President Donald Trump on Thursday pressed Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., to dismantle the Senate’s ‘blue slip’ tradition, arguing that the practice has allowed Democrats to block Republican judicial and U.S. attorney nominees.

‘If they say no, then it is OVER for that very well qualified Republican candidate. Only a really far left Democrat can be approved. It is shocking that Republicans, under Senator Chuck G, allow this scam to continue. So unfair to Republicans, and not Constitutional,’ Trump wrote on Truth Social.

‘I am hereby asking Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a fantastic guy, to get something done, ideally the termination of Blue Slips. Too many GREAT REPUBLICANS are being, SENT PACKIN’. None are getting approved!!!’

Trump’s remarks come as courts continue to scrutinize the legality of his U.S. attorney appointments.

Alina Habba announced on Monday that she would be stepping down as the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey after an appeals court ruled she was unlawfully serving in the role.

Trump appointed Lindsey Halligan to serve as interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, after Erik Siebert resigned. A federal judge in November dismissed the indictments of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, finding that Halligan had been unlawfully appointed and therefore lacked the authority to bring the charges.

Trump is effectively urging the Senate to end the long-standing custom for all judicial nominees. Senators from both parties are reluctant to change the practice, fearing they would lose the ability to stall or block nominees they have concerns about.

Fox News’ Chad Pergram contributed to this report.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., called on Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to resign Thursday during opening remarks at a House Homeland Security Committee hearing on ‘Worldwide Threats to the Homeland.’

‘You have systematically dismantled the Department of Homeland Security, put your own interests above the department, and violated the law. You are making America less safe,’ said Thompson. ‘So rather than sitting here and wasting your time and ours with more corruption, lies and lawlessness, I call on you to resign. Do a real service to the country and just resign. That is, if President Trump doesn’t fire you first.’

As Noem was giving her opening statement, several protesters against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) interrupted, yelling, ‘Get ICE off our streets,’ and, ‘Stop terrorizing our community.’

The protesters were escorted out by Capitol Police and detained outside the hearing room.

Noem, who was joined at the hearing by National Counterterrorism Center director Joe Kent and Michael Glasheen, the operations director of the National Security Branch of the FBI, said one of her grandchildren, who was in the audience, was crying a little during Thompson’s remarks.

‘I don’t think she agreed with him,’ Noem said jokingly.

She touted the work DHS has done to secure the southern border and protect the U.S.

‘DHS is eradicating transnational organized crime and the stopping of deadly drugs from continuing to be funneled into our communities,’ she told lawmakers. ‘We’re ending illegal immigration, returning sanity back to our immigration system, and we’re defending against cyberattacks against our critical infrastructure.’

The former South Dakota governor, speaking about the global threats facing the country — including those posed by domestic extremists and radical Islamic terrorism — said the U.S. should brace for heightened risks as it prepares to host major events in 2026 such as the World Cup and the nation’s 250th birthday.

‘These large-scale events will be potential targets for a range of bad actors, and they come with an increased level of risk. DHS is using every tool and authority we have to ensure the safety of U.S. citizens, and our visitors can enjoy next year’s events,’ Noem added.

Rumors had swirled in recent days that President Donald Trump was considering replacing her as head of DHS. Trump pushed back on those rumors on Wednesday, telling reporters that Noem has been ‘fantastic.’

Noem also addressed the rumors, speaking to Fox News prior to Thursday’s hearing.

‘Oh, that’s absolutely not true,’ she said. ‘President Trump and I are doing wonderfully. I’m so proud to work for him, and I’m going to continue to serve at his pleasure.’

Fox News’ Bill Melugin contributed to this report.

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. – One would think that running a profitable legal marijuana industry would be just about the easiest thing in the world, but don’t tell that to the Democrat leadership of Minnesota, which allowed wokeness and apparent corruption to grind their legalization rollout into dust.

Wherever one lands on the benefits or increasingly evident harms of marijuana legalization, once a state decides to do it, it has a responsibility to do it in a way that most benefits all the citizens. Of course, Gov. Tim Walz and the Minnesota Democrats made it all about social equity.

The 2023 legalization legislation mandated that for a year and a half, only Indian reservations could obtain licenses, a form of reparations similar to when New York mind-numbingly mandated that only people with previous marijuana convictions could open stores.

The upshot is that today, several dispensaries in the state have no product and others have a dwindling supply. One dispensary operator told me with a sigh, ‘We might get a new supply next week.’

And that’s not all, because the state has not approved enough licenses for transporting the product, much of it is sitting at farms, unable to get to market.

But the worst part of this, one very much related to the current scandal over fraud committed by Somali groups supposedly feeding kids, is that the legislation provides millions of dollars in grants and loans to start weed shops based on wokeness and DEI.

For example, the CanStartUp program ‘is a loan program available to new cannabis microbusinesses,’ in which a non-profit hands out the taxpayer cash ‘with priority given to social equity applicants.’

‘Social Equity Applicants,’ can be roughly read to mean no White guys.

Dr. Scott Jensen, one of several Republicans seeking to stop Walz from winning a third term next year, said it is part of a pattern with Walz and his cronies.

