Saturday morning, CNN’s Betsy Klein put her hard pass to the magnetometer and got a red light. The officer took the badge, said it was disabled, and had nothing else to tell her. She asked once more and was referred to the Press Office. She walked back to the sidewalk and went live with Kasie Hunt. Akayla Gardner of MS NOW handed over her badge at the same checkpoint. Cheyenne Haslett of Politico arrived later and was turned away too. All 3 still had phones, sources, a livestream of the briefing, and a 9 o’clock hit.

On Monday, September 21, CNN, MS NOW, and Politico sued in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, naming President Trump, White House communications director Steven Cheung, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and Secret Service Director Sean Curran. They asked Judge Timothy J. Kelly for an immediate injunction restoring the passes and the grounds. Kelly, who in 2018 ordered Jim Acosta’s credential returned the day after CNN sued, gave the Justice Department until Tuesday to respond and set a hearing for Wednesday at 3:30 p.m. The complaint calls the ban “a more direct assault on the First Amendment,” and says the president announced the punishment for “cumulative” coverage he regards as fake and purposely negative.

Once the White House opened press facilities to Washington correspondents as a class, Sherrill v. Knight held in 1977 that a bona fide reporter could not be turned away arbitrarily or for less than compelling reasons. Robert Sherrill of The Nation had been denied a pass on vague security grounds. The DC Circuit required notice of the factual basis, a chance to rebut, and a written decision. Jameel Jaffer of the Knight First Amendment Institute has already promised a supporting brief. If Kelly treats Saturday’s confiscations as a Sherrill problem, the administration may have to put reasons on paper. Cable has been selling a larger product: a constitutional entitlement to a chair.

The First Amendment protects speaking and publishing. Seating never made the text. The Supreme Court drew that line in 1965 in Zemel v. Rusk, a case about travel to Cuba, and reached for the White House to make the point. “The right to speak and publish does not carry with it the unrestrained right to gather information,” the Court wrote, and a ban on unauthorized entry to the White House “plainly limits” what a citizen can learn about his government without violating the Constitution.

Pell v. Procunier, 9 years later, held that the press has no constitutional right of access to sources the government does not make available to the public generally. Branzburg v. Hayes, decided in between, listed rooms reporters are kept out of as a matter of course: grand jury chambers, the justices’ own conferences, executive sessions of legislative committees. Those closed doors have never been treated as an abridgment of press freedom.

The Capitol is a public building. A senator’s private office sits inside it, and no citizen has a claim on the chair across from his desk. A reporter denied an interview may write whatever she likes about the senator the moment she leaves. The Fourth Circuit applied that reasoning in Baltimore Sun v. Ehrlich in 2006, after Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. told his staff to stop speaking with 2 Sun journalists he considered unfair. The reporters still received public releases and could attend public press conferences. They merely lost the governor’s voluntary cooperation.

The Oval Office and Air Force One sit on the office side of that line. In June 2025, Judges Neomi Rao and Gregory Katsas of the DC Circuit stayed the injunction ordering the White House to restore the Associated Press to those spaces. Restricted presidential workspaces, Rao wrote, are not forums the government has opened to private expression, and the president may consider a journalist’s outlook when deciding who rides along. “If the president sits down for an interview with Laura Ingraham, he is not required to do the same with Rachel Maddow.” She added that the AP cannot adversely possess a seat in the Oval Office. The panel left the portion of Judge Trevor McFadden’s order covering the East Room standing.

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McFadden’s April 8 ruling was narrower than the headlines. Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation noted that the injunction still left the government free to exclude journalists from limited-access events for a range of permissible reasons. Officials could still choose whom to sit down with and whose questions to answer. It invented no permanent wire slot. The AP won a point about viewpoint discrimination inside an event the White House had already opened. The DC Circuit then stayed most of that point for the Oval and the plane.

Sherrill is the piece Kelly actually has to decide on Wednesday. Hard passes were deactivated. Reporters were turned away from the grounds. The 1977 court required reasons before the government could deny a pass it had issued to a class of correspondents. Interviews, airplane seats, and the briefing room remained in the president’s hands. In 2018, Kelly restored Acosta’s credential on procedural grounds; the White House then restored the pass, and CNN dropped the suit. A letter of reasons is a plausible Wednesday outcome. Nothing in the cited cases hands CNN the furniture.

The White House said on September 21, “No President is required to host a hostile operation on the grounds.” These are outlets whose reporters shout questions at the president and his staff after being asked to leave the room at the end of a briefing. They are outlets that published on vulnerabilities to Air Force One after being asked, on security grounds, not to. The coverage itself reads like a campaign memo written every morning.

Over the past 6 years, CNN and MS NOW have each lost more than half their audience. On a good day, CNN now gets about 470,000 people to watch for an average of 5 minutes. I am one creator among thousands, and on an ordinary day my work reaches as many as 10 million unique readers and viewers, more than CNN and MS NOW combined. No judge will order the White House to open its doors to me, and no one at the Correspondents’ Association thinks I am owed a seat. More than 40% of US adults regularly get news from independent media and creators like me, and a majority of adults under 30 do. The split crosses party lines, with 21% of Republicans and 22% of Democrats. Oxford’s Reuters Institute reported that 22% of Americans encountered news or commentary from Joe Rogan in a single week after the January 2025 inauguration, and 14% from Tucker Carlson - numbers that neither CNN nor MS Now have ever generated.

The room itself is allotted by tenure. The travel pool on Air Force One has traditionally held 13 seats, split among wires, photographers, television crews, radio, and print, and the outlets pay a commercial fare for each one. The briefing room seating chart that took effect this February, drawn by the White House Correspondents’ Association, still gives the front row to NBC, Fox News, CBS, AP, ABC, Reuters, and CNN. The Daily Wire, whose reporter Mary Margaret Olohan covered briefings from the aisle before the outlet got its first assigned seat, now shares a single back-row chair with The Telegraph and Black Press USA. Axios, NOTUS, and Semafor share another. I’m not even offered the jump seat behind the pilot.

In May 1981, Ted Turner sued the Reagan White House along with ABC, CBS, and NBC because the 3 established networks were getting favored access to limited-coverage events and the year-old operation from Atlanta was not. After the White House told the television shops to pick their own pool and they could not agree, the press office posted a July 10 rotation with no cameras at all. ABC and NBC went to court, and Judge Orinda Evans in Atlanta issued a 10-day restraining order that restored the old arrangement. The 1981 complaint attacked a pool reserved for the 3 broadcast networks. The 2026 complaint attacks a White House that finally took the pool away from that club.

Rush Limbaugh called the front-row shops the drive-by media. The press corps travels together, eats together, and often publishes the same framing within minutes of one another, because the framing was settled on the bus. A pool of 13 drawn from the same dozen institutions produces a lot of bylines and very few surprises. The American who reads my graphic headline posts or listens to Rogan on the drive home noticed some time ago.

