One of the core executive powers is the authority to prosecute criminals. Article II of the Constitution assigns “the executive power” — all of it — to the president of the United States. In practice, the power to execute the laws against those who have violated them is delegated by the president to the attorney general, the Department of Justice she heads, and the 93 U.S. attorneys spread across the country.

Yet since he took office for the second time last January, President Trump and his attorney general, Pam Bondi, have had a heck of a time getting their people in place.

The criminal prosecution work of the US attorneys’ offices does not abate while Washington plays out its slow-walking games.

Of the roughly 50 U.S. attorney nominations the president has sent to the Senate, fewer than half — just 19 — had been confirmed by December 15, and all of those but three were confirmed en masse in October, some 10 months after Trump took office. Although another 13 were confirmed en masse on December 18, 14 are still awaiting confirmation as we approach the one-year mark of Trump’s second term.

A good bit of the holdup is caused by the Senate’s “blue-slip” process, whereby nominations will not be considered unless both senators from the nominee’s home state return a blue slip allowing the nominee to be considered.

Originally designed to allow input from the elected senators who presumably are most familiar with the nominee’s qualifications and temperament — the “advice” part of the “advice and consent” process mentioned in the Constitution — the refusal to return a blue slip has become an obstructionist tactic deployed by Democratic senators bent on blocking as much of Trump’s agenda as they can.

But the criminal prosecution work of the U.S. attorneys’ offices does not abate while Washington plays out its slow-walking games, and the president of the United States — the nation’s top executive and chief law enforcement officer, who has the constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” — needs to have people in charge of those offices.

RELATED: The ‘blue-slip block’ is GOP cowardice masquerading as tradition

Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Democratic obstruction

The Constitution’s default rule for the appointment of U.S. attorneys is presidential nomination followed by Senate confirmation. But because U.S. attorneys are “inferior officers” in the Constitution’s language, Congress can allow for appointments by the president alone, by the heads of the executive departments, or by the courts of law. It has done so by allowing the attorney general to appoint “interim” U.S. attorneys for up to 120 days to fill vacancies.

But after the 120-day period expires, the interim can remain in charge of the office only if the district court in that jurisdiction approves. Six of the U.S. attorneys appointed to interim positions have been rejected by their respective district courts: Bill Essayli in the Central District of California, Julianne Murray in the District of Delaware, Sigal Chattah in the District of Nevada, Alina Habba in the District of New Jersey, Ryan Ellison in the District of New Mexico, and John Sarcone in the Northern District of New York. Not surprisingly, five of these district courts are overwhelmingly stacked with Democrat-appointed judges, another outgrowth of the more aggressive “blue-slip” policy that has been deployed by Democratic senators in the last decade.

The Nevada District Court has seven judges, for example, and all seven were appointed by either President Obama or President Biden. It’s the same situation with the Northern District of New York, where all five judges on that court were appointed by Obama or Biden. The New Jersey District Court has 17 judges, and all but two (both George W. Bush appointees, not Trump appointees) were appointed by either Obama or Biden. The Central District of California has 28 judges, and fewer than one-third were appointed by Republicans. And five of the seven federal judges in New Mexico were appointed by Obama or Biden.

Alina Habba, who brought the indictment against Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) for interfering with Immigration and Customs Enforcement enforcement operations, was famously disqualified by the District Court in New Jersey after the cumulative 120-day period expired. And Lindsey Halligan — the interim U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia who obtained the high-profile indictments of former FBI Director James Comey for allegedly lying to Congress and of New York Attorney General Letitia James for allegedly falsely claiming a home in Virginia as her personal residence in order to obtain a more favorable mortgage interest rate — was disqualified by her local district court after the 120-day interim period in that office expired.

The bigger obstacle

The Department of Justice has said it will challenge these disqualifications on appeal. One issue will be whether the 120-day limit on the interim appointment authority is cumulative or successive. That is, if someone is appointed as interim U.S. attorney and then resigns before the expiration of the 120 days, does the attorney general get to appoint a new, different interim to fill the new vacancy for another 120 days, or does the new interim appointee only get to serve until the original 120-day clock expires?

