Senate Democrats voted Thursday to block a House-passed bill funding the Department of Homeland Security, tanking the motion 52-47 and all but guaranteeing a partial government shutdown by Saturday. Funding for TSA, FEMA, and the Coast Guard will lapse without further congressional action — and Democrats made clear they have no intention of acting without concessions on immigration enforcement.
Only one Democrat, Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, crossed the aisle to vote for advancing the measure. Senate Majority Leader John Thune voted no for procedural reasons, preserving his ability to bring the bill back to the floor later. The motion needed 60 votes. It wasn't close.
When Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama tried a fallback — unanimous consent on a simple two-week stopgap — Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut killed that too.
More than 260,000 federal employees now face a partial shutdown because Senate Democrats decided that leverage over ICE operations matters more than keeping the lights on at the agencies Americans depend on for airport security, disaster relief, and maritime safety.
Democrats aren't hiding the ball here. This is about ICE — specifically, about using the threat of a shutdown to force restrictions on immigration enforcement.
According to The Hill, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer framed the blockade in dramatic terms:
"Democrats have been very clear. We will not support an extension of the status quo, a status quo that permits masked secret police to barge into people's homes without warrants, no guardrails, zero oversight from independent authorities."
"Masked secret police." That's the language of a party that has abandoned any pretense of good-faith negotiation and is instead auditioning for cable news segments. Schumer isn't describing a verified agency protocol — he's painting a picture designed to justify an extraordinary tactic: shutting down homeland security funding during an era when the agencies in question have finally been resourced to do their jobs.
Last week, Democrats unveiled a 10-point plan for what they called reforming immigration enforcement operations. Among the demands:
Some of these sound reasonable in isolation. Body cameras and identification standards are ideas with bipartisan support in other law enforcement contexts. But packaged together and wielded as a precondition for funding the entire Department of Homeland Security, they become something else entirely: a legislative straitjacket designed to hamstring enforcement operations that Democrats spent years pretending to support.
Here's the part that deserves attention. Senate Republican Whip John Barrasso made a point on the floor that Democrats have not credibly answered:
"What we see are Democrats flip-flopping on funding the government. This was a bipartisan bill. Democrats helped negotiate it."
He's right. Just last month, Democrats signed off on the Homeland Security appropriations bill. Sen. Patty Murray — ranking member of the Appropriations panel — defended it publicly at the time, arguing that blocking the measure wouldn't even affect ICE and CBP operations in Minnesota, the flashpoint that has since consumed the Democratic caucus.
Now Murray stood on the Senate floor Thursday and declared:
"It is clear to just about everyone in every part of the country that ICE and CBP are out of control and must be reined in."
A month ago, she defended the bill. Now she's blocking it. The bill didn't change. The politics did.
What changed the politics was the fatal shootings of two individuals in Minneapolis last month and, specifically, the Jan. 24 emergence of video footage showing two federal officers shooting and killing Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse. According to reporting, Pretti was holding his phone and his glasses while kneeling on the ground when the first shots were fired. Another officer had already confiscated a concealed pistol that Pretti was licensed to carry.
The shooting demands an investigation. If the facts are as described, serious questions about the use of force deserve serious answers. No conservative argument for strong enforcement requires defending officers who shoot a kneeling, disarmed man. Accountability and enforcement are not in tension — they're prerequisites for each other.
But Democrats aren't pursuing accountability. They're pursuing leverage. There is a vast distance between demanding a transparent investigation into a specific shooting and holding hostage the funding for every TSA agent, every FEMA responder, and every Coast Guard crew member in the country.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire — described as a key moderate — made the strategy explicit:
"I'm not going to vote for a CR until we see some progress on reforms. It's not acceptable that we have a federal agency killing American citizens in the streets and we're not taking any action."
Shaheen previously voted in November to end what was described as a record-breaking 43-day government shutdown. Apparently, shutdowns are unconscionable when Democrats want them to end and perfectly acceptable when Democrats want something in return.
The White House didn't stonewall. Earlier this week, it sent a one-page letter offering concessions, followed by legislative text to Democratic negotiators. On Thursday, White House border czar Tom Homan announced the administration was ending its surge deployment of ICE officers in Minnesota — a direct response to the political pressure point Democrats had been hammering.
Schumer's response to Homan's concession was revealing:
"We need legislation to rein in ICE and end the violence." "Without legislation, what Tom Homan says today could be reversed tomorrow on a whim from a Donald Trump."
Murray was equally dismissive, telling The Hill that the White House proposal didn't address major concerns:
"They did not address our major concerns. We're going through it right now and intend to offer a counteroffer."
The administration offered concessions. Democrats moved the goalposts. The administration pulled back a surge deployment. Democrats said it wasn't enough. At some point, a reasonable observer asks whether the goal is reform or whether the goal is the shutdown itself — a way to manufacture a crisis they can blame on Republican governance.
It's worth remembering the backdrop here. ICE and CBP received tens of billions of dollars through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law by President Trump. These agencies are better resourced than they've been in years — because the law demanded it. Democrats who voted against that law are now demanding oversight of the spending it enabled, which is a convenient inversion: oppose the funding, then claim the funded agencies are "out of control."
Meanwhile, TSA agents, FEMA personnel, and Coast Guard members will continue working in some limited capacity during a shutdown — but the full scope of that limitation is still being assessed by Senate appropriators. These are the people who screen your bags, respond to hurricanes, and patrol American waterways. They're collateral damage in a fight over whether ICE agents in Minnesota need to wear standardized uniforms.
