(DCNF)—The Biden-Harris administration has aggressively pursued litigation against red states as a means of advancing its agenda, which legal experts said could infringe on states’ rights.
States such as Texas, which have taken steps to limit the surge of illegal migrants — reaching record levels under the Biden administration — are now facing lawsuits from the federal government. Similarly, states that passed laws contradicting the Biden administration’s positions on issues like abortion and gender have faced lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the bills.
The amount of lawsuits the Biden administration has filed is “unprecedented,” Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“And all of them are examples of the DOJ abusing its law enforcement power and infringing on federalism by going after the states,” he said.
The DOJ sued Virginia on Friday over an initiative intended to remove non-citizens from the voter rolls “too close” to the election. Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin called it a “desperate attempt to attack the legitimacy” of the state’s elections.
“With less than 30 days until the election, the Biden-Harris Department of Justice is filing an unprecedented lawsuit against me and the Commonwealth of Virginia, for appropriately enforcing a 2006 law signed by Democrat Tim Kaine that requires Virginia to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls — a process that starts with someone declaring themselves a non-citizen and then registering to vote,” Youngkin said in a statement.
The administration likewise targeted Alabama over an effort to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls. Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen, who announced in August that 3,251 registered voters had been issued noncitizen identification numbers by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), noted the federal government repeatedly denied requests for a list of noncitizens residing in the state.
When the state decided to tackle the issue itself, it was promptly hit with a lawsuit. Removing voters from the state registration list within 90 days of an election violates federal law, the DOJ argued.
The Biden-Harris DOJ has launched an unprecedented assault against American voters.
Just days before the election, they have sued the States of Alabama and Virginia to keep illegal aliens on the voter rolls.
Every single American should be outraged. pic.twitter.com/kuzX1RNcDd
— America First Legal (@America1stLegal) October 12, 2024
Other election litigation include the DOJ’s lawsuits against Arizona in July 2022 over a proof of citizenship voting law and Georgia in June 2021 over an election integrity law.
The Supreme Court allowed Arizona to partially enforce its law in August after the Republican National Committee (RNC) intervened in a separate lawsuit brought by a left-wing activist groups. While the high court rejected a ban on casting ballots for president without proof of citizenship, the majority allowed Arizona to reject state voter registration forms that lack it.
In Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger suggested the DOJ may have coordinated with activists on the case, requesting documents related to the Department’s decision.
“Given that it is a felony under federal law for an alien to register or vote, DOJ should be applauding the states trying to do something about this problem and helping the states defend lawsuits filed against them instead of suing the states,” von Spakovsky told the DCNF, noting the same is true in the immigration space. “The federal government needs the assistance and help of state governments and state law enforcement to enforce our immigration laws and stop the unlawful flood of illegal aliens coming into the country.”
The Biden DOJ has also taken aggressive action against states attempting to crack down on illegal immigration.
It sued Texas in January over a state law that empowers local authorities to arrest migrants who enter illegally, followed by suing Iowa and Oklahoma in May over similar laws.
In 2012, the Supreme Court held that an Arizona law making it a crime to be in the state without authorization was preempted by federal law.
“There was very little chance of Oklahoma or Texas being successful without overturning Arizona v. US, and maybe that is their objective, but it is hardly improper for the federal government to enforce what the Supreme Court has said are unconstitutional laws infringing on the power of the federal government (however much I disagree with the opinion in Arizona v. United States),” Competitive Enterprise Institute attorney Devin Watkins told the DCNF. “The Supreme Court refused to block the Texas statute on an emergency basis, suggesting that it is at least possible that the Supreme Court may overturn Arizona v. US on appeal.”
Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador accused the Biden administration of ignoring states’ rights when the DOJ brought a lawsuit challenging Idaho’s abortion ban to the Supreme Court.
The administration sued shortly after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, alleging Idaho’s Defense of Life Act prevents doctors from performing abortions in emergency circumstances as they claim is required under federal law. The Supreme Court reinstated limits on the law in June, sending the case back to the lower court without deciding whether the statute conflicted with federal law.
Currently, the DOJ is fighting Tennessee’s ban on child sex change procedures for minors at the Supreme Court.
South Texas College of Law Houston professor Josh Blackman told the DCNF it looks like the Biden DOJ is “trying to initiate as many lawsuits as possible before the election.”
“If Trump wins, it will be hard for [the] DOJ to terminate pending cases,” Blackman said. “It is also possible private groups can move to intervene to keep the cases alive.”
Watkins disagreed that the Biden administration has pursued more litigation than usual, noting lawsuits over voting issues are “actually quite common due to the federal election issues at stake.”
“Overall, I don’t believe that the federal government appears to be filing lawsuits against states any more often during this administration than in previous administrations,” he said. “Some of this litigation could infringe on states’ rights if successful, and in many cases, the federal government should lose, but this litigation isn’t unusual.”
During the Trump administration, the government sued California for a cap and trade agreement with Quebec. It also sued California, New Jersey and King County, Washington, over sanctuary city policies.
“The Trump administration did other things to put pressure on states to change their laws, like the DHS’s suspension of NY’s access to the Global Entry program, or threatening federal payments to local jurisdictions,” Watkins added.
The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment.
Featured Image: Screen Capture/CSPAN
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