The practice has been the latter, but that leaves the president without someone to exercise his executive authority in charge of the office, as long as the obstruction tactics in the Senate hold. That seems to be a big threat to the president’s ability to take care that the laws be faithfully executed and therefore a big Article II executive authority problem.

An even bigger obstacle for Trump, though one that has not received much attention, is the separation-of-powers problem lurking in this statutory scheme, which requires approval by the district court at the conclusion of the 120-day period.

Yes, the Constitution’s text allows for the appointment of inferior officers by the courts of law, which would technically allow Congress to create a scheme whereby the courts appoint the prosecutors who prosecute cases before them.

There is nothing in the records of sparse debate during the 1787 federal convention to suggest the drafters had such an interbranch appointment authority in mind however. Rather it would seem more likely that they intended inferior executive officers to be appointed by the president alone, or the heads of the executive departments, and inferior judicial officers to be appointed by the courts of law.

RELATED: Ketanji Brown Jackson still can’t define ‘woman,’ yet rewrites sex law

Photo by Arturo Holmes/Getty Images for ESSENCE

When it upheld the independent prosecutor law in the 1988 case of Morrison v. Olson, which had provided for the appointment by a “Special Division” of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, the Supreme Court rejected that interbranch argument, but it also pointed out that the independent prosecutor statute was designed to allow for investigation and prosecution of high-ranking officials in the executive branch, and the interbranch appointment process therefore avoided the obvious conflicts of interest.

No such conflict exists in the run-of-the-mill appointment (or rejection) by district courts of interim U.S. attorneys at the expiration of the 120-day interim period. The interbranch appointment authority raises serious separation-of-powers concerns, and the Supreme Court has been particularly solicitous of them in recent years. It also raises serious concerns about the president’s ability to take care that the laws be faithfully executed when the people executing them are not the ones he has chosen.

A century ago, in the case of Humphrey’s Executor v. the United States, the Supreme Court upheld congressional restrictions on the ability of the president to remove executive branch officials. But already on the Supreme Court’s docket this term is a case, Trump v. Slaughter, in which most observers rightly predict that it will overrule that old, New Deal-era case and restore a large measure of control of the executive branch to the head of that branch, the president — the only member of the entire executive branch that we the people actually elect.

If the Slaughter case ends up slaughtering the bad constitutional law from Humphrey’s Executor, it does not take much imagination to conclude that the question of judges appointing prosecutors who appear before them — that is, those officials who exercise the core executive function of prosecuting crimes — should also be in for a very serious reconsideration.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at the American Mind.

​Executive power, Federal judges, Trump nominations, Attorneys general, Democrats, Senate, District courts, Opinion & analysis, Donald trump, U.s. attorney, The courts, Article ii, Humphrey’s executor, Trump v. slaughter, Supreme court 

Haunted houses are prime material for horror movies, but is there any truth behind the idea? Can physical spaces really be inhabited by evil spirits?

On this episode of “Strange Encounters,” a podcast on biblical spiritual warfare, BlazeTV host Rick Burgess interviews Eric Davis about his bone-chilling book “Deliverance at Springhill Plantation.”

The book follows the true story of Eric and his wife, Cindy, and their paranormal experiences after purchasing what they thought was the plantation home of their dreams.

After two decades of grinding through a failing marriage, an antebellum-era plantation sitting on 34 acres of rolling green property in Alabama seemed like the perfect place for Eric and Cindy — both history buffs and antique collectors — to reconnect and begin anew. But they were hardly settled before the horrors started unfolding.

One morning shortly after moving in, Eric saw a moving fog — like “dry ice” — traveling from the barn to the old hospital on the property, where the original owner, who was a doctor, used to treat wounded soldiers during the Civil War.

“There was an absolute feeling of absolute evil all over me. I felt the electricity of evil,” he says.

A short while later, Eric saw a physical manifestation of a demon near the same barn. Eric was sitting on the front porch watching his wife go out to feed the cats, when suddenly he saw a man with “long, white hair” dressed in Civil War-era clothing approach her. At first, Eric thought it was an oddball neighbor, but when he made eye contact with the being, it “[disappeared] into a puff of smoke.”

