Birth Certificates!

Who issues birth certificates?

Last Tuesday, I wrote about the federal investigation involving Smith College, and it left me thinking more broadly about how identity is defined in law. In the United States, birth certificates are issued by the states, not the federal government. That raises a constitutional question worth unpacking: where in the Constitution is the federal government given authority to define sex or gender for legal purposes?

The Trump administration has said that passports will reflect sex assigned at birth only. But that raises several questions. First, in states like Connecticut, birth records are maintained by the state and are not typically accessible as a simple personal document in the same way a driver’s license is. So how would federal agencies determine “birth sex” in practice? For many people, the passport itself may already be the primary federal identity document.

Second, the Constitution does not explicitly grant the federal government a general power to define a person’s sex or gender across all legal contexts. Historically, federal agencies have relied on state-issued birth certificates and other identity documents when administering programs, including passport issuance through the United States Department of State.

Third, executive actions, such as orders addressing how federal agencies recognize sex categories and raise an important legal question. Even if the federal government sets internal definitions for its own programs, does that override or displace state-issued identity records? In my view, this raises a broader federalism issue: states traditionally control vital records, while the federal government operates within enumerated powers.

When federal agencies adopt definitions that differ from state-issued birth certificates, the question becomes whether that authority comes from a valid constitutional or statutory source, or whether it exceeds the federal government’s enumerated powers. I believe that the authority to define and record vital identity information should remain primarily with the states. The federal government can only allow M&F and not an X on forms, etc. but they have to go by state determination of gender

When arguments turn to biology, chromosomes, or other medical criteria to define sex for legal purposes, it raises further questions about where that authority is grounded in the Constitution. The federal government is not granted a general police power over identity classification.

So to sum it up:

• States control vital records (like birth certificates).
• The federal government has only enumerated powers under the United States Constitution.
• The federal government generally does not have a general police power over identity definitions.
• Under the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states or the people.

Bounty Hunters

The Department of Justice has a major problem: they can't find enough lawyers to do their dirty work. It’s gotten so bad that they’ve resorted to massive hiring bonuses just to get bodies in the door. It makes you wonder... is the DOJ the new "last resort" for legal careers?

DOJ Offers Lawyers $25,000 Signing Bonuses as Hiring Lags (2)

Bloomberg Law

Ben Penn

May 5, 2026

The Justice Department is taking a new tack to overcome hurdles in attracting qualified legal talent and to prevent current lawyers from leaving: offering signing and retention bonuses throughout the Civil Division.

New vacancy postings show signing bonuses of $25,000 are newly available to staff offices investigating youth transgender treatments and litigating the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.

Further, the head of the Civil Division—which plays a crucial role advancing and protecting the president’s policies in court—informed all his attorneys Monday that they’ll begin receiving a “retention incentive allowance” ranging from around $60 to $220 every pay period through Thanksgiving, according to an internal email reviewed by Bloomberg Law.

Do they feel that it is not a good step in career development?

The financial enticements are an apparent first for a department that in previous years would be inundated with resumes from lawyers willing to take significant salary reductions compared to private sector legal practice. Padding lawyers’ biweekly paychecks signals a division growing more desperate to stave off further departures of valuable legal minds, including those who’ve expressed discomfort with defending the president’s policies from a slew of lawsuits.

I guess they don't think that it will look good on their resumes to have prosecuted trans people for terrorism. It might look good to far-right law firms, but not in general law. But look who they are recruiting: college graduates with no experience! The ABA Journal reports:

The bonuses come as the department in March revoked its long-standing requirement that newly hired prosecutors have at least one year of experience practicing law. The Civil Division vacancies similarly state that new hires must have “up to one” year of legal experience, although there are openings at higher grade levels requiring more legal experience, according to Bloomberg Law.

And you wonder why judges are throwing DOJ lawyers out of their courtrooms! When you have inexperienced lawyers, these things happen. According to The New Republic, Judge Melissa DuBose discovered that DOJ lawyers—acting on instructions from DHS—had withheld information about a defendant’s outstanding murder warrant during a bail hearing.

Journalists say unprecedented FBI raid on reporter’s home will have ‘widespread ramifications’

Journalists say the raid is already impacting their ability to get important stories to the public.

Reporter's Committee

May 3, 2026

More than three months after the FBI took the unprecedented step of raiding a Washington Post reporter’s home in connection with a national security leak investigation, journalists say the search has had serious consequences — for reporters and their sources, and for the public that relies on them to hold the government accountable. 

