The Supreme Court will hear arguments Monday in a case that could determine whether millions of Americans who use marijuana are automatically stripped of their Second Amendment rights. The Justice Department is asking the justices to revive a criminal case against Ali Danial Hemani, a Texas man charged with a felony because he had a gun in his house and acknowledged smoking marijuana every other day.
At the center of the dispute is a federal law that bars people who regularly use marijuana from legally owning firearms. The conservative-leaning 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the government's case, finding that only people who are intoxicated while armed can be charged with a crime.
Now the full weight of the question lands on the Supreme Court. And it has produced one of the strangest coalitions in recent memory.
The NRA and the ACLU don't agree on much. The Second Amendment Foundation and NORML occupy entirely different political universes. Yet all four have lined up on the same side of this case, arguing that the federal ban sweeps too broadly.
On the other side, the Trump administration's Justice Department finds itself aligned with Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control organization that rarely sees eye to eye with any Republican White House.
These alignments tell you something important: this case doesn't break along the usual partisan fault lines. It cuts across them because it sits at the intersection of two issues where the right has strong convictions: gun rights and the growing absurdity of federal marijuana policy, as AP News reports.
FBI agents found a firearm and a small amount of cocaine in Hemani's home during a broader investigation. He acknowledged smoking marijuana every other day. For that, the federal government charged him with a felony.
Not for violence. Not for brandishing a weapon. Not for using a firearm while intoxicated. For possessing one in the same home where he used a substance that is legal for medicinal purposes in most states and for recreational use in about half the country.
The 5th Circuit wasn't buying it. Drawing on the Supreme Court's landmark 2022 decision that expanded gun rights, the appeals court held that the historical tradition of firearms regulation in America only supports disarming people who are actually intoxicated while armed, not people who happen to use a substance on their own time.
Lawyers for the Second Amendment Foundation put it plainly in court documents:
"Americans have traditionally chosen which substances are acceptable for responsible recreational use, and the fundamental right to keep and bear arms was never denied to people who occasionally partook in such drugs — unless they were carrying arms while actively intoxicated."
That distinction matters enormously. There is a world of difference between a man who fires a weapon while high and a man who owns a gun and also smokes marijuana on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The federal statute collapses that distinction entirely.
The government's argument leans heavily on tradition. Government lawyers wrote in court documents that "habitual illegal drug users with firearms present unique dangers to society," particularly because they "pose a grave risk of armed, hostile encounters with police officers while impaired."
Everytown for Gun Safety echoed the point, arguing in its own filing that restricting firearm use by illegal drug users is "as old as legislative recognition of the drug problem itself."
Both arguments share the same flaw: they treat marijuana users in 2026 the same way the law treated opium addicts in 1920. Cannabis policy in America has moved dramatically. President Trump has signed an order to fast-track marijuana's reclassification as a less dangerous drug. The federal government itself is signaling that the old framework is outdated. Yet the Justice Department simultaneously asks the Court to enforce a criminal penalty rooted in that very framework.
The tension is obvious. Washington is reclassifying marijuana with one hand and prosecuting people for possessing it with the other.
Beyond the Second Amendment question lies a due process issue that should concern anyone who cares about the rule of law. The ACLU's legal director, Cecillia Wang, said the law violates the Second Amendment and is unconstitutionally vague about what it even means to be a drug user.
"Millions of Americans use marijuana and there is no way for them to know based on words of this statute whether they could be charged or convicted of this crime because they own a firearm."
Wang also warned about the prosecutorial power the statute hands the government:
"We're deeply concerned with the potential of this statute to basically give federal prosecutors a blank check."
She's not wrong. When a law is so vague that a citizen cannot determine whether their conduct is criminal, the law becomes a tool of selective enforcement. It criminalizes not a specific act but a status. You don't have to do anything dangerous. You just have to be someone the government decides to charge.
Conservatives should recognize this pattern. It is the same kind of sprawling federal authority that has been used to entrap, overcharge, and selectively prosecute Americans on everything from paperwork violations to process crimes. The principle doesn't change because the defendant smokes pot.
