There has been much debate about President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency on our southern border. Critics complain either that no real emergency exists and/or that Trump’s actions are unconstitutional. Too often, how one feels about the issue of immigration shades one’s view of the declaration. Open borders advocates detest it and condemn the declaration, but those in favor of less immigration generally like it.

No matter where one comes down on this immigration issue, anyone holding any loyalty to our written Constitution should decry the National Emergencies Act itself. In declaring the emergency, Trump specifically relied on “sections 201 and 301 of the National Emergencies Act.”  In 1976, Congress granted to the president the authority to declare an emergency and to invoke “special or extraordinary power[s].”

As California voters may recall, in 2016 they rejected Proposition 62, which would have eliminated the death penalty, and approved Proposition 66, which speeded up the process for executions. As Lt. Governor, Gavin Newsom said he would abide by the will of the voters. But as governor, he has trampled the will of the voters by reprieving 737 convicted murders awaiting execution on death row, explaining to the public that some might be innocent. This gives Californians good cause for bewilderment.

Governor Newsom is not an attorney and not a judge. He did not attend the trials and produced no new exculpatory evidence in any of the cases. Yet, the governor remains certain that some of the duly convicted murderers, who have exhausted all appeals, are innocent, and he called off executions for the whole lot. On the other hand, this former San Francisco mayor kept rather quiet about the victims of those murderers, such as 12-year-old Polly Klaas. As it happens, confusion between guilt and innocence is not a new development in the Golden State.

In 2016, Hoover Institution economist Thomas Sowell, 86, decided to give up his nationally syndicated column and “spend less time following politics and more time on my photography.” Sowell practically dropped out of sight, but recently decided to speak out on an idea that was troubling him.

“Socialism is a wonderful sounding idea,” Sowell recently told Fox Business. “It’s only as a reality that it’s disastrous,” and the difference was on display close at hand. “When you see people starving in Venezuela and fleeing in the neighboring countries and realize that this is a country that once had the world’s largest oil reserves, you realize that they’ve ruined a really good prospect with ideas that sounded good but didn’t turn out well.”

Although many consumers and dermatologists are satisfied with the quality and safety of current sunscreens, sweeping changes may soon be coming.

The Food and Drug Administration recently proposed a variety of new heavy-handed regulations for over-the-counter sunscreen. The regulations getting the most media attention involve sixteen ingredients common in sunscreen products. According to the new guidelines, many of these ingredients have “insufficient data to decide on safety,” requiring manufacturers to undertake additional tests and submit their products for FDA approval. The proposal is currently under discussion and taking comments from the public.

By requiring sunscreen to undergo additional tests and earn FDA approval, the agency hopes to incorporate current scientific knowledge into supposedly outdated standards. As FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb stated in a news release, the agency’s proposal “is an important step in the FDA’s ongoing efforts to take into account modern science to ensure the safety and effectiveness of sunscreens.”

As Fox News reports, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren wants to break up Amazon, Google, Facebook, and even Apple. In the view of the 2020 presidential hopeful, these tech companies are just too big and too powerful. The government, she says, can apply the same antitrust principles that “applied to railroad companies more than a hundred years ago.” The candidate thinks the Justice Department and FTC are doing “not well for a long time now.” Warren is on to something here.

As we noted last year, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg has been careless with personal data, but seemed at pains to preserve confidentiality when he was cooperating with government investigators. Zuckerberg was puzzled at the concept of a “neutral forum” and admitted that government had demanded that Facebook remove a page from the site. The Facebook CEO did not indicate the content of the page, which government official had demanded its removal, and when the removal had taken place. So the problems with Facebook have to do with its collaboration with government power. This raises an issue that Warren and other candidates are not onto.

California isn’t the only state with a federal government-funded bullet train project that will never live up to expectations. The state of Illinois has one too, but unlike California’s high-speed rail system, it will almost successfully connect two major metropolitan areas with populations in the millions: Chicago and St. Louis.

I say “almost successfully connect” because currently, it won’t make it across the Mississippi River to reach St. Louis, where current plans have its route terminating in East St. Louis, Illinois.  That’s all that $2 billion in tax dollars will buy.

Even so, it will come closer to connecting major population centers than California’s bullet train project, which had been planned to connect the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles, but which will apparently now only provide rail travel at up to 220 miles per hour on a 119-mile route between Merced and Bakersfield.

Many state government-run pension plans are running short of the money needed to pay 100% of the retirement benefits that state politicians have promised to the teachers, police officers, firefighters, and other employees of state governments.

How short depends on the state and how you measure the amount of the shortfall. In October 2018, Bloomberg‘s Danielle Moran tallied the total liabilities and the funded portion that applies to each state’s public employee pension funds, finding that five states had funded less than 50% of the cost needed to pay for their promised state public employee’s pension benefits:

• Kentucky (33.9%)
• New Jersey (35.8%)
• Illinois (38.4%)
• Connecticut (43.8%)
• Colorado (47.1%)

Numerous high-profile investigations, including new probes just announced by Democrats in the House of Representatives, add to uncertainty about President Trump’s election prospects in 2020. Nevertheless, a strong case can be made that a hostile media environment will actually make the president’s reelection highly likely.

Although I have been a student of politics for decades, having worked for President Reagan and later Chief Justice Warren Burger, I have never seen the intensity of media hostility now directed at President Trump. But not until very recently did I come to the realization that such animosity works very much in the president’s favor.

My epiphany came on February 11, 2019, with President Trump’s campaign rally in El Paso. It was déjà vu all over again: 10,000 supporters, say local authorities, gathered to hear the president. I thought to myself: it’s the same huge, wild, yelling, clapping crowd that attended his campaign rallies in 2016. His poll approvals shot up to 52 percent, having been before El Paso at some 41 percent. It has of late been in the high 40s.

Writing at City Journal, Steven Malanga hones in on 10 state governments that have chronic overspending problems.

Since 2003, ten states, like impulse buyers wandering through a mall on Black Friday, have repeatedly run deficits, spending more than they generate in taxes, fees, and federal grants, and “pushing off to future taxpayers some past costs for operating government and providing services,” notes Pew Research in a new study. Working from states’ comprehensive annual financial reports, which give a more accurate picture of spending than government budgets, the nonpartisan Pew found that the worst offender was New Jersey, which took in just 91.3 percent of what it spent in the last 15 years. Not far behind were Illinois, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Kentucky, Maryland, New York, California, and Delaware—all in the red for 2003–17, using a combination of debt and deferred payments to live beyond their means.

California has allowed government employees to purchase years of service they do not actually perform, thus boosting their already generous pension benefits. The California Supreme Court has now ruled that government may rescind such “air time” but left intact the “California Rule” that bars any reduction of a pension benefit unless the government employee receives something of equal or greater value.

“The state and many amici urge us to use this decision as a vehicle to reduce the protection afforded pension rights by modifying or abandoning the California rule,” wrote the opinion by Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, “while plaintiffs and many other amici urge us to leave the California Rule intact. Because we conclude that the opportunity to purchase ARS credit was not a term and condition of public employment protected from impairment by the contract clause, its elimination does not implicate the Constitution. For that reason, we have no occasion in this decision to address, let alone to alter, the continued application of the California Rule.”