Texas Gov. Greg Abbott claims to be all about “America First,” so why is he threatening to punish a city in his state for insufficient loyalty to Israel?

The city council of San Marcos has set up a vote for next week on a largely symbolic resolution that calls for “an Immediate, Permanent, and Sustained Ceasefire in Occupied Palestine, Arms Embargo on the State of Israel, Recognition of Palestinian Sovereignty and Protection of Constitutional Rights.”

The proposed resolution reads in part:

The resolution specifically highlights that Palestinians of Jewish, Muslim and Christian faiths are facing a humanitarian crisis in Gaza and says that the council “condemns anti-Palestinian, Islamophobic, antisemitic, and all xenophobic rhetoric and attacks.” Nonetheless, in a threatening letter to San Marcos’ mayor, Abbott decried the resolution for being “antisemitic.”

In the letterAbbott wrote that “anti-Israel policies are anti-Texas policies” and said the proposed resolution “seems calculated to violate” a state law on boycotting Israel. The resolution notes that San Marcos residents’ tax dollars funded more than $4 million of Israel’s weapons purchases in 2024 and says that San Marcos “stands to benefit from a reallocation of local funds towards essential domestic priorities such as transportation, education, housing, healthcare, environmental protection, and public goods and services, which currently face neglect due to state and federal appropriations to Israel’s military.”

According to Abbott, this puts the city’s state grants at risk. He concluded by saying:

The hypocrisy at play is hard to ignore. Abbott has made a fairly similar argument to the one made in the proposed resolution, in which he says federal aid to Ukraine would be money better spent on Americans. For the record, most of the funding authorized for Ukraine has been spent making purchases from the U.S. defense industrybut the contradiction is clear: Abbott seems perfectly fine with the argument that American tax dollars are better off staying at home — unless anti-Israel sentiment is involved.

With a recent Pew Research survey showing that 53% of Americans carry an unfavorable view of Israelup from 42% in March 2022, it seems like Abbott is intent on quashing broadening dissent over all else.

Ja’han Jones

Ja’han Jones is an BLN opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. He is a futurist and multimedia producer focused on culture and politics. His previous projects include “Black Hair Defined” and the “Black Obituary Project.”

Let’s start with a cold truth: LeBron James is (probably) not retiring.

Many will speculate about that possibility, having just watched a 40-year-old superstar end his 22nd NBA season on the losing end of a first-round “gentleman’s sweep” by the lower-seeded Minnesota Timberwolves. After one of the most decorated careers in NBA history, James gave us one of his most impressive seasons, putting up numbers at his age — 24.4 points, 7.8 rebounds and 8.2 assists — that most players would be happy to have in their 20s.

When he was asked after Wednesday night’s 103-96 loss how much longer he’d play, James said, “I don’t know. I don’t have an answer to that. Something I’ll sit down with my family, my wife and my support group and kind of just talk through it and see what happens. And just have a conversation with myself on how long I want to continue to play.”

There’s nothing left for James — the 2004 rookie of the year, a four-time league MVP, four-time NBA Finals MVP, three-time All-Star MVP and the league’s all-time leading scorer — to prove in the NBA. But like most aging elite athletes of his era (see: Tom Brady, Alexander Ovechkin and Aaron Rodgers), he’s more likely to see his longevity as reason to come back and chase another ring rather than calling it a career.

That’s why the Lakers should be thinking about when they’ll move on from him instead of waiting for him to choose. The Lakers would probably never trade James, but they could make it clear that his time with the team has an expiration date. They should also be trying to figure out how and if they’ll be able to build a team around Luka Doncicthe 26-year-old superstar who essentially fell in their lap their season.

Many Lakers fans will loudly object to the idea of the Lakers moving on from James, especially given the remarkable numbers the league’s oldest active player put up this season. But those same fans are unlikely to tolerate a long dry spell between championships. Lakers Nation is among a small group of fanbases (Patriots, Steelers, Celtics, Yankees) who’ve raised so many banners that they believe winning championships is their right.

That means Lakers fans don’t have the tolerance for the kind of losing that usually accompanies a rebuild. The dilemma, of course, is that fans also don’t want their aging superstar to walk away, especially when he supplies enough thrilling plays and wins to give them hope that he’ll deliver another ring.

But if history is any guide, chances are low LeBron James will win the Lakers another title. Rare is the superstar athlete who goes out on top, and the Lakers organization and fans should be honest about that. Kobe Bryant won his fifth and final NBA championship in the 2009-2010 season at age 31. He played six more seasons, two of them shortened by injury, and put up big numbers. But he retired without another championship. The only title the Lakers have won since Bryant was during the pandemic-shortened 2019-2020 season, the first year that James and big man Anthony Davis played together. James was 35 then.