It's impossible to discuss this case without noting that Hunter Biden was convicted of buying a gun when he was addicted to cocaine under the same legal framework. That conviction put liberals in the awkward position of either defending a gun restriction or defending a president's son. Most chose the latter.
Now the shoe shifts. If the Supreme Court narrows or strikes down the federal prohibition, it would retroactively vindicate the argument Hunter Biden's own lawyers made. The political irony is thick enough to cut.
But irony isn't a reason to uphold a bad law. If the statute is unconstitutionally vague and historically unsupported, that's true regardless of who benefits from the ruling.
Joe Bondy, chair of the board of directors for NORML, didn't mince words:
"It's laughable to think that by outlawing cannabis users possessing firearms you'll minimize the problem with gun violence."
He's right, and the data behind America's actual gun violence crisis bears it out. The people driving violent crime in this country are not baby boomers with a medical card and a hunting rifle. They are repeat offenders in a revolving-door justice system that progressives have spent a decade making worse.
This federal statute doesn't target dangerous people. It targets a category of people and assumes they are dangerous. That is precisely the kind of reasoning the Supreme Court rejected in its 2022 landmark decision. The conservative-majority Court has shown it can uphold firearms restrictions when they are historically grounded; it upheld a federal law disarming people subject to domestic violence restraining orders. The question is whether marijuana use, standing alone, clears that same bar.
The 5th Circuit said no. The answer shouldn't change just because the case moved upstairs.
Marie Hurabiell, a San Francisco nonprofit executive and former Trump appointee, announced this week that she is running for the congressional seat held for nearly four decades by Nancy Pelosi. The move instantly complicates what was already shaping up to be a crowded Democratic contest in one of the bluest districts in America.
The Washington Examiner reported that Hurabiell, who leads the advocacy group ConnectedSF, framed her candidacy around pragmatism rather than ideology. In a post on X dated February 25, she laid out her pitch:
"I didn't plan to run for office this year — but San Francisco doesn't need more ideological extremes. We need results and reform."
"I'm running to bring pragmatic, common-sense Democratic leadership to Washington — focused on safety, innovation, and affordability. I've stood up to failed policies before. I'll do it again."
There's a detail her opponents will make sure voters don't miss: Hurabiell was appointed by President Donald Trump to the Presidio Trust Board of Directors. She was also a former member of the Georgetown University Board of Regents. And until 2022, she was a registered Republican.
Hurabiell switched her party affiliation from Republican to Democrat in 2022. That kind of conversion typically earns you suspicion from both sides, and Hurabiell's case is no exception. She has a paper trail that will thrill conservatives and terrify San Francisco's progressive establishment in equal measure.
Prior posts on X include the blunt declaration that "Trans women are NOT women" and a comparison of critical race theory to tactics "used by Hitler and the KKK." Those comments led to a protest outside the ConnectedSF gala in 2025.
None of this is the profile of someone who drifts quietly into a Democratic primary. Hurabiell is walking into the progressive lion's den with receipts that would get most San Francisco Democrats excommunicated from polite society.
Whether that's courageous or politically suicidal depends on how much the city has actually changed beneath its progressive veneer.
And there are signs it has changed. Through ConnectedSF, Hurabiell has worked on civic engagement and local policy advocacy. The group was an early endorser of San Francisco Democratic mayor Daniel Lurie, who returned the favor and has frequently appeared at Hurabiell's events, including a gala where he was the featured speaker.
That relationship suggests Hurabiell's brand of reform-minded politics has found real purchase among city leaders, even if they'd rather not discuss her old tweets at dinner parties.
Hurabiell faces two significant Democratic challengers who mounted their campaigns this year, and neither will make this easy.
Saikat Chakrabarti, a former tech executive who served as chief of staff to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, drew more than 700 people to a rally in San Francisco's Mission District when he launched his campaign. He has invested more than $700,000 of his own money into the race.