Thune's procedural vote preserves the ability to bring the bill back quickly. Democrats say they'll offer a counteroffer. The White House has shown willingness to negotiate. But the clock runs out Saturday, and Democrats have now blocked both the full funding bill and a two-week bridge.
Asked what the White House is willing to do to rein in ICE officers, Shaheen offered a telling answer:
"Nothing that I've heard."
That's not an indictment of the White House. It's an admission that Democrats aren't listening. A one-page letter of concessions, legislative text, and the withdrawal of a surge deployment apparently don't register as "something."
Senate Democrats helped write this funding bill. They defended it a month ago. Now they've blown it up, blocked the backup plan, and told 260,000 federal workers that the real priority is rewriting immigration enforcement on their terms — during a shutdown, under duress, with Saturday's deadline as the hammer.
That's not governing. That's hostage-taking with better press coverage.
Cardi B kicked off her Little Miss Drama Tour at Acrisure Arena in Palm Desert, California, on Wednesday night with a message for Immigration and Customs Enforcement: try something.
"B—h, if ICE come in here, we gon' jump they a–es."
The 33-year-old rapper, born Belcalis Marlenis Almanzar, told her audience she had bear mace backstage and declared that federal agents wouldn't be taking her fans. She asked how many Mexicans or Guatemalans were in attendance, sang a brief snippet of "La Cucaracha," then launched into her hit "I Like It" as if threatening federal law enforcement were just another part of the setlist.
The Department of Homeland Security didn't let it slide.
"As long as she doesn't drug and rob our agents, we'll consider that an improvement over her past behavior."
DHS posted the response on its official X page, quote-retweeting coverage of the rapper's comments. No ambiguity. No diplomacy. Just a clean shot referencing a chapter of Cardi B's past she's spent years trying to reframe.
In 2016, Cardi B went on Instagram Live and described — in explicit detail — how she lured men to hotels during her time as a stripper, drugged them, and robbed them. Her own words:
"And I drugged n****s up and I robbed them. That's what I used to do. Nothing was muthaf—in' handed to me, my n—a. Nothing!"
When those comments resurfaced in 2019, she addressed them on social media but never quite disavowed the conduct. Instead, she framed it as survival:
"I made the choices that I did at the time because I had very limited options. I was blessed to have been able to rise from that, but so many women have not. Whether or not they were poor choice at the time, I did what I had to do to survive."
She added that she never claimed to be perfect and described her admissions as speaking her truth — "things that I felt I needed to do to make a living."
This is the person now positioning herself as a moral authority on immigration enforcement. A woman who openly admitted to committing felonies against individuals is now threatening violence against federal agents whose job is to enforce laws Congress passed. The irony doesn't need decoration.
What Cardi B did on that stage wasn't brave. It was cheap. Telling a crowd of fans in a deep-blue California venue that you'll fight ICE costs nothing. There's no risk. There's no courage in performing defiance for an audience that already agrees with you in a state whose political leadership has spent years obstructing federal immigration enforcement.
But the performance matters — not because it changes policy, but because it reveals how normalized hostility toward law enforcement has become in certain cultural corridors. Threatening federal agents is now an applause line. Bear mace as a prop gets cheers, not concern. A rapper with an admitted criminal past gets to cosplay as a civil rights champion, and nobody on the left blinks.
Imagine the reaction if a country music star told a crowd in Nashville they'd assault ATF agents. The think pieces would write themselves. The double standard is the point.
The framing Cardi B leaned into — that ICE is some occupying force coming to snatch innocent people from concerts — only works if you refuse to acknowledge what ICE actually does. These are the agents who dismantle human trafficking networks, arrest violent criminals who've re-entered the country illegally, and enforce the immigration laws that exist precisely because a nation without borders isn't a nation at all.
When a celebrity with a massive platform tells fans to physically attack those agents, she isn't protecting anyone. She's putting her own audience at risk of federal obstruction charges. She's encouraging confrontation that could get someone hurt. And she's doing it from behind a security detail that would absolutely call law enforcement if someone rushed her stage.
That's the contradiction the left never addresses. The people who scream loudest about abolishing enforcement are always the ones most insulated from the consequences of lawlessness.
The department's response was notable for its brevity and its bite. No lengthy press release. No hand-wringing about artistic expression. Just a single sentence that reminded the public exactly who was lecturing them about morality — and what she's admitted to doing.
It's the kind of directness that government agencies have historically avoided, and it landed precisely because it refused to treat celebrity posturing as serious policy discourse. Cardi B made a threat. DHS made a point.
The rapper will sell tickets off this. The clip will circulate. Her fans will call it iconic. But somewhere in Palm Desert on Wednesday night, a woman who drugged and robbed men told a crowd she'd assault federal officers — and half the country was supposed to cheer.
DHS didn't cheer. They remembered.
Joy Behar has a legal prediction for Attorney General Pam Bondi: prison. The View co-host declared Thursday that Bondi is "looking at some prison time," offering a half-baked Watergate analogy as her legal reasoning and zero actual evidence of wrongdoing.
No charges. No investigation. No legal basis whatsoever. Just Joy Behar, a television personality, sentencing the sitting Attorney General of the United States on daytime TV.
Behar built her argument — such as it is — on a historical comparison that collapses the moment you touch it. She invoked the Watergate scandal, noting that President Nixon avoided prison, but his Attorney General, John Mitchell, did not:
"Just a little history, during the Watergate scandal, President Nixon did not go to jail, but John Mitchell did. John Mitchell was his Attorney General."
From this, she leapt to her conclusion:
"So at the end of the day, Ms. Bondi, you're looking at some prison time."
Co-host Sunny Hostin dutifully backed the play, according to the New York Post, adding that Bondi "could be held to account." Held to account for what, exactly, neither woman specified.
