Public infrastructure costs tied to Barack Obama's Presidential Center in Chicago have ballooned well beyond original projections, and not a single government office involved in the project has produced a unified accounting of how much taxpayers are actually paying. That's the central finding of a Fox News Digital investigation that submitted records requests and press inquiries to a constellation of Illinois and Chicago agencies, only to be met with silence, statutory stalling, and claims of having no responsive records.
The Illinois Department of Transportation now pegs its share at approximately $229 million. That's up from a roughly $174 million preliminary estimate dating back to 2017. The city of Chicago's side remains a black box.
When the project was approved in 2018, Obama pledged to privately fund construction of the expansive 19.3-acre campus in historic Jackson Park on Chicago's South Side. The facility was framed as a "gift" to Chicago. Eight years later, the gift comes with an infrastructure invoice that no one in government seems willing to total up.
IDOT provided Fox News Digital with an approximate breakdown of its $229 million in spending in July:
An IDOT spokesperson described the earlier $174 million figure as a "2017 was a preliminary cost estimate," which is bureaucrat-speak for "the real number was always going to be higher and we knew it." The state's contribution alone has jumped roughly $55 million beyond that initial projection, as Fox News reports.
On the city side, the picture is even murkier. When the project was approved, roughly $175 million in city infrastructure spending was discussed, meaning the combined early estimate sat around $350 million, split between state and city. Chicago's 2024–2028 Capital Improvement Plan lists more than $206 million for roadway and utility work surrounding the project. Whether that figure overlaps with the state's numbers, exceeds the original city estimate, or represents the full scope of Chicago's commitment remains unknown, because no one will say.
The construction costs for the center itself have followed an identical trajectory. Early estimates pegged the facility at around $330 million. According to the Obama Foundation's 2024 tax filings, that number has reached at least $850 million.
Fox News Digital submitted records requests and press inquiries to IDOT, the Chicago Department of Transportation, the Chicago Office of Budget and Management, the Mayor's Office, and Governor J.B. Pritzker's administration. The results read like a case study in coordinated non-response.
CDOT acknowledged a FOIA request dated October 7, 2025, took a statutory extension, and then never issued a final determination or produced the requested records. OBM's FOIA response was four words long: "does not have responsive records." No cost overruns, no reallocations, no breakdown of spending across major components. Nothing.
Mayor Brandon Johnson's office did not respond to repeated requests for the city's total infrastructure spending tied to the project or for how much more Chicago expects to commit. Pritzker's office gave conflicting responses and ultimately produced no records showing the state's total infrastructure spending. The Illinois Attorney General's Public Access Counselor is now reviewing whether multiple agencies complied with state transparency laws.
Consider what this means in practice. Hundreds of millions in public dollars are flowing to infrastructure surrounding a single development, and the taxpayers funding it cannot obtain a straight answer about the total cost from any level of government. Not one office provided a unified, up-to-date figure. Not one clarified whether city and state totals overlap. Not one demonstrated that anyone, anywhere, is tracking the full public tab.
The center sits on 19 acres of historic public parkland, transferred to the project under a controversial deal for just $10 and a 99-year agreement. Legal challenges to the transfer were ultimately dismissed, though the merits of the arguments were not adjudicated on. Cornell Drive, a four-lane roadway, was permanently removed under the center's site plan.
A $470 million reserve fund tied to the project has received only $1 million in deposits. That detail alone deserves attention. A fund presumably designed to ensure long-term maintenance and community benefit sits nearly empty while public infrastructure costs climb with no ceiling in sight.
Obama Foundation spokesperson Emily Bittner offered the kind of statement that sounds generous until you examine what it doesn't address:
"The Obama Foundation is investing $850 million in private funding to build the Obama Presidential Center and give back to the community that made the Obamas' story possible."
"After decades of underinvestment on the South Side of Chicago, the OPC is catalyzing investment, from both public and private sources, to build economic opportunity for residents through jobs, housing, and public spaces and amenities."
Note the framing. The Foundation counts the $850 million as its investment, as though the hundreds of millions in taxpayer-funded infrastructure are simply "catalyzed" investment rather than a direct public subsidy. The phrase "from both public and private sources" does a lot of quiet work in that sentence, folding an enormous and growing taxpayer obligation into the language of civic revitalization.
Illinois GOP Chair Kathy Salvi was considerably less diplomatic. She told Fox News Digital:
"Illinois Republicans saw this coming a mile away. Now, right on cue, Illinois Democrats are leaving taxpayers high and dry and putting them on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars to support the ugliest building in Chicago."
"Illinois' culture of corruption is humming along with pay-to-play deals to their allies and friends while lying to Illinois voters."
Salvi's tone is sharp, but her underlying point is the one that matters: taxpayers were told this would be a privately funded project. The public infrastructure costs were supposed to be defined, bounded, and shared transparently. Instead, every estimate has grown, every agency has dodged accountability, and the full scope of the public commitment remains deliberately obscured.
