Noem on thin ice? Few would claim that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem was hired for her position because of her administrative acumen.

Even so, a Wall Street Journal exposé on Noem’s DHS reveals a shocking level of infighting, dysfunction, and obsessive self-promotion at the top of a department responsible for implementing President Donald Trump’s mass deportation vision.

The Journal reports that Noem carefully tracks the television appearances of border czar Tom Homan, with whom she rarely speaks, to make sure she’s getting more airtime. Career immigration enforcement staff have been let go or demoted for questioning or objecting to the secretary’s decisions.

Noem and Corey Lewendowski, her advisor and rumored romantic partner, have also centralized control over contracting, leading to delays, higher prices, and potential conflicts of interest.

The secretary has raised eyebrows even within the Trump administration for spending on media campaigns that seem to do more to promote Noem’s image than to fulfill the DHS’ mission.

There are also several “lol” moments in the article. For instance, this bit about the DHS’ public communications during January’s winter storm:

Staff were also told not to use the word “ice” in any public messaging about the winter storm because they didn’t want any connection to the increasingly unpopular immigration operation in Minnesota, [Federal Emergency Management Agency] staff said.

Then there’s the petty bad boss behavior:

In the blanket incident, Noem had to switch planes after a maintenance issue was discovered, but her blanket wasn’t moved to the second plane, according to the people familiar with the incident. The Coast Guard pilot was initially fired and told to take a commercial flight home when they reached their destination. They eventually reinstated the pilot because no one else was available to fly them home.

The DHS spokeswoman didn’t address the episode but said the secretary has “made personnel decisions to deliver excellence.”

One could maybe argue there’s a libertarian silver lining in all this. As Reason has argued many times, the DHS should be abolished, and its few necessary functions spun off into other departments. It would therefore be odd to root for more effective administration of a department largely tasked with doing bad and/or unnecessary things.

Still, one can see a through line between the DHS’ dysfunction under Noem and some of the department’s worst abuses. The secretary’s focus on showy, promotional immigration enforcement and her feuding with career Immigration and Customs Enforcement leadership precipitated the department’s disastrous operation in Minneapolis, which resulted in two American citizens being shot by federal agents. That operation is now being ended.

There’s really no upside to a federal department becoming more dysfunctional and more deadly.

Boat tax break. In an effort to right the sinking ship of her South Carolina gubernatorial campaign, Rep. Nancy Mace (R–S.C.) has proposed one of the more ridiculous government subsidies to date.

On X, Mace touted her introduction of a federal bill last month that would allow taxpayers to deduct the interest they pay on loans used to purchase new, American-made recreational boats from their federal taxes.

South Carolina's boating industry generates $6.5 BILLION in annual economic impact and supports 27,100+ jobs statewide.

We introduced the No Tax on Boat Loan Interest Act of 2026. If you can deduct interest on your car loan, you should be able to deduct interest on your boat… pic.twitter.com/W4EQHUqpnN

— Nancy Mace (@NancyMace) February 11, 2026

To be sure, tax cuts are all well and good, especially if they are paid for by spending cuts. Targeted tax deductions merely shift the burden of taxation from some small favored group onto taxpayers as a whole or onto future taxpayers via increased borrowing.

That’s certainly the case with Mace’s boat loan interest deduction. It should be opposed on those grounds alone. And unlike other targeted tax breaks for healthcare spending or education, there’s no arguable public interest in letting people deduct boat loan interest from their taxes.

By the Mace proposal’s own definition, the deduction could only be used for recreational boats, which, nice as they might be to own, are hardly a necessity.

If it works like the mortgage interest deduction, one would expect the boat loan tax break to merely encourage wealthier people who were already going to purchase a boat to take out more debt to buy a bigger boat. If you’re hunting sharks, maybe you do need a bigger boat, but the tax code doesn’t need to subsidize it.

Additionally, the distributional consequences of Mace’s proposed deduction make it patently offensive. The tax burden is being shifted from rich to poor, old to young, and crusty sea dogs to salt-of-the-earth landlubbers.

