Supreme Court Allows DHS to Suspend Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans.

The latest SCOTUS order shows the justices are taking a more nuanced approach to district court injunctions of Trump Administration policies than its critics, left or right.

Today, over a lone noted dissent, the Supreme Court stayed a district court injunction barring the Department of Homeland Security from terminating Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans in the United States. The unsigned order in Noem v. National TPS Alliance noted that Justice Jackson would not have granted the stay.

The order was not an unqualified victory for the Trump Administration, as it does not extent–and expressly does not prejudice–challenges to the Administration’s withdrawal of other benefits or status designations for TPS beneficiaries. Those questions will be litigated separately.

The Court’s action was likely driven by the justices’ conclusion that the federal government is likely to prevail on the merits, as the decision whether to confer, maintain, or terminate TPS is largely discretionary. Indeed, it is not even clear TPS decisions are subject to judicial review (as the Administration argued in its stay application).

The Court’s order also highlights that, even within the constraints of the emergency docket, the justices are considering each application for relief on its own terms, and will police district court overreach where such overreach is clear. So while a majority of justices will not allow the Trump Administration to summarily deport individuals under the Alien Enemies Act without providing for adequate process, it is will also prevent individual district court judges from enjoining policy decisions that are clearly within the discretion of the administration.

This approach may not satisfy partisans, or those who presume the Trump Administration is entitled to prevail (or should be stymied) on every question (often without acknowledging, let alone understanding, the legal questions at hand), but it suggests the justices are endeavoring to pay attention to what the law actually allows or requires.

MISSING AIRLINE SLUMP

Just like the M.I.A. stock market crash, the long-promised airline travel slump is nowhere to be found.

I checked the most recent TSA statistics available on airline passengers. More than 2.8 million people passed through TSA checkpoints on the latest day available, Thursday, May 15. That was some 40,000 more than the equivalent day in 2024 (May 16) and over 200,000 more passengers than the same day in 2023 (May 18). Not a holiday weekend, not spring break, not yet the summer rush, just packed airports and packed planes on a random Thursday.

Yet this headline featured in Forbes last week,

‘Trump Slump’ Hits Expedia: Shares Fall 8% Due To Weak U.S. Travel Demand

Ah, yes, the much-promised, but little-seen “Trump Slump.” I had occasion to venture out to the local airport this afternoon for a passenger drop-off. Despite the Trump Slump and the surrounding city in its final death throes, the airport on a Sunday mid-afternoon was a complete zoo both inside and out.

Unfortunately, I fear that all too few departing passengers were traveling on one-way tickets.

[Update: it turns out that I was correct about yesterday (Sunday). TSA data show passengers over 2.9 million, some 86,000 above the equivalent day in 2024. Yesterday marked the biggest travel day since December 1, 2024, the Wednesday after Thanksgiving.]

Right on time comes this headline from the Baltimore Sun,

Despite economic concerns, Americans are set on getting away for Memorial Day weekend

Bon Voyage!

What the left doesn’t want you to know about the 2nd Amendment

Cultural myths have always held that the left is better at comedy than the right, at least according to the left.  But circular logic aside, the results of the past few years speak for themselves.  The left can’t meme, and it’s falling behind in comedic talent.  Case in point would be a comparison of the sheer genius of the folks of the Babylon Bee and the hapless, out-of-touch, and unfunny skits of Saturday Night Live.

The first video from the Babylon Bee is of a leftist (we’re using that term instead of the other “L” word) going back in time to try to “fix” the 2nd Amendment, applying many of the leftist tropes we’ve been endlessly subjected to over the past few decades, such as only covering muzzle-loading muskets and nothing else, especially scary-looking assault weapons.

In the video, the character portraying James Madison notes that an armed citizenry is the point of the Second Amendment in keeping the government in check.  At one point, he asks the Democrat who came back in time to alter the amendment a great question, one that should be asked of any leftist gun-grabbing ghoul:

“Do you trust your government?”

To which the leftist answers in the negative, and the natural response is:

“Then why would you want them to have much better guns than you?”

It’s a very entertaining 6 minutes that demolishes most of the myths of the gun-grabber ghouls, while making a strong case for our firearm freedoms and the commonsense human right of self-defense.

