Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is the latest billionaire to join President-elect Donald Trump’s economic-advisory board.

Musk, who has relied heavily on government subsidies for his business ventures, worked closely with the Obama administration to further the government’s green-energy policies. In fact, the Obama administration gave SolarCity, a company that Musk is chairman of, a federal tax credit valued at 30 percent of the cost of each solar system. And for each Tesla electric car sold, buyers receive a $7,500 federal tax credit.

In July 2016, 50 organizations — including Tesla — signed onto one of the Obama administration’s ambitious goals: “accelerating the deployment of electric vehicle charging infrastructure and putting more electronic vehicles on the road.” Tesla pledged to deliver the Model 3, a more affordable electric vehicle, in late 2017; the company’s $5 billion Gigafactory has already begun manufacturing affordable batteries.

Read More at National Review

On Monday, the Wisconsin Elections Commission concluded its ten-day recount of the state’s presidential election: Donald Trump widened his lead by 131 votes, officially beating Hillary Clinton 1,405,284 to 1,382,536.

The recount, paid for by Green party presidential candidate Jill Stein’s campaign, was based on the conspiracy theory that Wisconsin’s paperless voting machines were hacked in an effort to skew the election result towards Trump. Stein’s campaign spent approximately $3.5 million on the recount. Given the result, the campaign spent $26,717.56 for every Trump vote discovered by the recount.

Read More at National Review

On Tuesday, Kentucky representative Hal Rogers introduced a short-term spending bill to fund the government through April 28. And, despite warnings from minority leader Pelosi, House Republicans inserted a clause that expedites the confirmation process of former general James Mattis, whom President-elect Donald Trump has nominated to be his Secretary of Defense.

Mattis must receive a congressional waiver before he can head to the Pentagon. A 1947 statute, designed to maintain civilian control of the military, prohibits defense secretaries from serving within seven years of their nomination (a term that was originally ten years before the statute was modified in 2008). Mattis retired from the military in 2013.

Read More at National Review

Ken Aderholt holds the deed to 700 acres of land near the Red River, on the border between Texas and Oklahoma. The plot has been in his family since 1941, and he has paid all of his taxes on it. “It has been running through generations and handed on down to me,” he said late last year. But three years ago, that lineage was threatened by a familiar culprit: the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

Last year, the Aderholts and six other families whose land is threatened, backed by the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the law firm Caldwell Cassady & Curry, filed a lawsuit against the BLM. “My clients simply want to own the land they own without being under the cloud of the government’s claims,” Austin Curry, a founding partner at Caldwell Cassady & Curry tells National Review. “The case has had a very real impact on real people.”

At issue in the case is the meaning of a 1923 Supreme Court decision, Oklahoma v. Texas, which concerned a dispute between the two states and the federal government over ownership of the Red River riverbed. Curry and the plaintiffs’ counsel argue that Oklahoma v. Texas clearly defines what land belongs to the BLM, Oklahoma, and Texas: Oklahoma controls land north of the river’s medial line (the line designating the river’s middle point), Texas controls land below the south bank, and the BLM controls the sliver of land between the medial line and the south bank. The thousands of acres the BLM is now claiming as its own were, in 1923, still part of the river. But in the 90 years since, the river has receded and the disputed acres have become grassland. Legally, the question is whether that change was caused by a sudden avulsion (when a riverbank is altered in a catastrophic event) or a more gradual erosion or accretion. If the changed landscape resulted from avulsion, the boundaries established in 1923 remain in effect, and the land belongs to the BLM. If avulsion cannot be proven, it must be assumed that erosion or accretion was the cause of the shift, and the land belongs to the plaintiffs.

Assuming avulsion can be proven, the BLM’s legal case is that “while everyone else’s boundary followed the Red River through the gradual erosion of the riverbank, that with the 1923 case, their [the BLM’s] boundary remained fixed,” Robert Henneke, director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Center for the American Future, said. The BLM declined to comment on the ongoing litigation, but pointed to a letter written in 2014 by BLM director Neil Kornze explaining the bureau’s legal justification. Citing Oklahoma v. Texas and Congress’s consent to a 2000 compact establishing the jurisdictional and political border between Texas and Oklahoma as the river’s vegetation line, the letter argues that a shift in the river’s boundary may cause federal land to fall within the current boundary of Texas.

But the Congressional Compact explicitly states that titles to private or public land would not be affected by such a shift. Which means the case hinges on Oklahoma v. Texas’s boundaries, and the question of the river’s accretion, avulsion, and erosion remains. One federal district court ruling in particular supports the BLM’s case. In the early 1980s, an Oklahoma federal district judge ruled that avulsion occurred in the 1940s, fixing part of the legal boundary. But the judge in that case ruled based on eyewitness testimony rather than a gradient survey, meaning the plaintiffs have a good argument that his decision was dubious.

Read More at National Review

Last week, New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman and “Green 20” — an attorney-general-led coalition seeking to limit climate change — received yet another blow to their ongoing legal crusade against ExxonMobil when New York acting supreme court justice Henry Zwack ruled in favor of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a free-market think tank that has received funding from ExxonMobil.