That's the entire legal theory. A different Attorney General, serving a different president, in a different era, committed actual crimes and went to prison; therefore, Pam Bondi should expect the same. The logical chain has about as many missing links as The View has legal scholars on its panel.
Before arriving at her prison forecast, Behar set the table with a moral indictment of Bondi that was long on emotion and short on specifics. She described feeling "nauseous" watching Bondi speak in some unspecified context:
"I felt like when I was watching it, I felt a little nauseous from her. I was like, 'Why are you so lacking in empathy? What is wrong with you? What happened to you in your life that you can't give a moment to these poor girls?'"
Who "these poor girls" are, what event Behar was watching, and in what capacity Bondi was speaking — none of this was explained. The audience is simply expected to absorb the emotional charge and move on. Context is optional when outrage is the product.
This is the rhythm of The View: vague references to something terrible, a demand for empathy from the political opponent, and then the pivot to punishment. The emotional setup exists to make the absurd conclusion feel earned. It isn't.
Behar also took it upon herself to offer Bondi some unsolicited career advice, warning her that loyalty to the president is a one-way street:
"By the way, she needs to understand that she is speaking to Trump when she's up there, she's not speaking to anyone else. He has a whole reputation for throwing everyone under the bus. And when he's out of office, he really is going to throw you under the bus, Honey."
There's a particular kind of arrogance in a daytime talk show host counseling the Attorney General on political survival. Behar frames herself as the worldly-wise observer who can see what Bondi cannot — that her service will be unrewarded. It's concern-trolling dressed up as sisterly advice, and it assumes Bondi is either too naive or too ambitious to understand her own position.
The implication, of course, is that Bondi isn't acting out of conviction or duty but out of blind loyalty. That framing reveals more about how the left views public service than it does about Bondi. If you serve in an administration they despise, your motives can't possibly be genuine. You must be a pawn waiting to be sacrificed.
Consider what actually happened here. A television host, with no legal training, driving the analysis, publicly declared that a sitting cabinet member should expect incarceration — based on nothing more than political opposition and a historical analogy that shares exactly one data point: "was an Attorney General."
Imagine the roles reversed. Imagine a conservative commentator pointing at a Democratic Attorney General and casually predicting prison time, citing no investigation, no charges, no evidence — just vibes and a Watergate reference. The segment would be clipped, condemned, and held up as proof of dangerous rhetoric by every media watchdog in the country before the first commercial break.
But this is The View, where the rules of responsible commentary have never applied with any consistency. The show exists in a space where accusations function as arguments, where feelings are evidence, and where the applause of a studio audience substitutes for legal standing.
What Behar's segment actually demonstrates isn't a legal case against Pam Bondi. It's the left's frustration with an Attorney General who is doing her job as the administration sees it — and their inability to counter that with anything substantive. When you can't argue the policy, you argue the person. When you can't argue with the person, you predict their imprisonment.
No charges have been filed. No investigation has been announced. No legal authority has suggested Bondi faces criminal exposure. The entire "case" lives and dies on Joy Behar's emotional reaction to a clip she didn't bother to contextualize for her own audience.
That's not commentary. It's wish-casting with a live mic.
Mike Schaefer, an 87-year-old disbarred attorney with a misdemeanor spousal abuse conviction, a $1.83 million slumlord judgment against him, and a permanent restraining order obtained by actor Brad Garrett, filed Tuesday to run for Congress in California's 48th District. He filed from a Las Vegas address.
This is what Democrats mean when they talk about expanding the map.
Schaefer joins a handful of other Democrats hoping to flip CA-48, a seat currently held by Republican Darrell Issa and one of five GOP-held districts now in play after Proposition 50 redrew California's congressional boundaries. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the new maps on Feb. 4, and Democrats have wasted no time trying to capitalize. The district shifted from formerly Republican-leaning to what's being characterized as toss-up or even left-leaning territory—not because voters changed, but because the lines did.
Schaefer has run for office approximately 33 times over more than 50 years, according to the Daily Caller. He usually loses badly.
He was elected the youngest San Diego City Council member ever at age 27 in 1965 and served two terms. After that, the wins dried up. He pulled 0.98% in the 1971 San Diego mayoral race. He managed 2.5% in a 2016 Nevada congressional primary. He started as a Republican before switching to the Democratic Party around 2004—a conversion that coincided not with any discernible ideological awakening but with the discovery that one party's ballot lines were easier to get on in the districts where he wanted to run.
The one bright spot: in 2018, at age 80, Schaefer won a seat on the California State Board of Equalization, beating a Republican state senator. He was re-elected in 2022 with his party's endorsement, dubbing himself "The Equalizer." He is now termed out of that position, which apparently means it's time for Congress.
Schaefer was disbarred in both California and Nevada in 2001 for serious ethics violations. The Nevada Supreme Court cited a litany of offenses:
He has not been reinstated despite multiple appeals, the most recent in 2014.
Then there's the housing record. In 1981, Schaefer owned a 64-unit building in the mid-Wilshire area of Los Angeles for eight months. A 1986 jury in Los Angeles Superior Court awarded his former tenants $1.83 million—a record at the time. The building was found overrun with rats, cockroaches, and sewage backups that caved in ceilings and floors. Street gangs operated inside the property. Schaefer blamed the gangs for blocking improvements.
That wasn't an isolated episode. In 1979, he faced fire-code violations and threats of jail time in San Diego over unsafe conditions in properties he controlled. In 1982, he was involved in a rent dispute case in Arizona. He owned rundown apartments in Baltimore that drew complaints over alleged neglect and poor maintenance. The man earned the "millionaire slumlord" label across multiple states and multiple decades.