Chakrabarti is running on the premise that the Democratic establishment is exhausted:
"Democrats are craving a generational change and need a new kind of leader who is not a part of the establishment, because the establishment has failed us."
Then there is state Sen. Scott Wiener, a Harvard-educated attorney who chairs the state Senate Budget Committee. Wiener is known around Sacramento for championing LGBT rights, combating climate change, and pushing for fair housing.
He also made headlines for pushing back on Trump's recommendation to send National Guard troops to San Francisco.
So the field offers voters a clear menu:
Only in San Francisco would all three of these people be competing in the same primary.
The real story here isn't whether Hurabiell wins. It's what her candidacy says about the state of progressive politics in its own heartland. Pelosi's departure leaves a seat shaped by nearly four decades of Democratic power and national influence. The scramble to fill it is exposing fault lines the party would rather keep hidden.
Chakrabarti thinks the establishment has failed. Wiener is the establishment. And Hurabiell is betting that enough San Francisco Democrats are tired of both factions to rally behind someone who called out failed policies when it was unpopular to do so, even if she did it from the other side of the aisle.
Hurabiell has lost two bids for a seat on the City College of San Francisco board of trustees, so the electoral track record isn't exactly encouraging. But this is a different race in a different moment.
San Francisco spent years watching its streets deteriorate, its schools falter, and its businesses flee while its leaders competed to see who could be the most progressive. Voters elected Lurie on a reform platform. The appetite for something different is real.
Whether that appetite extends to a woman who was posting conservative critiques of gender ideology and critical race theory just a few years ago is the open question. Hurabiell is gambling that results matter more than orthodoxy. In most of America, that's not a gamble at all. In San Francisco, it's a high-wire act without a net.
The primary will tell us exactly how far the city's political correctness has traveled.
Deep State operatives inside the Department of Homeland Security secretly downloaded surveillance software onto Kristi Noem's phone and laptop, the agency chief revealed Wednesday on the PBD Podcast. The spyware was designed to record her meetings and monitor top political appointees across the department.
Noem said Elon Musk's deputies helped her identify the culprits.
"They helped me identify [the Deep State allies who] downloaded software on my phone and my laptop to spy on me, to record our meetings."
The surveillance wasn't limited to Noem. Multiple political appointees had their devices compromised. When DHS brought in outside technology experts to audit laptops and phones across the department, the scope of the operation became clear. The department's own internal tech teams had either missed it or weren't looking.
"They had done that to several of the politicals, and so we ended up bringing in [outside tech] people … [and we] didn't have those technology experts here in the department looking at all of our laptops and our phones and recognizing that kind of software."
According to Breitbart, this is what institutional resistance looks like when it stops being theoretical.
The surveillance software wasn't the only discovery. Noem said she recently stumbled onto a hidden SCIF, a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, tucked away on the DHS headquarters campus. The room contained files that no one in her leadership circle knew existed, staffed by individuals working on what Noem described as "some of these most controversial topics."
The discovery was almost accidental. An employee walked past a door, got curious, and started asking questions. That thread led Noem's team to a facility operating in the shadows of their own building.
"I just found the other day a whole room on this campus that was a secret SCIF secure facility that had files nobody knew existed."
Noem said she has turned the facility and its contents over to attorneys and is working to determine exactly what was happening inside.
Think about that for a moment. The person running DHS, a cabinet-level agency with sweeping authority over immigration, cybersecurity, and national security, did not know about a classified facility operating on her own campus. The people inside that room knew it existed. The people who put them there knew it existed. The person in charge did not.
That's not a bureaucratic oversight. That's a parallel command structure.
For years, the phrase "Deep State" drew eye rolls from the Washington establishment. Career bureaucrats were just doing their jobs. Institutional resistance was just institutional memory. Conservatives who warned about unelected officials undermining elected leadership were treated as conspiracy theorists.
Noem herself acknowledged the gap between what she expected and what she found:
"I always believed when people talked about the deep state before that it existed: I never would have dreamed that it was as bad as it is."