Mace’s political career, as detailed in a recent New York Magazine profile, is at a low ebb right now. It’s hardly surprising, then, that a politician suffering flagging popularity would try to revive their appeal with a schlocky, pandering tax break.

It is revealing about our politics that her pandering tax break would take the specific form of a subsidy for boomers’ recreation at the expense of the rest of the country.

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Scenes from D.C. Metaphor alert! Washington, D.C., is now officially the site of the nation’s largest-ever wastewater spill, after a section of 72-inch pipe along the district’s border with Maryland failed, releasing hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage into the Potomac River.

The failure in a section of a 72-inch sewer pipe in MD, has release of close to a billion gallons of raw sewage into the Potomac river just inside the Beltway

It’s now considered the LARGEST spill of wastewater in U.S. history

MD & VA Dems haven’t said a word. https://t.co/2WKcgDMUWi pic.twitter.com/xZME5lBira

— NOVA Campaigns (@NoVA_Campaigns) February 12, 2026

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QUICK LINKS

• President Donald Trump pardoned five NFL players, whose convictions ranged from drug trafficking to counterfeiting, on Thursday. Pardoning ex-players should be the real Super Bowl halftime show.
• Goldman Sachs’ top lawyer has been fired following revelations that she had a close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.
• A county in Northern Virginia, the world’s headquarters for data centers, is revolting against new facilities opening up in town.
• Watch the latest episode of Freed Up, the podcast I cohost with Robby Soave. We discuss Epstein, AI, and, of course, Mad Men.

• That really is an expensive chicken.

They’re shopping at Rigor Hill Market in Tribeca and buying $48 rotisserie chickens pic.twitter.com/gJ6eTHfzi6

— Ryan Radia (@RyanRadia) February 12, 2026

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Wisconsin Public Radio (Sarah Lehr) reported Monday:

A judge has sanctioned Kenosha County District Attorney Xavier Solis over his use of artificial intelligence in court filings.

Circuit Court Judge David Hughes called out Solis on Friday for using AI in a response to a defense attorney’s request to have a burglary case dismissed [without disclosing this, as Kenosha County court policy required].

Hughes also blasted Solis for using “hallucinated and false citations,” online court records show….

The judge dismissed the case, but defense lawyer Michael Cicchini was quoted as saying:

The judge actually granted my motion to dismiss on substantive grounds. In other words, the judge found that there was not probable cause that the defendant committed a crime. His ruling was based on the evidence the state presented at the preliminary hearing that was held about two years ago, under the previous district attorney administration.

Several years ago, Solis had been involved as an attorney in a dispute over the return of the bail funds in the Kyle Rittenhouse case.

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Justice Antonin Scalia died ten years ago today, and he left an extraordinary legacy to the American people. Justice Scalia single-handedly revived legal formalism and textualism, which had been dead in the legal world since the Legal Realist Revolution of the 1920’s.

Justice Scalia’s revival of textualism and rejection of legislative history and original intent remains dominant today on the Supreme Court and in the lower federal courts, and it is increasingly important in legal academic writing. Justice Scalia taught all of us that words matter and that it is the original public meaning of a text which is the law, and not the intentions of those who wrote it.

In championing formalism and textualism, Scalia built on Attorney General Ed Meese’s emphasis on originalist history, and Judge Robert H. Bork’s insistence on the rule of law as a constraint on judges. Each of these three great men revolutionized American constitutional law and the law of statutory interpretation in their own distinctive way.

But the job of harmonizing his own textualism with Meese’s emphasis on history and Bork’s emphasis on the rule of law for judges fell to Justice Scalia because he was the one of these three men who was on the Supreme Court from September 26, 1986, until his death on February 13, 2016. Scalia, through his sheer brilliance, the force of his personality, and the energy and passion that he poured into doing his job as a Supreme Court justice transformed American law.