In 1993, Schaefer was convicted of misdemeanor spousal abuse. He later served jail time for violating the terms of his probation.
By 2013, actor Brad Garrett—best known for "Everybody Loves Raymond"—secured a permanent restraining order against Schaefer in Las Vegas Justice Court. The dispute reportedly began over a complimentary show ticket at the MGM Grand and escalated from there, with Garrett accusing Schaefer of stalking and harassment.
The court ordered Schaefer to stay 100 feet away from Garrett at all times, banned him from the MGM Grand entirely, and required him to obtain court permission before filing any future lawsuits against Garrett or his staff. Schaefer had allegedly kept pushing unwanted promotion offers on Garrett and refused to stop. Garrett cited Schaefer's history of violence and erratic behavior in seeking the order.
A man who needs a judge's permission to file a lawsuit wants voters to send him to Washington to write laws.
Schaefer is a sideshow, but the circus he wandered into matters. Proposition 50 handed Democrats a redrawn map that puts five Republican congressional seats in jeopardy. Republicans challenged the maps in court, arguing they were drawn in at least one area to favor Hispanic voters in violation of federal voting rights law. The Supreme Court disagreed on Feb. 4, and the maps stand.
The term for this is gerrymandering, though polite company only uses that word when Republicans draw the lines. When Democrats do it in California through a voter-approved ballot measure, it's called "independent redistricting" or "democracy in action." The result is the same: lines redrawn to predetermine outcomes.
Issa is running for re-election in November in a district that no longer resembles the one his voters chose him to represent. Democrats smell blood—and their recruiting standards reflect the urgency. When your redistricting scheme is so aggressive that an 87-year-old disbarred, convicted, restraining-order-carrying perennial candidate sees a viable path, the maps aren't expanding democracy. They're diluting it.
The California Democratic Party endorsed Schaefer for his Board of Equalization re-election in 2022. That endorsement came decades after his disbarment, his spousal abuse conviction, his jail time, and the largest slumlord judgment in Los Angeles history. None of it disqualified him in the eyes of the party apparatus. None of it gave anyone pause.
This is the party that lectures the country about character, about protecting women, about housing as a human right. They endorsed a man convicted of beating his wife, who let tenants live with rats and sewage. They didn't just tolerate him—they put their brand behind him.
Now he's running for Congress, and the silence from California Democrats tells you everything about what "standards" mean when a seat is in play. The district is new. The candidate is the same man he's been for 50 years.
Thirty-three campaigns and counting. The voters have answered him 32 times. He keeps asking.
Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Thursday that approximately 1.6 million illegal immigrants with final deportation orders are currently living in the United States — and roughly half of them have criminal convictions.
That's 800,000 people whom an immigration judge already ordered removed from the country, who broke the law again after arriving here illegally, and who remained anyway. The orders weren't issued by ICE or the Department of Homeland Security. They came from immigration judges within the Department of Justice — the judicial process that amnesty advocates constantly insist must be respected.
The process spoke. Nobody enforced it.
According to Fox News, Lyons broke the numbers down further during questioning from Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., offering a state-level snapshot that sharpens the national picture. In Minnesota alone — a state that has become a flashpoint for clashes over immigration enforcement — Lyons testified that there are 16,840 individuals with final deportation orders at large.
"There's 16,840 final orders at large in the state of Minnesota."
Minnesota. One state. Nearly 17,000 people, a judge told to leave, who simply didn't. Multiply that pattern across fifty states, and you begin to understand how 1.6 million becomes not a statistic but a systemic failure — one that previous administrations chose to tolerate.
Lyons made clear that these deportation orders were issued through the legal system's own channels:
"Through an immigration judge with the Department of Justice separate from Immigration Customs Enforcement."
This distinction matters. Every time critics accuse the administration of acting unilaterally or bypassing due process, the answer is sitting in 1.6 million case files. These people received hearings. They received orders. The system rendered its judgment. What was missing — for years — was anyone willing to carry it out.
Lankford used his time to connect the current enforcement challenge to the open-border conditions that created it. The senator's testimony painted a picture of a border that functionally ceased to exist:
"Two years ago, we had 10,000 people a day illegally crossing into the country, two years ago, 10,000 people a day not vetted, had no idea who they were."
Ten thousand a day. That's not immigration — it's capitulation dressed up as compassion.
Lankford went further, citing the Biden administration's own estimates on one of the most alarming categories of border crossers:
"70,000 people were estimated by the Biden administration to come in in 2024 that were special interest aliens that had a locational connection to terrorism."
The Biden administration knew. Its own estimates flagged 70,000 individuals entering the country with ties to regions connected to terrorism — and the border remained open. Lankford drove the point home:
"But we had no idea who they were. They were allowed to be able to come into the country two years ago."
This is the inheritance. Not a policy disagreement. Not a difference in emphasis. A security catastrophe that the previous administration documented in its own data and then chose to ignore.
While ICE agents work to execute the deportation orders that judges issued — in some cases years ago — they face an increasingly hostile environment on the ground. Two activists, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, died in altercations with federal officers in Minnesota, incidents that have fueled protests against enforcement operations.
Lankford addressed the nature of those protests directly, describing a pattern that goes well beyond peaceful dissent:
"There are thousands of arrests that are happening in a day that are happening by the book. And what's happening is a group of protesters that are protesting and agitating, and some of them running into churches and disturbing church services and saying, 'It's my First Amendment right to shut down your church during a service.' And saying they're a peaceful protester while they throw rocks at agents, it just gets old."