This is how large-scale government projects operate in Illinois. The initial pitch is modest and palatable. The approvals come through. The cost projections drift upward. And when someone finally asks for a comprehensive accounting, every office points at the next one while producing nothing. It's not a bug. It's the system functioning exactly as designed.
The Obama Presidential Center was sold as a privately funded gift to Chicago's South Side. What it has become is a monument to the gap between political promises and public accountability. Nineteen acres of parkland for ten dollars, a reserve fund with a million in a vessel built for 470 million, construction costs that nearly tripled, and infrastructure spending that no government entity will tally.
The former president's official records, it turns out, will be maintained by the National Archives at a federal site in Maryland. The building in Jackson Park won't even house them. But it will house the bill.
President Donald Trump announced Friday he will not ask Congress to vote on imposing his tariffs following the Supreme Court's decision striking them down as unconstitutional. Speaking at a White House press conference, Trump made clear he sees no need for legislative action and intends to pursue alternative authorities instead.
"I don't have to," Trump said. "I have the right to do tariffs, and it's all been approved by Congress, so there's no reason to."
The Washington Examiner reported that the declaration came days after the House voted last week to repeal the president's tariffs on Canada, with six House Republicans joining almost every single Democrat to end the duty on Canadian goods.
Trump signaled the ruling won't slow his trade agenda, pointing to other tools at his disposal.
"Other alternatives will now be used to replace the ones that the court incorrectly rejected. We have alternatives. Great alternative, could be more money. We'll take in more money and be a lot stronger for it."
The House vote on Canada tariffs exposed a narrow fault line in the Republican conference. Three Republicans voted with all Democrats to stop an extension of a ban on tariff-repeal votes, which had been in place since last year and expired at the end of January. That procedural move opened the door for the full House to vote on repealing the Canada tariffs.
Trump downplayed the defections, though he misstated the number of Republicans who bucked him on the vote. Six House Republicans ultimately sided with Democrats.
"We lost two Republicans or three Republicans, because they're not good Republicans. We have great unity. There's great unity in the Republican Party."
Speaker Mike Johnson and other House Republicans had previously said they wanted to defer on voting to repeal tariffs until the Supreme Court's ruling was decided, so as not to act prematurely. That strategy effectively shielded members from having to take a difficult vote for months. Now that the Court has ruled, the political cover is gone.
Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, one of the Republicans who has vocally challenged the tariff approach, told the Washington Examiner he sees the Court's ruling as vindication.
"I've been saying this for 12 months. Article 1 gives Congress the authority for tariffs. Our constitutional checks and balances still work."
Bacon's argument is a straightforward textualist one: the Constitution assigns tariff authority to Congress, and no amount of executive creativity changes that foundational arrangement. It's the kind of argument that, in a different context, most conservatives would embrace without hesitation. The tension here isn't really about constitutional principle. It's about whether the trade policy goals justify the means used to pursue them.
Trump said he "would probably get it" if he went to Congress for a vote. Whether that's true remains untested, and the White House clearly has no interest in testing it.
Rep. Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, wasted no time framing the ruling as a rebuke of what he called "Trump's harmful tariff regime."
"For more than a year, Republicans repeatedly blocked Democrats' efforts to overturn these clearly illegal taxes that have burdened American families."
It's a convenient talking point, but it deserves scrutiny. Democrats spent years cheering executive overreach when it served their policy goals. The idea that they suddenly discovered a passion for Article I authority on trade is about as convincing as their rediscovery of fiscal responsibility every time a Republican occupies the White House.
It remains unclear whether Democrats will continue to force votes on repealing Trump's tariffs against Mexico and Brazil. The Washington Examiner reached out to Meeks's office on the question. If Democrats truly believe this is a winning issue, they'll push forward. If they go quiet, it tells you everything about whether this was a principle or positioning.
The real story here isn't the Court ruling itself. It's what happens after it. Trump's promise of "great alternatives" that could bring in "more money" suggests the administration has already identified other statutory authorities or executive mechanisms to continue pursuing its trade agenda. The specifics remain to be seen, but the posture is unmistakable: this is a detour, not an off-ramp.
For congressional Republicans, the situation is more uncomfortable. The procedural ban that shielded members from tariff votes is gone.
Every trade measure that comes to the floor now requires a public vote and a public position. No more waiting for the Court to decide. No more deferring to the White House while quietly hoping the issue resolves itself.
Six Republicans already showed they're willing to break ranks on Canada. The question is whether that number grows when Mexico and Brazil come up, or whether the party closes ranks behind whatever alternative the administration rolls out next.
The Constitution won a round. The trade fight isn't over.
Rep. Ilhan Omar told a town hall audience on Wednesday that Democrats aren't just talking about abolishing ICE anymore. They're having active conversations about dismantling the entire Department of Homeland Security.