‘The Walz team has repeatedly been characterized by a willingness to play political hardball by picking winners and losers, focusing on preserving voting blocks, rewarding loyalty over competence, ignoring employee input, and squashing transparency,’ Jensen told me.

John Nagel, a former state trooper running as a Republican against Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., had a harsher assessment.

‘Minnesota Democrats are recreating the exact conditions that led to the Feeding Our Future scandal, only this time they’re doing it inside the state’s new marijuana industry,’ he said. ‘When you look at the pattern, it’s unmistakable. The same political class that let Feeding Our Future flourish is now designing the cannabis market using the same toolkit—DEI language as political cover, nonprofit intermediaries with insider ties, and almost no accountability.’

He’s got a point. Why does Minnesota need to hand out millions of dollars to nonprofits to teach people how to sell weed? It’s not hard, just hang up a sign and ring up the sales.

This kind of corruption is nothing new. In the 1920s, Democratic Party machines gave out no-show patronage jobs down at the docks. Today, they hand out needless multimillion-dollar DEI contracts. It’s the same game.

The job of the government is to make things run efficiently for all citizens, not to infuse every project or policy with DEI initiatives that are little more than payoffs to loyal voter groups. Nationwide, the amount of money shelled out for this nonsense is in the billions.

In the wake of the Feeding our Future scandal, it is obvious that the nonprofits involved in this DEI weed initiative must be investigated. How can anyone now trust that the money isn’t being abused?

The cherry on top of this abysmal situation is that the inability of legal dispensaries to serve their clientele is driving people back to the black market, which will result in increased marijuana arrests, the very thing this legislation was meant to prevent in the first place.

It’s honestly amazing.

Meanwhile, few people here in the Land of 10,000 Lakes even know any of this is happening, because the local news media, which simply calls this all a ‘logistics problem,’ acts more like accomplices than arbiters of truth.

Walz and the Democrats in Minnesota have no more benefit of the doubt when it comes to shady laws that shower money on DEI-driven nonprofits. It’s time to see where these millions of dollars to train up the next generation of cannabis workers really went.

Perhaps the state can show that spending these millions of dollars had some positive result for Minnesota, but right now, it seems far more likely that the money just went up in smoke.

Senate Democrats banded together to kill Republicans’ plan to replace expiring Obamacare subsidies on Thursday, knocking the first of two proposals down for the count.

Senate Republicans’ plan from Sens. Bill Cassidy, R-La., and Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, the chairs of the Senate health and finance panels, would have abandoned the Obamacare enhanced premium subsidies for health savings accounts (HSAs), along with several reforms that Republicans appeared largely unified behind earlier this week.

Still, not every Senate Republican voted for the bill. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., joined all Senate Democrats in tanking the legislation on a largely party-line vote.

Lawmakers are now set to vote on Senate Democrats’ plan, which would extend the subsidies for another three years. That proposal is also expected to fail, given that Senate Republicans broadly don’t want to extend the subsidies without myriad reforms.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Senate Democrats have pitched their plan as the only option to prevent healthcare premiums from skyrocketing, while Republicans contended that the subsidies are rife with fraud and that the entire Obamacare system was causing premium prices to crank up year after year.

‘The Cassidy-Crapo [plan] is not a healthcare plan,’ Schumer said. ‘It’s not a plan at all. It’s an excuse. It’s a fig leaf. Because Republicans are so divided and can’t come up with a plan that unites them. They propose this fig leaf.’

‘My guess is most Republicans themselves are grimacing that they even have to vote for this thing,’ he continued. ‘How is a one-time check going to help you if you’re paying 1,000 or $2,000 a month more for health insurance?’

Cassidy and Crapo’s plan would have seeded HSAs with $1,000 for people ages 18 to 49 and $1,500 for those 50 to 65 for people earning up to 700% of the poverty level. In order to get the pre-funded HSA, people would have to buy a bronze or catastrophic plan on an Obamacare exchange.

It also included several provisions that didn’t make the cut in President Donald Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill,’ including measures to reduce federal Medicaid funding to states that cover illegal immigrants, requirements that states verify citizenship or eligible immigration status before someone can get Medicaid, a ban on federal Medicaid funding for gender transition services and nixing those services from ‘essential health benefits’ for Obamacare exchange plans.

It also included Hyde Amendment provisions to prevent taxpayer dollars from funding abortions through the new HSAs, a red line for many Senate Republicans that has proven divisive between the aisles.

The deadline to either extend or replace the credits, which were first passed and then enhanced under former President Joe Biden during the COVID-19 pandemic, is at the end of the year.

But whether the Senate acts before the deadline remains in the air, given that next week will be their last working week before leaving Washington, D.C., until the new year. There are several plans still on the table for lawmakers to choose from.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said ahead of the vote that it was clear that Schumer wanted Senate Democrats to fall in line for the upcoming vote but noted that there were still ongoing bipartisan conversations, and he didn’t close the door a possible Obamacare fix with the limited time lawmakers had left before the clock runs out.

‘If there is an interest in solving that, I don’t rule it out,’ Thune said. ‘I mean, obviously we don’t have a lot of time to do this, but I think there are ways in which you could where there’s a will, and if there are two sides willing to come together.’