There's a particular kind of audacity in invoking the First Amendment to disrupt someone else's worship — then throwing rocks at federal agents and calling it a peaceful protest. The contradiction doesn't need commentary. It speaks for itself.
Meanwhile, Democrats have threatened to defund DHS unless the agency changes its enforcement approach. The logic is remarkable: the judicial system issued 1.6 million deportation orders, agents are finally executing them, and the response from the left is to strip funding from the agency doing the work the courts demanded.
Lankford closed his remarks by acknowledging the men and women doing the actual work of enforcement — the agents operating under threat, executing lawful orders in communities where local politicians and activist groups treat them as the enemy.
"The work that the men and women that work around you have done have stopped that chaos."
He also offered a broader observation that deserves to echo beyond the committee room:
"We're losing perspective of what's really happened."
He's right. The national conversation has drifted so far from the underlying reality that enforcing a judge's order now gets treated as authoritarian overreach. A country that cannot remove people its own courts have ordered deported is not exercising compassion — it's advertising that its laws mean nothing.
There are 1.6 million tests of that proposition sitting in the United States right now. Eight hundred thousand of them have criminal records. The question was never whether enforcement would be difficult. The question is whether a nation that refuses to enforce its own judicial orders can still call itself a nation of laws.
Gail Slater, the head of the Department of Justice's antitrust division, resigned Thursday after reportedly losing the support of key cabinet officials — leaving behind a record that should trouble anyone who expected the Trump administration's trustbusters to actually bust trusts.
Her tenure's marquee case, the antitrust suit against Google, failed to secure a breakup of the internet giant or any penalty beyond what most onlookers considered a slap on the wrist. The biggest monopoly case in a generation ended not with a bang, but with Google's business model essentially intact.
And then there were the mergers she approved.
As Breitbart News noted, Slater greenlit the Disney-FUBO merger. She approved the NFL-Disney merger without even a second request review — the standard deeper examination that signals regulators are taking a deal seriously. Meanwhile, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has been actively taking on Disney, investigating The View for violating equal time rules and publicly noting the importance of not approving anti-competitive deals from monopolistic companies like Disney.
So one arm of the administration was challenging Disney's market dominance while Slater's DOJ was waving Disney's deals through without serious scrutiny. That's not a policy disagreement — it's a contradiction.
The one major merger she did block — the HPE-Juniper deal — drew concerns from Trump administration intelligence officials and MAGA leaders such as Charlie Kirk, who argued that killing the deal would help empower Huawei. Whether or not that argument is decisive, it's notable that Slater chose to flex enforcement muscle on a deal where national security figures wanted it approved, while giving Disney a pass.
Before joining the DOJ, Slater served as a member of the Transatlantic High-Level Working Group on Content Moderation Online at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at UPenn. The group's report offers a window into the intellectual circles she traveled in — and they weren't exactly free-speech friendly.
The Working Group called for "scalable solutions" to stop social media companies from:
If that language sounds familiar, it should. It's the same framework that was used to justify sweeping content moderation campaigns against conservative voices for years. The report went further, praising Big Tech for specific acts of censorship:
"Removing apps like Infowars for spreading COVID-19 disinformation" and "deleting misleading tweets from major political figures such as Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro."
The Working Group also championed a:
"Recognition by platforms of their moral/de facto responsibility as good corporate citizens for the content posted on their platforms."
Translation: Big Tech should police speech, and the policing they've already done — including against right-leaning outlets and world leaders — is the model to follow. This is the intellectual ecosystem that produced the person running antitrust enforcement for the Trump DOJ.
The reaction to Slater's resignation tells its own story. Luther Lowe, head lobbyist for Y Combinator and formerly Yelp's top lobbyist, posted on X:
"This is not a good development for those who care about little tech."
Lowe personally gave over $150,000 to Democrats and not a cent to Republicans. His boss, Y Combinator CEO Gary Tan, co-hosted a "Little Tech for Harris" fundraiser headlined by Nancy Pelosi during the 2024 election. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman co-hosted the same event.
When the people mourning your departure from a Republican administration are Democratic mega-donors who fundraised for Kamala Harris with Nancy Pelosi, it's worth asking whose interests were actually being served.
Even left-wing commentator Daniel Dayen of the American Prospect framed the resignation as a loss, posting on X that Slater was defeated by lobbyists who made:
"Corrupt deals with corporate monopolists for millions of dollars."
The left sees Slater as one of theirs who got pushed out. That alone should clarify where she stood.
Slater's departure leaves unfinished business. A proposed merger between Netflix and Warner Bros remains under review, and Slater's stance on the deal was described as unclear. Her successor will inherit that decision — along with the broader question of whether the DOJ's antitrust division will match the energy that Brendan Carr and others in the administration have brought to reining in consolidated corporate power.
Conservative populism's promise on antitrust is straightforward: the government shouldn't pick winners among corporate giants, and consolidated power — whether in tech, media, or entertainment — threatens the competitive markets that make free enterprise work. That promise requires enforcers who actually enforce, not appointees whose prior work championed Big Tech's right to censor and whose tenure is defined by waving through mega-mergers for companies the rest of the administration is actively challenging.
Slater is gone. The question now is whether her replacement understands the assignment.
Hillary Clinton stepped off a first-class ICE high-speed train at platform 22 in Munich's central station on Thursday, surrounded by aides and flanked by an armed German Federal police officer. The former Secretary of State had just completed the four-hour rail journey from Berlin — reportedly because a nationwide airline strike grounded hundreds of flights across Germany, including the ten hourly Lufthansa shuttles that normally run between the two cities.
