While the press reported unrelentingly on President Donald Trump’s travel-ban executive order, Trump signed what became his seventh executive order in ten days. For business owners burdened by overwhelming government regulations, his latest executive order is a sign of relief: for every new regulation within the executive branch, Trump seeks to identify and repeal two existing regulations.

“It is important that . . . the cost of planned regulations be prudently managed and controlled through a budgeting process,” the order states.

Since the fiscal year has already begun, Trump has started with a more moderate introductory period. For the rest of the year, the heads of agencies will be required to make the total incremental cost of regulations “no greater than zero.”

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Yesterday, 16 attorneys general condemned President Donald Trump’s executive order that placed a temporary ban on refugees entering the country as “unconstitutional, un-American and unlawful.” They agreed to “work together to ensure the federal government obeys the Constitution, respects our history as a nation of immigrants, and does not unlawfully target anyone because of their national origin or faith.”

If the executive order was without a doubt unconstitutional, as the attorneys general have confidently claimed, one could presume that at least one Republican attorney general would have signed the joint statement in a bipartisan fashion. But that is not the case: All attorneys general who signed the statement were Democrats, suggesting partisan politics rather than an unbiased legal interpretation. They represent the states of California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and the District of Columbia.

To be clear, Trump’s executive order imposed three bans: a 120-day ban on all refugees entering the U.S., an indefinite ban on Syrian refugees, and a 90-day ban on anyone entering the U.S. from seven Muslim-majority countries (Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen).

Once the refugee ban is lifted, the executive order also allows for the prioritization of refugee applicants (all refugee applicants — not solely those from the seven Muslim-majority countries listed above) who identify with the minority religion in their residing country. As our own David French explains, “In some countries, this means Christians and Yazidis. In others, it can well mean Muslims.” New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman, one of the 16 attorneys general who signed the condemning statement, argued that this preference is “directly in violation of the Establishment Clause of the Constitution” because “you can’t favor one religion over another.”

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California’s secession movement has grown significantly since Donald Trump became the 45th president of the United States. The golden state overwhelmingly disapproved of Trump at the ballot box — nearly 3.5 million more Californians voted for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton than voted for Trump — and a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found that one in three Californians now support the secession movement. (In 2014, only 20 percent of Californians favored secession.)

“Yes California,” the leading political action committee fighting for California’s independence from the union, has capitalized on the shift in public opinion. The campaign committee submitted a proposal to Secretary of State Alex Padilla on Thursday, allowing it to collect the necessary number of signatures to create a ballot measure for the November 2018 election; 585,407 Californians must sign the petition by July 25.

If “Yes California” reaches the signature threshold, Californians will vote on whether to repeal provisions in California’s constitution that outline the state’s relationship to the union. According to California’s attorney general Xavier Becerra in his summary of the initiative, there are two constitutional clauses in question: that “California is an inseparable part of the United States and that the United States Constitution is the supreme law of the land.” At least half of California’s registered voters must participate and 55 percent of those voters must approve the measure for it to pass. If it did pass, it would trigger a vote scheduled in March 2019 to ask voters whether California should “become a free, sovereign, and independent country.”

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Department of Homeland Security inspector general John Roth issued an urgent warning on Monday to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency within DHS: Don’t reinstate the Electronic Immigration System (ELIS), the discontinued system of processing naturalization applicants, because of “alarming security concerns regarding inadequate background checks and other functionality problems.”

If the USCIS gets its way, the flawed ELIS system will be relaunched later this month — before the full review is complete. In an attempt to draw attention to this, Roth opted to release preliminary findings in the hope that USCIS officials would change their plans.

In a November 2016 audit, Roth described ELIS’s deficiencies as “far worse than originally thought,” and since then, none of its faults have been resolved. Before the USCIS discontinued ELIS, it had produced nearly 20,000 green cards with incorrect information, and 2,400 immigrants, approved for a two-year residency, were issued cards with ten-year expiration dates. “It appears that thousands of Green Cards have simply gone missing,” Roth wrote. “In the wrong hands, Green Cards may enable terrorists, criminals, and undocumented aliens to remain in the United States.”

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On January 20, President Donald Trump’s first day in office, the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel published a legal opinion that cleared the way for Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, to serve in the Trump administration.

In authoring the opinion, deputy assistant attorney general Daniel Koffsky departed from decades of precedent. Koffsky determined that the 1967 anti-nepotism statute, which was implemented shortly after President Kennedy appointed his brother, Robert, to be attorney general, is irrelevant in the context of White House Office appointees because the White House Office is not an “executive agency.”

Koffsky justified his reasoning by citing a 1995 D.C. Circuit case, Haddon v. Walters, which found that the anti-nepotism statute is taken into consideration with appointees in executive agencies, a categorization that would exclude the White House Office. He also analyzed the connection between the anti-nepotism statute and the U.S. Code’s section 105(a) of title 3, which grants the president authority to make White House Office appointments “without regard to any other provision of law regulating the employment or compensation of persons in the Government service.” “In choosing his personal staff,” Koffsky wrote, “the President enjoys an unusual degree of freedom, which Congress found suitable to the demands of his office.”

