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The tax bills passed by the House and the now the Senate include slightly more generous benefits for parents. Unless their children are undocumented immigrants. Currently, non-citizens filing taxes using an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, or ITIN, are allowed to claim the child tax credit, which gives back up to $1,000 per child under age 17. In tax year 2013, according to the Government Accountability Office, 4.4 million ITIN filers claimed child tax credits worth $6 billion. Under both the House and Senate versions of the Republican tax bill, ITIN filers — most of whom are undocumented — would need...

President Trump on Tuesday plugged Roy Moore’s Senate campaign during a meeting with GOP senators at the White House. “I think he's going to do very well,” Trump said at the meeting, where frequent critic Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) was seated to his immediate left.

resident Trump may have thrown his support to GOP Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, but another Republican, Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, made it clear he does not think Moore should be elected to fill Jeff Sessions' former seat. He wrote a $100 check to Moore's opponent, Democrat Doug Jones, and tweeted a photo, with a simple caption, "Country over Party." The Arizona senator has also tweeted, "Just to be clear. If the choice is between Roy Moore and a Democrat, I would run to the polling place to vote for the Democrat." After the Washington Post reported that several women...

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico — It took nine days for Beatriz Morelos Casillas’ life to be completely upended. On July 23, Ms. Casillas — who goes by Betty — was stopped by an officer in Painesville, Ohio for a routine traffic citation. Because she was in the country without authorization, the mother of four was detained and slated for removal from the U.S. Just over a week later, Casillas was back in Mexico, a country she had not seen in nearly 20 years, with only her jeans and the shirt on her back — and no legal way to reunite with...

A top prosecutor who is now a deputy for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe praised then-acting Attorney General Sally Yates after she was fired in January by President Trump for refusing to defend his controversial travel ban. The email, obtained by Judicial Watch through a federal lawsuit, shows that on the night of Jan. 30, Andrew Weissmann wrote to Yates under the subject line, “I am so proud.” He continued, “And in awe. Thank you so much. All my deepest respects.” The disclosure follows confirmation that another Mueller investigator, FBI official Peter Strzok, was fired over the summer after...

As bad as Florida's reputation has been over the last decade and a half as a lawsuit-happy state, a new report says we've "risen" to a new low: "Enough shade has been cast on the Sunshine State to rank it as the nation's worst Judicial Hellhole," says the American Tort Reform Association (ATRA) in its latest report. The Florida Supreme Court, all on its own, was ranked fourth in ATR reports for the past two years -- for the torrent of liability-expanding decisions it issued, many over vigorous dissents. But for 2017-2018, we're No. 1 overall for the first time...

"While we firmly believe that Congress must work to address other issues without our broken immigration system, it is imperative that Republicans and Democrats come together to solve this problem now and not wait until next year," the 34 lawmakers wrote in a letter to Ryan. "Reaching across the aisle to protect DACA recipients before the holidays is the right thing to do." Republican Main Street Caucus Chairman Rodney Davis of Illinois and other caucus members joined the group to call for Ryan to move quickly to pass a bill. But that still leaves out more than 200 other House...

Sen. Susan Collins is now pushing for twice the amount of money she originally requested in an Obamacare bill she's co-sponsoring in order to win her vote on the tax overhaul measure, The Hill reports. The Maine Republican is co-sponsoring a bill with Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Florida, that would provide states with $10 billion over two years to establish reinsurance programs to lower premiums or high-risk pools. They had originally requested $4.5 billion in the bill, the report said. "This plan will provide $5 billion annually for two years in seed money for states to establish invisible high-risk pools or...

Lines began forming outside the Supreme Court last week for one of the biggest oral arguments of the year, in the case of a Colorado man who says that requiring him to create custom cakes for same-sex weddings would violate his religious beliefs. At the end of over an hour of debate, it became clear that, at least in one respect, the case is just like so many others: It is likely to hinge on the vote of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who initially seemed sympathetic to the same-sex couple but later expressed real concern that Colorado had not been sufficiently...

Democrats represent nineteen of the twenty-five congressional districts with the highest median income. The remaining six seats held by Republicans are all swing districts being targeted by the Democrats in 2018. This is not surprising, since these twenty-five districts gave Hillary Clinton 62.6 percent of the vote on average – 14 percentage points more than her share of the national vote. In contrast, Republicans hold 59 percent of the middle class congressional seats, as middle class is defined by the Pew Research Center. Republicans also hold 44 percent of the lowest-income congressional seats.

