Sen. Mike Lee takes down controversial X posts after widespread criticism
U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, participates in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on May 13, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by)
Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah took down X posts Tuesday making an apparent connection between Gov. Tim Walz and the man accused of shooting two Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses, and blaming 'Marxists' for the murders. The change comes after blowback from Sen. Tina Smith and her staffers as well as Democratic and Republican state representatives.
One X post said 'Nightmare on Waltz Street,' with pictures of Boelter, who is accused of killing Minnesota Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and shooting Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, in the early morning hours of June 14. Boelter also went to the homes of two other state lawmakers that night; one house empty, and at the other, a police officer pulled up to the house shortly after Boelter arrived, so Boelter left.
Another post read, 'This is what happens When Marxists don't get their way,' with a picture of Boelter.
Misinformation about Boelter's apparent connection to Walz has been circulating online since the murder. Walz reappointed Boelter to the Workforce Development Board after he was originally appointed by Gov. Mark Dayton, but Walz had no personal connection to Boelter. There have also been claims online that Boelter is a leftist, though his roommate told reporters that he is a Trump supporter.
The changes to Lee's X feed come after a confrontation between Lee and Smith Monday at the U.S. Capitol.
'I wanted him to hear directly from me about how painful that was and how wrong that was,' Smith told the Star Tribune. Smith, who was a friend of Hortman's, said Lee did not apologize during their conversation.
Ed Shelleby, Smith's deputy chief of staff, sent an email to Lee's staff condemning the senator's posts.
'You exploited the murder of a lifetime public servant and her husband to post some sick burns about Democrats. Did you see this as an excellent opportunity to get likes and retweet? Have you absolutely no conscience? No decency?' a copy of the email obtained by Semafor said.
Several Minnesota Republicans also condemned Lee's posts.
'I have tremendous respect for Senator Mike Lee, but it doesn't mean he is immune from the base impulses social media incentivizes. People say stupid stuff on the internet all the time. The best they can do is admit they shouldn't have and be better,' Rep. Nolan West, R-Blaine, wrote on X. He later responded to his post saying, 'Respect rescinded.'
'This has nothing to do with Governor Walz,' Rep. Walter Hudson, R-Albertville, posted on X.
In separate press conferences Monday, both state and federal officials addressed the misinformation that has been circulating online about the assassination.
'As our community grieves, I encourage those out there seeking to create additional chaos to stop spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories,' Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said.
Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com.
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CNBC
28 minutes ago
- CNBC
To fight Trump's funding freezes, states try a new gambit: Withholding federal payments
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Atlantic
37 minutes ago
- Atlantic
How Civil-Rights Law Became a Weapon Against Colleges
Progressives have long wished that the federal government would more aggressively enforce civil-rights law in higher education. Did they wish upon a monkey's paw? Since Donald Trump retook the White House, his administration has used the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to trap dozens of colleges in the federal equivalent of a headlock, forcing them to submit to sweeping demands or else have their federal funds frozen or foreign students banned. According to Team Trump, it is targeting academics who violate civil-rights laws—by discriminating against Asian Americans in admissions, allowing biological males to compete with females in athletics, tolerating a hostile climate for Jews, or sponsoring DEI programs that malign straight, white, and male students. Critics of Trump's approach counter that he has ulterior motives. 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Greg Lukianoff: Trump's attacks threaten much more than Harvard Trump's team was not the first to apply Obama's Title IX enforcement model to Title VI. After Hamas launched its attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and Palestine-aligned protests erupted on many campuses, political appointees at Biden's Department of Education issued a letter to clarify colleges' obligation to protect the rights of both Jewish and Arab students. The letter noted that protected speech wasn't unlawful. But it also said that some protected speech could contribute to a hostile environment that violates the Title VI rights of students, obligating a response from administrators. Once again, colleges were in a double bind: Cracking down on protected