Karoline Leavitt announced the correction on February 25, 2025. The White House, not the Correspondents’ Association, would determine the pool. Streaming services, print outlets, and radio voices would be added, while the 5-network television rotation stayed in place. The rotation published for the week of September 14 listed National Review, NTD, Center Square, Semafor, Border Hawk, The Washington Sun, and Townhall in the new-media slot, with Axios in secondary print and OAN, RSBN, and Real America’s Voice in secondary television. A reader who finds Border Hawk’s border coverage more useful than CNN’s loses nothing when Border Hawk gets the seat, and a reader who prefers CNN can still watch CNN, which has a camera at every public event and a livestream of every briefing.

The networks tried a different kind of pressure this week. ABC, CBS, Fox News, and NBC declined to replace CNN’s television pool crew after the White House blocked the network from its assigned rotation, including the trip to the United Nations. Bryan Boughton, the Fox Washington bureau chief who chairs the pool, told subscribers the shared TV coverage would go dark rather than fill CNN’s slot. They are betting that an empty camera will force the chair back. Leavitt has already shown a separate rotation can fill a week without it.

Creators with audiences in the millions have never been inside the building. Outlets with audiences in the hundreds of thousands have never once been asked to leave. I suspect the questions get sharper when a reporter’s audience can walk away; every seat held for a hostile incumbent is a seat the rest of us are still waiting on.

If you enjoy my work, please subscribe https://x.com/amuse/creator-subscriptions/subscribe

Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

A 26-year-old staffer joins the House Intelligence Committee and fills out Standard Form 86. It runs well past 100 pages. She lists every foreign contact, every address for the past decade, every debt, every relative born abroad. Investigators call her college roommate and her former landlord. Months pass before she may enter the committee’s secure room. The congressman she works for walks into that same room in his first week. He signs a short oath under House Rule XXIII, clause 13, and he is in. No form, no interview, no investigator. Why does Washington investigate the employee who handles a secret while presuming the elected official who receives it is trustworthy?

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The presumption is written into law. Under 50 USC 3163, the statute governing access to classified information exempts the president, the vice president, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, and presidentially appointed judges. Congress added that exception in 1994. Roll Call described the result: members are “by tradition deemed inherently trustworthy by dint of the offices they hold.” The House at least requires its secrecy oath. The Senate requires no equivalent. A senator’s eligibility for the nation’s most sensitive intelligence follows from election and nothing else.

Consider what an election is and what it is not. Shareholders choose a corporate board, and the vote confers real authority. It does not audit the directors. A director can be legitimately elected and financially dependent on a competitor at the same time, and the shareholders will never know unless someone checks. An election answers who should represent a district. A background investigation answers a different question: whether this particular person has foreign entanglements, hidden debts, or associations that endanger sources whose lives depend on secrecy. Nothing in the first answer supplies the second.

The record of what happens without the check is long. In 1943 Representative Andrew May, chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee, told reporters after a Pacific tour that Japanese depth charges were set too shallow to kill American submarines. The Japanese adjusted. Admiral Charles Lockwood later blamed the disclosure for the loss of ten submarines and 800 men. In 1971 Senator Mike Gravel read the classified Pentagon Papers into a subcommittee record and arranged their private publication. In 1975 Representative Michael Harrington passed along CIA testimony about Chile and was cut off from classified material by the Armed Services Committee, though the ethics charges later collapsed on a procedural defect. In 1987, Senator Patrick Leahy resigned from the Intelligence Committee after showing an NBC reporter a confidential committee draft. In 1995, Representative Robert Torricelli handed the press a letter exposing a CIA asset in Guatemala, and the ethics committee let it go because the wording of the secrecy oath was ambiguous. In 2002, the Justice Department investigated Senator Richard Shelby over a leaked NSA intercept, and nothing came of it. Notice the pattern. The disclosure is documented, the member is known, and the consequence is a rebuke, a resignation, or nothing.

Then there is the case that should have ended the debate. Eric Swalwell sat on the House Intelligence Committee from 2015 until Kevin McCarthy removed him in January 2023. Years earlier, a Chinese intelligence operative, Christine Fang, had attached herself to his rise, raised money for his campaign, and placed at least one intern in his office. FBI records declassified by the White House Transparency Task Force this year show that Swalwell admitted a physical relationship with Fang and that the Bureau discovered that she was steering donations and internships, involving foreign nationals, to his campaign. The FBI closed its corruption inquiry without charges. That is exactly the point. A clearance investigation does not ask whether a crime can be proven. It asks whether a person is a risk. Any clerk with Swalwell’s background would have been denied under Guideline B of the government’s adjudicative standards, which covers foreign influence. Swalwell instead read the nation’s secrets for eight years, and the only remedy anyone could find was a Speaker’s discretionary decision to pull him off a single committee.

Robert Menendez shows the other end of the pipeline. He chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee while sending nonpublic information about US embassy personnel in Cairo, through intermediaries, to an Egyptian official. The Justice Department called that information unclassified but highly sensitive. He is serving 11 years in jail. Voters elected him three times, and each election was perfectly legitimate.

Moreover, the class of member now arriving in Washington makes the old presumption untenable. On August 4, 2026, Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. FEC records show his campaign received thousands of dollars from at least 41 donors affiliated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), including executive director Nihad Awad, who said after October 7, 2023, that he was “happy” about the murder, kidnapping, and rape of Israeli civilians by Hamas. El-Sayed’s father-in-law, Jukaku Tayeb, sits on the CAIR board, sits on the governing bodies of two organizations named unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terror-financing trial, and was the largest individual donor to the super PAC backing El-Sayed. Texas designated CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations last year, and the State Department designated the Brotherhood’s Egyptian, Lebanese, and Jordanian chapters in January 2026. In August, a Senate Judiciary subcommittee heard testimony that CAIR and Brotherhood-linked groups have formed a working partnership with the Democratic Socialists of America around a shared revolutionary goal.

Zohran Mamdani supplies the control group. He co-founded a chapter of terror-adjacent Students for Justice in Palestine, campaigned arm in arm with Siraj Wahhaj, whom federal prosecutors listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and made Ramzi Kassem, a lawyer who represented al-Qaeda detainees in Guantanamo, his chief counsel. Nearly nine months into his term as mayor of New York, the FBI still has not granted him a security clearance. Eric Adams had his in five months; Michael Bloomberg in four. Notice what happened. The government applied the ordinary standard to an elected official, the police commissioner holds the clearance in the meantime, and the city has not fallen. A mayor is vetted before he reads terrorism intelligence about his own city. A senator from the same political tendency, with overlapping donors, will read far more than that on the afternoon he is sworn in.

Here is the proposal. Every member of the House and Senate should undergo an FBI background investigation before receiving classified information, under the same 13 adjudicative guidelines that govern every federal employee. Guideline A covers allegiance to the United States and reaches those who support or associate with organizations advocating the overthrow of the government by force. Guideline B covers foreign influence. Guideline C covers foreign preference. None of this is novel. Dwight Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450 in 1953 barred clearances for members of organizations seeking to alter the constitutional form of government by unconstitutional means. Ties to a designated terrorist organization, to a Marxist-Leninist party, or to a foreign intelligence service should disqualify a member exactly as they would disqualify his scheduler.