This is a sitting cabinet secretary saying that entrenched actors inside her own department deployed surveillance tools against the political leadership installed by a democratically elected president. Not foreign adversaries. Not hackers in a basement overseas. People drawing federal paychecks, using federal infrastructure, to spy on the people voters sent to run the agency.
Noem described an ongoing effort to root out what she characterized as disloyal actors embedded not just at DHS but throughout the federal government.
"I'm still every day trying to dig out people who don't love America, not just [those] who work at this department, but also work throughout the federal government."
Noem also disclosed that she is investigating ties between scientists at national laboratories under DHS jurisdiction and the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. She said her team is examining travel records and work connections between American researchers and the Chinese lab at the center of the COVID-19 origin debate.
"I also have national labs under my jurisdiction, they [have] scientists that participated with that [China-based] Wuhan lab. [We're studying] how they were traveling back and forth between each other, and working on those experiments."
This line of inquiry matters beyond the lab leak question itself. If American scientists under DHS oversight were collaborating with a Chinese government-linked facility, and that collaboration was never properly surfaced to political leadership, it raises the same structural problem the bugged phones do: a bureaucracy that operates independently of the people constitutionally empowered to oversee it.
The attorney review of the secret SCIF is underway. The tech audits have exposed the surveillance tools. The Wuhan travel records are being compiled. Each revelation is a thread, and every thread leads back to the same question: who authorized it?
Not who installed the software. Not who staffed the hidden room. Who decided that the political leadership of a federal agency should be treated as the adversary rather than the authority?
Noem summed it up simply:
"It's been eye-opening."
For the rest of the country, it should be something stronger than that. A government that spies on its own appointed leaders isn't a government that answers to the people who elected them. It's a government that answers to itself.
Justice Clarence Thomas concurred with Tuesday's unanimous Supreme Court decision in Villarreal v. Texas but refused to join the majority opinion, arguing it "needlessly expands our precedents" on how trial judges may restrict communication between defendants and their attorneys during recesses.
The case centered on a straightforward question: how far can a trial judge go in limiting what a defendant and his lawyers discuss during a break in testimony? The Court answered unanimously, ruling against the defendant. But Thomas saw the majority reaching beyond what the case required, and he said so.
David Villarreal was defending himself against murder charges in Texas when his trial testimony was interrupted by a 24-hour overnight recess. The trial judge instructed Villarreal's attorneys not to "manage his testimony" during the break. The restriction was narrow. Villarreal's lawyers could still discuss other matters, including possible sentencing issues. They simply could not coach their client on the testimony he was in the middle of delivering.
Villarreal was ultimately convicted. His attorneys appealed, arguing that the trial judge's restrictions on communication violated his Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The case climbed its way to the Supreme Court. Fox News shares.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson penned the majority opinion, which stated that court precedent allowed judges to restrict attorneys and clients from discussing testimony in the middle of a trial. The Court ruled against Villarreal's argument. So far, so good.
Thomas agreed with the outcome. He did not agree with how the majority got there. His concurrence argued that the trial judge's original order was already consistent with existing precedent and that the majority's opinion introduced unnecessary new rules where none were needed.
"The trial judge's order here complied with our precedents."
Thomas laid out exactly what the trial judge had done. The judge instructed defense counsel not to "discuss what you couldn't discuss with [Villarreal] if he was on the stand in front of the jury," and explained that "you couldn't confer with him while he was on the stand about his testimony." That restriction tracked existing law. It was measured. It was specific.
The problem, in Thomas's view, was that the majority went further than the facts demanded. Rather than simply affirming the trial judge's order under existing precedent, the majority opinion purported to announce a new rule: that a defendant has a constitutional right to "discussion of testimony" so long as that discussion is "incidental to other topics," such as plea advice or strategy.
"I am unable to join the majority opinion because it unnecessarily expands these precedents. It purports to 'announce' a 'rule' under which a defendant has a constitutional right to 'discussion of testimony' so long as that discussion is 'incidental to other topics.'"
