Three weeks after winning the presidency, Donald Trump tweeted, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Although Trump has provided no evidence to support his claim that nearly three million people voted illegally (and only for Hillary Clinton), he has relentlessly pushed his narrative. “I will be asking for a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD,” Trump announced on Twitter in January, just five days after his inauguration.

The Commission will be tasked with reviewing both the alleged widespread voter fraud, and voter suppression, in the U.S.’s electoral system. A White House official told ABC News that by investigating voter suppression as well, it would encourage Democrats to join the effort.

Members of the Commission will begin their investigation this summer. They will have until 2018 to “review policies and practices that enhance or undermine the American people’s confidence in the integrity of Federal elections,” a White House official said, “including improper registrations, improper voting, fraudulent registrations, fraudulent voting, and voter suppression.”

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Opposition to illegal immigration was once a bipartisan position. “We are a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws,” President Bill Clinton declared back in 1995. “It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years and we must do more to stop it.”

But this was before Donald Trump became president.

Now, Democratic politicians at all levels of government prefer to resist Trump entirely, even if it means championing illegal immigration and advocating sanctuary jurisdictions — that is, those government entities within counties, cities, and states that refuse to enforce federal immigration laws and thus to shield illegal immigrants from deportation.

“We’re going to defend all of our people regardless of where they come from, regardless of their immigration status,” New York City’s mayor Bill de Blasio announced in January, just days after Trump won the presidency. Over in Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel declared that “whether you’re from Poland or Pakistan, whether you’re from Ireland or India or Israel and whether you’re from Mexico or Moldova, where my grandfather came from, you are welcome in Chicago as you pursue the American dream.”

The majority of Americans disagree with the idea that cities should establish sanctuary policies, but the Democratic party has, according to the New York Times’s Sabrina Tavernise, “staked out an activist position built around protecting undocumented immigrants.” And as the sanctuary city debate intensifies it’s become clear that many legal immigrants — many of whom have voted Democrat for years – are not following the party in its new direction.

Tavernise described legal immigrants who opposed sanctuary cities across Md. as “unlikely sources” in her article on Monday, “Sanctuary Bills in Maryland Faced a Surprising Foe: Legal Immigrants.” But the fierce opposition shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. This is often the case.

J.D. Ma, a Md.-based attorney who grew up in China and migrated to the U.S. legally, explained to theTimes that he fought to achieve his “Americanness,” because “being in America is such a high privilege.” “You cannot easily give that privilege to somebody without going through some kind of process,” he continued. “It’s like giving lots of gold for one dollar.”

Ma contemplated whether the Democratic party is right to advocate sanctuary cities in an effort to keep families together, but concluded that its reasoning is flawed. “If a single mother commits a crime and has to go to jail,” he explained, “we don’t say, ‘Oh, we can’t do that, because it will break her family.’”

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Last October, then-U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson attempted to explain the 23-percent increase in illegal immigration apprehensions along the southwest border in one year. “Border security alone cannot overcome the powerful push factors of poverty and violence that exist in Central America,” Johnson argued. “Ultimately, the solution is long-term investment in Central America to address the underlying push factors in the region.”

Central America remains violence- and poverty-ridden. But under the leadership of President Trump and DHS Secretary John Kelly, apprehensions of illegal immigrants along the southwest border have dropped significantly. According to the Washington Times, southwest border crossings are at their lowest point in 17 years.

In a DHS report released on Tuesday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials announced that only 11,000 individuals were apprehended along the southwest border in April. This decrease in apprehensions is likely not a fluke: Indeed, every month that Trump has been in the Oval Office, the number of apprehensions along the southwest border has declined. In February, Trump’s first full month in office, there were 18,000 apprehensions; one month later, there were 12,000. These numbers sit in stark contrast to those in November and December (when President Obama was still in office but Trump’s presidential transition was underway), which saw 47,000 and 43,000 apprehensions, respectively.

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In his first campaign speech on energy policy last May, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump promised North Dakotans that, if elected, he would “cancel the Paris Climate Agreement and stop all payments of U.S. tax dollars to U.N. global-warming programs.” Soon thereafter, he pointed out that President Obama had signed onto the Paris Agreement “unilaterally, and without the permission of Congress,” in violation of the Constitution.