Will the executive branch then control its own overseers? Not if Congress writes the rule. The FBI already performs the fieldwork on cabinet nominees and federal judges without controlling the Senate’s vote. Each chamber can adopt the requirement by rule, let the Bureau investigate, and let a bipartisan panel adjudicate, with written findings and a right of appeal. Sue Myrick proposed something similar in H. Res. 265 in October 2001. Steve Buyer narrowed it to the Intelligence Committee and Defense Appropriations in 2006. Kat Cammack has spent more than a year pushing background checks for staff and told the Washington Examiner in July, “I have presented this to leadership multiple times, and while everyone agrees that it’s a good idea, there seems to be zero urgency.”

The second half of the proposal concerns leaks. A member who gives classified material to a reporter should lose access, and the referral to the Justice Department should be mandatory rather than discretionary. The Supreme Court settled the constitutional question in Gravel v. United States in 1972. The Speech or Debate Clause protects what a senator says on the floor; it does not protect arranging the private publication of stolen secrets. Section 798 of Title 18 already criminalizes disclosure of communications intelligence. The only missing ingredient is the will to apply it to people wearing a congressional pin.

The objections are predictable. One says Article I fixes the qualifications for office and Congress may add none. Correct, and irrelevant. A clearance is not a qualification for office. A member denied access still votes, still speaks, still represents his district. He simply does not read the intercepts. Another says checks cannot guarantee loyalty. Bruce Berkowitz answered that for the Hoover Institution in 2004: “the rule in protecting secrets should be risk control, not risk exclusion.” A lock that stops most thieves is still worth installing. A third says the process would be weaponized. It could be, which is why the guidelines must be written down, the adjudicaton bipartisan, and the record public enough to shame an abuse.

We must respect the voters. Michigan may send El-Sayed to the Senate, and New York has already made Mamdani its mayor, and nobody should propose undoing either result. Yet there is a difference between a mandate to legislate and a license to read the names of American assets in Tehran, and the voters never conferred the second one because it was never theirs to confer. The old phrase for people whose loyalties run to a hostile creed was the enemy within; it has become unfashionable to say so, but the Brotherhood’s own 1991 memorandum, introduced at the Holy Land trial, describes a project to destroy Western civilization from inside, and its American friends are now funding Senate campaigns, and anyone who calls that a conspiracy theory can read the FEC filings for himself. The senator gets to serve. He does not get the secrets until the FBI says he is safe with them.

If you enjoy my work, please subscribe https://x.com/amuse/creator-subscriptions/subscribe

Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

On September 17, the Education Department’s Student Privacy Policy Office opened an investigation under FERPA and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment into the Public Schools of Northborough and Southborough in Massachusetts. The parents of a student at Algonquin Regional High School say school personnel secretly facilitated their child’s gender transition without their knowledge, including a different name and pronouns, and that they believed the after-school sessions were for math help. The department says it is currently unclear whether the school and the district complied with either statute. Superintendent Gregory Martineau denies the allegations and says the district “welcomes and will cooperate fully with any authority investigating this matter.”

FERPA governs papers a school keeps about a student. PPRA governs surveys, evaluations, and analyses that probe mental health, sex behaviors and attitudes, or other listed subjects, and it requires written consent before administering those instruments. A gender transitioning counseling sequence that produces notes, emails, and a support plan is a records problem if those papers exist. The same sequence is a pupil-rights problem if it functions as an evaluation the parents never approved. PPRA’s consent rule covers surveys and evaluations on mental health and sexual behavior even when the office described the sessions as academic help. The department has not said which theory, if either, will hold.

I wrote on July 31, 2025, that Harvard’s Queering Education course trained future teachers to treat parental authority as an obstacle to be managed, and I called for federal investigations and funding consequences. In that column, I also wrote that no one denies that some children struggle with gender identity, “nor that they deserve dignity and mental health treatment.” On October 20th, my Texas ballot guide urged a yes vote on Proposition 15 so that “parents, not bureaucrats, control the moral and educational formation of their children.” Voters approved the amendment on November 4 with 69.87% of the 2,956,697 ballots counted. On December 3rd, I used 𝕏 against the organized opposition lined up against those initiatives.

The department is now enforcing a statute Congress passed in 1974. Districts that take federal money agreed to obey it. Under the regulations, an education record is information directly related to a student and maintained by the school, and that definition already reaches K-12 health records and electronic communications. In March, the privacy office told state chiefs that concealment of gender-identity records from parents was inappropriate. In August, it sent another letter. FERPA, that letter said, does not distinguish among an official record, a cumulative record, and unofficial papers. Information that concerns the child and is kept by the institution remains an education record wherever staff stored it. Gender transition plans parked to the side fall under that reading.

Under 34 CFR §§99.62 through 99.67, the privacy office can demand a district’s policies, training materials, and other relevant information. It can issue findings and require corrective steps. If the district fails to comply within the specified period, legally available remedies include withholding payments and terminating eligibility for federal programs.

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FERPA gives parents no right to sue. The Heritage Foundation’s Legal Memorandum 365, by Sarah Parshall Perry, walks through the inspection and correction procedures and then names the hole. The statute supplies no private right of action. The Supreme Court said so in Gonzaga University v. Doe (2002). Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote that FERPA’s provisions speak to the Secretary of Education and to the conditions on federal funds, not to a parent who wants a judge. Parents may still have constitutional or state-law claims. Under FERPA itself, they cannot sue. Their federal door is a complaint submitted to the department within 180 days of the alleged violation.

That door has been slow. A 2018 inspector general audit found 285 FERPA investigations open at the end of fiscal 2017. The office closed 24 that year. Nearly a third of the open cases were more than two years old, and some were more than six. Officials estimated they were about two years behind and could not precisely quantify the backlog because their tracking was broken. New staff hired to clear the queue were steered toward training and technical assistance. A 2022 follow-up said the backlog had shrunk and tracking had improved, yet policy questions that blocked some investigations remained unresolved. Federal funding has never been pulled for a FERPA violation.

Topeka shows what a signed FERPA remedy looks like. In August, the privacy office announced a resolution agreement with Topeka Public Schools after an April finding that the district, along with Olathe and Shawnee Mission, maintained policies instructing staff to hide gender-identity information from parents, including a different name on a diploma. Topeka agreed to stop creating gender transition plans for students, let parents review any such plans already kept, rescind guidance that kept parents in the dark, and include FERPA content in teacher and administrator training that the privacy office must pre-approve. Olathe and Shawnee Mission did not sign and were told enforcement would follow. Topeka disputed the finding even as it signed.

