🇨🇳 Xi Warns Trump on Taiwan, Promises to Help With Iran — The Beijing Summit’s Opening Day

President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping opened their two-day summit at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People Thursday with a brass band, marching military units, and cheering children waving American and Chinese flags — before Xi warned behind closed doors that Taiwan is “the most important issue in China-US relations” and that mishandling it will put the relationship “in great jeopardy,” while Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that Xi promised to help open the Strait of Hormuz and pledged China would not supply Iran with military equipment, according to CBS News and CNBC.

The two leaders agreed to work toward a “constructive China-US relationship of strategic stability” as the guiding framework for the next three years — a framework Beijing will treat as binding, analysts note, whatever Washington makes of it. Trump invited Xi to the White House on September 24 for a reciprocal visit, and hinted at a major agricultural and Boeing aircraft purchase announcement as the summit’s second day begins, while Elon Musk told reporters “many good things” had been achieved and Tim Cook gave reporters a peace sign and a thumbs-up on their way out of a separate CEO meeting with Xi, The Washington Post reported.

The Founders who negotiated the Jay Treaty and the Louisiana Purchase knew that great-power diplomacy produces agreements that need to be read very carefully — where what each side says publicly and what each side commits to privately can be very different things. Xi’s warning on Taiwan was not a courtesy. It was a red line, delivered in the same breath as an offer to help end the Iran war. That is not coincidence.

🇨🇦 Canadian Physicians Propose Offering Assisted Suicide to Infants — Where the Slippery Slope Leads

The Quebec College of Physicians has reiterated its recommendation — first made to Canada’s Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying and now reaffirmed — that medical assistance in dying be made available to infants under one year of age with “severe deformations” or “very grave and severe syndromes,” describing the deliberate ending of an infant’s life under such circumstances as a form of “care,” in a position that has drawn sharp international criticism from bioethicists, disability rights advocates, and pro-life organizations worldwide, according to Right to Life UK and CARE.

Canada legalized Medical Assistance in Dying in 2016, originally limited to terminally ill adults. Since then, eligibility has expanded to people whose deaths are not reasonably foreseeable, to those with chronic illness and disability, and by 2027 will extend to those whose sole underlying condition is mental illness. In 2023, the most recent year with full data, 15,343 Canadians — 4.7% of all deaths — died through euthanasia or assisted suicide. Professor Trudo Lemmens, a University of Toronto law professor who initially supported the law, told lawmakers: “One of the most worrying aspects of the Canadian experiment is it shows that once you start legalising, there is a risk that a significant number of physicians normalise this practice. It’s like putting fuel on the fire. I’m not sure it can be easily contained,” Heartlander News reported.

The Founders who wrote the Declaration’s opening line — that all men are endowed by their Creator with the unalienable right to life — did not add an asterisk for the inconvenient, the severely disabled, or the very young. What is happening in Canada is not an abstract debate about medical ethics. It is what happens when a society removes the bright line between “allowing a patient to die” and “actively ending a life,” and then watches the logic of that removal proceed to its conclusions.

💰 Senate Votes 99-0 to Withhold Its Own Pay During Government Shutdowns

In a rare moment of unanimous bipartisan agreement, all 99 present US senators voted Thursday to approve a resolution that will withhold senators’ paychecks whenever a government shutdown is in effect — with the withheld pay to be released once funding is restored — in a measure sponsored by Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana that takes effect the day after the November 3 midterm elections and does not require House approval or a presidential signature, coming after two record-breaking shutdowns in the past year including a 43-day total government closure and a 76-day DHS partial shutdown, according to PBS NewsHour/AP.

Kennedy said on the Senate floor: “Shutting down government should not be our default solution to our refusal to work out our issues and our differences. Take your brain with you, because this is about shared sacrifice. This is about putting our money where our mouth is.” The measure does not apply to the House, whose members will continue to be paid through any future shutdowns — a gap that Kennedy acknowledged but said the Senate could not fix unilaterally. The Constitution requires that congressional pay not be reduced during a term of service, but courts have held that withholding and later releasing pay does not constitute a reduction, ABC News reported.

The Founders who designed a bicameral legislature with the explicit duty to pass appropriations understood that a Congress which shuts down the government it is supposed to fund has failed its most basic responsibility. That it took multiple record-breaking shutdowns to produce even this modest measure of accountability is a telling commentary on how thoroughly Washington has normalized a problem the Constitution’s authors would have considered a dereliction of duty.

