Victor Davis Hanson

Since 2021, the Left has waged a veritable war against the American legal system in a variety of ways.

One serial target of Democrats and the Left has been the Supreme Court.

In 2020, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., spoke to an angry throng of pro-abortion protestors assembled at the very doors of the court chambers.

He threatened two of the justices, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, by name. Schumer yelled to the volatile crowd that the justices’ views would make them “reap the whirlwind,” and the two would not know what “hit” them.

In the ensuing months, protestors mobbed some of the conservative justices’ homes — likely committing felonies. The sympathetic Biden Justice Department chose not to follow the law, and so did nothing — although eventually a would-be assassin turned up.

Former President Joe Biden himself bragged that he would try to ignore the Supreme Court ruling banning his arbitrary cancellation of billions of dollars in student loans. Indeed, he boasted, “The Supreme Court blocked it, but that didn’t stop me.”

In response, no one on the left ever complained about endangering the “rule of law” or Biden as “a dictator.”

For three years, four local, state, and federal prosecutors warped the law to neuter Donald Trump. Most of the charges had never been brought against other political figures in similar circumstances.

The vast majority of the 93 weaponized indictments backfired on the liberal prosecutors, who had contorted the legal system for political purposes and now face their own ethical or legal quagmires.

The federal prosecutor Jack Smith belatedly reported accepting $140,000 in free legal services.

Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis was removed from the Trump case and fined, and is now under further investigation.

New York prosecutor Letitia James is now facing allegations of falsification of documents and loan fraud.

Federal immigration law prohibits the illegal entry into and residence within the United States. Yet the Biden administration deliberately violated the law by allowing somewhere between 10-12 million illegal aliens to cross the border. Thousands had criminal records.

No one on the Left decried any of these various affronts to the legal system.

In polls, by overwhelming majorities — above 70 percent — the public wants the Trump administration to close the border, begin deportations, and start with criminals or those with violent histories and gang ties.

The recent deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an illegal alien from El Salvador, to the vast majority of Americans seems to fit that profile.

Garcia entered the U.S. illegally and was later found consorting with members of M-13 — a State Department-designated terrorist organization — who were selling drugs. Informants reported that he was a gang member. His own tattoos likely confirm those accusations.

Two prior immigration judges found such evidence sufficient to allow deportation proceedings. In 2019, a third judge allowed Garcia to stay temporarily, but only on the grounds that hostile gangs might harm him should he return to El Salvador.

Garcia was pulled over for speeding without a driver’s license — but with eight illegal aliens who reportedly all lived at the Garcia residence. The officer released him, despite suspicions that Garcia was engaged in human trafficking.

Garcia’s live-in girlfriend, now wife, was physically assaulted by Garcia on two occasions, suffered injuries, and initially sought restraining orders against him.

The Left claims Garcia is a “Maryland man” without an arrest record.

But he is not a U.S. citizen or a legal resident of Maryland. Instead, Garcia is in legal limbo and remains what he always was — a citizen of El Salvador with gang ties and formerly residing illegally in the U.S.

The Left also ignores its own hypocrisies and ironies.

Those who weaponized the court system and destroyed the border now rail that Trump is acting unlawfully by not returning an illegal alien, an M-13 member, and a domestic abuser with a propensity to ignore our laws.

How ironic that those who rail about colonialism now sound like 19th-century Yankee imperialists.

Democrats do not own El Salvador — although they act like it when dictating to its government that El Salvador cannot detain one of its own citizens on its own soil for its own reasons.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books.You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.

Paul Gessing

New Mexico’s Legislature adjourned weeks ago, and not a moment too soon. That’s because the party that controls our state government spent most of the legislative session pushing misguided policies that expand the size of government, increase spending, fail to reduce tax burdens, and add red tape to our economy. Our leaders need to address the root causes of these problems by shrinking government.

Look no further than the housing market. Policy advisers to Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham report that in the past eight years, the average home price in New Mexico has gone up 70%, and the median rent costs have increased 60%.

That’s unsustainable for working families.

Analyses have emphasized the drastic undersupply of housing in New Mexico. An accumulation of development-deterring rules and regulations have suppressed the supply of housing, which in turn negatively impacts the going rates to buy or rent.

The Lujan Grisham administration rammed through a costly new building code in 2024. This new code raised insulation standards and mandated electric vehicle (EV)-related infrastructure. It also hasn’t helped that cities have been overly slow to reevaluate impediments like building height restrictions and unwise prioritization of costly single-family detached homes – which now makes up more than 65% of the state’s housing stock.

While increasing the housing supply in New Mexico’s largest cities was supposed to be the goal of the 2025 legislative session, a proposed bill (HB 215) would have worsened housing issues in the state. The bill would have barred the use of software by property managers to suggest rent prices or lease renewal terms. This entailed revoking the processes for analyzing and training an algorithm/AI on historical or contemporaneous prices, supply levels, or lease or rental contract termination and renewal dates of dwelling units from two or more rental property owners.

For consumers, much of what we buy is online or is supported by software tools like these that swiftly match our demands with available inventory and executing transactions the moment that we need them – think of flights, trains, cars, hotels and many other necessities.

While New Mexico’s proposal failed in the legislature, similar laws enacted in California have been passed. In short, statistical assessments of the rental property landscape simply reveal a snapshot of its current market conditions, not the other way around in establishing such conditions, as some may claim.

AI tools are just tools. If a landlord wishes to charge different rents or give discounts to customers, they are welcome to do that. AI is simply one of many tools that can be used to make sure that rental prices reflect current market conditions in the area.

Not only is AI not a problem driving New Mexico housing prices, it could be part of the solution. But the real solution to rising housing costs is to increase the housing supply. Austin, Texas is an example of a fast- growing city that has tamped down rising prices through increased supply. In this market, where construction has been allowed to keep up with and even surpass population growth, rents have fallen 22% from their peak in the summer of 2023.

Reversing the anti-technology approach to housing is critical given that basic functions of tools for price discovery in the rental market stand to encourage more entrepreneurial activity and motivate more potential property owners to bring more housing units to market. Allowing processes to demystify markets like these can also further push business leaders to move their AI-oriented operations to New Mexico and support better outcomes for local consumers.

Of course, solving New Mexico’s housing shortage starts with increasing supply.

Paul Gessing is president of New Mexico’s Rio Grande Foundation, an independent, nonpartisan, tax- exempt research and educational organization dedicated to promoting prosperity for New Mexico based on principles of limited government, economic freedom and individual responsibility.