President Joe Biden on Sunday issued another round of pardons, including to Virginia House of Delegates Speaker Don Scott (D-Portsmouth), for his 1994 drug conviction, after the Democrat's criminal past became the target of criticism by both Chris LaCivita, the campaign manager for President-elect Donald Trump in 2024, and the Republican Party of Virginia. The White House issued a statement on Sunday, in which Biden confirmed, "I am exercising my clemency power to pardon 5 individuals and commute the sentences of 2 individuals who have demonstrated remorse, rehabilitation, and redemption." The outgoing president told the public that those he selected, "each made significant contributions to improving their communities."

Because "approximately seven" Florida lawmakers made anti-transgender statements when voting to ban youth from starting so-called gender affirming care, and state medical boards wrote biased informed-consent forms regarding such treatment, the Sunshine State's SB 254 is unconstitutional, according to a lawyer for transgender youth and their parents. That argument was a stretch for Republican presidential nominees at an 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals hearing last week, while the three-judge panel's lone Democratic nominee worried that a ruling in the next few months could be for naught.

There is a strong Democratic tilt among professors in 15 departments at the University of Cincinnati, according to a College Fix analysis. Seven of the 15 departments surveyed lack even one identifiable Republican professor.

Delivering his second inaugural address indoors because of the frigid weather conditions in Washington, President Donald Trump vowed Monday to restore integrity and efficiency to government. Having won in November not only the popular vote, but also with a decisive Electoral College victory, Trump struck a mostly unifying tone from inside the Capitol, invoking Martin Luther King Jr. and asserting, “Impossible is what we do best.”

A jury decided last week that Lieutenant Benjamin Moore of the Phoenix Police Department (PPD) did not violate the First Amendment rights of two demonstrators who refused to disperse from a 2019 “Lights for Liberty” protest against ICE. Activists Phil Martinez and George Soria sued Moore and the City of Phoenix in July 2021, alleging that they were arrested in retaliation for exercising their First Amendment rights to engage in free speech critical of the police, with Martinez stating that it caused him a panic attack. The pair and others were arrested for obstructing the highway, public thoroughfare, and unlawful assembly. Moore’s defense attorney, John Masterson of Jones Skelton & Hochuli PLC, explained in his closing argument to the jury that the reason Moore didn’t arrest most of the other protesters is because they left when the police asked them to disperse. He noted that Martinez’s and Soria’s attorney Mart Harris admitted that Martinez and Soria refused to leave, and that there had been over 100 warnings to disperse.