🗳️ Louisiana Redraws Its Congressional Map — Republicans Gain a Seat as Both Parties Fight the New Lines

The Louisiana state Senate passed a new congressional map Thursday that eliminates a Democratic-leaning district running from Baton Rouge to Shreveport, replaces it with a Republican-leaning district clustered around predominantly white communities in the Baton Rouge area, and packs Democratic voters into the existing New Orleans-based district — in a plan that still needs House approval, prompted by a Supreme Court ruling that Louisiana’s previous map relied too heavily on race, and is expected to give Republicans a net gain of one House seat, according to PBS NewsHour/AP.

Republican state Sen. Jay Morris said plainly: “These maps are drawn to maximize Republican advantage for the incumbent Republicans that we have in Congress.” South Carolina’s governor is simultaneously pressuring his legislature to redistrict before the June 9 primary — calling lawmakers into special session — while elections officials warn that drawing new maps, moving primaries, and running two statewide elections in two months may require “employees to work 24 hours a day.” Republicans now believe they could net as many as 15 additional House seats across seven states from mid-cycle redistricting, while Democrats expect to pick up six from states where they control the process.

At its core this is a straightforward partisan battle over which party controls the House. Both parties are drawing maps to win. Both parties are using every legal tool available. The Founders who designed the Constitution understood that self-interested actors will use every tool available to stay in power — which is why they designed a system of checks. Whether the current redistricting wave, enabled by the Supreme Court’s recent VRA ruling, amounts to fair competition or structural entrenchment is the question voters and courts will be answering for years.

🔍 FBI Visits Home of Milwaukee County’s Top Election Official — No Explanation Given

An FBI agent visited the private residence of Milwaukee County’s director of elections this week — leaving a business card at her home rather than contacting the county Election Commission office directly — prompting county clerk George Christenson to issue a statement calling it “unfortunate” that the bureau “chose to visit the private residence” of a public servant “simply for carrying out her responsibilities with integrity and professionalism,” while the FBI declined to comment and the visit’s purpose remains publicly unexplained, according to CBS News.

Milwaukee County is Wisconsin’s most populous county, where Biden won nearly 70% of the vote in 2020, and it was the subject of an unsuccessful 2020 Trump campaign lawsuit seeking to disqualify over 200,000 ballots. The FBI’s visit is part of a broader DOJ pattern that now encompasses election-related inquiries in Fulton County, Georgia, Wayne County, Michigan, and Milwaukee County, Wisconsin — the three largest Democratic-leaning counties in the three states that proved decisive in the 2020 election.

Legitimate election integrity investigations are not only appropriate — they are necessary. The Founders who built this republic on the premise of free and fair elections would expect nothing less. What remains unclear is whether this visit was part of a legitimate fraud investigation, a witness interview, or something else — and the FBI’s silence makes it impossible to evaluate. In a republic that depends on public confidence in its elections, unexplained federal visits to election officials’ homes are not a neutral act. They deserve a public explanation.

🗺️ Mississippi Governor Pulls Back — Says Redistricting Won’t Happen Before Midterms

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves canceled a special legislative session planned for next week and said he will not pursue congressional redistricting before the November midterms, dealing a significant setback to Republicans’ hopes of eliminating Rep. Bennie Thompson’s Democratic-held seat before the election — citing the complexity of nullifying primaries that have already been held and the risk of setting a precedent that would allow blue states to cancel their own primary results, while nonetheless vowing: “The tenure of Congressman Bennie Thompson reigning terror on the 2nd Congressional District is over. It’s not a question of if. It’s a question of when,” according to Fox News and Mississippi Today.

The decision means House Speaker Mike Johnson loses one expected Republican pickup, as Republicans who had been counting on a 4-0 Mississippi map before November now face a 3-1 map. Reeves said he expects the legislature to redraw all congressional, legislative, and state Supreme Court lines before the 2027 election cycle — but critics note that redrawing congressional maps after the midterms, when the new Congress is already seated, does the party no good until 2028, Mississippi Free Press reported.

The Founders who designed the Constitution’s reapportionment and election provisions understood that the rules of redistricting matter as much as the outcome of any individual race. A governor who declines to cancel already-completed primaries in order to give his party an advantage is doing something the Founders would have recognized as principled restraint, even at a political cost. Whether Reeves’s reasoning was driven by principle or pragmatism, the outcome is the same: Mississippi voters will go to the polls in November with the districts they chose candidates under.