WASHINGTON—What happens when rules designed to ensure public safety fray so much that undocumented residents can obtain commercial driver’s licenses for big rigs, even if they are not qualified to drive them and do not speak English? In 2025, Americans saw the danger of allowing unvetted migrants to drive big rigs without obtaining bona fide commercial driver’s licenses, often thanks to what Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy calls “scam schools.” In November, an illegal immigrant with a California commercial driver’s license was charged with killing a newlywed couple in Oregon. In October, an immigrant truck driver who had been in the United States illegally since 2011 allegedly caused a fatal accident. He did not hold a valid CDL, the New York Post reported. In August, three people were killed in Florida after an Indian driver made an illegal U-turn on a major freeway. If you see the video, you have to wonder, what was the illegal immigrant from India thinking when he blocked all lanes of the highway? And who gave this guy a CDL? The answer, according to the Department of Homeland Security: California. Again. After President Donald Trump withheld $40 million in federal funds to punish California for not complying with its new English-speaking requirements, Gov. Gavin Newsom revoked some 17,000 CDLs. Good. Fatal crashes were bound to happen more frequently when unqualified individuals who should not be behind the wheel were able to drive 18-wheelers that weigh as much as 80,000 pounds—and on roads with family cars, light trucks, and pedestrians. As Paul Enos, CEO of the Nevada Trucking Association, said of big-truck drivers, “They should be able to read a runaway ramp truck sign.” Truckers who can’t read traffic signs won’t see warnings they need to see. But as a report you can read at TruckingResurgence.com informed, the requirement that truck drivers be able to read road signs and basic English instructions “was essentially removed in 2016.” “This administration is cracking down on every link in the illegal trucking chain,” Duffy maintained. “Under Joe Biden and [his Transportation Secretary] Pete Buttigieg, bad actors were able to game the system and let unqualified drivers flood our roadways.” According to the report, “90% of trucking carriers remain unrated for safety.” Scary. When truck drivers aren’t properly trained by experienced professionals who know why smart regulations make travel safer, they may not appreciate how lethal their profession can be. So they might flout the rule limiting drivers to 11-hour days behind the wheel, Enos noted. And they might tinker with electronic monitoring devices meant to make sure that they don’t drive too much in a day. Another issue is the problem of “chameleon carriers” who shutter when they are busted for flouting regulations, then reopen with new names. It takes brass to go after bad actors at a time when America is experiencing a trucker shortage. That’s probably why the Biden administration did not make compliance a top priority. On the one hand, trucking provides opportunities to men and women who aren’t interested in desk jobs. But the demands—long hours, living on the road away from family—mean the job is not for everyone. The rules and testing regimen can discourage marijuana users, which Enos tells me has limited the driver pool. But professionals want a system that protects them from bad actors. So it’s heartening that the Trump administration isn’t out to simply cut the size of government. Duffy wants to make it work. COPYRIGHT 2025 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Keep on Truckin’—If You Are Rightly Licensed appeared first on The Daily Signal.

On this episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler dig into the danger of tens of thousands of illegal immigrants racing tractor-trailers down our nation’s highways, and millions of illegal aliens flooding our health care system. Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to VDH’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.  Victor Davis Hanson: And I think [Rep. Ilhan Omar’s] currency’s up. I really do. And when you add this billion [in fraud], and it’s going to get bigger than a billion dollars from what you read. When you add it all up, and you collate the 17,000 driver’s license that we gave mostly to Indian Americans that were here illegally and did not know English and were not living in California, and other states did the same thing, there may be 60,000 of them. I see them driving all the time. I don’t want to stereotype anybody, but it’s “Road Warrior” now in California. There are trucks in the middle lane that are over the white line. Just this morning at 6:30, I walked outside. Five trucks full of gravel and dirt going to the high-speed rail ramp project were going 65 to 70, it seemed, a foot from my mailbox, 20 tons. Drivers just “bang,” just floorboarding it on a country road where the speed limit’s 55. There’s a lot of people, houses they can pull in and out. And there’s not a highway patrolman to be seen. If one highway patrolman just sat behind an almond tree, he could give 100 tickets a day to those drivers. They’re all going 65 or 70 with 20 tons of dirt, and it’s really scary.  I don’t want to stereotype, but I look very carefully because I’m about one foot from them when I’m outside on the road, and almost all of them are from India. I say that because they’re wearing turbans or ethnic beards. I really like the Sikh community, but there’s something wrong when people come here illegally, and they get driver’s licenses, and they’re not fully able to read. Jack Fowler: Yeah. Can you imagine going to China and trying to get a driver’s license and drive when you can’t read the road signs at all?  I’m not doing it. I’m not putting my life at risk, nor other people’s lives at risk. Hanson: I can’t imagine that going on anywhere. And then you add the students, Columbia, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, from the Middle East, they come over here and they play victim as if they’re part of the DEI binary on the victim side, even though they’re very wealthy kids from the Middle East. They get their Middle East Studies professors funded by Qatar. And then they get “From the River to the Sea.” And then suddenly it’s Jews. And then suddenly they’re chasing them in the library, or they’re roughing them up, or they’re telling them to go on one side of the room. It degenerates into pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah stuff.  