The Minnesota Democrat framed the shift as a natural evolution, suggesting that what once seemed radical has become mainstream within her party. In her own words:
"What I will say is that there is an easier conversation happening today than six, seven years ago when I got to Congress, about what we need to do with ICE, which is to abolish it."
She didn't stop there. Omar went further, describing broader ambitions that extend well beyond a single agency:
"There is a lot of conversation about what the dismantlement of the Department of Homeland Security should look like."
Not whether it should be dismantled. What the dismantlement should "look like." The premise is already settled in her circles. They've moved past the debate and into the logistics.
Remember when "Abolish ICE" was supposed to be a fringe position? When respectable Democrats assured moderate voters that nobody serious was actually proposing the elimination of federal law enforcement agencies? As Breitbart reported, Omar just confirmed what conservatives have warned about for years: the Overton window on the left didn't just shift. It shattered.
ICE has existed since 2003. The Department of Homeland Security was created in the wake of the worst terrorist attack in American history. These aren't bureaucratic relics from a forgotten era. They are the institutional architecture of national security in the post-9/11 world. And a sitting member of Congress is casually describing their demolition as though she's planning a kitchen renovation.
The honesty is almost refreshing. For years, Democrats played a double game: campaign on compassion, govern with ambiguity, and let activists do the dirty work of pushing actual policy positions. Omar skipped the choreography. She said the quiet part out loud, and she said it to applause.
Omar's comments land in a broader context that makes them harder to dismiss as mere rhetoric. Her home state has become ground zero for Democratic resistance to federal immigration enforcement. Governor Tim Walz, who lost the 2024 presidential election alongside his running mate, has positioned himself as a leader of that resistance.
Walz threatened last month to activate the Minnesota National Guard against federal law enforcement. He's also urged Americans across the country to join the fight. At one point, the governor issued this appeal:
"To Americans who are watching this, if you're in Portland or you're in L.A., or you're in Chicago, or you're wherever, they're coming next."
He called on people to "stand with us against this."
Against what, exactly? Against federal officers enforcing federal law? Against the agencies charged with border security and immigration enforcement? The language of resistance presupposes tyranny. But what Walz is describing isn't tyranny. It's the basic function of a sovereign nation to enforce its own borders.
Here's what makes the Omar-Walz position so revealing. Democrats spent the better part of four years insisting that "no one is above the law." They impeached a president twice on that principle. They prosecuted his allies. They lectured the country about norms, institutions, and the rule of law.
Now, a Democratic congresswoman openly discusses dismantling the federal department responsible for homeland security, and a Democratic governor threatens to deploy state military assets against federal agents. The principle of institutional respect apparently has an expiration date, and it expires the moment institutions start enforcing laws that progressives find inconvenient.
This isn't a policy disagreement. It's a philosophical one. Omar and her allies don't believe the United States has the right to enforce its immigration laws. Not selectively, not compassionately, not at all. The call to abolish ICE was never about reforming a single agency. It was about removing the capacity for enforcement itself. Dismantling DHS is simply the logical next step.
The American electorate weighed in on this question decisively in 2024. They chose President Trump and Vice President JD Vance over the alternative. The mandate was not subtle. Voters wanted the border secured, laws enforced, and sovereignty treated as something more than a talking point.
Omar's town hall remarks are a gift to anyone who wondered whether Democrats learned anything from that loss. They didn't. The party's progressive wing isn't recalibrating. It's accelerating. While voters demanded enforcement, Omar and her colleagues are blueprinting abolition.
That gap between what the electorate demanded and what the progressive left is planning tells you everything about where the Democratic Party is headed. They aren't interested in winning the argument. They're interested in eliminating the agencies that make the argument enforceable.
At least now they're saying so plainly.
Eighteen days into the search for Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of "Today" show co-host Savannah Guthrie, investigators have hit a wall. And the company standing on the other side of it is Google.
Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos told NewsNation on Tuesday that Google delivered a grim assessment of its ability to recover security camera footage from Guthrie's home near Tucson, Arizona. The tech giant's response, as relayed by Nanos:
"We don't think we can get anything."
Guthrie had multiple cameras installed at her home, but she did not have an active subscription for her Google Nest security system. That means the footage that could identify whoever took her may exist somewhere on Google's servers, buried under layers of overwritten data, with no guarantee it can be pulled back.
Sheriff Nanos described the technical challenge in vivid terms, the New York Post reported:
"It's like peeling paint — you have images over images over images. And you've got to peel back very easy because you might destroy the layer you wanted."
So far, the only video investigators have obtained from the Nest system shows the front of Guthrie's house, where a masked man can be seen approaching her front door. That footage was released to the public last week and generated nearly 5,000 tips. But what happened inside the home, or at any other camera angle, remains locked in digital limbo.