speech would create legal liability, but so would failing to respond to speech that the state deemed anti-Semitic. Scores of investigations for alleged failures to protect the rights of Jewish students quickly followed. The Knight First Amendment Institute concluded that there was good reason to believe that the Biden team was 'leveraging its power to regulate discrimination' to force crackdowns on 'protected student and faculty speech.' The Gersens felt that history was repeating itself. Their aforementioned paper goes on to show how the Office of Civil Rights under Biden once again created incentives for colleges to 'over-police and over-punish' students and faculty, this time relying on Title VI. Driving out discrimination 'is a laudable goal,' the Gersens write, but pursuing it 'may also produce far ranging negative consequences that go to the heart of the academic mission.' The new Trump administration has policed Title VI even more fervently, with initiatives from the White House and multiple federal agencies. In statements and executive orders, Trump has put colleges on notice, vowing to combat anti-Semitism and to treat all DEI initiatives as suspect (though guidance from the Department of Education seems to have softened that position). Trump has suggested that colleges should 'monitor' foreign students and staffers for anti-Semitism and 'report' their activities to the feds in case the students are eligible to be deported. Another executive order pressures college accreditors to strip the accreditation status of institutions accused of wrongdoing by civil-rights bureaucrats. The Department of Education has launched various kinds of Title VI probes of more than 50 institutions and sent letters to 60 institutions warning of potential enforcement unless they act 'to protect Jewish students.' At the Department of Justice, the civil-rights attorney Leo Terrell is leading a Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism; at the end of February, he announced visits to 10 campuses, and on March 7, the administration announced that Columbia would lose at least $400 million in federal grants 'due to the school's continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.' According to The New York Times, the Justice Department also recently demanded that the University of Virginia push out its president to 'help resolve a Justice Department investigation into the school's diversity, equity and inclusion efforts'; the president resigned on Friday. As a critic of DEI and anti-Semitism, I understand the impulse to crack down on both, much as I understood the impulse to crack down on sexual violence. But the administration's approach guarantees the same bureaucratic bloat and illiberal excesses that characterized Title IX enforcement. Two of the administration's primary targets have already been subjected to treatment that wildly exceeds reasonable and lawful oversight. In a March 25 letter to Columbia, the Trump administration demanded not only that the university 'complete disciplinary proceedings' related to campus encampments, but that it impose a minimum penalty of expulsion or multiyear suspensions. But what if, in a given case, a one-year suspension is most just? The administration told Columbia to 'centralize all disciplinary processes under the Office of the President.' What statute empowers it to dictate how administrators and faculty divide power? It demanded that the institution 'formalize, adopt, and promulgate' a definition of anti-Semitism, as if institutional neutrality about that topic of debate is somehow at odds with Title VI. Most strikingly, it ordered Columbia to begin 'placing the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department under academic receivership' for five years, a flagrant intrusion on faculty governance and academic freedom. In an April 11 letter to Harvard, the Trump administration made at least one legitimate demand––that the university comply with the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling that its admissions office cannot discriminate on the basis of race. But the administration also made demands that ought to be beyond the state's purview. Harvard was ordered to reduce 'the power held by students and untenured faculty' in its governance. It was told to pay for an external anti-Semitism audit that would list faculty members who discriminate against Jews so that they can be punished. Yet the next paragraph of the letter demanded that Harvard shut down all DEI initiatives. The letter even seeks to micromanage student groups; funding decisions 'must be made exclusively by a body of University faculty,' it states. Harvard has rejected these demands in court filings, and it is suing the administration to stop it from enforcing the letter's terms. Still, the overall effect of the administration's enforcement is aptly summed up by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. In an amicus brief supporting Harvard's lawsuit, the organization declared that the state's 'coercion of Harvard violates longstanding First Amendment principles and will destroy universities nationwide if left unchecked.' An aggressive regime of civil-rights enforcement