Chances are low LeBron James will win the Lakers another title.

To be clear, the Lakers committed themselves to dragging out the LeBron James era for as long as they can. Last offseason, they signed him to a two-year extension worth more than $101.3 million, with just over half of that due to him next season. If he makes it through next season healthy, few would be surprised if they re-signed him. They drafted his son and namesakenicknamed “Bronny,” who they hope will improve as a player with his dad still on the roster. Most significantly, the Lakers traded Davis to the Dallas Mavericks for Doncic, giving James a young offensive savant they hoped would help James make it out of the Western Conference and into his 11th NBA finals.

That didn’t go anywhere near according to plan. With the Lakers down 3-1 and playing for their season on Wednesday night, Doncic took a hard foullanded awkwardly and was hobbled by a bad back the rest of the game. He still contributed 28 points, 7 assists and 9 rebounds but for the time he spent on the floor, the Lakers scored five fewer points than the Timberwolves did.

Doncic is 14 years younger than James, but at times Wednesday he looked five years older. That made me wonder, “Where is this headed?” There was no indication that the back injury was serious or would affect Doncic’s play beyond his offseason rehab, but back injuries are tricky. If you buy that Dallas moved Doncic in part because of their concerns that he was poorly conditioned and didn’t maintain his health, it doesn’t take a big leap to be concerned about the lasting impact of an injury.

Hoop nerds have long debated whether Doncic’s immense talent will ever be validated with a championship. He didn’t win a championship in six full seasons in Dallas, and if he never does in L.A., such a failure might even flip negative public opinion about Mavs general manager Nico Harrison trading Doncic for Davis.  (Though it’s impossible to forgive his claim that he didn’t know just how beloved Doncic was in Dallas.)

Doncic is 14 years younger than James, but at times Wednesday he looked five years older.

James’ success next year and beyond, if he wants to keep playing, is more tied to Doncic than any other player on the Lakers’ roster. Which brings us back to: What do the Lakers really expect, and how much longer will it be before they start thinking about a true rebuild?

Lakers fans might not realize it, but they may already be in another championship drought as they watch and hope their best player can make it happen one more time. James’ career has been singularly excellent but we all eventually have to learn how to move on, even from him.

Keith Reed

Keith Reed is an award-winning journalist and a past senior editor at ESPN. His work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Root, Vibe, Essence and elsewhere.

President Donald Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act has faced intense preliminary litigation in courts around the country, leading to rulings such as the Supreme Court’s insistence that people potentially subject to the act must receive due process. But a new and significant ruling from a Trump-appointed judge Thursday gets to the heart of the matter, deeming the president’s invocation itself “unlawful.”

The 1798 act was previously used only during declared wars. The text of the act says it’s for “[w]henever there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government.”

Trump’s March proclamation targeted the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. In an attempt to tie the gang officially to another country under the act, the proclamation said that Venezuelan authorities had ceded such control to criminal organizations like TdA that it had created “a hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States.”

But U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. said that Trump’s invocation “exceeds the scope of the statute and, as a result, is unlawful.” The judge said the administration therefore can’t use the act to detain Venezuelans, transfer them within the U.S. or remove them from the country. The ruling applies to a class of plaintiffs in the Southern District of Texas.

The Trump appointee reviewed the historical record from the time of the act’s passage and found that the terms “invasion” or “predatory incursion” are meant to refer to “an organized, armed force entering the United States to engage in conduct destructive of property and human life in a specific geographical area.” Applying that background to Trump’s proclamation, the judge said TdA’s activities as described in the proclamation don’t qualify under the act.

While this is just one ruling from one (Trump-appointed) judge in one district, it shows the difficulty the administration could face in ultimately prevailing before the Supreme Court on the merits of the issue. Other trial and appellate court judges around the country could also favorably cite Rodriguez’s ruling if they agree with it, though they wouldn’t be bound by it. Trial judges are bound by appellate rulings in their circuits, and all judges are bound by the Supreme Court. Rodriguez sits in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the most conservative circuit, which would typically be the next step on the appellate chain if the government chooses to challenge the ruling.

In any event, Rodriguez’s decision doesn’t prevent the administration from using normal immigration authorities outside the rarely used act to carry out deportations.

The new ruling also underscores the illegality of the administration having already summarily removed people To El Salvador under the act and deposited them into a notorious prison there. Lawyers are also pressing to get them returned to the United States. And the ruling comes as the administration fights against returning Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran native who was also illegally deported to that country (albeit not under the Alien Enemies invocation).

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Jordan Rubin

Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined BLN, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.