And then when you say to Mr. [Mahmoud] Khalil, I think we’re going to give you your wish. You are so happy about Hamas and the Middle East. Go back there and be happy. Don’t come over here and be unhappy. Racist, racist, xenophobe.  And then when you add the people coming across the southern border and Laken Riley, all those people who were killed from DUI. I can’t even pick up the Fresno Bee anymore. Almost every single day, there’s two things that happen. A body is found in an orchard. There was one today that no one knows who she is. They just found her there, and they’re asking people who she is. Or there is a hit and run, a wreck, and the driver left the scene of the accident.  And nobody says a word. California Gov. Gavin Newsom just took 500 million of the budget—that’s 17 billion in the red—and applied it to illegal alien health care. And now he’s panicking because Medi-Cal, which has 40 % of all people in the state on it, is broke and he needed $2 billion from the federal government, and he promulgates a lie. “There’s not an illegal alien on it.” I would say there’s not one illegal alien who’s not on it. And I have had a lot of experience with the California medical system the last nine months.  MRIs, don’t know what you call it, CAT scans, PET scans, doctor’s visits, specialist visits. It’s not the same health care system of 15 years ago, I can guarantee you that. When you used to say you needed to see a specialist, it was a week, five days. Today they say three or four months. Fowler: Yeah, people die in the meanwhile.   Hanson: If you want to get a scan, if you want to get a PET scan, you better call every day, every single day. It’s just a different country. And then to hear these people who let in 12, 15, 20 million people who had no health care, were not audited, from the poorest places, very ill. And then to be told you’re a racist because nobody voted for this, and all of a sudden when a person becomes ill they can’t get proper care, and you’re supposed to feel guilty for thinking it might have something to do at least in the southern United States with an open border.  These people are really nefarious—these left wingers—because they’re all elites and they always do things to other people that never apply to themselves. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Victor Davis Hanson: ‘It’s Road Warrior Out There’: Illegals Plaguing Our Highways and Health Care appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Who controls the executive branch of government? For more than two hours on Monday, the Supreme Court listened to U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer and Amit Agarwal, a lawyer for Protect Democracy and former counsel to the Biden and Harris presidential campaigns, argue over this fundamental question. The issues raised in the case of Trump v. Slaughter implicate basic constitutional principles involving the president, Congress, and so-called independent agencies. A decision in the president’s favor, depending on who you believe, will either correct one of the worst decisions of the Progressive Era, Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S. (1935), which violated basic separation of powers principles and vitiated the constitutional authority of the president as head of the executive branch, or lead to “chaos and destruction” of our governmental structure and give the president who was elected by voters too much “control” over the executive branch (which, of course, is nonsense). The Background This case began when President Donald Trump fired Rebecca Slaughter, a commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission and a former counsel to Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. She sued, as have commissioners who were fired at other so-called independent agencies including the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board, claiming that the president lacked the authority to fire them, relying on Humphrey’s Executor.  In that 1935 case, the Supreme Court upheld a restriction that Congress put into the law limiting the ability of the president to fire a commissioner at the FTC except for cause. Congress placed similar limitations on the president when it created other agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission and the National Labor Relations Board, whose members, once nominated and confirmed by the Senate, serve for fixed terms. The Arguments Sauer told the Court that the Humphrey’s Executor decision is an “indefensible outlier” that has not “withstood the test of time.” It was “grievously wrong” when it was issued and has led to the creation of a “headless fourth branch” of government that is a direct threat to our constitutional structure. He emphasized throughout his presentation that since Article II makes the president the head of the executive branch, Congress cannot restrict the authority of the president over the principal officers who are the heads of agencies that carry out executive branch functions. In responding to an assertion by Justice Sonia Sotomayor that “Congress emphasized the importance of independent” decision-making by creating these agencies, Sauer said the “prestige of independency is not a constitutional principle.” In discussing the separation of powers principle, Justice Elena Kagan intimated that the government’s position was a violation of separation of powers because, since many agencies engage in rulemaking, it would give the president executive and legislative authority. But Sauer said that rulemaking is execution of the law, not acting as a legislature. In other words, the issuance of regulations is, in reality, agencies announcing how they are going to carry out and enforce the legislation passed by Congress. When Kagan expressed her fear that the “president would have control over everything,” Sauer answered that he will simply have “the executive power the Constitution provides” to a president. Sotomayor spent considerable time on how long the Humphrey’s Executor decision has been in place and kept asking Sauer for other precedent-setting decisions of long duration that have been overturned, repeatedly interrupting him as he tried to answer. He provided many examples, though, and as Justice Amy Coney Barrett later pointed out, some of those cases overruled precedents that had been in place nearly as long as Humphrey’s Executor. These agencies were pushed by progressives who thought federal bureaucrats, so-called “experts,” should be free of the political process and political interference to implement public policy no matter who is in the White House. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pushed that very same idea throughout her questioning, praising the concept of public policy being “handled by nonpartisan experts.” To her, that “makes perfect sense” because it removes them from politics and the “danger of presidential control.” Apparently, accountability to voters is a dangerous principle, at least according to her. Agarwal emphasized the length of time this decision has been in place but also claimed that such independent agencies and commissions have been in place since our start as a country. He said the Court should not “overrule a century of precedent” and shouldn’t abandon what “so much of modern government is based on.” Where Agarwal really got stuck was when several justices started grilling him on how much executive authority an agency has to have before he would consider it to be a violation of separation of powers and the president’s authority over the executive branch. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wanted to know if Congress could convert all of the cabinet departments into multimember-headed agencies. Agarwal responded that Congress can’t limit the president’s authority over officers exercising the president’s “conclusive and preclusive” authority, but he seemed to have trouble delineating what powers that entails, and which departments could be converted and put out of reach of the president. He finally admitted that Congress just taking over some departments was “probably within the realm of possibility.” Agarwal also tried to differentiate between criminal and civil enforcement authority, since the majority of independent agencies have the ability to bring civil enforcement actions against individuals. Agarwal actually claimed that exercising civil enforcement authority doesn’t mean that the agencies are carrying out executive branch duties. Justice Samuel Alito took him to task for that, saying that Agarwal couldn’t say that everything was “on the chopping block” if he couldn’t name which specific departments within the federal government could be converted to multimember agencies with limits on the president’s power to remove their leadership. Agarwal also indefensibly told Justice Neil Gorsuch that presidents don’t, in fact, have a duty to faithfully execute the law—contrary to the clear dictates of the Constitution. There were also questions about Congress hypothetically creating agencies with no partisan balance in the leadership and lengthening the terms of commissioners. At what point would such a term become so long, say 15 or 20 years, that it would start infringing on the president’s removal authority and constitute a constitutional violation of separation of powers? Agarwal had no firm answer to that other than the Court would have to determine that, meaning there could be no standard unless the Court created one. Current Unconstitutional Structure and Practices Federal agencies (like the FTC) with the authority to promulgate regulations that have the authority of law and the power to pursue individuals that they claim have broken the law or violated their regulations are engaging in the very essence of an executive function. In addition to being vested under the Constitution with all executive authority, it is the president who is designated in Section 3 of Article II with the responsibility to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” and contrary to Agarwal’s argument that includes both criminal and civil enforcement of the law.  Yet many of the so-called independent agencies are outside the control and supervision of the president. After all, what kind of supervision can a president—any president—exercise if he can’t fire officials who ignore his commands or take policy positions opposite those of his own administration? It was clear from the arguments that the liberal justices on the Court have no concern over that and don’t believe that is a constitutional problem. They want government policies carried out by “experts” supposedly oblivious to politics, but who can, in reality, exercise their own agendas without vital political checks.  It is a very anti-democratic concept that we should have administrative agencies that are not accountable to voters and not accountable to the president the public elected. Unfortunately, after listening to the oral arguments, it seems clear that Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson are prepared to vote to uphold just such a constitutionally problematic arrangement.  The question is whether the rest of the Court will take the needed step of overturning a decision that was, as Sauer said, “grievously wrong” when it was issued and that has led to the creation of a behemoth fourth branch of government largely immune to the democratic process. The justices need to correct the mistake the Court made almost a century ago. Fortunately, from the tenor of their questions, it seems likely they may do just that.  The post Majority of Justices Seem Prepared to Hold that the President Can Control the Executive Branch appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Trump administration has located 62,000 children who entered the U.S. unaccompanied under the previous administration, according to border czar Tom Homan.   “Some of these children were in sex trafficking—we found them. Some were in forced labor, some were being mistreated—I can’t even discuss some of the mistreatment we found out about,” Homan said Sunday on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends Weekend.” “President [Donald] Trump, again, proves why he’s the greatest president in my lifetime,” Homan added. “Over 62,000 children rescued by President Trump, again, children that were ignored and weren’t being looked for under President [Joe] Biden.”   Under the Biden administration, hundreds of thousands of illegal alien minors arrived at the southern border alone and were released into the care of sponsors, but the Biden administration did not track the location or status of each child after placement.   Between fiscal years 2019 and 2023, more than 448,000 unaccompanied alien children were transferred from Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody to the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services, and most of those children were placed in the care of a sponsor. A sponsor could be a close or distant family member and sometimes had no direct family relation to the minor.   Among the 448,000 minors to enter the U.S. in recent years, ICE failed to issue more than 233,000 notices to appear in immigration court, Joseph Cuffari, inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, told lawmakers in July. Furthermore, more than 43,000 migrant children who were given a notice to appear in immigration court failed to do so.    The Trump administration is now working to safety return unaccompanied migrant children to their home countries, The Daily Signal previously reported. The Trump backed “Big Beautiful Bill” now provides the Department of Health and Human Services with the ability to repatriate to their home country children who entered the U.S. alone.   Migrant children have consistently been a hot-button issue in recent years. Reports of “kids in cages” spread like wildfire thought the media during the first Trump administration.   In 2018, the Trump administration rolled out the Zero-Tolerance Policy for Criminal Illegal Entry, under which illegal aliens were prosecuted for entering the country illegally. Children cannot legally accompany adults into custody, hence family separation ensued, and minors were held in Border Patrol processing centers.   Facing backlash, the first Trump administration issued an executive order to stop the separation of families at the border.   When Biden took office in January 2021, he ended Trump’s border security measures, and mass migration, including of unaccompanied children, ensued. More than 10 million illegal aliens entered the U.S. in four years, flooding the immigration courts and overwhelming the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which operates under HHS and held responsibility for matching unaccompanied migrant children with sponsors.   A strained system led to poor vetting, rapid placement of minors with sponsors, and even abuses of the sponsor program, such as gang members applying to sponsor a migrant child, as whistleblower Aaron Stevenson previously exposed.   Working as an analyst for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in 2021, Stevenson began to notice that aliens with gang affiliations were applying to be sponsors for unaccompanied migrant children.   It’s Stevenson’s view that the primary reason gang members were seeking to sponsor children was financial.    “I think advantageous networks saw a situation, and they exploited it,” Stevenson said.    Finding the children placed with sponsors during the Biden administration is challenging, according to Homan, because children do not leave a digital footprint through credit cards, mortgage payments, or other transactions that allow authorities to track their location.   Still, Homan says, Homeland Security Investigations agents are working every day to find the missing migrant children and “make sure they’re safe.”  The post Trump Administration Has Found 62,000 Children, Some Victims of Sex Trafficking and Forced Labor, Tom Homan Reports appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Supreme Court’s conservative-leaning majority seems poised to scrap a 90-year precedent that has insulated the deep state for decades.  Justices are weighing whether an elected president can remove executive branch officials serving on supposedly “independent” commissions or boards, and whether blocking the president from doing so violates the constitutional principle of separation of powers. This specific case regards President Donald Trump’s ouster of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter. If the justices uphold Trump’s firing of Slaughter, that might overturn the precedent set Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935), which also dealt with the FTC. In the New Deal-era Humphrey’s Executor case, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress could enact laws limiting a president’s power to fire “independent” agency executive officials. Even Chief Justice John Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee who has occasionally joined the court’s three liberals against his fellow conservatives, called Humphrey’s Executor a “dried husk,” and said the original ruling “was addressing an agency that had very little if any executive power.” Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued, “The modern expansion of the federal bureaucracy sharpens the court’s duty to ensure that the executive branch is overseen by a president accountable to the people.” ?FOURTH BRANCH OF GOVERNMENTJohn Sauer rightly warns "independent agencies" tempt "Congress to erect at the heart of our government a headless fourth branch insulated from political accountability." It's time to overturn Humphreys Executor.https://t.co/BA8WIJCU4o pic.twitter.com/TiT0iGzgPw— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) December 8, 2025 Slaughter’s lawyer, Amit Agarwal, special counsel at the left-leaning group Protect Democracy, told justices that independent commissions have existed in some form since the 1790s, and added such bodies don’t operate with unchecked power.  “More than two dozen traditional, independent agencies have been established by statutes enacted by the people’s elected representatives and signed into law, all of them, by democratically elected presidents,” Agarwal said. ‘Absolute Power’ Justice Sonia Sotomayor, an appointee of President Barack Obama, said scrapping the precedent would give “absolute power to the president.” “You’re asking us to destroy the structure of government, and to take away from Congress its ability to protect its idea that the government is better structured with some agencies that are independent,” Sotmayor said.  Sauer said the Trump administration is asking the court to return to a longstanding separation of powers argument that predated the 1935 ruling.  “The fundamental alteration of the structure of the government was ushered in by Humphreys, and then the Congress kind of took Humphreys and ran with it, in the building of the modern administrative state, in the proliferation of independent agencies,” Sauer said.  ?THE SKY WILL NOT FALLD. John Sauer addresses the hyperbolic warnings that the entire government will fall if the Supreme Court returns "independent agencies" to the control of the people's elected president. pic.twitter.com/DgbCp08VQP— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) December 8, 2025 The so-called “independent” boards and commissions have members appointed by Republican and Democrat presidents who, in theory, operate without political concerns. They serve for a set term, regardless of whether a new president of a different party assumes office during that term.  Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Joe Biden appointee, defended Progressive Era policies. “My understanding was that independent agencies exist because Congress has decided that some issues, some matters, some areas, should be handled in this way by nonpartisan experts,” Jackson said. “Congress is saying that expertise matters with respect to aspects of the economy and transportation, and the various independent agencies that we have. So, having a president come in and fire all the scientists, and the doctors, and the economists, and the PhDs, and replacing them with loyalists, and people who don’t know anything, is actually not in the best interest of the citizens of the United States.” Sauer replied, “We can have a government that benefits from expertise without being ruled by expertise.”  Limits for Congress? The Republican-appointed justices later pressed Agarwal about what limits Congress would have under the natural logic of his arguments.  “Your position would allow Congress to create independent agencies, maybe converting some of the existing executive agencies into independent agencies, with no political balance requirement, with a long term, say, 10 or more years, and with the chairs not subject to removal as chair,” said Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee.   “I just want to give you a chance to deal with the hard hypothetical when both houses of Congress and presidency are controlled by said party, then creating a lot of these independent agencies with or extending some of the current independent agencies into these kinds of situations so as to thwart future presidents of the opposite party,” Kavanaugh continued.  Agarwal said there should be existing protections from that, outside his case.  “The bigger point is that historically, this is a problem, and this is a problem that has been resolved through a process of political accommodation,” Argawal said. “There’s no reason to believe that that process, which has been adequate for a very long time, will not be adequate in the future. But if it is not, the court can keep open the possibility that there will be time enough to decide on new constitutional rules.” Later during the arguments, Justice Neil Gorsuch, also a Trump appointee, asked, “The president is vested with all the executive power. You agree that he has a duty to faithfully execute all the laws?” After some hedging, Agarwal responded, “I would say, no.” “The president does not, under both history and tradition, have to have plenary power of supervision, but, in the case of the FTC, he does have some power of supervision, including, if there’s a demonstrable palpable violation of law, the president could absolutely fire a commissioner of the FTC under the plain language of the statute,” Agarwal argued. Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggests overturning Humphrey's Executor would "fundamentally" alter our "structure of government."D. John Sauer rightly responded that Humphrey's Executor itself fundamentally changed government, making it less accountable to the people. pic.twitter.com/2M6on6prHX— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) December 8, 2025 ‘Distrust of the Democratic Process’ Agarwal did not have good answers for justices when asked about the limiting principles of his argument, Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal after the arguments. Further, conservative justices seemed dismissive of liberal justices’ concerns about “chaos and destruction” if the Trump administration won the case, von Spakovsky said.  “It was clear the conservatives just thought that was a ridiculous argument,” he noted. He added that Jackson’s argument about government by experts is the argument progressives have advanced for 100 years.   “The liberal justices showed a fundamental distrust of the democratic process,” von Spakovsky said. The Humphreys case revolved around President Franklin Roosevelt’s firing of FTC Commissioner William Humphrey. The Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 prohibited the president from firing a commissioner for any reason other than “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”  Humphrey sued but died before the Supreme Court decided the case. Thus, it was named after the executor of Humphrey’s estate. The high court held that Congress can enact laws limiting a president’s ability to remove members of independent boards and commissions.  The post Supreme Court Majority Seems Skeptical of Longstanding Deep State Protection appeared first on The Daily Signal.