But then things got even darker. One morning while sitting on his couch, Eric was overcome with a sudden and deep hatred for his wife. “I would have loved to seen her dead,” he confesses.

Eric’s animosity toward Cindy was so tangible, the entire family recognized it as demonic oppression. That night, they walked through the home burning sage, anointing doors with oil, and reading aloud from Psalm 91.

“I’m anointing the doors and screaming for [the demons] to get out of my house and get out of our lives,” Eric recounts.

Then Eric walked to the top of the staircase, where there was a “small cubby hole door.”

“I felt a big time pressure behind that door, and I jerked the door open. Naomi [Eric’s daughter] put the sage in. I put my head in there and screamed, ‘Get out of here in the name of Jesus!’ And in the back of my attic was a very, very loud scream. It was like a woman screamed,” he recounts.

“I heard the sounds of barking dogs in the house. … The sage would be lit, and all of a sudden, this cold draft of air would just blow it right out. … It took probably two hours to get the smoke out of my house, but at the end of that night, everything was gone.”

The next several months were uneventful, and Eric’s family settled back into everyday life, believing the demonic activity had been driven out for good.

Then one day, Zoe, the family dog, started randomly whining and growling. “I turn, and out of the wall in my bedroom within six foot of me appears a black figure floating. … It very much looked almost like the Grim Reaper the way it looked. It was dark. It was levitating. It had sleeves. It had a hood. Had no face inside it, no hands, no feet,” Eric tells Rick.

“I screamed, ‘Get out in the name of Jesus!’ … I chased it downstairs and out of the house, and it left.”

At this point, Eric was utterly crushed in spirit by the warfare waged against his family. Having nowhere to turn, he “looked up to the night sky” and cried out, “God, where are you?”

“And suddenly this peace comes on me. I don’t know how to explain it. This peace was on me, and I heard one word,” says Eric.

That word was “church.”

Even though Eric and his family were believers, it had been many years since they’d belonged to a local congregation.

Eric reached out to a local church and told one of the people on staff what was going on inside his home. After Sunday service one day, several members of the church came over and “went to war in [the] house.”

Eric, who was standing outside with his family, says he could “feel [the demons] as they’re leaving.”

One of the women in the church group then shared a word the Lord had given her.

“She said there’s unforgiveness in this house,” says Eric.

“I pointed at Cindy, and Cindy pointed at me, and we released forgiveness toward each other. And when that happened, everything broke.”

“That was the root” that was permitting the darkness to temporarily flee but come roaring right back, Eric explains. “You can rebuke Satan in the name of Jesus all day long, but if you’ve got unrepented unforgiveness in your heart, nothing’s going to change,” he says.

But final deliverance for the Davis’ home wouldn’t come until eight months later after one final demonic siege.

To hear how Eric’s harrowing tale ends, watch the full episode above.

Want more from Rick Burgess?

To enjoy more bold talk and big laughs, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Strange encounters, Rick burgess, Burgess, Blazetv, Blaze media, Demonic activity, Demonic possession, Christianity, Spiritual warfare 

For more than a century, Darwinism has enjoyed a peculiar privilege. It is not merely taught as a scientific theory; it is treated as a final authority. Question it, and you are not mistaken — you are suspect, a heathen guilty of fidelity to first principles.

And yet the deeper one looks, the less sense it makes.

Darwinism is not merely incomplete; it is internally inconsistent. It claims to explain life while excluding what life most plainly displays.

Dr. J. Scott Turner, an American physiologist with decades of serious biological research behind him, is not a Bible-thumping believer or a culture-war activist. He is a scientist who followed the evidence where it led — and discovered that modern Darwinism could not follow him there, a conclusion he shared with me in a recent interview.

‘Marvelous contrivances’

The trouble, Turner explains, began with a quiet but decisive shift. Darwin’s original theory centered on organisms — living, striving creatures with what Darwin himself called “marvelous contrivances.” Modern Darwinism replaced them with something colder. Genes took center stage. Organisms were pushed aside.