As a matter of good public policy, Trump ought to fulfill his campaign promise. More important, he ought to use the opportunity to restore a constitutional norm. Under President Obama, the executive branch claimed the unilateral power to negotiate and sign agreements resembling treaties. By the terms of Article II of the U.S. Constitution, two-thirds of the Senate must approve of a treaty for it to be ratified. By the Obama administration’s logic, this requirement is negated if the president declines to say the word “treaty.”

Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, tells National Review that “asking the Senate to weigh in would be restoring the treaty power.” Such a move by the Trump administration “hardly imposes new limits on the executive,” he says. Rather, it “helps a feckless Senate reclaim its own role.”

The Paris Agreement, which commenced on November 4, 2016, was signed by the U.S. and nearly 200 other nations. Building on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an international environmental treaty conceived in 1992, it seeks to reduce carbon emissions worldwide. Its signatories have agreed to limit “a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius.” The U.S., for example, has committed to reducing its emissions to over 25 percent below its 2005 levels by 2025 — and to meet ever-lower emissions targets at five-year intervals after that.

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FBI director James Comey testified in the Senate Judiciary Committee today on the FBI’s annual oversight hearing. Democrats were quick to question Comey’s rationale for announcing eleven days before the presidential election that the FBI was re-opening its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified emails as secretary of state.

Comey confirmed that even in retrospect, he believes that he made the right decision. It was a choice “between really bad and catastrophic,” he said, and “concealment in my view would have been catastrophic.”

The FBI found that Clinton’s assistant Huma Abedin sent classified emails to her then-husband, Anthony Weiner, but the data collected in the investigation was not enough to recommend criminal charges for either Clinton or Abedin. Indeed, they were both “extremely careless.”

“Somehow, [Huma Abedin’s] emails were being forwarded to Anthony Weiner, including classified information,” Comey said. Weiner’s “then-spouse Huma Abedin appears to have had a regular practice of forwarding emails to him for him to print out for her so she could deliver them to the secretary of state.”

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The U.S. Department of Justice released statistics today regarding aliens incarcerated in the Federal Bureau of Prisons. It found that as of March 25, there were 41,528 illegal immigrants in its prison system. The cost of this to the American taxpayer runs into the billions.

Of the 41,528 inmates, 22,541 have already received immigration orders for removal. Meanwhile, 13,886 aliens are being investigated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for “possible removal,” and 5,101 aliens are “still pending adjudication.” (Pending adjudication means that a final disposition has yet to be settled, but ICE officers have charged these inmates under deportation cases.)

Which is to say that U.S. taxpayers are spending in the ballpark of $1.2 billion per year on the incarceration of illegal immigrants. The Federal Bureau of Prisons spends on average $29,226 per year on each inmate (this average takes into account all inmates, including those who need high security, medium security, and low security). Moreover, U.S. taxpayers are footing a bill of roughly $660 million per year — or $1.8 million per day — for inmates who have already received deportation orders.

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Since Election Day, Donald Trump has asserted that he will be president for two terms, confidently predicting victory in 2020. Two months before even stepping foot in the Oval Office, for example, Trump tweeted:

Trump’s reelection campaign officially commenced five hours after his Inaugural Address, when he formally filed his candidacy with the Federal Election Commission. And with Trump’s constant political rallies across the country (this past weekend, for example, he held a rally in Harrisburg, Pa.), it seems that he never left the campaign trail.

Over the past few months, President Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed contempt for the mainstream media, claiming its journalists are dishonest and “the enemy of the American people.” Trump’s attitude toward the press may be disconcerting to some. And it should be. But it’s imperative that the press and the public avoid confusing Trump’s rhetoric with the actual decline of a key component of our democracy.

In fact, according to a report released Friday from Freedom House, the U.S. still has one of the freest media industries in the world.

Michael Abramowitz, the president of the independent watchdog group, which advocates freedom and democracy worldwide, said in the report that there’s been no detectable chilling effect on the press. “So far, despite President Trump’s fierce denunciations of unfavorable but factual stories as ‘fake news,’” Abramowitz said, “there is abundant evidence that major news organizations remain undeterred, even innovative, in pursuing serious investigations of the government and of Trump himself.”

But as U.S. journalists continue to shriek that the U.S. press is no longer free, leaders of countries across the globe are increasingly imprisoning, and killing, journalists who criticize them. The countries that Freedom House found to be the most hostile to the press are, to name a few, North Korea, Cuba, Iran, and Syria. No surprise there. The countries deemed to be the “worst of the worst” with regard to freedom of the press have not had a free press for quite some time (or forever). The report’s most significant finding is that press freedom has declined notably across the globe; the worldwide measure is at its worst in the 13 years since Freedom House began its annual report. Only 13 percent of the world’s population has access to a free press such as that of the U.S.