The second video proves our adage on the left and humor, but what is truly interesting is that this skit inadvertently also makes the case for the Second Amendment, making it look cool.  Naturally, in their little way, they tried to knock our firearm freedoms with an ending tagline, but it ends up coming up short on the message.  Their main, inadvertent point is that guns and gun-owners are cool instead of “scary.”  It’s more than amusing that Saturday Night Live has fallen so far as to have the opposite intended cultural effect.

We can only guess from the sign-off from the second video from the formerly funny Saturday Night Live that it was meant as a criticism of the commonsense human right of self-defense and the Second Amendment.  Unfortunately for them, they end up making firearm freedom cool and inadvertently boost that part of the Bill of Rights.  These videos are well worth sharing with those on the fence, as a way of easily dispatching some gun-grabber ghoul myths.

Occasionally life intrudes; Spent most of the night and early morning at the ER with Dad. He’s back home and feeling a lot better, but Ich Bin was worn out and spent the day and early evening sacked out.

We now return to our somewhat regular scheduling

May 19, 2025

39 years ago, Congress passed and POTUS Reagan signed into law, and immediate effect, the ‘Firearms Owners Protection Act’, that among some good things, also banned further production of ‘transferable’ automatic firearms for civilian possession.

If it’s that advanced, it means he likely was suffering from it YEARS ago Maybe even before 2020!
And his physical exams (PSA) lab work should have indicated it.
So…. what else is new about covering up for SloJoe?

Joe Biden diagnosed with ‘aggressive form’ of prostate cancer with metastasis to the bone

Former President Joe Biden’s office confirmed on Sunday that he was diagnosed with an “aggressive form” of prostate cancer.

“Last week, President Joe Biden was seen for a new finding of a prostate nodule after experiencing increasing urinary symptoms,” Biden’s team shared in a statement. “On Friday, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, characterized by a Gleason score of 9 (Grade Group 5) with metastasis to the bone.”

“While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management. The President and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians,” the statement said.

Guns are here to stay in US, that’s an opportunity not a threat

With yet another school shooting in the news in April, the familiar rhetoric has made a reappearance nationally.

On the one hand, President Donald Trump marked the occasion by bloviating about one short section of the Constitution while systematically flouting dozens of other sections. On the other, the usual gun-control forces are fundraising off the Florida State tragedy with yet another call for “commonsense” gun regulation.

We’ve been here before, and we’ll be here again, and we’re getting nowhere. It’s not where most Americans want to be with gun issues.

As a school board member in Second Amendment-loving Pennsylvania, I see every month urgent, complex challenges connected to firearms that get less attention than shootings, but they’re important, too.

We encounter everything from parents’ worries about the psychosocial impact of active shooter drills to how to deal with kids who bring toy guns to school (sometimes with blaze orange tips unlawfully removed). There are complicated finance and legal issues related to firearms. There are discussions of “hardening” buildings as targets. There are security armories to maintain. All in all, forecasting and policy-making around issues of gun-related safety and crime are inescapable in K-12 education. I don’t foresee that changing.

Why? Because guns aren’t going away. Four in 10 American adults live in a house with a gun, according to one recent Pew survey, and civilians own an estimated 380 million guns. We can’t hide from such sobering data.

Meanwhile, positive community-building gun experiences are being sidelined. Public support for shooting sports and legal hunting have seen worrying declines. Despite two very active popular private shooting ranges in our school district near Bethlehem, for instance, our school’s rifle team — a club that offered students of all ability levels a chance to learn about gun safety in a politically neutral environment — closed down years ago and sold off its rifles for lack of community support.

Any resolve to teach beneficial, sustainable relationships with guns for sport doesn’t seem to exist. It’s easier to slap a SIG Sauer weapons maker sticker on the back of a back of a big pickup than to spend time teaching a high school kid to safely clear a chamber, clean a barrel, use a scope or handle a loaded rifle. We’ve been discussing the process of resurrecting our school rifle team (using air rifles), and I’m hopeful, but we’ll be competing with the easy allure of “Call of Duty” and online cultures.

Young Americans aren’t getting the whole story when it comes to firearms and national history either, so they easily fall prey to steroid-fueled, hyper-masculine, action-movie narratives that grossly distort American identity.

Even before the founding of our republic, Puritans in the Americas needed to protect themselves. From the moment Myles Standish stepped ashore in present day Massachusetts, in 1620, the idea of America was anointed in gunpowder and the unholy chimes of matchlock musket fire. You think Pete Hegseth is a mad Christian neo-fascist militant? You wouldn’t like a hothead soldier of fortune like Standish, whose general rule was kill-first-make-peace-later. Our early settlers were fiercely fiercely protective of their homes, and for better and sometimes worse, this impulse remains part of the American DNA.