is easy to defend in theory. Without bureaucrats focused on the obligations that colleges have under Title IX and Title VI, institutions can neglect the statutory rights of students. Federally dictated policies and procedures can enhance consistency and impartiality. Investment in the Office of Civil Rights and campus-compliance structures can reduce sexual assaults and bigoted harassment. And penalties can be meted out justly to particularly bad actors. But that isn't how the civil-rights regime that arose in 2011 has worked in practice. Listen: Why Trump wants to control universities The new Title IX bureaucracy cost colleges hundreds of millions of dollars to implement, from 2011 to 2016. And for all the bureaucracy's illiberal excesses, colleges ultimately reported an overall increase in forcible sex offenses during the same period. Meanwhile, policy making through the bureaucracy rather than Congress sowed dysfunction, with appointees of different presidents imposing wildly different, sometimes contradictory, accounts of what the law required, such that satisfying one administration got you in trouble with the next. Similarly dismal results are likely as the Trump administration applies the Title IX playbook to Title VI. There is no reason to assume that Jewish students will be better off if colleges comply with every Trump-administration dictate. As Republican administrations used to understand, intense bureaucratic attention to a problem doesn't automatically improve it. And often, state coercion can invite state abuses, yield unintended consequences (see the Israeli students who will have to leave Harvard if Trump succeeds in banning foreign students), and crowd out better solutions. Returning to pre-2011 norms would be better than the status quo. But at this point, an act of Congress might be the only way to stop what one attorney has called the 'regulation by intimidation' that threatens higher education. Congress could clarify what Title IX and Title VI require of colleges, in particular establishing that colleges can never be punished by the administrative state for allowing speech protected by the First Amendment or extending due-process rights to accused students that they would enjoy in a court of law. It could raise the bar for launching an investigation. It could afford colleges more due process before penalties are imposed. And it could silo penalties, so that violations in one part of a university, such as the law school, do not threaten another part, such as a cancer-research center. Many kinds of reform are possible. It is, in any case, unsustainable for colleges to be micromanaged by rival factions of coercive ideologues. Yet many Trump critics are still focusing on his administration's glaring procedural violations, rather than the enforcement model that underlies them. Even if Trump's team were as procedurally diligent as its predecessors (a low bar), the overly aggressive approach to civil-rights enforcement that began in 2011 and persists today would serve academia ill. Civil-rights enforcement on campuses has mutated into something with costs that outweigh its benefits.
USA Today
41 minutes ago
- USA Today
Senate debates Trump's major tax, Medicaid, border bill after dramatic vote: Live updates
Hours of debate will be followed by likely hours of voting on what could be dozens of amendments. WASHINGTON – The Senate begins its marathon debate about President Donald Trump's package of legislative priorities as Republicans try to thread the needle for tax cuts, Medicaid reforms and border security funding with a narrow majority. The debate comes after a dramatic 51-49 vote June 28 that was held open for more than three and a half hours while a handful of Republican senators negotiated with Senate leaders, Trump and Vice President JD Vance. The victory meant the bill cleared a key hurdle for the success of Trump's domestic agenda for tax cuts and border security. Trump has urged Congress to complete the measure by July 4. After the vote, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, forced Senate clerks to read the entire 940-page bill rather than customarily waiving that chore. 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Musk added another post warning the GOP of the electoral risks if they vote for the Trump-backed legislation that is not polling well with Republicans. −Bart Jansen What's in the Senate version of Trump's bill? The largest provisions in the legislation would extend expiring tax cuts and create a few new ones, and a dramatic increasing in spending on border security. The heart of the legislation would extend Trump's 2017 tax cuts which are set to expire at end of the year. Republicans have said defeat of the measure would lead to a $4 trillion tax hike over the next decade. New tax deductions Trump campaigned on would apply to tips for employees such as waiters through 2028 and for overtime pay. The Senate capped the deduction at $25,000 and weakened the break for individuals with income above $150,000. For border security, the bill would increase funding about $150 billion for the Department of Homeland Security. 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