Who Had the Worst Week?

Last week’s winner came back to defend her title, and she did not come to lose.

Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar (MN-5) spent the week insisting her name is Ilhan Abdullahi Omar. Federal prosecutors, in a D.C. court filing tied to an immigration fraud investigation, called her something else: Ilhan Nur Said Elmi. That is also the name of her first legal husband, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi.

Some in the press hurried to explain that women often take their husband’s last name. That is true in Minneapolis. It is not how names work in Somalia. There, a person carries a given name, then the father’s name, then the grandfather’s, then the great-grandfather’s, and a woman does not usually trade hers away at the wedding. Two people who share “Nur Said Elmi” are, by that tradition, naming the same father, the same grandfather, and the same great-grandfather.

Asked directly whether she and her ex-husband are related, the congresswoman said, “Not to my knowledge.” Most of us know who our siblings are without having to consult our knowledge.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the only member of the Supreme Court to note a dissent when the justices allowed New Hampshire to stop accepting student IDs as backup identification at the polls. The state legislature had already removed them from the approved list this spring. Justice Jackson argued that the lower court was only correcting a misleading public statement by the secretary of state, and that without its order some citizens would be unduly burdened in exercising the right to vote.

It is worth sitting with what a student ID is. It verifies no address. It checks no citizenship. It certifies that someone paid tuition, or at least enrolled. We ask Americans to show a real government ID to board a plane, pick up a prescription, or open a bank account. Asking the same at the ballot box is not suppression. It is the minimum a self- governing people owes itself, and every justice but one seemed comfortable letting New Hampshire ask it.

Speaking of ballots, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Democrat Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (NY-8) filed a 44-page federal lawsuit to stop the Justice Department and Homeland Security from pressing states to remove suspected noncitizens from their voter rolls. The suit also aims to stop federal requests that California set aside mail ballots from roughly 20,000 registrants until their citizenship can be confirmed.

The Democrat leaders say the federal lists are unreliable. Some of them may be. The honest answer to an imperfect list is to check it, name by name, before the votes are counted. Suing to stop the checking two weeks before an election asks voters to simply trust that the rolls are clean while making sure no one is allowed to find out. Every ineligible vote quietly cancels the vote of a citizen who did everything right. Those citizens deserve leaders who want the light on.

And then there is France. Some of the worst urban violence the country has seen in years broke out on the fringes of cost-of-living protests, and in Limoges the historic town hall was gutted by fire. Speaking from Doha, Emmanuel Macron scolded foreign leaders, including some “on the other side of the Atlantic,” for “stupid” comments he said were fed by AI-generated images of things that never happened.

Some fakes surely did circulate. They always do. But the town hall in Limoges was not rendered by a computer, and its ashes are not a deepfake. Macron’s own prime minister blamed far-left extremists for part of the violence, and police arrested a suspect in the Limoges arson. The shopkeepers sweeping glass off their floors and the families who watched a centuries-old building burn deserve a president more interested in who lit the match than in who posted the photograph. A leader who truly loves his country, as Macron insists he does, starts by telling it the truth.

So there is your field: a congresswoman with a name problem, a justice standing alone, two party leaders suing to keep the lights dim, and a president blaming the camera for the fire.

You make the call. Send your votes to thatkevinshow@gmail.com.

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