In July, after an investigation that began in 2025, the department found that Burlington Public Schools violated the pupil-rights law by administering the 2025 Youth Risk Behavior Survey to students whose parents had opted them out. The survey asked seventh graders and older students about sexual encounters, drug and alcohol use, and gender identity. The district had used versions of that instrument since 2012. It admitted that opted-out students still sat for the 2025 version. It was later reported that at least five students received it after their families had returned the notices. Those parents had read the form and sent it back on time. The proposed terms were specific: send the survey questions to the families, have the superintendent apologize in writing, adopt compliant policies, and submit future sensitive surveys for federal review. I cannot tell you whether Burlington signed or mailed those letters, because the department has not said.

Critics of the Northborough action argue that records access will expose vulnerable children to hostile homes. FERPA already carries limits that address that fear. The rights transfer to the student at 18 or upon enrollment in college. A teacher’s private memory aids, kept in sole possession, are excluded. A court order or binding custody document can revoke a parent’s access entirely. Nothing in the statute obstructs a school’s duty to report abuse.

Some districts have tried a different route. Santa Ana training materials reportedly advised schools to avoid creating certain records altogether. If the right attaches only to what the school keeps, the cheapest evasion is to keep nothing. FERPA does not require writing down every hallway conversation. State legislatures and school boards still can set documentation rules for consequential decisions about a child. Christopher Thomas of the Goldwater Institute made the companion point in February 2025, when Arizona’s House Education Committee voted 12-0 for HB2514, requiring written parental consent before a district releases a child’s mailing address, telephone number, or email to third parties. Information should move toward the family. It should not leak out to strangers.

Section 99.10 already supplies a clock. A school must allow inspection within a reasonable period, and never later than 45 days after the request, and it may not destroy records while a request is outstanding. How many complaints has the office received, how old is the median one, how many parents got complete responses inside 45 days, how many districts finished their corrective work, and how many offended again; those figures can be published in aggregate without naming a single child. An announced investigation is not a record delivered; the department knows this, the Burlington parents know it better than anyone, and the officials who want to be graded on press releases are the only ones served by mixing the two.

Frank Miller, who directs the privacy office, explained last week that “Parents have a right to know what is happening with their children at school.” He is right, and President Trump deserves credit for putting investigators in that office after years in which the complaint queue did the work of a refusal. Most parents have a work schedule and a district counter that closes at 4:00. The useful figure is how many ordinary written requests come back complete inside those 45 days, without a lawyer or a camera. I would like to see that count. The administration is the only institution that can collect it.

If you enjoy my work, please subscribe https://x.com/amuse/creator-subscriptions/subscribe

Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

A company can tell its investors in the morning that it needs fewer workers and tell Washington in the afternoon that it cannot find enough of them. Closing a semiconductor fab in Ohio and hunting for a chip designer in Austin can produce both sentences honestly. The harder case is when the two sentences describe the same desks. For more than 30 years, nobody in the federal government was assigned to sort one from the other. On September 18, President Trump signed an executive order that gives that comparison to the agencies already charged with reviewing H-1B sponsorship.

Section 3(a) instructs the Secretaries of State, Labor, and Homeland Security to take into account, on any labor condition application, petition, visa, or entry, whether the sponsor has carried out, directly or indirectly, layoffs in the previous year or plans future layoffs that would hit similarly situated US workers. Section 3(b) gives the Department of Labor, through the Wage and Hour Division, 30 days to begin examining the labor-condition data sponsors have already submitted and to decide whether section 212(n)(2)(G) of the Immigration and Nationality Act warrants action against those employers. The same order tells those three secretaries to consult Commerce, Education, and the Small Business Administration for wage, industrial, and employment figures the visa offices have not had as a matter of course. It runs through statutes already on the books. It does not invent a new crime or a new cap.

The purpose section puts a number on the mismatch. Technology employers have requested H-1B visas for hundreds of thousands of workers while laying off somewhere between 800,000 and 1.3 million American employees from 2022 through 2026. Employers have forced laid-off Americans to train their replacements. That is the White House’s account, written into the order itself, and it is the pile of cases the new review is supposed to sort.

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I came late to wanting even this much. On January 4, 2024, I posted on 𝕏 that the US should make skilled immigration easier. I believed what most admirers of American technology companies believe: that the country wins when the best engineers in the world want to work here, and that the H-1B visa was the door they walked through. By December 28, 2024, with Elon Musk and much of the MAGA base fighting over the program on 𝕏, I asked for higher wage floors, real oversight, and the freedom for a visa holder to change employers. I still thought the design was mostly sound. A year ago, on September 19, 2025, I published “Scrap H-1B, Build Merit” and proposed a first-principles rule blunter than anything in Thursday’s text: “If a company has laid off American workers in the past year, it may not hire foreign replacements. No exceptions.” The order is narrower than that rule, and better for it. A firm closing in one city and hiring for different work in another has an answer. Last year’s rule would have treated that firm as if it had none. I think this is the most useful thing anyone has done to the H-1B program in a decade.

The record that moved me is old enough to be embarrassing. In 2015, Disney laid off hundreds of American IT employees and made training their H-1B replacements a condition of severance. Southern California Edison ran the same play. DHS data showed more than 85% of approvals landing in the two lowest wage tiers. In FY2024, employers submitted over 780,000 lottery registrations for 85,000 slots. The year before, more than 400,000 entries came from individuals registered multiple times, a practice USCIS itself calls often fraudulent. Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services built billion-dollar businesses on bulk allocations. Sold as a hunt for the exceptional, the program had become a volume trade.

The paper that precedes every petition gets a seven-day look. Before an H-1B case moves, the employer submits a labor condition application attesting to the job and the wage. The Department of Labor describes that review as a check, finished within seven working days, for completeness and obvious inaccuracies. A builder’s signed assurance that a structure meets the fire code matters. The inspector still walks the building.

Kishore Dattapuram understood the gap. He co-owned Nanosemantics, a San Jose staffing business, and on April 21, 2025, Judge Edward J. Davila sentenced him to 14 months for visa fraud and conspiracy after a November 2024 guilty plea. The firm submitted applications describing jobs at named client companies that did not exist. Dattapuram sometimes paid companies to pose as the end-client. With visas already in hand, Nanosemantics could place workers faster than competitors who waited for a real assignment before asking for a real visa. He forfeited $125,456.48 and paid a $7,500 fine. The victims included every staffing firm that told the truth.

Some of this happens before an American ever sees the posting. On February 25, 2026, the Justice Department announced a settlement with Elegant Enterprise-Wide Solutions, a Virginia IT-services provider, over allegations that its AI-generated job advertisements limited consideration to applicants holding H-1B, OPT, or H-4 status. The civil penalty was $9,460. A settlement resolves allegations and is not a conviction. It was the department’s eighth such settlement since it relaunched the Protecting US Workers Initiative in 2025.

Microsoft is harder to call, which is why agencies are now told to look at the paperwork instead of the press release. In July 2025, the Washington Examiner set the company’s large layoffs beside labor-condition filings covering 14,181 positions. Microsoft answered that the figure far exceeded its actual petitions, that 78% of its petitions in the preceding year were extensions for people already on staff, and that H-1B employees were among those let go. Both accounts may be accurate. Until September 18, no one in Washington was required to put them side by side.