Neo-Darwinism, Turner argues, became “a form of gene determinism embedded in a statistical framework that largely shoved organisms off the stage.” What disappeared with them were the qualities that make life recognizably alive: “intentionality, intelligence, and purposefulness.” What passed for progress was, in fact, reduction.

Christians have long sensed this loss, even without the language to name it. They were told that purpose was an illusion, design an accident, and meaning a projection — that life was nothing more than chemistry with better branding. Turner’s work shows what happens when that story is taken seriously.

Termite testimony

His research on termite colonies posed a problem Darwinism could not absorb. The termites were not merely adapting to their environment. They were building it — massive mounds precisely regulated for temperature and humidity, engineered for their own survival. The environment was not selecting them. They were shaping it.

“The old idea that organisms adapt to environments is only half the story,” Turner explains. “Organisms also adapt environments to themselves.” This is not unique to termites. Coral reefs, beaver dams, and human cities all tell the same story. Life has always been an active force, not a passive one.

Once organisms shape the conditions of their own survival, the Darwinian account begins to strain. Selection still operates, but it is no longer blind or passive. It is infused with preference — with direction, with desire.

Darwinism has no language for that.

Faced with obvious design — termite mounds, bird flight, the cantilevered structure of mammalian bones — modern Darwinism retreats into qualifiers. Design becomes “apparent” design. Purpose becomes “as if” purpose. Intelligence is reduced to coincidence wearing a lab coat.

RELATED: Science’s God-denying narrative just got crushed again

Mongkolchon Akesin/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Darwin vs. design

Turner refuses the dodge. “I couldn’t support the notion of ‘apparent’ design or ‘apparent’ intentionality any more,” he says. “These weren’t illusions. They were fundamental properties of life.”

That refusal has consequences.

Darwinism is not merely incomplete; it is internally inconsistent. It claims to explain life while excluding what life most plainly displays. It demands silence precisely where the evidence speaks.

This is why Turner concludes — without theatrics or bitterness — that Darwinism cannot be true. Not because evolution is false, but because Darwinism lacks the conceptual tools to describe what evolution actually entails.

The hardest line Darwinism draws is at meaning.

Turner is blunt about this. Darwinism’s deepest limitation is not scientific but metaphysical. It operates within what he calls an “epistemic bubble” — a closed system that refuses to admit evidence challenging its assumptions.

That is not how science advances. It is how dogma survives.

An overdue truce

Christians are often told that faith and science are natural enemies. Turner’s work suggests something more unsettling: the conflict was never necessary. It was constructed.

Between militant Darwinism and intelligent-design polemics lies a broad, neglected middle ground — one Turner openly occupies, along with scientists and philosophers like Stuart Kauffman and Terrence Deacon, as well as researchers working on the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis — who accept evolution while rejecting the dogma that purpose and agency are illusions.

Here, intelligence is neither smuggled in from theology nor erased by materialism. It is treated as a real feature of living systems.

This view has ancient roots. Turner describes himself as an Aristotelian — not an atomist, reducing life to particles and chance, nor a Platonist, locating purpose outside the world altogether. Aristotle began with what could be observed: living things striving toward ends. That vision sits comfortably alongside religious belief, which has always held that life is ordered, directed, and intelligible. Turner’s approach simply takes life as it appears — purposeful, directed, alive.

For Christians, this matters.

A world without purpose is corrosive. It erodes responsibility, dignity, and moral meaning. It tells us that desire is a delusion and intention an error — that life is busy, but empty.

Darwinism promised a grand explanation. What it delivered was a grand refusal. And yet faith remains — not as an intrusion, but as a witness to reality.

​Faith, J. scott turner, Evolution, Darwinism, Creationism, Christianity, Extended evolutionary synthesis, Interview 

Elementary school students in Kansas reportedly chose the likes of Jesus, President Donald Trump, and Charlie Kirk as role models during an assignment — but a guidance counselor reportedly squashed those picks, KWCH-TV reported.

