more likely to result in the schools losing funding or ceasing to operate entirely.

In fact, many of the failed charter schools cited by Innovation Ohio were authorized by the very same school districts that run traditional public schools. So when those charter schools close, “Ohio’s school districts are partly to blame for that,” Aldis notes.

Read More at National Review

Today, Nevada attorney general Adam Laxalt announced his filing of the first state-led lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Labor’s new overtime rule, in what could prove a major blow to one of President Obama’s signature policies. Laxalt, in partnership with 20 other state attorneys general and governors, wants to halt the policy’s December 1 implementation date because the new rule, he argues, is an unconstitutional attempt by the Obama administration to “dictate how state and local governments allocate their budgets and provide service to their citizens and constituents.”

The new rule forces both public- and private-sector employers to pay time-and-a-half overtime to any hourly employees earning less than $47,476 per year, nearly double the old threshold of $23,660. Employees earning less than the threshold but performing “executive, administrative, or professional” duties were previously exempt from the DOL’s overtime requirements, but the new rule mandates that they receive time-and-half pay for extra work, too. In so doing, it directly overrides the exemptions outlined by Congress in the Fair Labor Standards Act. In addition to modifying the threshold and eliminating the white-collar exemption, the Obama administration created an algorithmic method to automatically update the salary threshold every three years based on wage growth and other factors. Laxalt calls this algorithm “ratcheting,” and it is a significant component of his lawsuit.

“Not only do we think we have an unlawful rule, but this rule will ratchet upward automatically forever,” Laxalt tells National Review. “We do not believe that federal law allows this to go into effect.”

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When Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey subpoenaed ExxonMobil for 40 years’ worth of company documents in April, she alleged the energy giant had engaged in a conspiracy to bury its scientific understanding of the consequences of burning fossil fuels on the climate. Healey claimed the documents would prove that ExxonMobil “knew about the risks of climate change decades ago and fraudulently concealed that knowledge from the public.” Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, disagreed. Last Friday, he filed an amicus brief on behalf of his state and ten others in support of ExxonMobil, describing the subpoena as a “grave mistake” — no less than a political stunt to silence all climate-change skeptics.

Healey’s subpoena stems from New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman’s probe into ExxonMobil. In November 2015, Schneiderman rallied 19 Democratic state attorneys general and formed “Green 20,” a coalition with one common interest: “Limiting climate change and ensuring the dissemination of accurate information about climate change.” Since its establishment, three members of Green 20 — Schneiderman, Healey, and U.S. Virgin Islands attorney general Claude Walker — have issued subpoenas for ExxonMobil’s climate-change related documents and the files of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a free-market think tank that has received funding from the Texas-based oil-and-gas company. (Walker withdrew his subpoenas in June.)

But the Green 20 coalition is now opposed by eleven Republican state attorneys general, marking a major shift in the controversial lawsuit. In addition to Texas’s Paxton, the state attorneys general of Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Utah, and Nevada signed the amicus brief challenging Healey’s subpoena.

Paxton’s brief called into question Healey’s use of her law-enforcement authority in the context of an “ongoing public policy debate of international importance,” noting that it is a threat to freedom of speech. In this, Paxton is correct; government does not have the authority to silence or bully those who disagree with its preferred policy agenda.

“If the [Attorney General Healey] is right,” ExxonMobil’s attorneys wrote in a filing before Massachusetts’s Suffolk County Superior Court, “nothing is to stop a state prosecutor from issuing a subpoena to a political opponent seeking decades of records on the theory that a disagreement about policy constitutes fraud.” Policy disagreements, ExxonMobil’s attorneys argued, should be “resolved at the ballot box, not in the courthouse ” — reasoning closely aligned with Paxton’s. With a countersuit filed in federal court in Texas, ExxonMobil hopes to end Green 20’s investigation based on Healey’s imminent violation of the company’s constitutional rights, including the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure and its freedom of speech.

Read More at National Review

As part of his lame-duck foreign-policy push, Obama has sought to establish friendlier relations with Laos, a nation that is still a one-party Communist state.

In a speech to the people of Laos on Tuesday announcing a $90 million payment from the U.S. for the removal of unexploded ordnance dating back to the Vietnam War, he nodded at the fact that Laos is not a free country:

As we do around the world, the United States will continue to speak up on behalf of what we consider universal human rights, including the rights of the people of Laos to express yourselves freely and decide your own future.  Yet even as our governments deal candidly with our differences, I believe, as we have shown from Cuba to Burma to Vietnam, the best way to deliver progress for all of our peoples is by closer cooperation between our countries.

Obama also discussed the country’s government corruption. “We believe that there needs to be good governance, because people should not have to pay a bribe to start a business or sell their goods.”

But why would a Communist regime that is ranked 139 out of 165 in public-sector corruption abide by the Obama administration’s wishes for good governance?

Read More at National Review