The Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a protective order to prevent former President Donald Trump from releasing classified documents that will be shared with his lawyers amid his Mar-a-Lago records indictment, The Hill reported.

According to the motion, which was obtained by The Hill, the documents Trump has ‘include information pertaining to ongoing investigations.’

The motion, which is pending review from Judge Bruce Reinhart, would prevent Trump from accessing the 31 classified documents except in the presence of his lawyers

‘Defendants shall only have access to Discovery Materials under the direct supervision of Defense Counsel or a member of Defense Counsel’s staff,’ the motion said. ‘Defendants shall not retain copies of Discovery Material.’

‘Defendants may take notes regarding Discovery Materials, but such notes shall be stored securely by Defense Counsel,’ the motion added.

Trump was indicted on 37 federal counts this month after Special Counsel Jack Smith investigated his alleged improper handling of documents at his club, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida.

The former president is accused of intentionally retaining classified documents after federal investigators issued a subpoena summoning him to return them. The specific charges include conspiracy to obstruct justice, false statements and willful retention of national defense information.

The Mar-a-Lago indictment claimed that Trump’s alleged actions ‘could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military, and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods.’ 

Trump called the indictment a ‘political hit job’ by President Joe Biden, commenting on Truth Social ahead of his Miami court appearance this week.

‘ONE OF THE SADDEST DAYS IN THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE!!!’ Trump wrote.

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Republicans are rallying behind former President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, according to a new poll that reveals an increase in support among the GOP following his two indictments.

After being indicted on charges related to alleged mishandling of classified documents, a Marist Poll survey found that 56% of Americans — the majority being Democrats and independents — think Trump should halt his 2024 presidential campaign, while 43% think he should remain in the race.

But the poll reveals strong GOP support for Trump, with 83% of Republicans supporting his run for president amid the investigations, while 87% of Democrats and 58% of independents think he should drop out of the race.

The majority of Republicans, 76%, reported having a favorable opinion of the former president, increasing from 68% in a February poll.

‘As former President Trump deals with his latest legal woes, Republicans are mostly standing with him, while Democrats are calling for him to exit the 2024 campaign,’ Lee M. Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, said alongside the polling results. ‘Time will tell if this pattern holds, but for now, Republicans are grounded on where they stand on Trump regardless of these unfolding events.’

Trump received a boost in support from Republicans around his indictment, with 50% believing he did nothing wrong, up five points from 45% in a March poll.

Looking forward to 2024, 64% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said they will support Trump in his campaign if he does not drop out, while 32% said they are going to support another GOP candidate.

The poll also revealed a decrease among Americans who believe Trump did something wrong in the indictment, dropping from 75% in March to 73% in the June survey.

The results suggest that 78% of Democrats and 50% of independents believe Trump broke the law.

Trump was first indicted in April on state-level charges stemming from alleged claims he made hush money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election.

Last week, the former president faced a second indictment from Special Counsel Jack Smith on 37 federal counts relating to retention of sensitive documents.

Despite speculation over how the indictments might affect Trump’s presidential bid, his campaign reportedly received over $6.6 million in fundraising within days of the federal indictment. Trump pleaded not guilty in a Miami court Tuesday and has not made any indication at this time that he will drop out of the 2024 race.

The Marist poll was conducted June 12-14, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

A group of Maine lobstermen won a big legal victory in court Friday in their lawsuit against the Biden administration over regulations they said threatened their livelihood. 

Last year, the Maine Lobstermen’s Association (MLA) sued the Biden administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) for its new rule that the government said was aimed at protecting the endangered North Atlantic right whale, but that lobstermen claimed threatened to put family-owned lobster fisheries out of business.

That rule imposed operating limits on lobster fisheries and set new technical standards on how much lobster trap rope could be in the water, which would cut in half the number of traps that could be deployed.

NMFS defended its rule in court by saying that the Endangered Species Act (ESA) demands that the agency make rules based on assumptions of worst-case scenarios and ‘give the benefit of the doubt’ to the endangered species.

But Judge Douglas Ginsburg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, who was part of the three-judge panel that decided the case, lambasted the government’s theory in an opinion issued Friday: 

 ‘The Service’s legal reasoning was not just wrong; it was egregiously wrong. The Service’s argument rested entirely upon a half-sentence in the legislative history. This ‘approach is a relic from a bygone era of statutory construction,” Ginsburg said. 