The Jan. 14 raid on the home of reporter Hannah Natanson sent a shockwave through the journalism industry. In its immediate aftermath, journalists expressed alarm that federal agents not only searched Natanson’s home but also seized the reporter’s phone, laptops, and other electronic devices, capturing years of her newsgathering materials and communications with confidential sources. Journalists have since had several months to assess the raid’s fallout.

[...]

The journalists we interviewed almost universally expressed shock, but not necessarily surprise, about the search, with some emphasizing that it was an inevitable next step in what they see as the Trump administration’s broader anti-press agenda.

The DOJ knew what they were doing: creating fear in reporters and their sources!

The collective chilling effect — both on sources and reporters — spells grave danger for a free press in the United States, journalists told us. The impact of the raid, some said, will have “widespread ramifications” across the country, affecting not just national security reporters covering, for instance, the war in Iran but also local reporters covering small-town police departments. 

Above the Law has a different take on this:

The Department of Justice has a major problem: they can't find enough lawyers to do their dirty work. It’s gotten so bad that they’ve resorted to massive hiring bonuses just to get bodies in the door. It makes you wonder—is the DOJ the new "last resort" for legal careers?

[...]

It’s a problem that stretches to every corner of the DOJ. The Solicitor General’s office has hemorrhaged at least half of its career attorneys. The Civil Rights Division has shed more than 60 percent of its workforce since January 2025. U.S. Attorney’s Offices around the country are cracking under the strain of cleaning up after DHS and an immigration enforcement regime that treats federal court orders as mere suggestions. Career lawyers have resigned in organized waves rather than pad their portfolio for what should be the inevitable disciplinary proceedings.

Everything has its price. The DOJ is hoping “lying to courts” and “open contempt” is worth about $25K.

It is all part of the Trump administration's plan to control the media! It is being seen as the politicization and disorganization of the Justice Department by the Trump administration.

A Death Sentence

For trans parents!

What?

Yup, a Republican candidate wants to execute parents of trans children!

GOP candidate for governor of Tennessee wants to execute the parents of trans kids

Tennessee Republican Monty Fritts has been widely condemned this week after he openly called for the state to execute the parents and guardians of transgender youngsters.

The Pink News

by Amelia Hansford

January 30, 2026

The 62-year-old gubernatorial candidate made the shocking remarks during a guest spot on a Christian Nationalist podcast earlier this week.

A clip shared by the anti-fascist group Right-Wing Watch on Thursday (29 January) sees Fritts not only call for the state-funded execution of trans and non-binary children’s parents, but of anyone who helps to provide life-saving gender-affirming care to under-18s, such as doctors.

“I think we need a law in Tennessee that would allow for capital punishment for those who commit an assault on the sanctity of life,” he said in the 40-second clip.”I think that anyone who would try to disfigure a child through hormones or surgery, you might be eligible to capital punishment.

It is like the Republicans are playing the game of One-upmanship on who can come up with the draconian laws against us.

We Made It To The FBI Terrorist List!

Weaponizing the FBI! Tell me what terrorist acts have trans people done?

Trump counterterrorism strategy targets ‘violent left-wing extremists’ with ‘transgender ideology’

The strategy focusing on left-wing groups reverses the Biden-era concentration on right-wing extremism.

Politico

By Diana Nerozzi

05/06/2026

“Violent left-wing extremists” and “extremist transgender ideology” are among the most concerning threats facing the country, according to the Trump administration counterterrorism strategy released Wednesday.

The strategy, the first released in President Donald Trump’s second term, underscores how Trump’s priorities differ from predecessors, listing “violent left-wing extremists” as one of its top three focuses, alongside “narcoterrorists” and “Islamist terrorists.”

[...]

“We see a threat, we will respond to it, and we will crush it, whether it is the cartels, the jihadists, or violent left-wing extremists like antifa and like the transgender killers, the non-binary, the left-wing radicals who killed my friend Charlie Kirk, we will take them on, head on,” senior director for counterterrorism Sebastian Gorka told reporters on a call Wednesday.

Whoa "Transgender Killers!"

Psycho Killer

Qu'est-ce que c'est?

Fa-fa-fa-fa, fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa, better

Run, run, run, run, run, run, run away, oh-oh-oh

Psycho Killer

Qu'est-ce que c'est?

Fa-fa-fa-fa, fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa, better

Run, run, run, run, run, run, run away, oh, oh, oh, oh

Ay-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya, ooh

Psycho Killer Talking Heads

Tell me, how many terrorists have been "trans"? Four or five? How many terrorists have been "cis"? How many were right-wing terrorists... hundreds?