Critics say a layoff proves nothing. Companies restructure constantly. A firm shedding mainframe programmers may truly need chip designers. The displacement rules Congress actually wrote bind mainly H-1B-dependent employers and willful violators, so on this view the order licenses harassment of any large company that ever trims a division. Section 3(a) reaches layoffs of similarly situated workers, people doing comparable work in the same period. An employer whose new hires do different work has a complete answer and can give it in an afternoon. The wage statute already requires a sponsor to pay the higher of the prevailing wage and the actual wage it pays comparable employees. Comparing payroll to the petition is a duty Congress wrote years ago. Nobody ran it.

The wage evidence is unsettled, and the people who say so have a paper. In February, Jiaxin He and Adam Ozimek of the Economic Innovation Group published a replication putting the average H-1B wage gap at 5.1%, far below the 16% estimate behind the administration’s fee. They found that older H-1B workers earn less than comparable natives while younger ones earn more. An average cannot convict or acquit a particular employer. Kevin Lynn warned in the Daily Caller on May 22 that firms facing higher wage thresholds “will simply reclassify more positions into the revised Level I category while continuing to pay below market rates.” That is why any serious look has to match the stated job to the work performed.

Last December 14, defending the president’s $100,000 fee, I wrote that no bureaucrat could tell a real shortage from wage arbitrage and that price should do the screening. The same week as the new order, a companion proclamation renewed that payment for certain petitions through September 21, 2027. The administration reports that lottery registrations from the major IT staffing and outsourcing firms fell from 24,946 to 2,055, a 92% decline. That is the government’s own figure. Several policies changed at once, and a registration is not a hire. Even so, the drop is large enough to take seriously. On July 24, the First Circuit refused to stay the judgment vacating the fee in State of California v. Mullin; the immigration bar’s reading is that collection remains blocked, a price can be enjoined, and this one was, and what is left standing is the power to compare what a sponsor swore to against what its own payroll shows. Examiners cannot read motives. They can read records.

The next president can quietly withdraw an order. Heritage’s November 25, 2025 report by Simon Hankinson recommended searchable monthly data on petitions, layoffs, complaints, and investigations, and Thursday’s text promises nothing of the kind. Without those numbers, workers and compliant employers have no way to tell an enforcement program from an annoucement. The administration should publish the reviews it opens, the violations it establishes, and the wages it recovers. Daniel Kishi of American Compass proposed in March that sponsors be required to post jobs domestically first and that displacement liability follow the work through the labor contractor to the company that benefits from it. Until that is statute, the client that hands its IT department to an outsourcer stays insulated from the layoffs that follow.

After the American engineer, the people with the most to gain from the review are the foreign professionals hired honestly. Their reputation is currently set by brokers like Dattapuram, and every invented job makes a real one look suspect. If Labor finds that the laid-off and the newly sponsored did different jobs, the sponsors lose a few weeks. If it finds what Disney’s technicians found in 2015, some of the largest names in American business have been swearing to things that weren’t true, and we will finally have it in writing.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

A certified teacher in Richland Parish, Louisiana, can collect a supplemental check of up to $50,935 this year. Last year the maximum was $10,200. She still teaches the same children in the same building, in a corner of the Delta where soybean fields run to the horizon, and young people have been leaving for work elsewhere. The money came from sales taxes. The sales taxes came from construction of a Meta data center a few miles down the road.

That check is already drawn, which is why it sat on the table at the All-In Summit. Meta President Dina Powell McCormick appeared there with Louisiana Economic Development Secretary Susan Bourgeois and Sheldon Jones of the Richland Parish schools. In December 2024, Meta committed $10 billion to the site. On July 13, 2026, Louisiana announced that the commitment now exceeds $50 billion, for a campus of nearly 10 million square feet and 5 gigawatts of computing capacity. Governor Jeff Landry said projects like it “ensure America continues to lead in the technologies that will define the next generation.” The panel’s narrower claim matters in Rayville. The leading can be done in a Delta parish, and the people who live there can be paid for it, provided the state writes the terms before the first crane arrives.

The bonus is the part that has already happened. The New York Post reported that the parish collected $42.9 million in sales and use taxes in the first nine months of its fiscal year, and that Meta made a separate $22.4 million tax payment in May. The school board’s explanation matches what a shopkeeper in Rayville already sees. Thousands of construction workers buy lunch, fuel, lumber, and lodging. Several of the parish’s existing taxes fund employee pay, including a 1% parish-wide sales and use tax authorized on February 6, 1968, and dedicated to school salaries and retiree benefits. Panelists put local tax growth at 60% to 70% early on and 260% more recently. Nobody who lived there before was handed a new levy. The larger base ran through an ordinance that had been sitting on the books for half a century.

You might ask whether one fat year is a policy. Jones told the audience that teachers from outside the parish have started asking about openings, which is what happens when a poor rural district can suddenly outbid its neighbors. He added that, for the first time in his 30-year career, every teacher the district interviewed this year was fully certified. The Wall Street Journal, relaying local officials, described “an influx of economic activity that is helping to revitalize a slumping region.” Test scores are a question for later years. Recruitment is the question the district can answer now.

Louisiana projects 7,500 workers on site at peak construction, and roughly 1,000 permanent operating positions, and the state’s economic development agency models another 1,900 indirect jobs on top of those. In a parish of about 20,000 people, a thousand steady paychecks change who can remain. Virginia’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, which has studied the most mature data center market in the country, concluded in December 2024 that distressed rural communities can compete for AI training facilities in particular, because training needs land and power more than it needs a city nearby. Jones wants leaving Richland Parish to be a choice graduates make. For decades, the local economy made it a necessity.

A mill town’s payroll was never the whole of its importance, since suppliers, contractors, and lunch counters all rode the same wave and the county taxed the traffic. Meta has awarded more than $1.6 billion in contracts to Louisiana businesses since construction began. On the panel, that figure had faces: a caterer who went from 40 meals to 400, and an entrepreneur who opened a business because Meta was coming. Virginia’s auditors found the same pattern at scale, with much of the construction spending staying in state and data center taxes reaching 31% of total local revenue in one mature market.

That same year, the campus scaled up, and the supply chain began to follow. In June, Faith Technologies announced an $80.5 million plant in neighboring Ouachita Parish, with 500,000 square feet devoted to electrical assemblies and energy systems, at least 200 direct jobs, and entry-level pay starting at $22 an hour. No one claims Meta alone summoned that plant. A region already building power and computing infrastructure becomes a place where it pays to manufacture parts nearby.

Critics say neighbors will pay for all this on their electric bills. A 5-gigawatt customer would do that if the utility were allowed to push the new costs onto a widow on a fixed income. Entergy Louisiana describes the Meta agreement as the opposite arrangement. Meta pays its full cost of service and funds the generation, transmission, and related upgrades required to serve the campus. Entergy projected $650 million in customer savings over 15 years under the original deal, including roughly 10% cuts in storm charges on customer bills, and in March it projected another $2 billion over 20 years, for $2.65 billion in combined benefits. These are forecasts. Regulators should hold the utility to them rather than treat the press release as a result. President Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge would carry the model nationwide. Developers bring new supply, pay for delivery infrastructure, and pay for contracted power even when they do not use it.