A theme of community safety is huge in this country’s gun history, too. As the the writer Charles E. Cobb once said about incomplete portrayals of the Black civil rights movement in the 1960s: “One important gap in the history … is the role of guns in the movement. I worked in the South, I lived with families in the South. There was never a family I stayed with that didn’t have a gun. I know from personal experience and the experiences of others, that guns kept people alive, kept communities safe.”

We’ve forgotten that complex, social heritage. Instead of treating guns either as evil instruments of psychopathy, or glorifying them as extensions of an incomplete masculinity, we need to respect their place in American communities, and in our nation, for what they are: Extremely dangerous, essential and often fascinating tools of sport and defense with the deepest of roots in our history and culture.

We can recognize the horror of mass shootings and do all we can to prevent them. There are many preventative actions we can take that don’t involve Second Amendment infringement. But at the level of civic policy and education, this also means working to demystify firearms and remembering their positive contributions to American kinship and community empowerment. By doing so, we help prevent gun pathologies from taking root and give law-abiding gun owners the right to protect themselves.

Guns aren’t going away. The Second Amendment certainly isn’t going away. It’s time to see that as an opportunity, not a threat.

This is a contributed opinion column. Bill Broun teaches writing at East Stroudsburg University[Pennsylvania]. He is a school director for Saucon Valley School District. [Hellerstown PA]

Gun Owners Kill Compromise Bill That Kept Suppressors on the NFA

The reconciliation bill that included lowering the tax stamp fee for suppressors but kept the device on the National Firearms Act of 1968 failed to pass the floor vote in the House of Representatives largely in part to Section 2 of the Hearing Protection Act (HPA) and the Stop Harassing Owners of Rifles Today (SHORT) Act being missing.

Reconciliation is a process that deals with taxes. Unlike normal bills requiring a supermajority in the Senate, a reconciliation bill only requires a majority vote. Republicans control both chambers of Congress; they can pass it even if every Democrat votes against it. Since the United States Supreme Court has already stated that the NFA is primarily a tax, it can be modified through the reconciliation process. Pressure from gun owners and activists on members of the House helped to crush the reconciliation bill.

The HPA would have removed suppressors from the NFA while still subjecting them to the Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA) regulations. This change would mean no tax stamp to buy a suppressor, and gun owners would not need to register their devices with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), which many view as an infringement.

The SHORT Act would remove short-barreled rifles (SBR) and short-barreled shotguns (SBS) from the NFA. The NFA requires registration with the ATF if a rifle has a barrel less than 16 inches or a shotgun has a barrel less than 18 inches. This requirement was implemented during the debate over the NFA in 1934. The NFA looked to include pistols, so SBRs and SBSs were added to prevent people from using these “loopholes” to get around regulations. During the debate in 1934, the pistol regulation was removed, but the restrictions on rifles and shotguns remained. The SHORT Act would fix a nearly 100-year-old mistake.

During the House Ways and Means Committee markup of the bill, Republicans led by David Kustoff (R-TN) changed the language of the HPA to eliminate the $200 tax stamp fee but kept the suppressors on the NFA. Gun Owners were furious and felt betrayed by the Republican-led committee. Rep. Kustoff claimed he pushed what he did because of the Senate’s “Byrd Rule.”

The Byrd Rule states that only tax issues can be done through reconciliation. Speaking to people in the Senate, they do not believe that removing suppressors from the NFA would violate the Byrd Rule since SCOTUS has already determined the NFA to be tax law. They also point out that if the Senate decided it violated the Byrd Rule, it could be modified in the Senate. There was no need for the House to worry about the Byrd rule.

Because Friday’s vote failed to pass the bill through the House, the budget committee will reconvene on Sunday to hash out a bill that will most likely pass. Hopes are high due to the outpouring from the gun community that Section 2 of the HPA will be included. This change would mean that suppressors would be removed from the NFA. Those at AmmoLand News have spoken to in the House are confident that the HPA will be included in the new text. The SHORT Act also has a shot of being included, but that is far from certain.

If the bill is fixed on Sunday, a vote will happen early next week before it is headed to the Senate. This reconciliation package could be a significant step towards dismantling parts of the NFA.