This is the reality of modern home security that rarely gets discussed. Millions of Americans install cameras believing they've created an unblinking witness. What they've actually done, in many cases, is hand their security to a subscription model. No active plan, no stored footage. The camera sees everything and remembers nothing.
The digital roadblock is not the only frustration. A glove recovered approximately two miles from Guthrie's home yielded DNA, but when investigators ran it through the FBI's national DNA database, CODIS, it came back with no match.
No match means whoever left it has no prior profile in the system. It doesn't mean the evidence is useless. It means the suspect hasn't been caught before, or at least hasn't been cataloged. If and when a suspect is identified, that glove becomes a critical piece of the puzzle. But right now, it leads nowhere.
Despite the setbacks, Nanos projected confidence. He said he has "100% faith" that authorities will crack the case, and he sent a pointed message to whoever is responsible:
"If you were the guy, if you were that monster, you should be worried."
That kind of public pressure matters. It tells a suspect that investigators aren't winding down. They're digging in. Nearly 5,000 tips from a single video release suggest the public is engaged. A reward of up to $100,000 has been offered for information leading to Guthrie's recovery or the arrest and conviction of those responsible.
The investigation has also extended beyond Arizona's borders. A man named Luke Daley, 37, described as a felon, was detained in a SWAT raid on Friday, February 13, and subsequently released. He has denied any connection to Guthrie's disappearance, saying there was "no link whatsoever." Reports have also indicated the FBI contacted Mexican authorities regarding a purchase connected to the case and asked a gun store owner to check firearm sales against a list of names and pictures, though details on those threads remain sparse.
The most unsettling element of this story isn't the masked figure on the doorstep. It's the possibility that a trillion-dollar company built on capturing and monetizing data might shrug its shoulders when that same data could save a woman's life.
Google knows what you searched last Tuesday. It knows where you drove, what you bought, and what you almost bought. Its entire business model is built on the premise that no digital footprint is too small to harvest. But when law enforcement needs camera footage from a kidnapping victim's own home, the answer is "we don't think we can get anything."
Maybe that's technically accurate. Maybe the data really is gone. But the contrast is worth sitting with. The infrastructure exists to serve you an ad for running shoes thirty seconds after you mention a jog. The infrastructure to help find an 84-year-old woman taken from her home apparently does not.
Investigators have pressed Google on whether additional recovery is possible. The answer so far has not been encouraging. But the search is 18 days old, not 18 months. Cases break on the 19th day. They break on the 40th. They break when one of those 5,000 tipsters remembers something they didn't think mattered.
Nancy Guthrie's cameras were watching. Whether anyone was recording is the question that may define this case.
A coalition of election integrity organizations filed an amicus brief on Tuesday pressing the Supreme Court to uphold what they argue is a straightforward requirement of federal law: mail ballots must be received by Election Day, not days or weeks after.
The brief, filed in Watson v. Republican National Committee, backs a lower court ruling that found Mississippi's practice of accepting mail ballots up to five business days after Election Day violates federal statute. The Honest Elections Project, the Center for Election Confidence, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections all signed on in support of the RNC's position.
Oral arguments are scheduled for March 23. A decision is expected by the summer, in time to shape the rules for the 2026 midterms.
The RNC originally sued over Mississippi's allowance for counting mail ballots that arrive up to five business days after Election Day, so long as they are postmarked by that date. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled in the RNC's favor, finding that federal law trumps the state's extended deadline and requires ballots to be in hand by Election Day.
The case now sits before the Supreme Court, and the stakes stretch well beyond Mississippi. Fourteen states and Washington, D.C., currently count ballots received after Election Day if postmarked on time. A ruling affirming the 5th Circuit's decision would force those jurisdictions to change their practices or face legal challenges.
Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, told Fox News Digital:
"Counting ballots that are received after Election Day unnecessarily damages public trust in election outcomes, delays results, and violates the law."
He's right on the trust question, and the data backs it up. Americans have watched elections drag on for days and sometimes weeks past Election Day as late-arriving ballots trickle in and shift margins. That spectacle does not inspire confidence. It breeds suspicion, whether warranted in a given race or not.
The legal fight matters, but it's worth noting that the political ground has already shifted. Since the 2024 election, four Republican-controlled states, Kansas, Ohio, Utah, and North Dakota, have moved to require ballot receipt by Election Day. They didn't wait for the Supreme Court. They read the statute, recognized the problem, and acted.
That trend underscores something important: this is not a radical legal theory. It is the plain reading of federal law, supported by a Supreme Court decision from three decades ago in Foster v. Love. The novelty isn't in requiring ballots by Election Day. The novelty was in the 14 states that decided to ignore that requirement.
Supporters of the RNC's position acknowledge that curtailing acceptance of late-arriving ballots would not guarantee that election officials finish tabulating on election night. Close races will still take time to count. Nobody is pretending otherwise.