This is Thomas at his most consistent. He has spent decades warning the Court against doing more than a case requires, against the judicial habit of using narrow disputes as vehicles for broad pronouncements. A unanimous outcome masked a real disagreement about judicial restraint.
There is a meaningful difference between a court saying "this trial judge acted within established law" and a court saying "we are now announcing a new constitutional rule about when defendants can discuss testimony with their lawyers." The first resolves a case. The second creates precedent that will ripple through courtrooms for years.
Trial judges across the country manage testimony recesses every day. They make practical decisions about what attorneys and defendants can discuss, balancing the integrity of testimony against the right to counsel. Those judges now have a new "rule" to contend with, one that distinguishes between direct discussion of testimony and discussion that is merely "incidental" to it. That line is not as clean as it sounds. Defense attorneys will test it. Prosecutors will challenge it. And lower courts will have to sort out what "incidental" means in practice.
Thomas saw this coming. His objection was not about the outcome for Villarreal. It was about what the majority opinion will mean for the next case and the one after that.
Conservative jurisprudence has long held that courts should decide the case in front of them and resist the temptation to legislate from the bench. That principle applies even when the result is unanimous. Especially then. A unanimous decision carries enormous weight. When the entire Court agrees on an outcome, but the majority opinion sweeps more broadly than necessary, the new precedent arrives with the full force of nine justices behind it, even if the breadth was never truly contested.
Thomas's concurrence is a reminder that unanimity on the result does not mean unanimity on the reasoning. And reasoning is where law gets made.
The trial judge in Texas did his job. The Supreme Court could have simply said so. Thomas wanted to leave it there. The majority did not.
Kansas lawmakers pushed a slate of election integrity measures through the House this week, targeting everything from all-mail elections to noncitizen voter roll scrubbing to advanced voting timelines. The bills, driven largely by House Elections Committee chair Rep. Pat Proctor, a Leavenworth Republican running for secretary of state, passed with comfortable margins and now head to the Senate.
Six bills cleared the chamber. The most consequential would repeal the state's Mail Ballot Election Act, require public benefits agencies to share data on non-citizens with election officials, put citizenship status on driver's licenses, and tighten deadlines for mail-in and in-person advance voting. One passed without any opposition at all.
Democrats called it a solution in search of a problem. The vote tallies suggest Kansas Republicans disagree.
The centerpiece of the push is a set of interlocking measures designed to keep noncitizens off voter rolls in the first place. House Bill 2491, which passed 87-37 on Wednesday, would require that names, addresses, and other personal identification information of people without U.S. citizenship who receive public benefits be regularly shared with the Kansas Secretary of State's Office, according to the Kansas Reflector.
That builds on a bill passed last year requiring the Kansas Department of Revenue to send personal data to the Secretary of State's Office, where it is compared side-by-side with statewide voter rolls. House Bill 2448, which passed 77-41 on Feb. 12, would add citizenship status to driver's licenses, giving election officials another verification layer.
Proctor framed the effort not as conspiracy-chasing but as basic institutional hygiene. He acknowledged on the House floor that noncitizen voting is not rampant, then made the case that even rare occurrences demand systematic prevention:
"But we owe it to Kansans to be able to tell them with confidence, 'No, noncitizens are not voting, and we know because we have all these different ways of scrubbing the voter rolls to make sure they never get on the voter rolls in the first place.'"
The facts back up the concern enough to justify action. Clay Barker, general counsel to the Secretary of State's Office, confirmed at a Jan. 29 committee hearing that two people have been indicted for fraudulent voting-related crimes, a third indictment is on the way, and 10 people are being examined. It has been explicitly illegal for immigrants to vote in federal elections since 1996. The Heritage Foundation's database catalogues 77 instances of noncitizens voting between 1999 and 2023.
Proctor put it plainly:
"One is too many."
That's a hard line to argue with. Either you believe election integrity matters at every margin, or you believe some amount of illegal voting is an acceptable cost of convenience. Kansas Republicans chose the former.
