New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith Chairs Hearing on Biden’s Push to Cede U.S. Sovereignty to World Health Organization

New Jersey Representative Chris Smith (R) announced Monday he will chair a congressional hearing on the Biden administration’s push to enter into an international pandemic treaty that could cede U.S. sovereignty to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Read More

Commentary: ‘Conservatism, Inc.’ Fiddles While the Republic Burns

While members of the conservative think tank elite, outfitted in black tie and ball gowns, sat celebrating themselves in a Washington, D.C., ballroom listening to Dierks Bentley and popping off fireworks over the Potomac, their opponents in Minnesota were pre-registering 16- and 17-year-olds to vote, enacting “motor voter” laws, and establishing pop-up polling locations wherever they expected a balloting hotspot might be (think drop boxes on steroids).

While the Left is actually working to achieve generational political power, elites on the Right seem satisfied to simply celebrate . . . what? The latest white paper? The sold-out conference on how the Left is beating them in the political arena? Another record fundraising year where 60 percent of the funds go to promote the institution rather than on-the-ground efforts to implement the ideas? It’s usually all of the above.

Read More

Nation Health Agency Spends Millions on Equity, LGBT Issues Instead of Researching Cures

Congress’ recent $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill increased the budget for medical research funding at the National Institutes of Health to nearly $50 billion in 2023 alone. A closer look at the agency reveals that NIH is increasingly spending its time, and funds, on equity and LGBT issues as well as “systemic racism and inequities.”

The National Institutes of Health has devoted millions of taxpayer dollars toward these kinds of issues for their research, taxpayer money that did not go to the federal health agency’s primary research goal of finding cures and medical treatments.

Read More

Florida and Arizona Top-Ranked States in Heritage Foundation’s Education Freedom Report Card

The Heritage Foundation ranked Florida, followed by Arizona, as the states that most empower parents in their children’s education and support education freedom.

On Friday Heritage published its first Education Freedom Report Card which provides measures of the concept in four categories: school choice, academic transparency, regulation freedom, and spending.

Read More

Conservative Group Sues Biden Admin for Failing to Share How It Decided to Limit Deportations

The Heritage Foundation filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Wednesday, seeking who the Biden administration consulted in its decisions to limit immigration enforcement, according to a copy of the lawsuit obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Read More

Joe Biden Signs Executive Order Pushing Further Transgender Treatments for Children

Joe Biden signed an executive order Wednesday that directs his Departments of Health and Human Services and Education to further push life-altering, “gender-affirming” treatments in children who claim gender confusion, and increase LGBTQ activism infiltration, under the guise of anti-bullying and anti-suicide programs, in public schools throughout the United States.

The order is specifically aimed at states that have banned transgender medical interventions for minors, promoted parental rights, and that have blocked public schools from teaching concepts related to gender identity and sexuality to young children.

Read More

Study: Greater Likelihood of Youth Suicide in ‘Gender-Affirming’ States Allowing Minors Transgender Drugs Without Parental Consent

A study by the Heritage Foundation reveals a higher likelihood of youth suicide in states that allow minors to receive puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones without parental consent – an outcome that contradicts what the “gender-affirming” crowd is fear-mongering to parents.

Research has shown the vast majority of children who express signs of gender dysphoria experience a resolution of the problem without medical intervention, but Heritage Senior Research Fellow Jay Greene, Ph.D. notes in his study, released Tuesday, that data indicating adolescents with gender confusion suffer from a high rate of suicide have been “invoked” by LGBTQ activist organizations, media, and even the White House, “to assert that cross-sex medical interventions reduce the risk of suicide.”

Read More

Commentary: Chief Justice of the Court of Natural Law

Justice Clarence Thomas

Recently, the Heritage Foundation and the Scalia School of Law at George Mason University honored Justice Clarence Thomas on the 30th anniversary of his joining the Supreme Court. A day of panels featuring former Thomas clerks and prominent legal scholars commented on his legacy and future. The justice responded that evening. 

Yet even a full day of often enlightening panels and speeches, doubtless to be supplemented in the years to come by law review issues, articles, and books, misses the crucial fact about Thomas’ jurisprudence that has made him the indispensable justice: his overarching focus on natural law. 

In America natural law comes to sight in the principle of equality, which continues to confuse both conservatives and liberals. With the Democrats’ embrace of “equity,” they have cast aside equality as a principle. Conservatives have never been comfortable with equality to begin with, as Harry Jaffa consistently pointed out in his work. Equality does not mean socialism but rather government by consent, and all the institutions that follow from the preservation of this fundamental element of justice. The clearest expositor of this principle, as Thomas explains, has been Abraham Lincoln, when he attacked the evil of slavery. 

Read More

While Pennsylvania Democrats Want to Increase Welfare Payments, Some Experts Urge Focus on Bigger Picture

Democrats in the Pennsylvania General Assembly hope to increase monthly welfare benefits in Pennsylvania, reasoning that payments under the federally funded Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program have stayed flat since the 1990s, falling well behind inflation. 

Legislation being drafted by state Sen. Katie Muth (D-PA-Royersford) and state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta (D-PA-Philadelphia) would increase Pennsylvania’s TANF benefits, which average $403 per month for a family of three in most counties.

Read More

U.S. House Passes ‘Equality Act’ Which Religious Conservatives Say Is ‘Conscience-Crushing’

The Democratic-controlled U.S. House of Representatives passed the “Equality Act” — a piece of legislation that critics say poses a threat to Christian universities.

The Equality Act seeks to “prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation” by providing the “full range of remedies available under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

Read More