‘Under the Service’s approach, legislative history may supply duties that, as the Service now concedes, are not found in the enacted law. As the Supreme Court recently said, ‘We cannot approve such a casual disregard of the rules of statutory interpretation.’ The reason is obvious; as any high school Civics student should know, legislators vote on and the president signs bills, not their legislative history,’ he continued. 

Judge Ginsburg also seemed to call out the agency for historical hypocrisy in its rulemaking. ‘Only a few years ago, the Service, revisiting its interpretive rules, agreed with commenters that ‘nothing’ in the ESA required it to use ‘a ‘worst-case scenario’ or make unduly conservative modeling assumptions,’ and rejected comments arguing it should give the benefit of the doubt to a species by evaluating ‘effects or activities that were possible even if not likely.” he said. 

Dustin Delano, former vice president of the MLA and now chief operating officer of the New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association (NEFSA), said Friday’s court decision is a welcomed moral boost to the fishing industry that he says has been drowning in overreaching regulations.

‘Today’s decision is a rare and long-sought victory for lobstermen. Regulators must confront the human cost of their skewed and unjustified approach. NMFS’ rules could have destroyed an iconic trade based on a distorted analysis of data that the law does not justify,’ Delano said.

‘Lobstermen, like all New England fishermen, are formed in an ethic of conservation that long predated federal regulations and the environmental movement. We are deeply sensitive to the marine environment,’ he added. 

The North Atlantic right whale is an endangered species, with fewer than 400 left in the ocean. They are vulnerable to vessel strikes or entanglement with fishing gear.

But the MLA says that right whales do not inhabit the coast of Maine, and there has not been a documented right whale entanglement associated with Maine lobstermen since 2004. There has also never been a documented instance of Maine lobstermen seriously injuring or killing a right whale.

Delano says that for decades, the NMFS has been imposing rules based on assumptions and bad data, because it has been ‘caving’ to the environmental groups without input from the fishing community. 

‘Enough’s enough,’ Delano said.

‘I just I really can’t stress enough obviously what this will do for the people in our industry,’ Delano said of the Friday ruling. 

‘Everybody’s under a great deal of stress between multiple things. 2022 being one of the worst seasons, the threat of offshore wind development off our coast. So to have some positive news, and to get a win for the fishing industry. You know, it gives me goosebumps, because it’s not something that we’ve experienced in quite a while,’ he said. 

Delano helped launch NFSA earlier this year, a group that aims to represent New England fisherman to beat back federal regulations that are crippling the industry.

Delano praised the work of the MLA for Friday’s court victory and said that he hopes his new organization can follow in its footsteps. 

‘You know, growing up, half of the kids in my class were fishermen. We’d go to school, and we talked about what we got in our traps the night before. That’s what we’ve been doing since we were 10 years old. And that still continues today,’ Delano said. 

‘And that’s part of why NFSA was formed, because we want more than anything to continue that tradition. And we need a larger presence in Washington, D.C., and that’s why we really wanted to try to get all the fishing associations together to represent all fishermen all across New England to have a larger voice,’ he said. 

A federal judge issued an order on Friday preventing Indiana’s ban on puberty blockers and hormone treatments for minors from taking effect July 1 as scheduled.U.S. District Court Judge James Patrick Hanlon allowed the law’s ban on gender surgeries for minors to stand.Hanlon, a Trump appointee, justified the ruling by noting constitutional challenges to such legal provisions may come with ‘some likelihood of success’

A federal judge issued an order Friday stopping an Indiana ban on puberty blockers and hormones for transgender minors from taking effect as scheduled July 1.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana sought the temporary injunction in its legal challenge of the Republican-backed law, which was enacted this spring amid a national push by GOP-led legislatures to curb LGBTQ+ rights.

The order from U.S. District Court Judge James Patrick Hanlon will allow the law’s prohibition on gender surgeries to take effect. Hanlon’s order also blocks provisions that would prohibit Indiana doctors from communicating with out-of-state doctors about transgender procedures for their patients younger than 18.