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Water travels faster on a Facebook thread than power does. The Richland design circulates a glycol mixture through the computing halls in a closed loop and sheds heat through dry cooling for most of the year. Bourgeois told the panel the campus will use less water than the farming operation it replaced, which matters because the site displaced irrigated farmland. Microsoft has published a design that eliminates evaporative cooling entirely and saves more than 125 million liters per facility each year, with the first sites due in late 2027.

Associated Builders and Contractors estimates that the construction industry must attract 349,000 new workers in 2026 and 456,000 in 2027, and it singles out electricians capable of the precision wiring that data centers demand. The panel cited 500,000 open positions and welders earning $120,000 a year. Wages like that mean little to a man who cannot afford a month without a paycheck while he trains. Meta’s America’s Workforce Academy, launched with $115 million, targets him. It covers tuition, travel, and lodging; pays a daily stipend; runs for four weeks for its construction and fiber technician tracks; and promises graduates a job. According to the panel, 40,000 people have applied, 250 have graduated, and retention stands at 90%. The course is four weeks. Graduates walk out with a start date and an industry credential, then learn the rest of the trade on a live site.

The politics are messier than the usual allignments would predict. ABC, the voice of merit shop contractors, is a partner in the Academy. North America’s Building Trades Unions signed their own partnership with Meta in August, including a community fund for teachers, first responders, and local infrastructure. Organizations that spend most years at odds agreed there is a generation of work on the calendar. A governor who wants to build can find allies in both halls if he asks.

Skeptics press a harder point. The companies get tax breaks, the cranes leave, and the town is left with a windowless box and a handful of technicians. The reply lies in what a state can demand before the first crane arrives. Sites with land, reliable power, and a permitting office that finishes a file are scarce, and that scarcity is the parish’s bargaining position. Governor Landry’s Executive Order 26-058 makes participation in the state’s data center incentives conditional on paying for incremental electric infrastructure, long-term reliability, workforce development, local tax contributions, resource stewardship, and accountability. A reduced rate on a tax base that would otherwise not exist is still new revenue. Virginia’s audit shows recurring equipment and property taxes outlasting construction. Moreover, the Heritage Foundation has warned that local moratoriums and five-year interconnection queues are already slowing the buildout and pushing projects toward states that can finish a permit. The panel acknowledged a survey in which 80% of respondents viewed data centers unfavorably. That survey does not vote in Richland Parish. The parish that wants the project, on terms it can read and enforce, gets to say yes and keep the proceeds.

The stakes run past Louisiana. David Sacks put the matter plainly when the White House released its AI Action Plan: “To remain the leading economic and military power, the United States must win the AI race.” That race is physical. Models are trained in buildings; the buildings need power, fiber, and electricians, and a country that cannot permit the buildings will watch them rise somewhere else. On June 10, Senator Tom Cotton asked the Justice Department to investigate alleged Chinese influence on campaigns against American data center development. The investigation will show what it shows. Beijing’s interest in a slower American buildout does not depend on the outcome of that file. The same campuses already feed tools most zoning hearings never price, including Meta AI glasses that the Blinded Veterans Association now offers, with training, to eligible blind and low-vision veterans who use them to read mail and identify objects on a kitchen counter.

Earlier waves of technology wealth pooled in a few zip codes, and the rest of the country was told to be glad for the apps. This wave happens to need things Richland Parish has: acreage, transmission lines, a willing statehouse, people who can pull wire. Over the next decade we will know whether graduates stay, whether operating revenue replaces the construction surge, and whether Entergy’s projections show up on actual bills. Louisiana has written its terms down. Other states can copy them or improve on them. The ones that refuse to build will still use the AI; they will just send the taxes to somebody else’s school board and then wonder why they cannot keep a teacher.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

The Washington Examiner published two related reports on September 15. OpenAI lobbyists are backing regulatory provisions in the bipartisan FRONTIER Act, H.R. 9925, introduced in July by Reps. Jay Obernolte and Lori Trahan. Rep. Josh Gottheimer, who co-chairs the House work on the subject, is pressing a different method. He wants mandatory government review of the most advanced models and has said third-party audits alone do not meet the moment. The live argument in Washington is now the machinery. Who assesses a model, what standard that person uses, and how long a developer can survive a refusal will decide whether the statute protects the public or merely rations the right to compete.

Cities inspect bridges because collapse is final and inspection is cheap insurance. The trouble starts when only 3 firms qualify to inspect, every appointment takes 9 months, and an engineer whose design is rejected never learns why. The shortage does the work a ban would have done. Congress is writing a version of that arrangement into federal law for artificial intelligence. Safety is doing a lot of the talking. The identity of the gatekeepers is doing too little.

I argued in June 2025 that Congress, not 50 legislatures, should write the rules for this industry. The White House took the same view in its December 2025 fact sheet calling for a national framework to replace a pile of state mandates. A company should not need 50 legal opinions to ship one product. Uniformity still has to shrink the total burden. Swap many uncertain demands for one expensive bottleneck and the tidy map produces less opportunity than the sponsors promised. The test that matters is practical. Can a new lab read the obligations, budget for them, and meet them before its capital runs out? If it cannot, the framework has failed on the terms used to sell it.

H.R. 9925 is tiered, and the text should be read as written. It distinguishes frontier developers from large developers and from very large developers. Large developers must publish a frontier AI framework covering catastrophic-risk thresholds, model-weight security, and deployment decisions, then undergo annual independent audits for compliance with that framework. Only very large developers must retain licensed independent verification organizations for ongoing assessment. That last category requires both revenue above $5 billion and at least $10 billion in AI development spending over the preceding 36 months, counting affiliates. A garage lab does not walk into a federal licensing board on day one. The pressure the bill creates sits in the assessor market; it would stand up. An independent verification organization would judge whether a very large developer’s published framework, followed as written, is adequate to hold catastrophic risk to an acceptable level, including when the model is used inside the company. That is a serious job. It only works if more than a handful of organizations can do it on a calendar a growing industry can survive.

The Department of Commerce would license those organizations and set their qualifications through a new Under Secretary for AI Security. Sections 3 and 7 address assessor conflicts of interest and assessor licensing, and they require the Government Accountability Office to examine the assessor market every year for capacity, entry barriers, and independence. Section 9 preempts state law in a targeted way, with exceptions. Section 8 pairs emergency restrictions for imminent catastrophic risk with administrative review, constrained judicial review of provisional orders, and an exception that preserves constitutional claims. The sponsors saw the concentration problem. That credit is real, which is why they are the audience for a harder draft rather than a dismissal.

