How The GOP Can Stop Being The Do-Nothing Party And Offer America A Vision To Vote For
Congressional Republicans quickly become beholden to polls and media pressure — they need real vision and leadership.Congressional Republicans quickly become beholden to polls and media pressure — they need real vision and leadership.Some Students Have Never Read A Full-Length Book. This Bill Would Fix That
To deprive students of whole books is to deprive them of an education.CNN poll on Trump SOTU bodes poorly for Democrats
Democrats desperate to take the wind out of President Donald Trump's sails and torpedo his State of the Union address Tuesday with heckles, boycotts, and low-energy critiques may be upset to learn that the Americans who tuned in were overwhelmingly receptive to the speech and its contents.
A CNN poll found that a near-supermajority of "speech-watchers" said that Trump's policies will move the country in the right direction.
'Look at the growth President Trump made over the speech.'
David Chalian, the network's political director, told talking head Jake Tapper, "64% say Trump's policies would move the country in the right direction, 36% say the wrong direction."
"Look at the growth President Trump made over the speech," said Chalian. "So pre-speech, it was 54% of speech-watchers said his policies will move the U.S. in the right direction. After the speech, that number goes up 10 percentage points. So Donald Trump made some progress with people watching the speech from their pre-speech expectations to what they saw in the speech itself."
Trump said a great deal on the policy front:
- his tariffs might one day "substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax";
- legislation should be passed "barring any state from granting commercial driver's licenses to illegal aliens";
- he is "restoring American security and dominance in the Western Hemisphere, acting to secure our national interests and defend our country from violence, drugs, terrorism, and foreign interference";
- he prefers a diplomatic resolution to mounting tensions with Iran;
- he is "ending the wildly inflated costs of prescription drugs";
- his administration is leaning on major tech companies to provide for their own power needs;
- he is "making it easier for Americans to save for retirement"; and
- he is keeping "large Wall Street investment firms from buying up, in the thousands, single-family homes."
In an apparent effort to reassure the network's liberal viewers, Chalian suggested that "it is a much more Republican universe that got polled here because Republicans tune in in greater numbers for a Republican president's State of the Union address."
Chalian added that CNN's "poll of the overall electorate is the exact opposite of that."
A CNN poll conducted last week found that 38% of respondents said that the policies being proposed by Trump would move the country in the right direction, and 61% said they would move the country in the wrong direction.
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Why the laws of government physics remain undefeated
In an age when government grows with the regularity of the sunrise and the humility of a bonfire, Dan Mitchell’s “20 Theorems of Government” land not as abstractions but as reminders of truths America’s founders understood almost instinctively. The theorems, devised by the co-founder of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, capture the recurring failures of centralized authority and the virtues of free people operating in free markets.
These theorems are not predictions. They are explanations of what government always does when left unchecked and how society always suffers when the state’s reach exceeds the citizen’s grasp.
The problem is not the quality of the people in government. The problem is the nature of government itself.
Mitchell’s First Theorem, which describes how Washington actually functions, could be carved above every federal agency door. Politics rewards the spending of other people’s money for other people’s benefit. The entire system is designed to avoid accountability and to maximize political reward. Once you accept that incentives drive outcomes, the rest of the theorems follow naturally.
The Second and Third Theorems make this point bluntly. Any new program will grow, metastasize, and waste money. Centralization magnifies inefficiency because bureaucracies face no competition, no profit-and-loss constraint, and no personal consequences for failure. When the private sector gets something wrong, it pays for its mistake. When government gets something wrong, it demands a larger budget.
Theorems Four through Seven widen the gap between political rhetoric and economic reality. Good policy can be good politics, but incentives push politicians toward superficial fixes and short-term gratification. Even strong ideas rot inside bureaucratic execution. And the larger the government becomes, the more incompetent and unresponsive it grows. Bureaucrats answer to political pressure, not consumer choice, and the results are inevitable: waste, rigidity, and indifference.
The Eighth through 10th Theorems confront the moral dimension of government overreach. Politicians who obsess over inequality rarely seek to lift up the poor; they seek justification for more control. Crises — real or imaginary — become tools for expanding that control. And politics almost always overwhelms principle. This is not cynicism. It is observation backed by centuries of evidence.
Theorems 11 through 15 dismantle common misconceptions. Big business is not the same thing as free enterprise. In many cases, it is free enterprise’s most persistent enemy. Corporations often work hand in hand with government to protect themselves from competition. Meanwhile, anyone who opposes entitlement reform is endorsing massive, broad-based tax hikes, because arithmetic leaves no other option. You cannot fund European-style welfare states without European-style taxation. And history shows voters resist paying for the bloated government they claim to want.
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This leads naturally to the 16th and 17th Theorems. Economic progress becomes a race between private innovation and public consumption. When government grows faster than the private sector can produce, stagnation follows. Worse, when dependency becomes a norm, the cultural foundations of liberty erode. A nation that forgets how to rely on itself cannot long remain free.
The final three theorems complete the picture. Climate policy becomes hypocrisy when elites demand sacrifice from others while refusing it themselves. Politicians operate under incentives that reward short-term benefit at long-term cost. And the fiscal results — from rising deficits to ever-multiplying promises — are exactly what those incentives predict.
Taken together, Mitchell’s 20 Theorems point to a conclusion Milton Friedman drew decades ago: The problem is not the quality of the people in government; the problem is the nature of government itself. A government that grows without limit will, eventually and inevitably, burden the citizens it claims to serve.