The ACLU filed the lawsuit within hours after Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb signed the bill April 5. The challenge, on behalf of four youths undergoing transgender treatments and an Indiana doctor who provides such care, argued the ban would violate the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection guarantees and trampled upon the rights of parents to decide medical treatment for their children.

Indiana’s Republican-dominated Legislature approved the ban after contentious hearings that primarily featured testimony from vocal opponents, with many arguing the gender procedures lessened the risk of depression and suicide among young people diagnosed with ‘gender dysphoria,″ or distress caused when gender identity doesn’t match a person’s assigned sex.

Hanlon, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump, wrote that he was blocking the law from taking effect because its opponents had demonstrated potential irreparable harm to those undergoing treatment and shown ‘some likelihood of success’ in arguments that it was unconstitutional.

The ACLU had provided ‘evidence of risks to minors’ health and wellbeing from gender dysphoria if those treatments can no longer be provided to minors — prolonging of their dysphoria, and causing additional distress and health risks, such as depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and suicidality,’ Hanlon said. ‘While the State has identified legitimate reasons for regulation in this area, the designated evidence does not demonstrate, at least at this stage, that the extent of its regulation was closely tailored to uphold those interests.’

ACLU leaders hailed the ruling as a victory in the fight ‘to defend the right of all trans people to be their authentic selves, free from discrimination.’

‘We won’t rest until this unconstitutional law is struck down for good,’ Ken Falk, the ACLU of Indiana’s legal director, said in a statement.

At least 20 GOP-led states have now enacted laws restricting or banning such medical treatments for transgender minors after Missouri’s governor signed that state’s bill into law last week. Lawsuits have been filed in several states against transgender treatment bans. Federal judges have also blocked enforcement of laws in Alabama and Arkansas, and Oklahoma has agreed to not enforce its ban while opponents seek a temporary court order blocking it.

Indiana bill sponsor Republican Rep. Joanna King of Middlebury said as the ban was debated that it would ‘protect our children from irreversible, harmful, life-altering procedures.’

The Indiana attorney general’s office didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment on Hanlon’s ruling and whether it would attempt to appeal the injunction before July 1. Provisions of the law that were blocked gave trans youth taking medication to transition until Dec. 31 to stop.

A top attorney for the state told Hanlon during a court hearing on Wednesday that risks from gender treatments during puberty such as future fertility, bone strength, brain development and possible reversibility had not been adequately studied by scientists.

Such factors make it within the Legislature’s authority to decide ‘we don’t want our children to be part of this grand experiment,’ Indiana Solicitor General Thomas Fisher said.

Though guidelines from leading authorities on transgender procedures already say surgery generally should be reserved for adults, with exceptions for older teens who meet certain criteria, the Indiana law calls for an immediate ban on surgeries.

The provisions of the law banning gender surgeries for minors in Indiana will have no immediate impact. Hanlon wrote in his ruling that no medical providers in the state perform those procedures on people younger than 18.

Representatives from Indiana University Health Riley Children’s Hospital, the state’s sole hospital-based gender health program, told legislators earlier this year that for patients who are minors, doctors do not perform genital surgeries or provide those surgery referrals. IU Health was not involved in the ACLU’s lawsuit.

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Milwaukee County’s first openly LGBTQ+ county supervisor says an assailant called him a gay slur and then punched him in the face this week at a suburban mall.

Supervisor Peter Burgelis was struck in the face while inside a store at the Mayfair Mall on Monday, news outlets reported, citing Wauwatosa police.

The attack happened after a dispute in the parking lot, police said Friday. Officers said the suspect left before they arrived at the scene but they have identified a person of interest.

Burgelis told WTMJ-TV that he went to a hospital after the attack and will have surgery on his jaw.

‘I will never be silenced, nor will I allow this act of violence to detract from our ongoing efforts to secure acceptance and equality for the LGBTQ+ community,’ Burgelis said in a written statement. ‘If anything, this assault serves as a stark reminder of the pervasive challenges we continue to face.’

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More than a dozen Republican Senators are demanding President Biden finally give an answer for why he allowed a Chinese spy balloon to float across the continental U.S. earlier this year.

Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Vice Chairman Marco Rubio, R-FL, Senate Committee on Armed Services Ranking Member Roger Wicker, R-MS, said in a new letter that Biden has yet to give a public accounting of the ‘flagrant violation of U.S. sovereignty.’ 

In the letter, the senators expressed their frustration with Biden, his alleged failure to confront China’s continued threats to America’s security, and are demanding his administration’s assessment of the spy balloon.  

The Republicans have written other letters to the Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence and the White House.

Previous letters were sent to the White House in both March and February.

‘While four months have passed since a Chinese surveillance balloon was allowed to fly across the United States, your administration has yet to provide the American people a full accounting of how this spy platform was allowed to traverse across sovereign U.S. territory, what the balloon carried, and what it collected during its mission,’ the lawmakers said.

They continued: ‘Your administration has also not taken appropriate steps to hold the PRC accountable for this flagrant violation of U.S. sovereignty. As such, we urge you to immediately direct all relevant administration officials to release information, as appropriate, to the American public regarding the Chinese spy balloon.’

Lawmakers have described the use of the balloon as deliberate espionage by the Chinese Communist Party as it was carrying surveillance equipment. 

It was allowed to float from Alaska and across the country before it was ultimately shot down off the coast of South Carolina.

The People’s Republic of China, under the control of the Chinese Communist Party, has only increased its brazen threats to our national security.

They were joined in signing the letter by fellow Republican Sens. Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Jim Risch of Idaho, Susan Collins of Maine, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, John Cornyn of Texas, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Michael Rounds of South Dakota, and Jerry Moran of Kansas, Deb Fischer of Nebraska, Joni Ernst of Iowa, Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, Rick Scott of Florida, Ted Budd of North Carolina, Eric Schmitt of Missouri, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, and Dan Sullivan of Alaska.

Read the full text of the letter below:

Dear Mr. President:

We write to express our deep concern with the lack of transparency from your administration over the information it has collected regarding the surveillance platform that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) deployed over our country.

In your State of the Union address this year, you promised the American people that you would protect the United States from the PRC’s threats to our sovereignty. While four months have passed since a Chinese surveillance balloon was allowed to fly across the United States, your administration has yet to provide the American people a full accounting of how this spy platform was allowed to traverse across sovereign U.S. territory, what the balloon carried, and what it collected during its mission. Your administration has also not taken appropriate steps to hold the PRC accountable for this flagrant violation of U.S. sovereignty. As such, we urge you to immediately direct all relevant administration officials to release information, as appropriate, to the American public regarding the Chinese spy balloon.

The People’s Republic of China, under the control of the Chinese Communist Party, has only increased its brazen threats to our national security. In addition to deploying a spy platform into U.S. territory, the PRC has conducted dangerous maneuvers against U.S. aircrafts in the South China Sea and U.S. ships navigating international waters, and continues to support Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine, harass American companies operating in China, commit egregious human rights violations, all while threatening a free and democratic Taiwan.  

We note with grave concern how, in a recent report in The New York Times, officials in your administration acknowledged that a May 2023 PRC malware attack against Guam was ‘part of a vast Chinese intelligence collection effort that spans cyberspace, outer space and, as Americans discovered with the balloon incident, the lower atmosphere.’ It is time that your administration fully exposes Beijing’s efforts to collect intelligence against the United States and the threats posed by such activities.

As such, we urge you to release, to the American people, all appropriate information that the United States has collected regarding the Chinese spy balloon. In particular, we note that the Financial Times reported last April that ‘China is refusing to let U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visit Beijing over concerns that the FBI will release the results of an investigation into the downed suspected Chinese spy balloon.’ We therefore call on you to stand up to Beijing’s efforts to coerce the United States into silence on the PRC’s violation of U.S. sovereignty and to release the FBI’s findings on the PRC’s spy balloon immediately.

Furthermore, we encourage you to review all options to firmly respond to, and deter, the PRC’s significant violations that threaten American national security and interests.  Beijing continues to test U.S. resolve and tarnish U.S. credibility—we must respond with strength, or risk further aggression from America’s adversaries.  

Fox News Digital reached out to both Rubio and Wicker for additional comment but a response was not immediately received.

Fox News’ Kelly Phares contributed to this report.