Gottheimer’s track and the FRONTIER design are two different gates. He would put the review inside an agency. H.R. 9925 puts it in a licensed private market that Commerce would supervise. The private version is easier to defend in a hearing because it looks like independence. It is harder to defend in an actual queue if only a few shops can do the work, if those shops take months to schedule, and if a rejected developer cannot learn why the verdict came down.

A formally even rule can still land unevenly. Joshua Levine’s June 2025 study for the Cato Institute treated auditing and impact-assessment procedures as natural sites of regulatory capture, and the mechanism is ordinary rather than conspiratorial. Large compliance departments are a fixed cost. A firm with $5 billion in revenue can absorb delay, keep a scarce assessor on retainer, and staff the paperwork. A lab of 12 engineers with a better training run cannot. The statute uses the same words for both. The calendar does not. The Heritage Foundation has made the same warning in plainer language. A centralized partnership between government and a handful of frontier firms, sold as safety, is the outcome to fear. Heritage’s critique of California’s earlier frontier bill ran on the same rail. Thresholds and reporting that look neutral on paper become barriers once only a few shops can staff them. Competition among open and closed models, and among multiple providers of apps and infrastructure, is often the discipline that actually works.

A rulebook written around the habits of today’s leaders also risks treating one business model as the only responsible way to operate. Congress should ask of every provision whether it measures a danger or merely rewards familiarity with a particular laboratory’s methods. That question still matters when everyone in the room believes the public purpose is real.

Vice President Vance’s remarks on September 14 named the tension in public. He granted that AI carries real risks and real benefits, said the administration wants to “regulate smartly,” and said he was uneasy that frontier companies are the ones asking for the rules. Lydia Moynihan made the same observation in the New York Post that day, warning against a “please regulate us” turn that just happens to freeze the field. Established firms have an incentive to favor industry-wide constraints they can carry and rivals cannot. The incentive is visible on the balance sheet. Chris Lehane’s September 9 statement for OpenAI says a federal framework should target “the handful of well-resourced laboratories developing the most capable systems” and that “a serious public framework should reduce, not increase, the concentration of power.” Convert the second sentence into terms a competitor could enforce. A shared line in a white paper is where the drafting starts.

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Once an outside assessment becomes a condition of competing, access to competent assessors is public policy. The GAO review in the bill is useful and late. A report on a concentrated assessor market after it forms is a different task from building capacity before the obligation bites. Congress should require published waiting times next to completed assessments. It should set qualification standards that a new evaluator with a different technical approach can actually meet. It should decide whether a developer may carry valid assessment evidence from one evaluator to another, so changing shops does not mean repeating a year of work. Security and intellectual property will force a defined handoff. Portability makes exit practical, and exit keeps an assessor honest.

Standards must be justified, not assumed. The Mercatus Center’s AI Policy Guide makes the point that keeps getting skipped: “AI audits depend on application.” Goals and methods vary with what the model does. No single audit uncovers every problem. A mandate should say what an assessment must establish, let qualified organizations show different ways of establishing it, and require written reasons when an applicant is rejected. An assessor who will not say why a model failed leaves no record that a court, a rival evaluator, or the public can test. Conservatives have spent a generation watching agencies exercise power in that form. They should not bless the same pattern because the subject is code.

Section 8 does provide review of emergency orders, and the bill should acknowledge that. The review offered for provisional orders is still constrained. For a small developer, a stop-development order is not a pause on the calendar. Investors leave, engineers take other jobs, and by the time the administrative case closes there is often nothing left to vindicate. Preserve the government’s power to act on an evidenced emergency. Require early and effective review of any decision that halts development, with the burden of explanation on the institution using the power. Developers remain responsible for meeting justified obligations. The state remains responsible for justifying them.

Competition among assessors could reward weak auditing, and the design must account for that risk. A developer might shop for an agreeable evaluator. Cheap work can look like rigor until someone tests it. Demonstrable qualifications, disclosed conflicts, periodic testing of assessor performance, and mandatory reasons for consequential decisions make a purchased verdict harder to hide. Paperwork volume is a poor proxy for safety in either direction. Competing evaluators and public criticism find weaknesses a closed roster has no incentive to publish.

Jennifer Huddleston warned Congress in April 2025 against treating early AI leaders as permanent monopolists. She was right, and the warning still fits. The ecosystem is wider than a handful of laboratories, and today’s leaders acheived their place by building tools people actually used. Supporting the country’s best innovators and protecting everyone else’s right to displace them can happen under the same statute. An America First AI policy has to protect the nation’s capacity to produce challengers, including the engineer who has not yet incorporated, the researcher working from a different method, and the customer who wants a second vendor because an industry that cannot be challenged from below will call that arrangement safety, and the rest of the country will be asked to treat the label as proof.

Congress can write a national framework, and it can put real obligations on the largest developers. Handing a small circle of laboratories and compliance firms the lasting authority to decide who may challenge them, then calling the result safety, is the outcome the present draft still leaves open. Before the government requires an outside organization to judge a developer, the public should know who can become that organization, what its verdicts must rest on, and how a wrong verdict gets corrected while the company is still alive to care. The FRONTIER Act already admits the assessor market can concentrate. The next draft should treat that admission as a design problem, not a reporting footnote.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in a sponsored partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

In April, a shipment of New Jersey primary ballots left Trenton bound for voters and instead rode a trailer to Memphis. Workers had moved the ballots off their original pallets into replacement containers so the trailer would pack tighter, and they left the tracking labels on the empties. The Memphis plant received the load the next day. For seven days, nobody logged the containers as ballot mail. The shipment came back to South Jersey on April 29 and reached voters on April 30, still ahead of the June 2 primary. The Postal Service inspector general told the story in a September 4 audit, report 26-054-R26, and called it human error. No voter lost a ballot. For days, the service still could not say where those ballots were.

Inspectors did not find Memphis by accident. After a congressional inquiry, they returned in June to five plants in New Jersey and Tennessee, adding those visits to earlier stops at nine processing plants and 73 delivery units in eight states during the March to May primaries. Recommendation 10 tells the Postal Service to keep the labels that uniquely identify a pallet of ballot mail attached to that mailing through the trip, until the mail is ready to be processed. Recommendation 11 tells managers to notify Election and Government Mail Program Specialists when a barcoded ballot cannot be read, so the service can go to the board of elections, including in North Carolina, instead of letting a smudged envelope fall out of the count.

The same report names rooms that never reached a cable chyron. At Harrisburg, a hand canceler used on Pennsylvania’s May 19 primary was still set to March 19, and at least 56 ballots left with the wrong date. Another 108 return ballots at that plant had been mixed into ordinary redirected mail and had to be driven to Pittsburgh the morning of the election. Training materials were missing from the workroom floor at 22 of the 73 delivery units. Among about 1.27 million election and political pieces the auditors watched, 214 were delayed, 115 of them ballots, and five missed the delivery deadline. From February through May, the mail service could measure posted on-time scores between 97.75% and 98.99%.