As a result of the ruling, Schneiderman must comply with CEI’s FOIA request for the common-interest agreements made between his office and other state attorneys general, as well as his agreements with environmental activists. CEI believes that its FOIA request will reveal evidence that the lawsuit is politically motivated. (Just days before Zwack’s ruling, U.S. district judge Ed Kinkeade expressed concern to this effect, and ordered Healey — and, potentially, Schneiderman — to testify in Dallas on December 13.)

In his ruling, Zwack declared that Schneiderman’s denial of CEI’s request represented “nothing more than a parroting of statutory language,” a regurgitation of the law’s essential terms rather than a tailored explanation of his reasoning. CEI’s general counsel Sam Kazman praised this development. “While the campaign by him [Schneiderman] and his cohorts [Green 20] that began in March continues against those who disagree with him on global warming,” Kazman explained in a press release, “we are glad to see that it is being held subject to the basic laws of the land.”

Read More at National Review

On Friday, Fidel Castro, the former Communist dictator of Cuba, passed away at the age of 90. The Castro regime exiled 1 million Cubans; it killed tens of thousands. Yet, as many public figures penned their thoughts on Castro’s death, they opted to overlook his inhumane, tyrannical actions and highlight the positives.

Here’s a list of the ten most outrageous reactions to Castro’s death.

Read More at National Review

With less than two months to go before President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration, President Obama’s legacy took another blow this week — this one from Judge Amos Mazzant, who he appointed to the Eastern District of Texas. On Tuesday, Mazzant blocked the U.S. Department of Labor’s new overtime rule, which was set to go into effect December 1. Nevada attorney general Adam Laxalt, in partnership with 20 other state attorneys general and governors, had sued to stop it, and the group was granted a preliminary injunction; now, the rule will not be implemented as litigation continues. Unless the Department of Labor engages in an unusually aggressive effort to expedite the response to Mazzant’s ruling, the litigation is likely to outlast the Obama administration — and, under a Trump administration, one can assume that Department of Labor officials will drop the litigation or roll back the rule.

As I previously reported at National Review Online,

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.

Laxalt and his coalition sued the Department of Labor on the grounds that the overtime rule overrode congressional authority by omitting white-collar exemptions; it violated the Tenth Amendment by forcing states to pay employees a specific salary, indirectly controlling state budgets; and it violated the Administrative Procedure Act by ratcheting up the salary threshold every three years.

If Judge Mazzant had denied the preliminary injunction, as many as 44 percent of small businesses would have felt the pressures inflicted by the Obama administration’s blatant federal overreach. “Like all of President Obama’s policies that are intended to help workers, they actually hurt workers,” Laxalt tells National Review. Among other disastrous consequences of the increased salary threshold, business owners would have responded by laying off workers and reducing hours, services, and pay.

In the public sector, the overtime rule would have likewise had an adverse effect. For example, state officials would have been forced to find additional funds to comply with the rule, potentially squeezing out other services and programs. “It squarely puts the federal government into our budget process,” Laxalt says, noting that the rule imposes “millions of dollars of unfunded liabilities on the states.”

Read More at National Review

Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach, a top contender for secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, gave the world a glimpse of the 365-day plan he would enact if he were to be nominated by President-elect Donald Trump. As Trump and Kobach wrapped up their meeting at Trump International Golf Club in New Jersey on Monday, the two posed for photos — and, with papers in his hand, Kobach likely underestimated a camera’s zoom. Only portions of the document titled “Department of Homeland Security Kobach Strategic Plan for First 365 Days” were readable, but enough was visible to make clear that liberal outrage over Trump’s supposedly “dangerous plan” is misdirected. In fact, the plan seems fairly reasonable.

Kobach’s plan to bar entry of potential terrorists would not ban all Muslims from entering the United States, as Trump has suggested in the past.

Read More at National Review

On Friday, Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey received a major blow to her ongoing legal crusade against ExxonMobil from U.S. district judge Ed Kinkeade, when Kinkeade expressed grave concern that the lawsuit is politically motivated.

Healey and other members of “Green 20” (an attorney-general-led coalition that seeks to limit climate change) subpoenaed ExxonMobil for 40 years’ worth of internal documents related to climate change. By Healey’s account, the climate-change documents will prove that ExxonMobil “knew about the risks of climate change decades ago and fraudulently concealed that knowledge from the public.” But Kinkeade seems unconvinced. Healey, he ruled, must testify in his Dallas court room, more than 1,750 miles away from Boston. This order comes just one week after Kinkeade authored an opinion outlining allegations of bad faith on the part of Healey and Green 20.

Read More at National Review

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi had a bad day yesterday. First, Ohio representative Tim Ryan announced his candidacy for House minority leader, declaring: “Democrats have been reduced to our smallest congressional minority since 1929” under Pelosi’s leadership. Then, Pelosi’s political foes, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), mockingly endorsed her reelection bid.

Pelosi, who was elected to Congress in 1986, was speaker of the House from 2007 to 2011, then became minority leader when Democrats lost the majority in the 2010 tea-party wave. Explaining his decision to challenge Pelosi, Ryan noted that Democrats have secured the majority in just two of the past nine terms. Along with last week’s Republican victories, this “should indicate to all of us that keeping our leadership team completely unchanged will simply lead to more disappointment in future elections,” he said.