The image writes itself: a former U.S. presidential candidate, once accustomed to Air Force jets and motorcades, climbing down from a Deutsche Bahn carriage because German unions decided Thursday was the day to walk off the job over retirement benefits.
Michaela Kuefner, Chief Political Editor at Deutsche Welle News, captured the scene:
"Hillary Clinton arrives by train from Berlin… No hassle from people asking about those files. No hot drinks because of a power failure in the bistro for half the trip."
No hot drinks. A power failure in the bistro car. It's the kind of detail that needs no editorial seasoning.
Clinton arrived ahead of the Munich Security Conference, which runs Friday through Sunday. But as Breitbart News reported, the real story isn't who's arriving by rail — it's the shadow that still hangs over this conference from last year, when Vice President JD Vance walked onto the same stage and delivered a speech that left Europe's diplomatic establishment in visible distress.
Vance, serving as President Trump's emissary, challenged European leaders directly on their own democratic commitments:
"For years we've been told everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values… But when we see European courts cancelling elections and senior officials, threatening to cancel others, we have to ask if we are holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard. And I say ourselves because I fundamentally think we are on the same team. We must do more than talk about democratic values, we must live them."
Conference boss Christoph Heusgen — a top German diplomat — broke down in tears in response. The speech forced a conversation that European elites had spent years avoiding: whether the continent's increasingly heavy-handed approach to speech regulation and electoral intervention was compatible with the democratic values it claimed to defend.
That conversation clearly hasn't ended.
This year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio leads the U.S. delegation. According to the Associated Press, the conference "warily" awaits his arrival — a revealing word choice. U.S. officials indicated his speech is intended to be "less contentious but philosophically similar" to Vance's 2025 address.
Read that framing carefully. The AP treats an American official speaking plainly about democratic principles as something a European security conference must brace for. The wariness isn't about substance — it's about the discomfort that comes when someone says out loud what polite diplomatic circles would rather leave unsaid.
"Philosophically similar" is the key phrase. The administration isn't retreating from the core message Vance delivered. It's delivering it through a different voice, with a different tone — but the substance holds. Europe's allies are expected to live by the values they invoke when asking for American support. That's not contentious. That's the baseline.
What, exactly, brings Hillary Clinton to the Munich Security Conference in the current moment? The fact sheet doesn't say, and Clinton herself offered no public remarks upon arrival. She is there, presumably, in some unofficial capacity — a former Secretary of State still orbiting the international circuit that once defined her career.
There's an irony worth noting. Clinton arrives at a conference still reverberating from Vance's challenge to European democratic backsliding — the very kind of frank, uncomfortable diplomacy that the foreign policy establishment she represents spent decades avoiding. The old guard traveled to Munich to reassure. The current administration travels to Munich to recalibrate.
Meanwhile, Lufthansa told passengers with grounded domestic flights they could exchange tickets at no extra cost for Deutsche Bahn train passes. Hundreds of flights were cancelled in a single day because unions walked out over retirement benefits. Germany's infrastructure, once the pride of European efficiency, reduced Clinton and countless other travelers to four-hour rail commutes with no hot coffee.
The Munich Security Conference used to function as a comfortable annual ritual — Western leaders affirming their shared commitment to the transatlantic order, exchanging pleasantries, and returning home having changed nothing. Vance broke that pattern last year. Rubio appears poised to maintain it this year, not with provocation for its own sake, but with the simple insistence that words and actions align.
That shouldn't be a radical proposition. The fact that European diplomats greet it with tears and wariness tells you everything about how far the gap between rhetoric and reality has stretched.
Clinton rode the train to Munich. The world she helped build is the one being asked to account for itself when she gets there.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told podcast host Theo Von on Thursday that he used to snort cocaine off toilet seats — and that the addiction he developed as a young man still requires daily vigilance decades later.
Kennedy appeared on "This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von," where the two discussed their shared history in recovery. Kennedy and Von met in substance abuse recovery years ago, and the conversation turned to how Kennedy maintained his sobriety through the COVID-19 pandemic while much of the country shut down.
His answer was characteristically blunt.
"We still did live meetings every day during COVID. We moved from the bank. There was about 15 of us who moved from the bank and we got into the Palisades Playhouse, which now is burned down during the fire, but it was kind of a pirate group … I don't care what happens, I'm going to a meeting every day. And I said, I'm not scared of a germ. You know, I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats. And I know this disease will kill me, right?"
No hedging. No PR-scrubbed language. The nation's top health official talked about his addiction the way people in recovery actually talk about it — directly, with the kind of gallows humor that comes from staring down something that nearly destroyed you.
There is a particular species of Beltway discomfort that surfaces whenever a public figure refuses to behave like a public figure. Kennedy's remarks will inevitably generate pearl-clutching from the same people who spent years demanding politicians be "authentic" and "vulnerable." Now they have one, and the authenticity makes them squirm.
Kennedy didn't stop at cocaine, according to the Daily Caller. He described recovery as a matter of survival — not a lifestyle choice, not a personal brand, but something that keeps the wheels from coming off entirely.
"If I don't treat it, which means, for me, going to meetings every day, it's just bad for my life. So for me it was survival. And then the opportunity to help another alcoholic, that's the secret sauce of the meetings. And that's what keeps us all sober and keeps us from self-will."
That's a man who understands his own weakness well enough to build a life around managing it. There's more moral clarity in that single paragraph than in a year's worth of congressional testimony.
This isn't Kennedy's first public disclosure about substance abuse. At HMP Global's Rx and Illicit Drug Summit 2025 in Nashville, he recounted the story of taking LSD for the first time at age 15:
"I said to the guy, 'If I take that, will I see dinosaurs?' He said, 'You might.'"