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As New York and California advance measures to consider state-level reparations for slavery, leading activists accuse Democrats in Congress of letting down Black voters at the federal level with the help of ‘relic’ social justice groups.

The state legislature in New York passed a bill last week that would create a commission to study the effects of slavery and racial discrimination in the Empire State and make recommendations for potential reparations, such as restitution payments from the government. The commission’s recommendations would be non-binding, meaning the legislature would decide whether to take them up for a vote.

Gov. Kathy Hochul is reportedly reviewing the bill but hasn’t commented publicly on the legislation, which needs her signature to become law. If Hochul signs the bill, New York would be the second state to establish a reparations commission, following California’s lead.

While some reparations activists see what’s happening in New York as an encouraging step, others told Fox News Digital that state and local efforts are insufficient, blaming Democrats in Washington, D.C., and even fellow activists for the lack of progress.

‘This push for local reparations has always been a way for relic reparations organizations like NAARC [National African American Reparations Commission] and N’COBRA [National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America] to avoid any confrontation with Democrats in Congress who refuse to make reparations a legislative priority,’ Yvette Carnell, president of the ADOS (American Descendants of Slavery) Advocacy Foundation, told Fox News Digital. ‘When Democrats in Congress had a majority and the first Black president, they refused to engage the issue of reparations.’

Racial justice groups and some Democrats in Congress have been pushing President Biden for months to establish a national reparations commission by executive order. The White House has indicated Biden, who’s largely been quiet about the issue, supports studying potential reparations for Black Americans but has stopped short of saying he’d back a bill introduced in Congress that would create such a commission.

Reparations at the federal government level appear stalled amid widespread Republican opposition and only partial support among Democrat lawmakers.

But several blue localities across the country in recent years have broached the subject of reparations for slavery.

San Francisco could be the first major U.S. city to fund such a policy as its own local commission explores potentially doling out millions of dollars to qualifying Black residents. The Chicago suburb of Evanston in 2021 became the first U.S. city of any size to fund reparations, giving money to qualifying people for home repairs, property down payments, and interest or late penalties due on city property.

At the state level, New York and California are the only legislatures that have passed bills to formally create a commission to consider reparations.

However, Carnell argued such efforts are more indicative of surrender than progress.

‘These local reparations initiatives are a way for NAARC and N’COBRA to symbolically advocate for reparations while giving Democrats a pass for refusing to move the needle on any meaningful reparations legislation,’ she said. ‘Both organizations are putting the needs of politicians ahead of the needs of their community. Black voters are the base of the Democratic Party, and at ADOS AF, we believe that voting is an exchange, not a gift.’

Carnell added that she and her organization support a federal reparations program – including ‘direct cash payments to American descendants of slavery only, not all people of African descent’ – as opposed to the ‘sort of home refurbishment programs we see in Evanston, which has, unfortunately, been mislabeled as reparations.’

Despite such comments, other reparations activists view what’s happening in New York optimistically.

‘It’s a fabulous move that’s long overdue and hopefully will be signed by the governor into law,’ Nkechi Taifa, executive director of the Reparation Education Project, told Fox News Digital. ‘It’s good to have commissions, states and municipalities look at things within those communities, including and especially education. But this should not be an excuse to drag things out, and I consider these more local initiatives as complimentary to federal legislation.’

Taifa argued that local efforts should not be displaced by federal action, saying reparations are ‘due from any and all culpable entities, wherever there was harm that must be redressed’ stemming from slavery and subsequent discrimination.

‘The harms of the enslavement era and its living legacies are multifaceted and, thus, ways to address it now must be multifaceted,’ she continued. ‘Reparations require a comprehensive approach. It’s up to New York what they want to do, but we talk about a number of areas: the wealth gap, educational inequity, health disparities, the eradication of language and religion … but it’s important redressing these issues is not a substitute for ordinary public policy – reparations are something more, extra.’

Critics argue it doesn’t make sense for people who never owned slaves to pay reparations to people who never were slaves themselves to make amends for slavery, saying that measures such as restitution payments won’t ultimately address the problem. They also say programs would simply be unaffordable.

Hochul and New York state lawmakers recently approved the state’s mammoth budget of $229 billion. According to a new budget projection, New York’s expenses will outpace revenues by $9.1 billion next year and $13.9 billion the following year.