Besides the obvious attempt to make a whole community suspect, I see it as a form of political marginalization. This comes on the heels of Trump calling for Democrats to cut back on their rhetoric.

The far-left Mother Jones wrote,

Wednesday’s document, masterminded by White House “counterterrorism czar” Sebastian Gorka, does not mention far-right violence at all. It identifies “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists” as a security threat of equal severity to “Legacy Islamist Terrorists” and “Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs.” The administration will now apparently “prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”

In a bizarre but familiar turn, the document also blames transgender people for the shooting of Charlie Kirk. “Americans have witnessed the politically motivated killings of Christians and conservatives committed by violent left-wing extremists, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.”

This is scary! They are weaponizing the government against us; it is a dangerous form of political scapegoating that uses valuable government resources to persecute us!

But the document reads less like a plan than a list of targets. Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), the House Committee on Homeland Security’s ranking Democrat, noted in a press release that the document left out the far right—the group most likely to commit violent acts against civilians on US soil—“despite years of data proving that right-wing extremism has presented the most persistent and deadly threats to Americans for decades.”

I also want to point out that last week, the feds went after the Southern Poverty Law Center charging them with allegations that the organization defrauded its donors by secretly funneling money to the very extremist groups it claimed to be fighting.

This follows threats made by Brendan Carr, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, to yank the licenses for ABC network stations over the TV show The View

History is repeating itself... Hungary, Belarus, Russia, and going back to the 1930s and early 1940s!

We saw it when they passed Paragraph 175, a law that criminalized "unnatural indecency" between men, and we see it now in the governments of Russia and Belarus, and until recently in Hungary. They scapegoat a minority and control the press, and now we are seeing it here!

Bring Your Orange Vest

This summer, as you are laying out on Marconi Beach in the Cape Cod National Seashore, you might want to wear your orange hunting vest over your bathing suit! Believe it or not, Trump & Company have extended the hunting season there to include spring and summer.

Trump is lifting restrictions on hunting in national parks and other areas

AP News

By  TODD RICHMOND
May 8, 2026

 

 

 President Donald Trump’s administration is quietly pushing national park, refuge and wilderness area managers to dramatically scale back hunting restrictions, raising questions about visitor safety and the impact on wildlife.

U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued an order in January directing multiple agencies to remove what he termed “unnecessary regulatory or administrative barriers” to hunting and fishing and justify regulations they want to keep in place.

So, what are some of these “unnecessary regulatory or administrative barriers”? Well, for one thing: the piping plover. Traditionally, beaches are closed during bird nesting season to protect them, but those protections are now on the chopping block.

The CCNS is one of the most visited national seashores in the country. Expanding hunting into the spring and late summer significantly increases the likelihood of dangerous encounters between hunters and the general public. To put the scale of the risk in perspective, in 2025, the Cape Cod National Seashore saw a total of 3,478,828 visitors!!!!!

 The hunting season in the Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts, for example, would be extended through the spring and summer. Hunters in the Lake Meredith National Recreation Area in Texas would be allowed to clean their kills in bathrooms. And hunters would be allowed to kill alligators in the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve in Louisiana.

There might be a "but" involved, however. There is a possibility of an agreement with the state to adhere to standard Massachusetts hunting seasons, which could mitigate some of these changes—but for now, keep your eyes open and your safety gear ready.

The First Amendment Be...

[Editorial]

...Damned!

Why is that it seems like the Republicans hates the 1st Amendment? They want to tell you which books to read, what television shows to watch, and now what colors to paint the fence!

A Florida city fined a lesbian couple over a rainbow fence. Now they’re suing

The ACLU says Key West selectively enforced the city code after the women painted their fence in rainbow colors to protest the removal of Pride crosswalks.

The Advocate

Jacob Ogles

May 08, 2026

Many Key West residents protested Florida’s removal of a rainbow crosswalk by painting their fences in the same colors, only to be met with city fines. Now, a federal lawsuit backed by the American Civil Liberties Union challenges that punishment on First Amendment grounds.

Coley Sohn and Linda Bagley-Sohn repainted 12 pickets at their Old Town home, inspiring similar protests throughout the city. But code complaints with the city prompted Key West officials to cite the lesbian couple, with the threat of $250 fines each day until the fence was repainted white.

What? What? You mean the city has a law on what color you can paint your fence? It looks like that you can paint your any color as long as it is white!

