VP Harris’ Tie-Breaking Vote Approved Appointment of Federal Judge Tied to Earlier Trump-Carroll Defamation Lawsuit

Vice President Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote confirmed Judge Loren AliKhan to the federal bench for life after AliKhan helped along a defamation lawsuit against former President Donald Trump. Ironically, according to Politico, Harris has expressed support for President Biden’s plans to impose term limits on Supreme Court justices who at the moment, like AliKahn, enjoy lifetime tenure.

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Apple Files to Dismiss DOJ Antitrust Case Against Its Smartphone Business

Person holding an iPhone

Apple has filed a motion to dismiss a case from the United States Department of Justice claiming that it monopolizes the smartphone market using anticompetitive practices making it harder to switch to another phone. Antitrust experts say this case, if won by the DOJ, could set dangerous precedent by granting the government power to more easily define companies as monopolies and practices as monopolistic, and determine what companies must do or cannot do to avoid the label. 

The United States Department of Justice and 16 Attorneys General — including California and the District of Columbia — filed a lawsuit in March alleging Apple illegally monopolizes the smartphone market, such as green boxes with “social stigma” for non-Apple text messages and Apple smartwatch incompatibility with other operating systems. 

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U.S. Drivers Killed Fewer Pedestrians in 2023, Except in Pennsylvania

Pedestrians

Pedestrian deaths are finally starting to drop across America to pre-pandemic levels.

Pennsylvania, however, bucked the national trend. Drivers killed 192 pedestrians in 2023, eight more than in 2022, and 25 percent more than in 2019, according to an analysis from the Governors Highway Safety Administration.

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D.C. Holds Training Sessions for Noncitizens to Vote

An agency of the District of Columbia held a training session last month to teach illegal immigrants and other noncitizens how to vote, according to documents obtained by the watchdog group Judicial Watch.

News of the training session held by the local government in the nation’s capital comes as House Republicans push a bill—with the backing of Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La.—to require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote.

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Nation’s Capital Devastated by Crime Spike in 2023

DC Skyline

The District of Columbia experienced a 39% increase in violent crime in 2023, according to data published by its Metropolitan Police Department (MPD).

The District has long experienced issues with crime and property theft, despite having the most police officers per capitaof any jurisdiction in the country, due to the significant presence of federal law enforcement to protect the seat of the government of the United States. In 2023, overall crime increased by 26% over 2022, with 34,414 instances of violent and property crime reported to police, with property crime alone rising by 24%.

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Progressive Activists, Officials Work to Extend Voting to Prisoners, Noncitizens to Expand Base

by Fred Lucas   Inmate voting, noncitizen voting, and even mandatory voting have been among the initiatives pushed in Democrat-led jurisdictions this year to expand their voting base. “The Left wants to normalize voter classes that nobody took seriously a generation ago—criminals, foreigners—to help them win elections,” J. Christian Adams, president of the…

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Capitol Rioter Who Attacked Police Sentenced to 63 Months, Longest January 6 Sentence Yet

A Capitol rioter who had pleaded guilty to attacking overwhelmed police officers with a fire extinguisher and other potentially dangerous objects was sentenced Friday to more than five years behind bars, the longest sentence so far in connection with the Jan. 6 incident.

“Your honor, I’m really really ashamed of what I did,” the rioter, 54-year-old Robert Palmer, told a federal judge in Washington, D.C., during his sentencing hearing, according to the Associated Press.

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Commentary: Harvard’s ‘Lawfare’ Programs Are an Omen of Elections Decided Not at Polls — But in Court

Before the Donald Trump-inspired challenges of the 2020 presidential election, Democrats and liberals alleged fraud and formally contested the results of the 2000, 2004, and 2016 Republican-won presidential elections. Those earlier challenges spurred the creation of a network of election litigators on the left — what J. Christian Adams, a conservative ex-Justice Department attorney pitted against them, calls a “linear build-out” of “some 30 groups” responsible for a lot of sudden changes in election law last year amid the pandemic.

For the closely fought 2020 presidential election, 29 largely Democrat-controlled states and the District of Columbia loosened voting laws, most expanding access to mail voting, according to the liberal Brennan Center for Justice. In response, after former President Trump’s efforts to contest his narrow loss, 19 largely conservative states tightened their voting laws, the Brennan Center reports. The latest changes have provoked a wave of litigation, overwhelmingly from the left.

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