Democrats marshaled the predictable counterarguments. Rep. Kirk Haskins, a Topeka Democrat and ranking minority member on the House Elections Committee, led the opposition. His critique leaned less on principle and more on logistics and cost:
"We're not going to address the fact that county election offices, they don't even know how much it's going to cost. But we do need more people. This is called by definition an unfunded mandate."
Haskins also pointed to the committee hearing for HB 2491, where three proponents and 12 opponents testified. He questioned why the legislature keeps "emphasizing we have an issue when it's been proven we don't time and time again."
Proctor anticipated this. He noted the familiar pattern of shifting goalposts from opponents of election integrity reform:
"We used to hear, 'This never happens. Noncitizens never vote.'"
Now the line has moved to "seldom happens" and "it's infrequent." The concession embedded in the retreat is the whole point. If it happens at all, the system failed. The question is whether you build safeguards or shrug.
As for the unfunded mandate argument: county clerks manage elections with public money to serve the public interest. Verifying that only eligible citizens vote is not an add-on to that mission. It is the mission.
House Bill 2503, which passed 72-50 on Thursday, would repeal the Mail Ballot Election Act entirely, removing the possibility for local entities to carry out elections solely with mail-in ballots. This does not eliminate mail voting. It eliminates the option for jurisdictions to make mail the only way to vote.
The distinction matters. Conservatives have long argued that all-mail elections reduce the security and oversight that in-person voting provides. Repealing the act preserves mail as an option while ensuring voters always have access to a physical polling place.
House Bill 2453, passed 86-38 on Wednesday, restructures the advanced voting calendar:
Rep. Sandy Pickert, a Wichita Republican who sponsored HB 2453, was the only person to speak in support of the bill during its hearing in early February. The bill passed anyway, by 48 votes.
The logic here is straightforward. Tighter deadlines give election officials more time to verify ballots and less exposure to the logistical chaos that plagued elections in recent cycles. Earlier cutoffs also mean results come faster and with fewer outstanding ballots lingering in the count. Voters who care enough to participate can plan 25 days.
House Bill 2451, passed 88-36 on Wednesday, would bar government employees from advocating for or against proposed constitutional amendments or ballot questions. The bill drew bipartisan support, with Democratic Reps. Wanda Brownlee Paige of Kansas City and Angela Martinez of Wichita are joining Republicans.
This is a clean, good-government measure. Taxpayer-funded employees using their positions to influence ballot outcomes is a conflict of interest regardless of which side they advocate for. The public pays them to administer policy, not to campaign for it.
House Bill 2733, introduced by Rep. Bill Sutton, a Gardner Republican, passed the House on Tuesday without opposition. It requires certain elected officials to be residents of Kansas and their districts upon election and throughout their terms. That a residency requirement for elected officials needed to be codified at all tells you something about the state of modern politics.
Kansas has been here before. A previous law backed by Kris Kobach, then-Secretary of State and current Attorney General, required proof of citizenship to vote. It was struck down in court after preventing more than 30,000 Kansans from voting during the three years it was in effect.
That history looms over the current push. The new approach is notably different. Rather than imposing proof-of-citizenship requirements directly on voters at the point of registration, these bills work on the back end: cross-referencing public benefits data, flagging noncitizens through driver's license records, and giving the Secretary of State's Office tools to audit rolls proactively. It's a system designed to catch problems without creating a barrier that a court can paint as disenfranchisement.
Whether courts see it that way remains to be seen. But the legislative architecture is smarter this time, built to survive legal challenge by focusing on data-sharing between agencies rather than demanding documents from individual voters.
The bills now move to the Kansas Senate. Proctor, who is running for secretary of state, has made election integrity the signature issue of both his legislative work and his campaign. The margins in the House suggest the appetite for these reforms extends well beyond one ambitious lawmaker.
Kansas voters will eventually judge whether their elections are cleaner for it. The lawmakers who voted yes this week are betting they will.