U.S. Supreme Court opinions in 2026 are far more formalist, more textualist, more historical, and more conscious of the rule of law because of Justice Scalia. All nine of the current justices have been profoundly shaped by Scalia’s legacy even if only two of the justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, view themselves as always being bound by the original public meaning of texts. Justice Thomas, but not yet Justice Gorsuch, has said essentially that he never feels bound by precedent. Justice Scalia did follow longstanding precedents that were non-originalist, but which were deeply rooted in American history and tradition.

Justice Scalia, like Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes before him, wrote dissents that have become today’s majority opinions. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) finally heeded Scalia’s call for the overruling of Roe v. Wade (1973). Scalia’s passionate demand that we leave abortion law up to the people of the fifty states won out because of his many powerful dissents, especially in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992).

Racial preferences and opposition to affirmative action were frequent topics of Scalia’s other dissents. Thanks to Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), and to the Herculean efforts of the Trump Administration, racial preferences are being torn up root and branch all over the country.

The Roberts Court, with huge help from President Trump, may be on the verge of getting rid of Humphrey’s Executor (1935) and the headless fourth branch of the government. If the Supreme Court so rules, it will be in part because of Scalia’s powerful dissent in Morrison v. Olson (1988), which was surely one of the most unsound Supreme Court majority opinions of all time.

When Justice Scalia died on February 13, 2016, his death galvanized the whole country’s political system. President Barack Obama nominated a feckless man, Judge and future Attorney General, Merrick Garland, to replace Justice Scalia. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, in the most consequential act of his long career, kept Scalia’s seat open to be filled by the new president who would be elected in 2016.

American voters on election day 2016 knew that they were choosing between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to fill the crucial Scalia seat on the Supreme Court, and voters in the key Electoral College battleground states chose Trump. Public opinion polls of the 2016 electorate showed that of those voters for whom choosing a Supreme Court Justice was their top issue, 57% voted for Donald Trump and 43% voted for Hillary Clinton.

Justice Scalia’s replacement was such a political earthquake with the American people that it may have changed the outcome of a presidential election and produced a Supreme Court with six good Republican-appointed justices on it. I cannot think of another instance in 237 years of American history where there was a good chance that the death of a Supreme Court justice changed the outcome of a presidential election.

As wonderful as today’s Supreme Court is, it must be acknowledged that none of the nine current justices are public intellectuals like Scalia. None of them tour every top left-wing law school, and ninety countries all over the world, preaching the Gospel of original public meaning textualism.

As a result of this gap, some like former Scalia law clerk Adrian Vermeule have taken to challenging originalism and urging for right-wing judicial activism now that conservatives have the votes. Justice Scalia would have been appalled, but not surprised, that heresies like this would appear, and he would have done everything in his power to stamp them out.

Whoever you are and whatever you are doing today, dear reader, please pause for a second to reflect for a moment on the brilliant life and legacy of Justice Antonin Scalia. God made only one man like that, and it was our great privilege to share this earth with him for a time.

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For my entire adult life, I’ve listened to self-described “constitutional” conservatives strut around like God’s gift to the nation’s conscience, as they lecture everyone on the importance of upholding the original intent of America’s founding document. They’ve been oddly silent as Donald Trump’s administration directly assaults the Constitution. He’s not the first one to do it, but he is doing so more brazenly than others.

Even if some “whataboutism” is appropriate, wouldn’t it be more consistent for conservatives to criticize these assaults just as they criticized previous assaults under Joe Biden and Barack Obama? Cheering—or remaining silent—as ICE agents arrest those who photograph them (First Amendment), carry out warrantless searches (Fourth Amendment), and ignore the directives of governors (10th Amendment) is the definition of hypocrisy.

As the late conservative writer and Christian apologist Malcolm Muggeridge said, “An orgy looks particularly alluring seen through the mists of righteous indignation.” Many modern American conservatives seem to enjoy this orgy of violence as it’s carried out under state sanction, but aren’t even committed enough to their “Constitution” bit to feign any righteous indignation at it. We’ve seen a few notable exceptions, but it’s the latest example of how partisanship warps people’s minds.