If Americans wish to preserve both prosperity and freedom, they will have to internalize these theorems as practical truths, not relics of libertarian theory. The path forward is not mysterious. Limit government. Unleash markets. These principles are old — and their urgency has never been greater.
Europeans want US missiles to defend them, not America — and Rubio's had enough of their hypocrisy
Secretary of State Marco Rubio called out European officials on Wednesday for criticizing America's self-defense while expecting the U.S. to provide military support for their own.
The Trump administration has obliterated at least 19 alleged narco-terrorist drug boats since Sept. 2 with the stated aim of "protecting the homeland and killing these cartel terrorists who wish to harm our country and its people."
'I don't think that the European Union gets to determine ... how the United States defends its national security.'
President Donald Trump has suggested that each drug boat vaporized by U.S. fighter jets, AC-130J gunships, and drones amounts to 25,000 American lives saved.
— (@)
A day after War Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the U.S. had sunk an additional two boats in the Eastern Pacific, altogether killing six alleged narco-terrorists, French foreign minister Jean-Noel Barrot joined the chorus of foreign dignitaries who have been complaining about the strikes.
Barrot reportedly said at the G7 summit on Tuesday, "We have observed with concern the military operations in the Caribbean region, because they violate international law and because France has a presence in this region through its overseas territories, where more than a million of our compatriots reside."
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When confronted with questions about the U.S. maritime strikes during a meeting with Latin American leaders last week, the European Union's foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said that the EU upholds international law and "international law is very clear on that. You can use force for two reasons: one is self-defense, the other one is the U.N. Security Council resolution."
Rubio addressed the European pearl-clutching on Wednesday, politely suggesting to reporters that the continentals should pound sand.
"I don't think that the European Union gets to determine what international law is, and what they certainly don't get to determine is how the United States defends its national security," said Rubio. "The United States is under attack from organized criminal narco-terrorists in our hemisphere, and the president is responding in the defense of our country."
After indicating that the Europeans are out of their depth, Rubio hammered America's allies across the Atlantic for their apparent hypocrisy.
"I do find it interesting that all these countries want us to send, you know, and supply, for example, nuclear-capable Tomahawk missiles to defend Europe, but when the United States positions aircraft carriers in our hemisphere where we live, somehow that's a problem," said the secretary of state.
Rubio added, "The president ordered it in defense of our country. It continues. It’s ongoing. It can stop tomorrow if [terrorist cartels] stop sending drug boats."
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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia tossed out the February order of a Biden-appointed district judge on Wednesday and delivered the Trump administration a big win.
How it started
President Donald Trump ordered a pause in foreign aid on his first day back in office, eliciting backlash from beneficiaries abroad and vested interests at home.
Trump, convinced that the U.S. "foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values," ordered a 90-day pause in foreign aid, affording his administration an opportunity to review relevant programs "for programmatic efficiency and consistency with United States foreign policy."
'The grantees failed to show they are likely to succeed on the merits.'
Secretary of State Marco Rubio subsequently suspended new funding obligations for the State Department; terminated thousands of grant awards; and shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Grantees of foreign-assistance funds promptly sued to get their hands on nearly $4 billion for global health programs and over $6 billion for AIDS programs that had been appropriated by Congress to be disbursed by the State Department and USAID.
Foreign-born U.S. District Judge Amir Ali helped them in February to keep the gravy train moving.
Ali, a Biden appointee, issued a universal injunction — the kind the U.S. Supreme Court determined on June 27 "likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts" — that barred the Trump administration from "suspending, pausing, or otherwise preventing the obligation or disbursement of appropriated foreign-assistance funds in connection with any contracts, grants, cooperative agreements, loans, or other federal foreign assistance award that was in existence as of January 19, 2025."
How it's going
In a 2-1 decision on Wednesday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia did what the Supreme Court refused to do in March: vacate Ali's order.
The majority on the panel — comprising a George H.W. Bush appointee and a Trump appointee — concluded that "the district court abused its discretion in granting a preliminary injunction because the grantees failed to show they are likely to succeed on the merits."
The majority also determined that "the grantees lack a cause of action to bring their freestanding constitutional claim" and "have no cause of action to undergird their [Administrative Procedure Act] contrary-to-law claim."
'We will continue to successfully protect core Presidential authorities from judicial overreach.'
In her dissenting opinion, Judge Florence Pan, a Biden appointee and daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, accused her colleagues of reframing the case to help the government.
"The majority concludes that the grantees lack a constitutional cause of action — an issue that the government did not mention in its opening brief and did not fully develop even in its reply brief," wrote Pan.
The Biden-appointed judge wrote that the government instead argued that the grantees lack a statutory cause of action to force President Donald Trump to obligate the funds in question.
Pan also suggested that the majority opinion "misconstrues the separation-of-powers claim brought by the grantees, misapplies precedent, and allows Executive Branch officials to evade judicial review of constitutionally impermissible actions."
Blaze News has reached out to the State Department for comment.
Attorney General Pam Bondi celebrated the victory, noting, "In a 2-1 ruling, the DC Circuit lifted an injunction ordering President Trump to spend hard-earned taxpayer dollars on wasteful foreign aid projects. We will continue to successfully protect core Presidential authorities from judicial overreach."
"Today’s decision is a significant setback for the rule of law and risks further erosion of basic separation-of-powers principles," stated Lauren Bateman, an attorney with Public Citizen Litigation Group who represented some of the grantees. "We will seek further review from the court, and our lawsuit will continue regardless as we seek permanent relief from the administration’s unlawful termination of the vast majority of foreign assistance."
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