But there is a meaningful difference between counting ballots that are already in hand and waiting for new ballots to arrive through the mail. One is a logistical reality. The other is a policy choice that introduces uncertainty, delays finality, and opens the door to questions about the chain of custody. Even the U.S. Postal Service has warned that postmarks may not reliably reflect when a ballot actually entered the mail system.
Military and overseas ballots, governed by the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, would likely remain unaffected by a ruling in the RNC's favor. That's a reasonable distinction. Service members stationed abroad face genuine logistical barriers that domestic voters do not.
The left will frame this case as voter suppression. They always do. Any rule that requires citizens to meet a deadline, prove their identity, or follow basic procedures gets cast as an obstacle to democracy rather than a safeguard of it.
But the argument here is simple enough that it fits on a bumper sticker: Election Day is a day, not a suggestion. Federal law sets it. States don't get to unilaterally extend it by accepting ballots that arrive nearly a week later and calling that compliance.
Snead said a favorable ruling would "protect the rights of voters and the integrity of the democratic process, and ensure that it is easy to vote but hard to cheat in future elections."
That formulation captures the conservative position precisely. Nobody is trying to stop anyone from voting. Mail your ballot early. Drop it off in person. Use the systems available to you. But do it by the deadline that Congress established. That is not suppression. It is the bare minimum expectation of a functioning election system.
The Supreme Court will hear arguments in March. By summer, we'll know whether Election Day still means what it says.
Eric Swalwell — congressman, former Intelligence Committee member, and now California gubernatorial hopeful — once fancied himself a poet. The results are about what you'd expect.
A sexually graphic poem penned by Swalwell during his sophomore year at Campbell University has surfaced, courtesy of a Daily Mail report. Titled "Hungover From Burgundy," the piece appeared in the university's literary magazine, The Lyricist, and reads like a fever dream scrawled on a dorm room napkin at 2 a.m.
The highlights — if you can call them that:
"And there beauty was, formless and magnificent — a flurry of limbs and nails. She chased and I ran, I chased and she ran."
"While I screamed, she bent her lips to mine. Kissing till veins imploded and exploded, till blood rolled down our chins, for bounded mouths cannot speak of parting."
"In the morning, I awoke beside beauty's shadow — her form sloppy and her legs pale. My scar lost, my lips cracked and dry. And we groaned simultaneously."
A Swalwell spokesman offered the campaign's only response to the Daily Mail:
"If you think Eric's poetry at 18 was bad, you should see his diary entries from when he was 12."
Points for self-awareness, at least.
The poem itself is embarrassing but ultimately harmless, the New York Post noted — most people's college creative writing deserves to stay buried. What makes this worth more than a laugh is context. Swalwell isn't some anonymous state legislator. He's a man who sat on the House Intelligence Committee, who lectures his colleagues on national security with the cadence of a man who believes he's the only adult in the room. And the trail of baggage he's hauling into this governor's race extends well beyond purple prose.
Start with the college writings that aren't erotic. The Daily Mail report also unearthed commentary Swalwell penned for his student newspaper that critics say expressed sympathy for Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted in the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia police officer, and Leonard Peltier, found guilty in the 1975 killing of two FBI agents. Activists have long argued that both were politically persecuted. Swalwell, at the time, was apparently sympathetic to that framing.
That might be a forgivable youthful indulgence — college kids flirt with bad ideas the way Swalwell's poetry flirts with coherence — except for one detail. Swalwell went on to become a prosecutor who led a hate crimes unit. Opponents have raised the obvious question: how does a man who expressed sympathy for convicted cop killers pivot to that role without anyone asking him to reconcile the two?
Nobody has provided a satisfying answer. Swalwell himself hasn't addressed it — he hasn't responded to requests for comment on any of this.
Then there's Christine Fang. Between 2011 and 2015, Swalwell had contact with a woman later identified by U.S. intelligence officials as a suspected Chinese operative tied to China's Ministry of State Security. Fang cultivated relationships with local and national politicians, helped raise funds for Swalwell's 2014 re-election campaign, and even assisted in placing an intern in his congressional office.
Federal investigators eventually gave Swalwell a defensive briefing in 2015. He cut off contact. The House Ethics Committee investigated and concluded in 2023 without taking action. Swalwell was not accused of wrongdoing.
Those are the facts — and they're the facts Swalwell's defenders always recite, as though a clean ethics report erases the underlying reality. A suspected foreign intelligence asset embedded herself in a congressman's orbit closely enough to fundraise for him and place staff in his office. Then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy removed Swalwell from the House Intelligence Committee over national security concerns. That decision wasn't made lightly, and no ethics committee finding changes the substance of why it was made.
Swalwell's gubernatorial bid arrives at a moment when California is drowning in real problems — housing costs that punish working families, an energy grid held together by optimism, and cities that have spent a decade treating law enforcement as the enemy. The state needs a governor who commands seriousness.