Text messages obtained by the Daily Mail show a sexually explicit late-night exchange between Rep. Tony Gonzales and Regina Aviles, the director of his regional district office in Uvalde, from May 2024. The messages, sent around 12:15 a.m. and continuing until 1 a.m., include Gonzales asking Aviles to send him a "sexy pic," pressing her about sexual positions, and sending a one-word message too vulgar to print here.
Sixteen months after that exchange, Aviles was dead. The 35-year-old mother of an eight-year-old boy killed herself in September 2025 by dousing herself in gasoline and setting herself on fire in her backyard.
Gonzales, a father of six now seeking a fourth House term, denied the relationship in November 2025. Early voting in his closely contested primary is already underway, with Election Day set for March 3.
The exchange paints a picture that is difficult to square with Gonzales's blanket denial, according to the Daily Mail. In the messages, the congressman wrote "Send me a sexy pic," followed by "Hurry," and then explained himself: "I'm just such a visual person." When Aviles responded that "you don't really want a hot picture of me," Gonzales replied, "Yes, I do."
Aviles pushed back at points. "No, I just don't like taking pictures of myself," she wrote. Twice, she warned him he was going "too far." At one point, she asked him directly:
"Please tell me you didn't just hire me because I was hot."
Further texts obtained by the San Antonio Express-News reportedly show Aviles arranged to meet Gonzales two days later while he campaigned in the Uvalde area. In those messages, Gonzales wrote that the meeting "will be lots of fun" and referenced "at check-in time."
Former staffers told the Daily Mail anonymously, citing fear of retaliation, that the romantic relationship allegedly began in 2022.
The alleged affair unraveled in June 2024, when Aviles's husband, Adrian, sent a group text to Gonzales's staffers that left nothing to the imagination:
"Just a heads up this is Adriana Aviles, Reginas soon to be ex husband I just wanted to inform all of you that we will be getting a divorced after my discovery of text messages and pictures that she's been having an affair on me with your boss Tony Gonzales for some time now, Feel free to reach out if you want more of an explanation."
The grammar was rough. The message was not ambiguous.
After the exposure, Adrian Aviles moved out with their son. According to the ex-husband, Gonzales did not fire Aviles from her position. Instead, she was reportedly given a paid month off work. Adrian Aviles later revealed that she was "spiraling." She reportedly suffered from worsening depression in the months that followed.
By September 2025, she was gone.
The Daily Mail first reported on the relationship in October 2025, weeks after Aviles's death. When asked in November 2025, Gonzales offered this response:
"The rumors are completely untruthful. I am generally untrusting of these outlets."
He has since accused Adrian Aviles of trying to blackmail him. The Daily Mail noted that Gonzales regularly granted interviews to the publication until they began reporting on his relationship with Aviles. Representatives for Gonzales did not immediately respond to the outlet's latest request for comment.
The relationship may have been in breach of U.S. House ethics rules that bar romantic relations with staff members. According to Adrian Aviles, the congressman has been under federal investigation over the alleged affair since last year, though no agency has been named and no charges have been filed.
Meanwhile, Adrian Aviles reportedly tried to negotiate a confidential settlement with the congressman over the affair and his ex-wife's death before going public.
Political scandals have a rhythm to them. Texts leak. Denial issue. Opponents pounce. News cycles move. The mechanics are familiar enough to become numbing.
This one resists that treatment.
A woman is dead. An eight-year-old boy no longer has a mother. Whatever the full truth of the relationship between Gonzales and Aviles, the human wreckage is not abstract. It is a backyard in Uvalde, a container of gasoline, and a family broken apart.
Conservatives rightly hold that personal character matters in public officials. That principle cannot be seasonal, applied to political opponents, and suspended for allies. If the facts bear out what the texts strongly suggest, voters in Texas's 23rd District deserve to weigh that information before March 3.
Gonzales calls the reporting untruthful. The texts call that denial into serious question. Voters will have to decide which version they believe, and they won't have long to make up their minds.
Early voting has been underway since February 17.