This is a break with tradition. Since 1967, the OLC has reaffirmed that a president’s relatives are prohibited from accepting positions in any part of the administration. For example, in 1977 the OLC objected to President Jimmy Carter’s son working as an unpaid assistant in the White House.

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In 2010, emergency worker Kirk Allen responded to a call that inspired him to hold government officials accountable: An eleven-day-old baby had stopped breathing, and it was apparent that the 911 dispatcher had failed to provide medical instructions to the infant’s guardian. When Allen questioned the county director of dispatchers, he was assured that all dispatchers were certified, and that this had been an isolated incident. He suspected the director was lying, and filed a Freedom of Information Act request that revealed that uncertified dispatchers had been present in Kansas Township, Illinois, for years.

“I figured that if they were going to lie to me about that, then what else are they going to lie about?” Allen recalls. It turns out that the 911 office was lying to the public about a lot. After more FOIA requests, Allen uncovered illegal spending in addition to the uncertified dispatchers.

The experience inspired Allen to co-found the Edgar County Watchdogs along with fellow Edgar County resident John Kraft, who was also frustrated with government officials. Since the small-town Illinoisans founded their group, they have forced out 185 public officials in the state, all of whom resigned or chose not to seek reelection. More impressive still, the pair has accomplished all of this without any funding, through the use of FOIA requests, pro se litigation, and comments at public government meetings.

Due to their exemplary achievements, Allen and Kraft won the State Policy Network’s 2016 Unsung Hero Award, a cash prize of $25,000 that is sponsored by the Vernon K. Krieble Foundation. The award is part of the foundation’s citizenship program, “Lens of Liberty,” which encourages citizens to defend their rights and freedom.

Helen Krieble, president of the foundation, tells National Review that she was excited by the more than 30 nominations they received for the award. “The time is right,” she says, because “a Trump presidency has empowered people to hold government accountable.”

Krieble was most impressed with Allen and Kraft, whose project is particularly ambitious; throughout 2016 Edgar County Watchdogs has expanded dramatically, going first statewide and then national. Thus far, the group has trained 500 people; eventually, the two men hope their group will gain footholds in every state.

The Trump administration’s White House website, launched at noon today, displays the biographies of President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, First Lady Melania Trump, and Second Lady Karen Pence. Mrs. Trump’s biography, like virtually all biographies, outlines her array of achievements, from serving as the Honorary Chairwoman for the Boy’s Club of New York to creating her own jewelry collection, “Melania Timepieces & Jewelry.”

The Washington Post took issue with the list of her accomplishments, however, decrying the bio for “promoting” Melania Trump’s modeling career and jewelry line. “Trump’s biography starts with traditional details such as her date of birth in her native country of Slovenia and information about her background as a model. That’s when the brief backgrounder takes a promotional turn,” the Post’s Kelsey Snell wrote. “The website includes a lengthy list of brands that hired her as a model and several of the magazines in which she appeared, including the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.”

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This morning, the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza covered the latest revelation involving John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat and civil-rights leader, who has publicly announced plans to boycott President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on Friday. The revelation? Lewis had told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd that he had attended every inauguration since 1986 (the year he was elected to Congress), but a 2001 Washington Post article revealed that he boycotted George W. Bush’s first inauguration, too.

Lewis’s staff claims that Lewis didn’t lie; he simply “forgot.” Even Cillizza — usually seen as fairly center of the road — attributed Lewis’s erroneous claim that he attended the past seven inaugurations to “forgetfulness,” chalking up Lewis’s lapse as only a “memory glitch.”

“His absence at that time was also a form of dissent,” Lewis’s spokeswoman Brenda Jones explained. “He did not believe the outcome of that election, including the controversies around the results in Florida and the unprecedented intervention of the U.S. Supreme Court.”

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Last week, the Senate began confirmation hearings for President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet appointees. And some Democratic senators chose to spend their time asking bizarre, irrelevant questions of the cabinet nominees.

Here are the top ten such questions, all of which occurred during the hearings for attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions, CIA director nominee Mike Pompeo, and secretary of state nominee Rex Tillerson.

1. “Given that you did not disclose a number of those awards,” Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal asked Sessions, “are there any other awards from groups that have similar kinds of ideological negative views of immigrants or of African-Americans or Muslims or others, including awards that you may have received from the Ku Klux Klan?”

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Georgia representative and civil-rights leader John Lewis announced last week that he will boycott President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20. “I don’t see this president-elect as a legitimate president,” Lewis told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd. “You cannot be at home with something that you feel that is wrong, is not right.”

Since Lewis announced his boycott of the inauguration, and Trump subsequently denounced Lewis as “all talk, talk, talk — no action or results,” the ranks of Democratic representatives staying home rather than witnessing the peaceful transition of power have swelled to over two dozen.

Newspapers continue to cite the boycott as an unprecedented act. For example, the Sacramento Beeclaimed that the boycott was “breaking with generations of past precedent.” And Business Insider erroneously reported that the 2017 inauguration will be “the first time he [Lewis] will miss an inauguration since 1986,” the year he was elected to Congress.

But this isn’t the first time Lewis has boycotted a presidential inauguration.

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