What it's getting instead is a candidate whose public record includes sophomoric erotic poetry, college sympathy for cop killers, a suspected Chinese spy in his fundraising apparatus, and removal from one of the most sensitive committees in Congress. His campaign's instinct when confronted with any of it is to crack jokes about diary entries.
California voters will decide whether that's the résumé of a governor — or of a man who peaked as a mediocre campus poet and never quite figured out the difference between ambition and qualification.
Hillary Clinton stood before a room of U.S. and European politicians and security officials in Munich and said what Democratic leaders spent four years refusing to admit: the Biden-era migration wave went too far.
"We need to call it for what it is, a legitimate reason to have a debate about things like migration. It went too far. It's been disruptive and destabilizing, and it needs to be fixed in a humane way with secure borders."
That's Clinton — not some MAGA firebrand, not a conservative talk show host — acknowledging that the open-border experiment Americans lived through was exactly as destructive as conservatives warned it would be. The word "destabilizing" is doing heavy lifting there, and she knows it.
The admission landed at a European meeting of national security officials and influencers, where Secretary of State Marco Rubio had spoken before Clinton's event, laying out the Trump administration's low-migration, high-tech alternative to Europe's strategy of growing economies through mass, low-skilled migration.
According to Breitbart, Clinton framed migration as a "huge flash point," which is a remarkably sterile way to describe what Biden's border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, oversaw. Under his tenure, at least 10 million illegal migrants entered the country, alongside millions of legal migrants and visa workers. That isn't a "flash point." It's a policy choice that reshaped American communities without their consent.
But Clinton's concession came wrapped in the kind of moral packaging that Democrats specialize in. She wants secure borders, she says — but the response must not "torture and kill people." The framing is instructive. Enforcing immigration law becomes cruel. Failing to enforce it becomes compassion. The only acceptable position is the one where Democrats retain moral authority regardless of outcomes.
She also couldn't resist folding her migration remarks into a broader progressive sermon:
"It is for me, a blessing that freedom was expanded to include — in the United States, for example — the right of black people to be treated at least better than they had been for 400 or so years. It was a culmination of freedom for women to be given their rights much more fully than they had been. It was, I think, a dramatic recognition of dignity for gay people to be able to be treated without fear and even marry, which, to me, is creating a family."
Notice the move. Civil rights, women's suffrage, and marriage equality get stacked together, and mass illegal immigration gets quietly filed under the same umbrella of expanding freedom. It's a rhetorical sleight of hand that conflates the constitutional rights of American citizens with the question of whether a nation enforces its borders. Those are not the same conversation, and treating them as one is how the Democratic Party lost the argument in the first place.
Clinton offered what she clearly believed was an olive branch:
"I understand conservative impulses. I understand we are fighting an ideological battle that is as old as time. There are those of us who are more comfortable in a more open, tolerant world, and there are those who have their concerns about it because they worry about the impact on existing institutions like the family, community and others."
This is the tell. In Clinton's framework, progressives are "comfortable" in an "open, tolerant world," while conservatives merely "have their concerns" — as though protecting the institutions of family and community is a nervous tic rather than a coherent worldview backed by millennia of human experience.
She "understands" conservative impulses the way an anthropologist understands a tribe she's studying. The empathy is clinical. The hierarchy is clear. Her side represents progress. The other side represents anxiety about progress. That framing hasn't changed since 2016 — it's just gotten a softer delivery.
And that's the core problem with Clinton's Munich performance. She admitted the policy failed. She refused to admit the worldview behind it was wrong.
Clinton wasn't the only one attempting revisionist history at the gathering. Polish Foreign Affairs Minister Radosław Sikorski offered his own take on mass migration's origins:
"It was for decades, supported by Republican businessmen who wanted cheap labor from Latin America."
Sikorski added that mass migration "is not inherently a left-wing or right-wing idea." He's partially right — the bipartisan cheap-labor consensus that fueled decades of lax enforcement is one of the reasons Donald Trump won the presidency in the first place, and won it again in November 2024. Republican voters punished their own party's establishment on this issue long before Democrats felt the consequences.
But Sikorski's framing conveniently ignores which party made open borders an ideological commitment rather than a business convenience. Republican businessmen may have wanted cheap labor. Democrats built an entire moral infrastructure around the idea that enforcement itself was bigotry.
Clinton lost the 2016 election. Trump won reelection in November 2024. Between those two data points lies a simple truth that Clinton's Munich remarks dance around but never fully confront: voters rejected the migration consensus — twice.
Saying "it went too far" in a conference room in Germany is not the same as reckoning with the policy. It's reputation management. Clinton wants to preserve the progressive project by conceding its most politically toxic element — without surrendering any of the underlying assumptions that produced it.