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It’s astounding how many defenses of the state’s position in Masterpiece Cakeshop depend on misrepresentation and misconceptions. Last week I wrote about the most common misrepresentation — that Jack Phillips discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation when he refused to design a custom cake for a same-sex-wedding celebration. After all, he served all customers — regardless of race, sex, or sexual orientation. He just consistently refused to design cakes that advanced messages he disagreed with. No person of any identity has the legal authority to compel an artist to use his talents to advance a cause the artist...

The Supreme Court is taking up the highly anticipated case of the Colorado baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. Tuesday’s clash at the high court pits baker Jack Phillips’ First Amendment claims of artistic freedom against the anti-discrimination arguments of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, and two men Phillips turned away in 2012. The commission ruled that Phillips violated the state’s anti-discrimination law when he refused to make a wedding cake for Charlie Craig and David Mullins. The argument is the first involving gay rights since the Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that states...

If you tried to keep abreast of the news this weekend by reading the New York Times, watching ABC News, or following well-regarded veteran reporters on Twitter, you would have been led astray as badly as if you had followed a couple of guys working out of a coffee shop in Moldova. Relying on the supposedly respectable news media would have left you believing that the FBI found President Trump urging national security adviser Michael Flynn to contact Russia during the campaign (it didn’t), that Trump national security aide K.T. McFarland wrote that Russia threw the election to Trump (she...

In December 2016, Michael Flynn was three weeks from becoming the national-security adviser to the next president of the United States. This is a pertinent fact in evaluating the conduct underlying his plea deal with Robert Mueller. Flynn admitted to lying to FBI agents about his contacts with Russia and other foreign governments during the transition. He’s paying a steep price for his dishonesty, but from what we know so far, it’s not clear what’s supposed to be the larger scandal. In these conversations, Flynn didn’t “collude” with the Russians about hacked e-mails. He informed them of Donald Trump’s posture...

Warts and all, if I were a voting member of Congress, I would certainly cast a yea for the tax-cut plans passed by the Senate and House that are headed for conference (to work out minor differences) in the weeks ahead. These bills are not perfect, especially on the individual side. But the business tax cuts will generate an investment boom in the years ahead. And those cuts will bring economic growth back to its historical norm of three to four percent. Incredibly, the Joint Committee on Taxation, or JTC, scored growth for the Senate plan at less than one...

You knew it had to happen sooner or later, but a respected pediatrician has warned against announcing “It’s a girl!” or “It’s a boy!” at the baby’s birth or when the sex is visible on an ultrasound. Why? It is because “there are scenarios in which a sex assignment may later be questioned or reversed, leading to a significant amount of distress.” In other words, the child might later identify as transgender, in which case by “assigning” it the wrong gender at birth, you do the child much harm. As reported by Mary Hasson on The Federalist, “In the November...

When Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, and Kathleen Willey went public with their sexual assault and harassment allegations against Bill Clinton, #metoo was not a thing. “The victim must be believed” had not yet entered the lexicon. Instead, these three courageous women have endured decades of attacks by Democrats, the media, and the Clintons. Only now, as the Clintons fall down the rabbit hole of irrelevancy, do their stories suddenly matter. What Democrats don’t want to admit is that by protecting a serial sexual reprobate in the 1990s, they enabled 20 years of sexual harassment on countless innocent women by predatory...

One way to kill a predatory animal is to deny it sustenance. The tax-cut bill passed by the Senate, if it clears a conference with the House and President Trump signs it, may be the first step toward starving the big government beast. Reporting on the Senate vote early Saturday morning reflected the biases of various media outlets. Predictably, The New York Times and Washington Post characterized the cuts as favoring the "rich," while doing nothing for the poor. Bulletin: Relatively few low-income people pay federal income taxes. They join the 46 percent of Americans who pay no taxes to...

Whenever I'm asked if the Trump tax cut is for the rich, I say yes. It is a tax cut for the rich. It is a tax cut for the middle class. It is a tax cut for small businesses. It is a tax cut for the Fortune 100. If you pay federal income taxes, you will, in almost all cases, be getting more take-home pay come Jan. 1. One of the ironies of the left's "these are tax cuts for the rich" mantra is that many upper-income people I know in states such as California, New Jersey, and New...