It’s unclear how much a New York reparations plan would cost. In California, the reparations task force has called for initial ‘down payments’ of up to $1.2 million for qualifying Black Californians while they wait for the purported full amount of money lost due to slavery and subsequent racism to be calculated. Estimates have put the total cost of such calculations at about $800 billion, nearly triple California’s total annual state budget of roughly $300 billion.

Last month, Newsom announced that the state’s budget deficit has grown to nearly $32 billion, which is about $10 billion more than he anticipated in January when he offered his first budget proposal.

Carnell seemed to acknowledge the fiscal complications presented by large-scale reparations, particularly for more local proposals.

‘At the ADOS Advocacy Foundation, we view local reparations programs as an oxymoron because it is unlikely that any of these programs can achieve the goal of compensating American descendants of chattel slavery,’ she said. ‘States have enormous budgetary constraints when confronting cash payments, the most materially significant component for repairing past harms anchored in the institution of American slavery.’

San Francisco Mayor London Breed’s verbal sparring match with a city official over the role of police in fighting the drug crisis could signal a tone shift, according to one cautiously-optimistic activist.

‘It sent a message, I think, to San Franciscans that the age of this kind of Democratic Socialist, radical politicking in San Francisco is coming to an end,’ recovering addict-turned-activist Tom Wolf told Fox News.

Breed recently committed to cracking down on open-air drug markets in San Francisco, and announced during a Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday that police made 38 arrests in about one week. During a question and answer period, Supervisor Dean Preston criticized Breed’s approach as contradicting the city’s 2022 overdose prevention plan stating that ‘Black, Brown and indigenous communities nationwide’ have been disproportionately impacted by racist drug policies.

The self-described Democratic Socialist also suggested ‘punitive policies’ would lead to more overdose deaths.

‘Here we go. Another White man who’s talking about Black and Brown people as if you’re the savior of those people and you speak for them,’ Breed responded. She then defended law enforcement as a necessary component of fixing the city’s drug crisis.

‘At the end of the day, when we need to make arrests because someone’s breaking the law and needs to be held accountable and can potentially be forced into treatment services, I’m going to do so,’ she said.

Wolf was addicted to heroin and homeless in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district in 2018. He said his sixth arrest landed him in county jail long enough to get clean and reevaluate his life. Now he is a recovery advocate and has often criticized Breed and other government officials.

‘Even though she was right [on Tuesday], a lot of what we see that’s happened in San Francisco happened on her watch. So she also has to bear some responsibility for that,’ Wolf said.

DRUG RECOVERY ADVOCATE ‘HOPEFUL’ SAN FRANCISCO MAYOR CAN STOP CITY’S DOWNWARD SPIRAL:

Breed joined a chorus of liberal mayors across the country who diverted funds from police in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The next year, Breed reversed course and announced an emergency request for more money to bolster the police department and address crime.  

Wolf added that Breed’s response to Preston’s questioning was ‘somewhat performative’ but it ‘definitely needed to happen.’

San Francisco residents have complained for years about rising homelessness, crime and drug use in their neighborhoods. The coronavirus pandemic sparked a mass exodus from the Bay Area, and while the flow has slowed since the start of the pandemic, San Francisco County still lost 9,421 residents last year, according to the Census Bureau.

Far-left progressives and Socialists have controlled politics in Golden Gate City for years and ‘drove San Francisco into a ditch,’ Wolf said.

‘Our downtown has cratered,’ he said, pointing out that the city’s most prominent mall recently opted to default on its loan and hand its property over to lenders. ‘They walked away because they had lost confidence that shoppers would return to this town.’

Wolf said progressive politicians can ‘blame the pandemic only so much’ and that public drug use, crime and homelessness have exacerbated problems downtown. 

‘You have to start thinking that it’s maybe bad policy combined with bad leadership that equals actually bad outcomes,’ he said. ‘We’re kind of scraping the bottom right now and hopefully there’s nowhere to go from here except up.’

Wolf said the ‘jury’s still out’ on whether Breed will follow through with a tough-love approach to the drug crisis, combining public health with accountability.