She wants secure borders, but only "humane" ones — with Democrats defining what humane means. She wants to acknowledge conservative concerns, but only as something to be "understood," not adopted. She wants credit for honesty while offering the minimum viable admission.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is doing what Clinton says needs to be done — securing the border and enforcing the law — and Democrats are calling it extreme. The same party whose most prominent figure just admitted the old policy was "destabilizing" treats the correction as a crisis.
Clinton told the room in Munich what everyone already knew. The question was never whether Biden's migration policy failed. The question is whether Democrats will let anyone fix it.
Barack Obama sat down with progressive YouTuber Brian Tyler Cohen on Saturday to deliver his most direct public endorsement yet of the demonstrators who have mobilized against ICE operations in Minneapolis and St. Paul. The former president framed the protests as a patriotic act — American citizens standing up for their values — and characterized federal immigration enforcement in Minnesota as lawless and unaccountable.
It was a carefully staged moment. Not a press conference, not a statement through a spokesperson, but a lengthy interview with a friendly progressive media figure, designed to reach the activist base that once powered Obama's own political machine.
And the message was unmistakable: Obama wants the resistance to continue.
Obama's rhetoric escalated well beyond vague disapproval. He described ICE operations in the Twin Cities as "unprecedented" and rattled off a series of inflammatory claims about federal agents' conduct. In the interview, he said:
"It is important for us to recognize the unprecedented nature of what ICE was doing in Minneapolis, St Paul, the way that federal agents, ICE agents were being deployed, without any clear guidelines, training, pulling people out of their homes, using five-year-olds to try to bait their parents, all the stuff that we saw, teargassing crowds simply who were standing there, not breaking any laws."
No sourcing for those specific claims. No investigation cited. No official finding referenced. Just Barack Obama's characterizations, delivered with the calm authority of a man who knows his words will be repeated without scrutiny by every legacy newsroom in the country, as The Guardian reports.
He then cast the protests in the broadest possible terms — not as opposition to immigration enforcement, but as a test of national character:
"Right now, we're being tested, and the good news is, what we saw in Minneapolis and St Paul, and what we're seeing in places across the country, including here in Los Angeles, has been the American people saying no. At least a good number of the American people saying, we're going to live up to those values that we say we believe in."
And his bottom line:
"As long as we have folks doing that, I feel like we're going to get through this."
"Get through this." As though enforcing federal immigration law is something the country must survive rather than something it chose through an election.
This isn't the first time Obama has weighed in. Last month, he and Michelle Obama released a joint statement calling the death of Alex Pretti — one of two people who died in connection with federal operations in the Twin Cities — "a heartbreaking tragedy" and "a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party, that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault." The statement also accused federal law enforcement and immigration agents of not operating "in a lawful or accountable way in Minnesota" and claimed the tactics employed by ICE and other federal agents seemed "designed to intimidate, harass, provoke and endanger the residents of a major American city."
That language does real work. It doesn't just criticize specific incidents — it delegitimizes the entire enforcement apparatus. When a former president tells the country that federal agents are operating unlawfully, he is providing moral permission for obstruction. He's telling local officials, activists, and ordinary citizens that resisting federal law enforcement is not just acceptable but noble.
The deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in connection with federal operations deserve scrutiny — every use of lethal force by government agents does. But note what Obama did not do: he did not call for an investigation. He did not call for due process. He did not wait for facts. He rendered his verdict and wrapped it in the flag.
There's a particular irony in Obama positioning himself as the champion of lawful, accountable government. His own administration deported millions of illegal immigrants. His own DHS conducted workplace raids and interior enforcement operations. The infrastructure he now decries didn't materialize from nowhere.
But the deeper problem isn't hypocrisy — it's strategy. Obama knows exactly what he's doing. By elevating Minneapolis as a model of resistance, he's signaling to Democratic mayors, progressive DAs, and activist organizations across the country that confrontation with federal immigration enforcement is the path forward. He referenced Los Angeles in the same breath as Minneapolis, drawing a line from the Twin Cities to every blue city in America.
He also offered what amounts to a theory of political change:
"The reason I point out that I don't think the majority of the American people approve of this is because ultimately, the answer is going to come from the American people. We just saw this in Minnesota, in Minneapolis."
The framing is deliberate. Obama wants the public to believe that street protests represent the majority opinion — that the crowds in Minneapolis speak for America. This is from the man who watched his party lose the White House in an election in which immigration enforcement was a central promise to voters.
Border czar Tom Homan said this week that the Trump administration would draw down its immigration operations in Minnesota following the two deaths. Many have credited the protests as the reason for the pullback, and Obama clearly wants that narrative cemented.
But the administration's decision to scale back in a specific locality after two deaths connected to federal operations is not the same as capitulation to protest movements. Operational adjustments happen. The conflation of a tactical drawdown with a political retreat serves Obama's narrative, not reality.
What the protests in Minneapolis have actually demonstrated is something different: that a sufficiently mobilized local population, backed by sympathetic city and state officials, can create enough friction to complicate federal enforcement. That's not a values victory. That's obstruction with better branding.
