After what has felt like years of non-stop campaigning, news coverage, polling, analysis, and predictions, our nation finally elected its 47th president. Sadly, the sharp, sometimes heated disagreement and discord of the campaign season didn’t end on Election Day.
Read MoreAuthor: RealClearWire
Analysis: Republicans Flip Senate, Eye More Gains
Voters handed control of the U.S. Senate to Republicans Tuesday, although the contests in several battleground states won by Donald Trump were still too close to call Wednesday morning.
Read MoreSecret Service Brass Interfered in Inspector General Assassination Probe
Secret Service leaders meddled in an independent government investigation of the July 13 assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump and are still not following many basic agency security protocols for presidential candidates, presidents, and vice presidents in the final days before the election, according to emails reviewed by RealClearPolitics and several sources in the Secret Service community.
Read MoreCommentary: Tim Walz’s Progressive Education Policies Could Doom Harris
Donald Trump currently holds a razor-thin 0.6 percent lead over Kamala Harris in the RealClearPolitics Polling Average for Pennsylvania. With this key swing state potentially deciding the outcome of the Electoral College, Democrats can only wonder how different the polls might look if Pennsylvania’s popular governor, Josh Shapiro – once considered a frontrunner for Harris’ VP pick – were on the ticket instead of Tim Walz.
Read MoreCommentary: The Real Threat to American Democracy
Heading into Election Day, we hear constantly that the presidential candidates are mortal threats to American democracy. Anxieties about Donald Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, rampage at the U.S. Capitol and his declaration that he would act as “dictator for a day” are countered by Elon Musk’s warning that if Harris wins, “this will be the last election,” or alarms that Harris’ designs on overhauling the Supreme Court will lead to an end to the rule the law.
The very idea that our republic’s future hangs on the outcome of a single presidential contest, however, reveals the deeper, unacknowledged, underlying danger: a Congress incapable of performing its constitutional duties as our country’s lawmaking body and the guarantor of our representative democracy.
Read MoreCommentary: Feds Set Record for Improper Payments
In 2021, near the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, investigators tailed a Jeep Cherokee stolen from an airport Avis to a New York City apartment they called a “fraud factory” – no furniture, just an air mattress, a computer, stacks of loan and tax forms, and a shredder.
Two men who had first met in prison – Adedayo Ilori, 43, and Chris Recamier, 59 – were using stolen identities and fake paperwork to falsely claim they employed 200 people, bilking the federal government’s pandemic-relief programs of more than $1 million, according to federal prosecutors. They used the stolen money to splurge on big-ticket purchases, such as cryptocurrency, leasing luxury apartments and a Mercedes, the evidence showed.
Read MoreCommentary: Biden’s Climate Splurge Gives Billions to Nonprofit Newbies
Although there isn’t much public information available about the Justice Climate Fund, it appears to have been an overnight success.
After gaining nonprofit status in August 2023, the organization was awarded $940 million by the Biden administration just eight months later in connection with the White House’s $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which aims to provide financial assistance to reduce carbon emissions and reduce pollution.
Read MoreCommentary: The Role of Federalism in Trump’s Second Term
The presidential election is in its final stretch and the race is neck-and-neck, according to the polls. The outcome will have a profound impact at all levels of government and business, so preparing for a second Trump term would be prudent.
In office and on the campaign trail, former President Trump has championed federalism and granting the states greater latitude to implement policies and programs. He has voiced a commitment to reducing the footprint of federal regulations. As president, he implemented executive orders and other actions that sought to ease regulatory costs and effects. The Trump Administration also galvanized deregulatory efforts at the state and local level through the Governors’ Initiative on Regulatory Innovation. A similar effort can be expected in a second term.
Read MoreSecret Service, FBI Downplay Threat to Trump at California Rally
The U.S. Secret Service and the FBI are downplaying the threat to former President Donald Trump posed by a man arrested outside a California rally Saturday night – despite assertions made by a local sheriff that his detention likely thwarted a third assassination attempt.
Deputies working for the Riverside County sheriff’s office arrested a man, identified as Vem Miller, and subsequently discovered a shotgun, loaded handgun, and high-capacity magazine in his car about a quarter mile from the entrance to Trump’s campaign rally in Coachella Valley. Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco, who endorsed Trump publicly in June, said Miller’s car, identified as a black SUV, had a fake license plate that was unregistered and possessed several phony passports and driver’s licenses with different identities, as well as what Bianco described as a fake press pass.
Read MoreBuying the News: Documenting the Takeover of Local Journalism by Leftwing Donors
American journalism has experienced a spectacular collapse in the last 25 years – daily newspaper circulation has declined from over 60 million subscribers to just over 20 million. And the trend is accelerating: According to the Pew Research Organization, the average monthly number of unique visitors to the websites of the country’s top 50 newspapers plummeted 20 percent in one year from 2021 to 2022.
Read More