As of December 2016, for example, 81 journalists are being held in Turkey’s prisons under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rule — “the highest number in the world,” the report said. Over in Ethiopia, 16 journalists are also behind bars for reporting that was critical toward their government.

In the Middle East and North Africa, countries increasingly restricted the press. “In 2016,” Freedom House research director Jennifer Dunham wrote in the report, “journalists and media entities in countries such as Algeria, Bahrain, Iran, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates suffered from the chilling effects of harassment, threats, and attacks, particularly regarding critical coverage of government officials.” In Yemen, at least six journalists were killed; nine were “forcibly disappeared.”

Over in the Asia-Pacific, the Republic of Maldives implemented laws to intimidate journalists. Defamation was criminalized, and journalists can now be forced by the government to reveal sources. Similar government restrictions on the press also appeared in sub-Saharan Africa, specifically South Sudan, where Dunham found that security agents were “deployed to printing sites to halt the publication of certain articles.”

In Brazil, government officials used creative ways to silence opposition from the press. Five investigative journalists who exposed the extravagant salaries of members of the judiciary in Paraná state had nearly 50 lawsuits filed against them. “The lawsuits were apparently coordinated, using similar language,” the report explained, “but were spread out geographically, forcing the journalists to spend considerable resources traveling between the courts.”

The strangling of the free press worldwide is a trend that can be altered, especially if the U.S. remains exemplary in its commitment to a free press at home. Dunham explained that if Trump continues to criticize the press and goes as far as to implement laws in violation of the U.S. Constitution, “Washington’s ability to apply normative pressure to media freedom violators around the world will suffer.”

But Trump has given no indication that he seeks to violate the Constitution, and his track record doesn’t suggest otherwise. While his highly controversial travel-ban executive order was blocked by the courts and some argued it was unconstitutional, he deferred to the court’s decision. He may have criticized the judges involved, just as he criticized the press, but it is clear that he obeys the checks and balances in our nation’s system of government.

In an interview last January with UCLA’s campus newspaper The Daily Bruin, University of California president Janet Napolitano was clear that there would be a 2.5 percent tuition hike this fall across the ten UC campuses. It is “a last resort,” she said, but it’s necessary to “maintain quality” across the statewide public-university system.

But according to an audit released on Tuesday by California’s state auditor Elaine Howle, the UC Office of the President has plenty of money to “maintain quality” across UC campuses; it just wants more. Howle found that Napolitano and her colleagues accumulated $175 million in reserve funds, all of which were concealed from the public, the California state legislature, and even the UC’s governing board, the UC Board of Regents.

“Why did we need to increase tuition if the Office of the President has $175 million in reserve that nobody knew about?” Howle asked.

Even California’s Democratic lieutenant governor Gavin Newsom, who is also a member of the the UC Board of Regents, decried Napolitano’s opaqueness. “It’s outrageous and unjust,” he said, “to force tuition hikes on students while the UC hides secret funds.” Newsom called on the UC Board of Regents to reconsider the tuition hike.

The UC Office of the President collected a surplus of $175 million quite easily, and it did so while paying its staff extravagant salaries. In fiscal year 2014-2015, Howle discovered that ten of Napolitano’s colleagues were paid a total of $3.7 million — “over $700,000 more than the combined salaries of their highest paid state employee counterparts.” The UC chief financial officer makes $412,000, for example, while the California State University’s chief financial officer — its counterpart — makes $341,000.

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Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, the “King of Cable News,” has been forced out of his prime-time show, “The O’Reilly Factor.”

“After a thorough and careful review of the allegations,” 21st Century Fox said in a statement, “the company and Bill O’Reilly have agreed that Bill O’Reilly will not be returning to the Fox News Channel.”

O’Reilly began his career at Fox News in 1996, and for the past 15 consecutive years, “The O’Reilly Factor” has been the most-watched cable news show in the United States.

The departure comes just weeks after the New York Times published its findings from an investigation into sexual-harassment allegations made against the Fox News host. The newspaper found that O’Reilly and 21st Century Fox settled a lawsuit with five of O’Reilly’s accusers, and spent nearly $13 million in settlements. O’Reilly denies all of the allegations against him.

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