Kennedy has been open about his history of drug use and his decades-long experience in recovery programs. He has a family history of addiction. None of this is hidden. None of it is leaked. He volunteers it — at summits, on podcasts, in rooms where the cameras are rolling.
Consider the contrast. Washington is full of people who build elaborate facades, sanitize their histories, and crumble the moment a skeleton surfaces. Kennedy walks into a room, opens the closet door himself, and starts naming the bones.
The easy take is the sensational one: "HHS Secretary did cocaine off toilet seats." It'll trend. It'll generate clips. And it'll miss the point entirely.
The harder truth — the one that matters for the roughly 15 people who moved their meetings to the Palisades Playhouse rather than go virtual, the one that matters for every person white-knuckling sobriety through isolation — is that Kennedy chose physical presence over safety theater. During COVID, when the federal government was telling Americans to stay home, Kennedy and his small group decided that the disease of addiction was more immediately lethal than a respiratory virus.
For people in recovery, that wasn't reckless. It was triage.
The public health establishment spent years insisting that every in-person gathering was a potential super-spreader event. Recovery meetings, church services, funerals — all subordinated to a single-variable risk calculus that ignored every other way a human being can fall apart. Kennedy lived the cost of that calculus and rejected it in real time.
Something is fitting about a person with Kennedy's history leading HHS. Not despite the addiction — because of the recovery. The pharmaceutical industry, the institutional inertia of federal health agencies, the sheer scale of the addiction crisis in this country — none of it is abstract to him. He has skin in the game in a way that career bureaucrats simply don't.
His critics will use this interview as ammunition. They always do. But the attack requires you to believe that a man who has been sober for decades, who attends meetings daily, who speaks openly about his worst moments, is somehow less qualified than the parade of credentialed functionaries who presided over an opioid epidemic that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Kennedy didn't snort cocaine off a toilet seat last week. He did it in another life — and then he clawed his way out. The people running health policy before him can't say the same about their failures. Those are ongoing.
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson spent this week on a media tour — not to discuss the weighty constitutional questions sitting on her desk, but to defend her night out at the Grammy Awards and promote her memoir.
Jackson appeared on "CBS Mornings" on Feb. 10 and ABC's "The View" on Feb. 11, where she defended attending the Grammy ceremony this month as a nominee for the audio version of her 2025 book "Lovely One." She did not win. The Dalai Lama took the award for best audio book, narration, and storytelling recording.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court still has not issued a ruling on President Trump's tariffs — a case argued back in November — and has decided only one of the other eight cases from that same oral arguments session. The court is currently in the middle of a four-week break from hearing arguments and issuing opinions.
The issue isn't that a Supreme Court justice attended an awards show. The issue is which awards show, and what happened there.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., laid it out plainly, according to USA Today: many attendees at the ceremony wore "ICE OUT" pins, and two award winners used their acceptance speeches to denounce the Trump administration's immigration enforcement. Blackburn called it:
"Such a brazenly political, anti-law enforcement event."
Jackson, seated in that audience, is part of the court currently deliberating a major case on presidential authority. The optics aren't complicated. A justice who will rule on the legality of the president's enforcement powers attended an event where enforcement of immigration law was treated as something to protest — accessorized with lapel pins, no less.
On "The View," Jackson waved it off. She described the evening in glowing terms:
"It was extraordinary. I'd never been to any kind of event like that before."
When pressed on the criticism, she framed attendance as part of her duties:
"Another part of the job, actually my job, is public outreach and education. I thought this is a great opportunity to highlight my work in this ways and to see what's happening at the Grammy's."
Public outreach. At the Grammys. While your pending caseload includes whether the president can use emergency powers to impose tariffs.
Co-host Whoopi Goldberg rushed to Jackson's defense, arguing that the justice "had no way of knowing what anyone's speech was going to be." Jackson agreed:
"That's right."
Fine. She didn't know what the speeches would say. But she also didn't leave. She didn't issue any statement distancing herself from the politicized spectacle. She went on two talk shows afterward and described the evening as "extraordinary."
On "CBS Mornings," Jackson addressed the still-pending tariffs case with the kind of reassurance that sounds reasonable until you think about it for more than a few seconds:
"The court is going through its process of deliberation. The American people expect for us to be thorough and clear in our determinations and sometimes that takes time."
Thoroughness is a virtue. But the court heard oral arguments on these tariffs in November. It's now mid-February. They've managed to resolve exactly one of the nine cases argued that month. The tariffs — which function as a centerpiece of the president's economic agenda and a major foreign policy tool — remain in legal limbo.
During those November arguments, many justices sounded skeptical that the president can tap emergency powers to sidestep the standard tariffs process. That skepticism, combined with the glacial pace, has fueled speculation that the court is in no rush to invalidate a sitting president's signature economic policy — preferring to let the clock run rather than issue a politically explosive ruling.
That's a choice. And it's a choice that has consequences for American businesses, trading partners, and the broader economy every single day it goes unresolved.
There's a deeper pattern worth noting. Jackson is not the first justice to have a public life outside the court. Justices write books. They give speeches. They attend events. None of that is inherently problematic.
But the left spent years demanding that conservative justices recuse themselves from cases based on the flimsiest associations — a flag on a neighbor's lawn, attendance at a legal conference, a friendship with someone tangentially connected to a litigant. The standard they set was that even the appearance of bias was disqualifying.
Now, a liberal justice attends an event where performers and attendees openly protested federal law enforcement, where anti-ICE sentiment was literally pinned to people's chests — and the defense is that she couldn't have predicted the speeches. The recusal industrial complex that targeted conservative justices has gone remarkably quiet.