But I figured the modern Right would at least draw the line at the one right they seem to place above every other right: the Second Amendment right to gun ownership. Here again the Republican administration has taken a living-and-breathing approach to the Constitution. Some conservatives have complained about the administration’s recent comments on guns, but they haven’t been as apoplectic as one would expect.

“I don’t know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign,” said Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem after ICE agents shot to death Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, per ABC News. FBI Director Kash Patel echoed those sentiments: “As Kristi said, you cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It’s that simple.” Trump also weighed in, calling the nurse an “agitator and, perhaps, insurrectionist.” The evidence suggests no such thing, but that’s MAGA: always double down.

The hypocrisy is glaring, of course. Republicans have celebrated Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two people and wounded another at a Black Lives Matter rally in Wisconsin. He testified that he acted in self-defense and a jury acquitted him, but he did in fact travel from Illinois to the protest with a firearm. Officers appeared to have taken Pretti’s handgun from him before the fatal encounter, whereas the internet is full of photos of Rittenhouse carrying a semi-automatic rifle.

Contrast conservatives’ harsh critique of Pretti with this description from The Guardian of Rittenhouse’s appearance at a Turning Point USA conference in Phoenix following his acquittal: “As Rittenhouse took the stage, thousands of cheering fans chanted his name, along with his own theme song, adapted from his name. Hosts asked if any women in the crowd wanted to go on a date with Rittenhouse, prompting loud cheers.”

So apparently the ban on carrying a gun “to any protest that you want” has exceptions—at least in Republican circles. The funny thing about the Constitution: It’s meant to protect everyone from government overreach. The only way that constitutional rights mean anything is if they are applied equally to friend and foe alike.

But then U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro compounded the administration’s problem when she said in a recent Fox News interview: “You bring a gun into the district, you mark my words, you’re going to jail. I don’t care if you have a license in another district, and I don’t care if you’re a law-abiding gun owner somewhere else. You bring a gun into this district, count on going to jail and hope you get the gun back.” That reinforced the idea that the Second Amendment is fine if, say, you cosplay at a pro-MAGA event or a coffee shop, but maybe not if you’re protesting current federal policies.

Politico reported that she backtracked after receiving criticism from some Republicans, but Pirro’s new statement wasn’t much better than the first one: She said she supports the Second Amendment, but “Washington, D.C. law requires handguns be licensed in the District with the Metropolitan Police Department to be carried into our community.” Does that mean Republicans are now onboard handgun licensing? It’s easy to get tangled up this way when one lacks consistent principles.

To their credit, some gun-rights supporters did get agitated over this kerfuffle. After the administration’s Pretti reaction, the pro-Trump National Rifle Association offered this mild rebuke: “The NRA unequivocally believes that all law-abiding citizens have a right to keep and bear arms anywhere they have a legal right to be.” That’s good practice. Maybe someday those who claim to champion the Constitution will do so more often, more consistently, and more vigorously.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

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2/13/16: Justice Antonin Scalia died.

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It has been illegal since 1986 for the federal government to establish a national forearms registry. As you might expect of the sort of people who gravitate to government employment, the bureaucrats at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), enabled by Biden-era policy changes, have taken that as a challenge. Now, members of Congress want answers from the federal gun cops about a vast gun registry database that could threaten the liberty and privacy of firearms owners. They have been stonewalled so far.

Lawmakers Question an Illegal Gun Registry

On February 3, Rep. Michael Cloud (R–Texas) and 26 other members of Congress wrote to the ATF asking about the status of a year-old query that the regulatory agency has ignored. The original 2025 letter inquired about the ATF’s collection of Form 4473 firearms transaction records, which are filled out in the course of every firearms sale by a licensed dealer, from gun vendors that have gone out of business. These records have accumulated and turned into a gun registry in waiting.

“We fear that ATF could have as many as 1.1-billion-gun registration records in its database, if ATF has continued with this historic pace and digitalized an average of 50 million firearm transaction records per year,” the members of Congress reminded the ATF in the recent letter. “This is a violation of the federal prohibition on gun registration at 18 U.S.C. 926(a)(3).”