The Justice Department stepped into California's redistricting fight on Thursday, seeking to intervene in a lawsuit that aims to stop the state from implementing new congressional maps approved by voters just last week. The maps would create five additional House districts favoring Democrats, and Attorney General Pam Bondi isn't mincing words about what's really going on.
Bondi accused Gov. Gavin Newsom of executing a power grab wrapped in the language of voting rights:
"California's redistricting scheme is a brazen power grab that tramples on civil rights and mocks the democratic process."
The DOJ's argument is straightforward. Justice officials contend the map violates the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause and the Voting Rights Act by factoring in racial demographics when drawing new districts. In other words, California Democrats used race as a tool to engineer a partisan outcome, then asked voters to bless it.
The story begins with a move that should have drawn far more scrutiny than it did. Newsom and Democrats in California overrode their state's independent redistricting commission and proposed a ballot measure for new congressional maps. That ballot measure, Proposition 50, went before voters and passed by an overwhelming margin.
The California Republican Party filed suit the day after the election. Now the DOJ is joining the fight, according to the New York Post.
DOJ lawyers laid out the core of the legal case plainly:
"Race cannot be used as a proxy to advance political interests, but that is precisely what the California General Assembly did with Proposition 50."
The lawsuit cites public comments from Paul Mitchell, the redistricting expert who helped draw the new maps, to argue that California Democrats factored in the distribution of Latino voters in each district to comply with the Voting Rights Act. The legal theory here matters: compliance with the VRA doesn't give states a blank check to sort voters by race in ways that conveniently produce five extra Democratic seats.
Federal courts have been prohibited from policing partisan gerrymandering since a sweeping 2019 Supreme Court ruling. That decision essentially told voters and state legislatures that political line-drawing was their problem to solve, not the judiciary's.
But racial gerrymandering is a different animal entirely. The Constitution still bars it. And the DOJ argues that California dressed up a racial gerrymander in the clothing of partisan strategy, or perhaps the reverse. Either way, the use of racial data to achieve partisan ends lands squarely in territory the courts have never blessed.
The Supreme Court heard arguments last month in Louisiana v. Callais, a case that could further clarify where these lines fall. California's maps may soon become the next major test.
Bondi noted that Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general and head of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, has recused herself from the case. Dhillon was previously the vice chair of the California Republican Party, making the recusal both appropriate and notable.
California's map didn't materialize in a vacuum. President Donald Trump successfully pushed Texas to redraw its maps to create five GOP-leaning districts. Republicans in Missouri, Ohio, and North Carolina followed suit with new maps of their own. Democrats, watching seats shift, responded with their own plays:
Both parties are fighting over the same chessboard. The difference the DOJ is drawing here isn't about partisanship. It's about the method. Using racial data to achieve political outcomes isn't just aggressive redistricting. It's a constitutional violation.
Newsom spokesperson Brandon Richards offered what might generously be called confidence:
"These losers lost at the ballot box and soon they will also lose in court."
The "losers lost at the ballot box" line captures everything wrong with how California Democrats have approached this. Voter approval doesn't immunize a law from constitutional challenge. Plenty of ballot measures have passed overwhelmingly and been struck down. Popular doesn't mean legal.
This is the same Gavin Newsom who championed an independent redistricting commission as a model of good governance, right up until the moment it stopped producing the results he wanted. Then he and his party simply went around it. They bypassed the very institution designed to prevent exactly the kind of partisan manipulation the DOJ is now alleging.
Bondi put it directly:
"Governor Newsom's attempt to entrench one-party rule and silence millions of Californians will not stand."
The legal fight will turn on whether California's mapmakers used race as a predominant factor in drawing district lines. The public comments from Mitchell, the redistricting expert, could prove damaging. When the people who drew the maps talked openly about sorting voters by ethnicity, they created a paper trail that DOJ attorneys will exploit relentlessly in court.
California Democrats are betting that voter approval provides political armor thick enough to survive judicial review. The Justice Department is betting that the Constitution still means what it says about equal protection.
One of those bets is going to lose. And if the DOJ prevails, five Democrat seats evaporate before anyone ever casts a vote in them.
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.