‘If she can figure that out,’ he said, ‘then we can maybe make some real progress in San Francisco.’

To hear more from Wolf, click here.

Ramiro Vargas contributed to the accompanying video.

Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives are planning to utilize a rare procedural maneuver next week to force Republicans to go on the record about codifying abortion rights, despite being the minority party.

Pro-Choice Caucus Chairs Diana DeGette, D-CO, and Barbara Lee, D-CA, will file a discharge petition on the ‘Women’s Health Protection Act,’ which would force a vote on the abortion legislation if they can get a majority of members to sign it, DeGette’s office said in a press release. Rep. Judy Chu, D-CA, the sponsor of the bill, also intends to join the petition.

‘The Women’s Health Protection Act, which was approved by the House twice last Congress, would restore the protections that were in place under Roe v. Wade by codifying a nationwide right to abortion care. Poll after poll shows that more than two-thirds of the country supports women’s right to abortion care,’ DeGette’s office said.

It continued: ‘DeGette, Lee and Chu are hoping there are, at least, six Republicans who will be willing to listen to the people of their district and help restore their right to reproductive care.’  

With 211 Democratic members already supporting a vote on the legislation, the lawmakers will need some help from their Republican peers to get to the 218-vote threshold.

‘The trio has been working closely with Democratic leadership to make the legislation a priority to help countless Americans who are suffering as a result of the GOP abortion bans that are now in place in several states across the country,’ DeGette’s office said.

Democratic lawmakers attempted to use a discharge petition to push a clean debt limit bill through the chamber, but negotiators ultimately came to an agreement before they could convince enough Republicans to join them.

The current discharge petition could pressure moderate Republicans, especially in swing districts, to go on the record.

Democrats pushed the Women’s Health Protection Act after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year in its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.

 The Supreme Court striking down the 1973 decision returned the legality of abortion to the state level.

The bill reads, ‘A health care provider has a right under this Act to provide abortion services, and a patient has a corresponding right under this Act to terminate a pregnancy prior to viability without being subject to state limitations.’

The bill would also authorize post-viability abortions when ‘in the good-faith medical judgment of the treating health care provider, it is necessary to protect the life or health of the patient.’

Reaching the signature threshold of 218 would not immediately trigger a vote on the bill.

At least seven legislative days have to pass after the petition received 218 signatures before it can come up for a vote.

The Women’s Health Protection Act cleared the House in Sept. 2021, almost entirely along party lines, 218 – 211.  Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas was the only Democrat to vote against the bill. Three members did not vote.

Fox News’ Tyler Olsen contributed to this report.

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The Rhode Island Senate on Thursday approved a $14 billion budget proposal for the 2024 fiscal year that begins July 1, a week after the House also approved the spending plan.

The bill directs spending toward the housing crisis, supports business development and makes education funding more equitable while limiting the use of one-time revenue to one-time expenditures, lawmakers said.

The budget now heads to Democratic Gov. Dan McKee, who is scheduled to sign it at noon Friday on the south steps of the Statehouse.

‘Today we are passing a responsible, balanced budget that helps Rhode Islanders now and positions our state for strong fiscal health in the future,’ Senate Finance Committee Chairman Louis P. DiPalma said.

DiPalma said the budget helps small businesses, preserves and expands important early childhood programs and supports a variety of initiatives to help tackle the state’s housing crisis while also protecting the state’s rainy day fund.

Lawmakers added $39 million from the original proposal to help address the state’s housing crisis, including $4 million for transit-oriented development and $4.3 million to support infrastructure needed for housing development, such as road and utility connections.

The House plan included a low-income housing tax credit program. The program would provide a tax incentive for developers to expand subsidized housing options for low-income households.

Lawmakers did not include a proposal submitted in the governor’s housing amendments authorizing eminent domain powers for the Department of Housing.

An amendment added when the House approved the bill last week added $7 million for early childhood programs from unspent federal funds.

‘This budget was carefully crafted so that our residents, particularly our most vulnerable, retain the supports and assistance that they and their families need, so that our businesses have the ability and opportunity to grow, and so that Rhode Island is situated to withstand a very possible financial downturn that will affect both our state and national economies,’ House Finance Committee Chairman Marvin Abney said in a written statement.

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