Sohn and Bagley-Sohn applied to the city in December for a permit to paint the fence pickets rainbow colors, but the city, in February, determined the display violated the code because the fence was no longer painted in an approved color.

This might be a hard case to sue except for the fact that they are only enforcing the rainbow colors. NBC News 6 in South Florida writes that,

Their attorney, Nick Warren of the ACLU of Florida, argues the city’s actions amount to unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.

“If you walk around Old Town Key West, you’ll see lots of colorful displays and different colored paints on fences and houses,” Warren said. “Many of them violate the same rules that the city is citing — but if the city is only enforcing the law against some people because of the message they’re expressing, that’s viewpoint discrimination.”

Sohn said the couple believes they have the right to express themselves.

“We have the right, as anyone else does, to protest what they want to protest,” she said. “If the powers that be don’t agree with what we’re protesting, it doesn’t mean they can silence us.”

That shoots holes in the city argument... it seems that they are only enforcing the law for "The Rainbow!"

[/Editorial] 

Question: Who In Washington Do Our Legislators Represent?

A simple little question, but it is something that voters have to think about this election year. In the Indiana primaries, the Republicans decided they don't want candidates who represent the voters of Indiana, but rather "The Donald."

Republican primary voters sent dangerous message to America | Opinion

A handful of Indiana Republican state senators saw this abuse of power unfolding and said, 'Not on our watch.' And now they've been voted out by those who placed loyalty to Trump ahead of democracy.

USA Today

Tim Swarens

May 8, 2026

Donald Trump, even more so than other presidents, needs guardrails to keep his worst impulses in check. 

But on May 5, Republican primary voters in Indiana further weakened the political and legislative guardrails around the president when they threw out of office at least five GOP state senators because they put the Constitution ahead of Trump’s partisan demands.

It wasn’t just those relatively obscure legislators in Indiana who lost. We all did.

That’s because the message delivered to GOP members of Congress, as well as to Republican lawmakers in other states, is that defying even Trump’s most outrageous demands is still the path to defeat within their own party.

[...]

Now, five senators whom Trump targeted have lost their reelection bids, and one other race is too close to call. Only one Republican incumbent targeted by Trump managed to withstand the president’s onslaught.

Message sent and received.

Trump created this rush to gerrymander districts. To win, Democrats now have to overcome a 5–10 point bias in the voting districts by ensuring a massive turnout. Trump lives up to the old saying... "If you can win honestly, cheat!"

Saturday 9: Like My Mother Does

Saturday 9: Like My Mother Does (2011)
On Saturdays I take a break from the heavy stuff and have some fun…

Unfamiliar with this week's tune? Hear it here.

1) In this song, Lauren Alaina tells us she knows she's beautiful and strong because she sees herself as her mother does. Who in your life consistently sees the best in you?
Well definitely my brother and family. And my friends.

2) She sings that her mother is her "rock." In this context, what do you think that means?
That she always has her back and that she is one she turns to for help.

3) When Lauren performed this song in concert, she brought her mother Kristy up on stage and held her hand as she sang. Kristy said she was touched, but also embarrassed because her daughter was the entertainer, not her. Do you get shy when all eyes turn to you?
Um… this was just before I gave a speech at the “Mother’s March on Hartford”

 

4) Lauren began reading in pre-school and always read well above grade level. As a child, were you a big reader? Are you a big reader today?
I’m now into audiobooks, last month I maxed out my library card and a book from Audible.

5) According to the National Restaurant Association, we like to eat out on Mother's Day, and brunch is especially popular. If you could have whatever you want for brunch, what would you order? 
Lobster Benedict!

6) Mother's Day is the third biggest card-sending holiday in the US, just after Christmas and Valentine's Day. Who received the last card you purchased?
It has probably been over a decade since I sent them out.

7) While flowers are the most popular Mother's Day gift, jewelry comes in second. Are you wearing any jewelry as you answer these questions? If yes, did you receive it as a gift or buy it yourself? 
Nope… I’m ready for bed.

8) According to the National Retail Federation, more and more of us are celebrating our mothers by taking her to a paint and sip event, a pottery class, or candle or soap making. Which of those four options do you think you'd enjoy the most?
It is a toss up between  pottery class, or candle making.

9) While there's a spike in phone traffic on Mother's Day, these days it seems the trend is texting. On holidays, do you receive more calls or texts?
By now everyone should know by now… don’t text me! I think the last text message that I got is probably ago month.<