The incident at Marshall Elementary School in Eureka took place in late October, the station said, citing a civil rights complaint the American Center for Law & Justice filed Tuesday.

‘This action undermines trust between schools, students, and parents.’

The ACLJ is representing a parent and an elementary school student in the case, KWCH said.

The station reported that a guidance counselor assigned sixth-grade students to call out their role models in a project called “Find Your Voice” while one student designated as a “student teacher” wrote the names on a board.

The ACLJ provided the following narrative of what it said happened, KWCH noted:

“When a student identified Charlie Kirk as a role model, [the guidance counselor] got very uncomfortable and refused to allow this name to be written on the board, yelling that he was ‘not a hero,’ and that he was not a role model. The student teacher had already started writing Charlie Kirk’s name on the board, and was ordered by [the guidance counselor] to remove it. When another student selected President Donald J. Trump as a role model, [the guidance counselor] reiterated her prohibition even more angrily, stating that students could not write political or religious figures on the board, and in fact excluded political and religious topics altogether. However, [the guidance counselor] permitted other controversial figures to be listed as heroes.”

The station said it spoke with a Eureka parent of a sixth-grade student who recalled that another student wanted Jesus as a role model, but that choice also was not allowed as part of the assignment.

RELATED: Yet another SoCal HS teacher allegedly embroiled in anti-Trump controversy — this time it’s over a student’s MAGA clothing

The ACLJ’s complaint accuses the school district of religious discrimination, political/viewpoint discrimination, violation of free speech rights, and retaliation, KWCH noted.

Oh, and the law firm also accused the powers that be of encouraging students to not tell their parents about the incident, the station said.

Specifically, the ACLJ called out “egregious conduct in engaging in viewpoint-based discrimination against students who identified conservative political figures as role models, and the subsequent directive instructing students not to report concerns to their parents,” KWCH reported.

In addition, the ACLJ maintained that while students were allowed to list whomever they wanted in their written assignments, they were prohibited from calling out the names of “religious or political heroes publicly on the board,” the station said.

The ACLJ further argued that “the selective prohibition created immediate confusion among students about whose voices were valued and whose were not,” KWCH said.

More from the station:

The group also called out school’s response to what happened, saying that the administration claimed that prohibiting political and religious figures from being discussed in the “Find Your Voice” activity was in the name of being “inclusive and neutral.”

The American Center for Law & Justice particularly took issue with an alleged instruction for students to bring concerns to teachers or the principal first, not directly to their parents.

The ACLJ said the directive “instructing children not to report concerns to their parents … violates fundamental principles of parental rights, educational ethics, and child safety,” KWCH added.

The Eureka school board reportedly addressed the issue during a Dec. 8 meeting and met in executive session, the station said. However, the ACLJ said “no public response was provided, no corrective action has been announced, and the violations continue to remain unaddressed,” KWCH reported.

U.S. Rep. Ron Estes of Kansas’ 4th Congressional District, which includes Eureka, shared the following on social media about the controversy, the station said:

“It’s alarming to hear of a Kansas teacher silencing students’ voices in the classroom. Schools shouldn’t be a place where a teacher’s political beliefs are forced onto students. This is a violation of their constitutional rights and does not represent Kansas schools’ fundamental principles.

“Parents should have the confidence in schools to allow their children to grow and engage in classrooms that support their children’s ideas and opinions. This action undermines trust between schools, students, and parents. I do not condone this type of political censorship in any school.”

Marshall Elementary School Principal Stacy Coulter noted the following in response to the civil rights complaint and a request to discuss the issue, KWCH reported:

“We are aware of this incident and are always working with families and our school staff to make sure every learning activity is a positive and encouraging experience for every student.

“We are unable to comment on the individuals involved because of our commitment to the privacy of our students and employees. This information is also protected by confidentiality laws. Thank you for your understanding.”

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​Civil rights complaint, American center for law and justice, Jesus, Charlie kirk, Donald trump, Elementary school students, Role models, Assignment, Kansas, Education, Discrimination, Politics