Jackson also used her Grammy loss to charm the talk show audience:
"If you're going to lose, I mean, you might as well lose to the Dalai Lama, for sure."
It's a good line. It's the kind of thing that plays well on daytime television. And that's precisely the concern — a sitting Supreme Court justice who seems more comfortable on a talk show couch than behind the bench, building a media persona while cases of national significance collect dust.
Jackson described her Grammy attendance and media appearances as "public outreach and education." She called the criticism itself just:
"Part of the job."
But there's a difference between public engagement and a publicity tour. Promoting a young adult version of your memoir on "The View" while the country waits for a ruling on presidential trade authority isn't outreach. It's branding.
The Supreme Court's authority rests on the perception that its members are above the political fray — that they deliberate with care, speak through opinions, and let their work product do the talking. Every appearance on a daytime talk show, every photo op at an awards ceremony dripping with partisan signaling, chips away at that perception.
Jackson has every right to attend the Grammys. She has every right to go on television. But rights and wisdom aren't the same thing. The American people waiting on a tariffs ruling might prefer their justices spent February working — not explaining why losing to the Dalai Lama was actually kind of fun.
James Van Der Beek died on Wednesday at the age of 48. The actor, who became a household name as the lead of the WB's "Dawson's Creek," had announced a Stage 3 colorectal cancer diagnosis in early November 2024.
His wife, Kimberly Van Der Beek, confirmed the news on Instagram:
"He met his final days with courage, faith, and grace. There is much to share regarding his wishes, love for humanity and the sacredness of time. Those days will come."
She asked for privacy as the family grieves. Van Der Beek is survived by Kimberly and their six children.
Born March 8, 1977, in Cheshire, Connecticut, James David Van Der Beek found the stage early, appearing in school plays as a child before making his professional debut in an off-Broadway production of Edward Albee's "Finding the Sun." His first film credit came in 1995's "Angus," followed by "I Love You, I Love You Not" the following year.
Then came the role that changed everything, as NBC News reported. In 1998, "Dawson's Creek" premiered on the WB, and Van Der Beek's portrayal of Dawson Leery — the earnest, film-obsessed teenager navigating life in a small coastal town — struck a chord with millions of young viewers. The show ran for six seasons and 128 episodes before ending in May 2003. It launched careers alongside Van Der Beek's, with Katie Holmes, Michelle Williams, and Joshua Jackson all starring as series regulars.
Van Der Beek marked the show's 20th anniversary in a January 2018 Instagram post:
"The little pilot we shot in that small town for that fledgling network aired, changed our lives and launched our careers."
A year after "Dawson's Creek" debuted, Van Der Beek starred in "Varsity Blues" as a high school quarterback — a film that became its own kind of cultural touchstone. Cameos in "Scary Movie" and "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" followed in 2000 and 2001, respectively.
The trajectory of Van Der Beek's career after "Dawson's Creek" was the trajectory of an actor who refused to be defined by a single role — even if the world kept trying. He appeared across a wide range of television, with guest spots on "Criminal Minds," "Ugly Betty," "How I Met Your Mother," "One Tree Hill," "Medium," and "Law & Order: Criminal Intent."
In the early 2010s, he landed what many considered a creative high point: playing a fictionalized, self-mocking version of himself on ABC's "Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23." He spoke about the role to The Hollywood Reporter in 2014:
"It was a really fun character to play because he was completely without shame. It's fun to mock the business, and it's fun to keep your own ego in check, too. You feel very safe when you're constantly destroying all those little things you keep precious as an actor. It's a very liberating feeling."
That willingness to laugh at himself — genuinely, not performatively — set him apart in an industry where ego is currency. He went on to star in CBS's "CSI: Cyber" for two seasons and appeared in the first season of FX's drama series "Pose."
In a 2024 interview with People magazine, Van Der Beek reflected on the peculiar intensity of the fame "Dawson's Creek" brought him as a young man:
"When it first started happening, the people who were coming up to me were teenage girls who were screaming."
He was characteristically honest — and funny — about the mark it left:
"I have what I call the lamest form of PTSD ever, which is when I hear teenage girls go, 'Oooh!' When I hear that titter, I go into a still space ... [then] I'm like: Dude, get over yourself."
Self-deprecation as a survival mechanism. It served him well.
On November 3, 2024, Van Der Beek revealed publicly that he had been diagnosed with Stage 3 colorectal cancer. He had been fighting privately before making the announcement, a decision that itself reflected a kind of quiet dignity increasingly rare in an age where every personal crisis becomes a content strategy.
"I've been dealing with this privately until now, getting treatment and dialing in my overall health with greater focus than ever before. Please know that my family and I deeply appreciate all the love and support."
He was 47 at the time of that post. He was 48 when he died.
Colorectal cancer rates among younger adults have been climbing for years, and Van Der Beek's diagnosis — and now his death — puts a recognizable face on a disease that too many people still associate only with older generations. Forty-eight is not old. It is the age of fathers coaching Little League, of men in the prime of their professional lives, of husbands with six children who still need them.
There is something worth pausing over in Kimberly Van Der Beek's words. She did not describe her husband's final days with the language of victimhood or defiance that has become reflexive in public grief. She said he met them with courage, faith, and grace.
Those are not small words. They are the vocabulary of a man who understood that how you face the end matters — that character is not something you perform for an audience but something you carry into the rooms where no cameras follow.
James Van Der Beek made his mark playing a teenager who took everything too seriously. He spent the rest of his career proving he didn't have to. He leaves behind a family, a body of work, and the memory of a man who — by every account available — faced the hardest thing with the best of himself.
He was 48 years old.