The source of concern for the 27 members of Congress is not only the de facto registry—though that’s disturbing enough—but that it has seemingly been created in defiance of a specific prohibition. Under the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act, which became law in 1986, “no such rule or regulation prescribed after the date of the enactment of the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act may require that…any system of registration of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions or dispositions be established.”

However, that law also contained the seeds of mischief by requiring gun dealers to maintain sales records that, if they go out of business, must be surrendered to the government. For decades, dealers could purge older records, surrendering only more recent ones to the ATF if they closed their doors. That changed under the Biden administration.

ATF Builds on a Biden-Era Policy Change

“In 2022, the ATF finalized a rule requiring FFLs to maintain firearm transaction records indefinitely instead of destroying them after 20 years,” Del Schlangen wrote in 2024 for the University of Wyoming College of Law’s Firearms Research Center. “This move, along with the ATF’s ‘zero-tolerance’ guidance for revoking FFL licenses, has further fueled concerns about the potential for a federal gun registry.”

Schlangen also noted that instead of the masses of paper retained in the past, the ATF was now converting firearm transaction records to electronic format, and “as of 2021, the ATF had digitized over 50 million out-of-business records in that year alone.”

That figure wasn’t advertised by the Biden administration. Instead, the Gun Owners of America (GOA) gained access to internal ATF documents revealing that in 2021, the regulatory agency processed 54.7 million out-of-business records—mostly paper, but some submitted in increasingly common digital format. Those records quickly added up.

In response to a 2021 query from Cloud, who has turned the backdoor gun registry into a crusade, the gun bureaucrats conceded that “ATF manages 920,664,765 OBR [out of business records] as of November 2021. This includes digital and an estimated number of hard copy records that are awaiting image conversion. It is currently estimated that 865,787,086 of those records are in digitalized format.”

But the Registry Isn’t Searchable! Sort of.

A May 2022 report from GOA based on freedom of information requests revealed that the ATF stored these records in searchable PDF and JPEG formats. The agency claims it’s in compliance with the law banning gun registries, though, because the resulting database isn’t searchable by name. But that’s apparently a choice that can be altered at any time.

“It appears the only reason ATF’s registry is not searchable by name is because ATF has merely disabled the ability for its software to search that particular record field,” notes the GOA report. “Of course, something that is so easily disabled could be easily re-enabled.”

Besides, the report adds, “ATF records reveal its gun registry to be searchable by weapon type, make, model, serial number, and caliber, among other functions.”

In fact, proponents of a gun registry used the searchability of the Out of Business Records Imaging System (OBRIS) as a selling point after the attempted assassination of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. After the would-be assassin was killed, law enforcement agents seized his rifle with hopes of retrieving details based on the serial number.

“They were able to do so in about 30 minutes,” Perry Stein reported for The Washington Post. “The search used sale records from an out-of-business gun store that the government is required to collect—but that Republican lawmakers and the gun lobby would like to place off-limits.”

Well, yes. Advocates of self-defense and of gun ownership in general oppose a gun registry because they fear it could lead to gun confiscation, as politicians including former Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris keep threatening. That’s why they successfully pushed to make a registry illegal. And a searchable database of gun sales that has had the search function for names temporarily disabled is a gun registry waiting to be activated. The fact that it has been built at all shows a bureaucracy champing at the bit to escape restrictions on its power.

As Rep. Cloud commented last week, “the American people have a right to know if their government is maintaining an unlawful registry of firearms and firearm owners in direct violation of U.S. code and the Second Amendment.”

Government Incompetence Is the Only Saving Grace

The only saving grace is that if the federal government ever flips the switch on that gun database, it’s going to be a mess. Records that are 10, 20, or 30 years out of date will have been superseded by the passage of time. Gun owners will have moved, divorced and divided their property, died and left their possessions to their heirs, lost guns, or transferred them in private transactions. Or they’ll just claim that their guns are long gone in tragic boating accidents.

But when has the federal government ever done anything especially well? Incompetence has never prevented government officials from taking on big projects like gun registries, and from damaging liberty as they do so.

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