Obama closed his interview with hope for the next generation of American leaders — the kind of gauzy optimism that made him famous. But strip away the rhetoric, and the picture is stark. A former president of the United States is actively encouraging citizens to resist federal law enforcement operations targeting illegal immigrants. He's doing it from a platform designed to maximize reach among the activist left. And he's doing it while casting the agents carrying out those operations as rogue actors operating outside the law.
That's not a call for accountability. That's a call to arms — wrapped in the language of values so it goes down easier.
The American people spoke on immigration. They spoke in November. Obama just didn't like what they said.
When the Supreme Court splits 5-4, and the liberal bloc wins, Brett Kavanaugh is on their side more than half the time.
Newsweek reported that data from the Supreme Court Database, as cited by SCOTUSblog, shows that since the 2020-2021 term, Kavanaugh has joined the liberal majority in 52 percent of 5-4 cases where a liberal justice was in the majority.
Neil Gorsuch sits at 43 percent. Amy Coney Barrett comes in at 22 percent.
All three were appointed by President Trump during his first term. Only one routinely hands liberals the fifth vote they need.
The raw percentages deserve a closer look, because they reveal something more than a single justice drifting left. They reveal distinct judicial personalities among the three Trump appointees.
Kavanaugh joins the liberal majority at the highest rate — 52 percent — but rarely joins them in dissent. His rate of siding with the liberal bloc in losing 5-4 causes is just 7 percent. That means Kavanaugh isn't a philosophical fellow traveler with the left. He's a swing vote — someone who moves to the liberal side when it's going to win, not when it's going to lose. He's not joining lost causes. He's joining winning coalitions.
Gorsuch, by contrast, presents a different profile entirely. He joined the liberal majority in 43 percent of these close cases but sided with the liberal dissent in 40 percent of them. Across all 5-4 decisions, Gorsuch joined the liberal justices roughly 44 percent of the time.
His breaks from the conservative majority appear more ideologically driven — a libertarian streak that occasionally lands him in unexpected company regardless of which side prevails.
Barrett is the most reliable of the three. She sided with the liberal majority in just 22 percent of these cases and joined the liberal dissent 20 percent of the time. Consistent, predictable, and firmly planted on the right side of the bench.
Adam Feldman, a recurring columnist at SCOTUSblog, put it plainly:
"This pattern is striking but the results are clear: When liberals win narrowly, Kavanaugh is the conservative justice most likely to be part of the winning coalition."
Conservatives fought for a generation to build a 6-3 Supreme Court. The Federalist Society pipeline, the brutal confirmation battles, the political capital spent — all of it aimed at producing a court that would interpret the Constitution as written, not as progressives wished it read.
A 6-3 majority should be commanding. But a 6-3 majority with a reliable swing vote is functionally a 5-4 court — and Kavanaugh's pattern suggests that on the cases that come down to a single justice, the conservative supermajority shrinks to a coin flip.
This isn't about demanding lockstep agreement. No serious person expects nine justices — or even six — to rule identically on every case. Judicial independence matters, and cases that reach the Supreme Court are genuinely difficult. The easy ones get settled lower down.
But the pattern matters because 5-4 decisions are, by definition, the ones where the legal arguments are closest and judicial philosophy carries the most weight.
These are the cases where the composition of the court is supposed to matter most. And in those cases, Kavanaugh sides with the liberal outcome more often than not.
A Marquette Law School poll conducted January 21 to 28 — surveying 1,003 adults with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points — found that Kavanaugh carries the lowest net favorability rating among Supreme Court justices.
Just 21 percent of U.S. adults view him favorably, while 28 percent hold an unfavorable opinion, putting his net favorability at minus 7.
Other justices also received negative net favorability ratings, but Kavanaugh sits at the bottom. That's a remarkable position for a justice whose confirmation fight turned him into a cause célèbre for the right. Conservatives rallied around him during one of the ugliest confirmation processes in modern memory. The left savaged him. And now neither side seems particularly pleased with what they got.
The left will never forgive him for existing on the court. The right increasingly wonders what it purchased with all that political capital.
There's a crucial distinction between a justice who reaches unexpected conclusions through originalist reasoning and a justice who gravitates toward the majority coalition. Gorsuch's breaks from the right, whatever you think of them, tend to follow a discernible libertarian logic — they happen win or lose.
Kavanaugh's breaks happen overwhelmingly when the liberals are already winning. That 52-to-7 split between joining liberal majorities and liberal dissents isn't a sign of independent thinking. It's a sign of coalition management.
The current term runs through June, and the cases still to be decided will test whether this pattern holds or shifts. But for conservatives watching the court they spent decades building, the data from the past several terms sends an uncomfortable signal.
A 6-3 court means nothing if the sixth vote keeps walking across the aisle.
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.