The measurement gap predates this year’s lawsuits. In its April 2025 review of the 2024 general election, report 24-143-R25, the inspector general counted 59.4 million ballots inside the service-performance system, on time 97.3% of the time, and recorded a Postal Service estimate of another 39.8 million ballots moving without tracking data. Those are mailpiece figures. Treat them as a fraud tally, and you will have lied. Treat them as a visibility number, and you will have described the system the country actually ran. Roughly 40% of the ballot mail in a presidential election traveled outside the measurement stream before anyone sued President Trump.

Forty-seven states already offer voters some form of ballot tracking. The holdouts, on the US Vote Foundation directory, are Illinois, Missouri, and Wyoming. Derek Tisler and Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center acknowledged the spread of tracking in March, because a ballot that leaves the documented stream is a risk they also recognize. Trump’s March 31 order, Executive Order 14399, tried to make that practice a national floor: Official Election Mail markings, unique Intelligent Mail barcodes on the outbound and return envelopes, and a structured exchange so the Postal Service knows which pieces it has accepted. Postmaster General David Steiner noted on September 4 that Kit 600, the Postal Service’s own election-mail guide, has recommended serialized Intelligent Mail barcodes for years, and that the House had already passed a unique-barcode and special-envelope bill 396-6 in 2024. A similar measure cleared House Oversight this year. Appearance on a federal citizenship list is a different fact from registration under state law, and the order left eligibility where it already sits, with the states.

On September 14, the Supreme Court refused to lift the preliminary injunction against the Postal Service rule that carried out the order. United States Postal Service v. California, No. 26A305, leaves Judge Indira Talwani’s September 4 injunction in Boston in force through November. The unsigned emergency order said the government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge to that injunction and that the equities do not favor a stay. Justice Kavanaugh wrote separately that, on the briefing so far, there is a fair prospect the final rule falls within the Postal Service’s authority under 39 USC §401(2). His no was the calendar. Applying a new national interface weeks before a general election would likely be arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act, he concluded, because state and local officials do not have time to implement it. Justice Alito, joined by Justice Thomas, would have granted the stay and noted that 12 states supporting the rule considered compliance practicable. In the end, the left’s lawfare, combined with sympathetic Democrat judges delaying implementation by the USPS, left SCOTUS with no real option but to allow the litigation to proceed without any relief for the president.

I wrote on May 31 that the postal rule was a fallback after the Senate left the SAVE Act behind a filibuster, and that an early procedural win would not close the case. The House had passed the SAVE Act 220-208 on April 10, 2025, then passed the SAVE America Act in February. Senate Democrats blocked a floor vote 48-50 on June 4. The litigation did not end. Shawn Fleetwood at The Federalist reported the administration’s August courtroom success next to the Court’s warning that implementation was not necessarily lawful. Jay Rogers in the Washington Examiner said in early September that a win on the docket is not a substitute for a statute. Monday made that warning the governing fact. The injunction binds.

The September audit still leaves work that does not run through the blocked rule. The inspector general issued 11 recommendations covering wrong-date postmarks, hand-canceler control, late-arriving political mail reports, twice-daily all-clear certifications, training posted on the workroom floor, response times on the Election Mail website, container identification, and barcode readability outreach to boards of elections. The Postal Service agreed with 10 and rejected only the item that would have required prompt notice to customers affected by regional transportation changes during the midterm season. The audit states it did not evaluate the executive order and that later work will address separate allegations received in late August. A closed recommendation means a facility, a manager, a completion date, and a later inspector general test of the claim. That closeout can finish before November.

Ken Blackwell, the former Ohio secretary of state now chairing election security work at the America First Policy Institute, put the plant-floor test this way in August: “The Postal Service already sets detailed standards for how mail is prepared and tracked, and ballot mail deserves the same rigor.” Rigor at a facility is a failed-scan queue a supervisor has to clear before the shift ends, with published definitions, so pieces left out of the official count cannot drop quietly from the denominator.

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Congress can still write the postal duties into statute, fund the interfaces between USPS and state election systems, and set a schedule that gives officials a full cycle to test before anything becomes mandatory. A statute would face constitutional review, and it should. A funded duty on a realistic calendar does not rest on contested readings of general agency powers or on emergency applications filed weeks before an election. The Heritage Foundation released its 2026 Election Integrity Scorecard on September 15, ranking states across more than 50 practices in 15 categories. Don Palmer, Heritage’s senior legal fellow for election integrity, said the Foundation’s 2027 priorities run through proof of citizenship, enforcement, and compliance audits. Heritage’s model absentee language already asks for a unique barcode on the outbound and return envelopes that can be followed through the Postal Service, kept apart from any mark that would identify the voter on the ballot itself. Tracking belongs on that map with registration-list accuracy, voter identification, absentee procedures, observers, and post-election audits. Heritage also credits states that issue free identification.

In July I wrote about Alaska, where a man in Kotzebue, off the road system and reachable only by air, already mails an original birth certificate to collect his Permanent Fund Dividend, and where geography plus an inflexible in-person voting rule still imposes real costs on eligible voters. I argued for remote verification, free documents, and time to correct a bad record. The state had just mailed 3,048 letters asking voters to confirm citizenship against a normal DMV-match yield of roughly 200. The objective was sound. The method needed a channel that did not strand an eligible citizen behind a stale match. Before an untested data exchange becomes a condition of moving a ballot, the exchange should be tested, the error rate should be known, and a citizen whose record is wrong should have a way to fix it without a lawyer. The Postal Service’s final-rule explanation says its participation records concern planned ballot mailing, not candidate selections, and that military and overseas ballots under UOCAVA are exempt. Those are stated design features of a blocked rule. Independent privacy testing still has to happen, access to participation data has to be limited, logged, and reviewable, and no identifying link to a vote choice can survive once the envelope and the ballot are parted.

A registered parcel records movement and receipt and says nothing about who packed it or whether the papers inside are genuine; ballot tracking and eligibility checks do different jobs, and a reform that keeps them apart can be tested on each job without turning a missing scan into a slogan or a barcode into a cure. The September audit is useful because it shows high on-time scores at most plants, documented failures at some, and an agency signature on 10 of 11 repairs.

The injunction is in force through November. The inspector general’s list does not need a stay to move. A later statute or a later rule has to meet the timing test Kavanaugh wrote down. What can be finished before the midterms is a named closer on each agreed reccomendation, with a date anyone can inspect.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

Marathon’s Garyville plant on the Mississippi started up in 1977. It remains the last major American refinery built with significant downstream capacity. Smaller units have opened since, and existing sites have added capacity, but the country has not built another Garyville in half a century. In that same stretch, U.S. crude output more than doubled after 2010, mostly from light shale in the Permian. The fleet asked to absorb those barrels has been running near 98% utilization, and some operators have pushed scheduled maintenance into late 2026 and even 2027 to hold those rates. National diesel has crossed $6 a gallon. David Blackmon wrote in the Daily Caller in August that a system this tight does not need a standing order to run harder. It needs more capacity.

Washington has spent years counting barrels produced and barrels exported and calling the result energy richness. The barrels are real. What has gone unfinished is the capacity to turn them into fuel on American soil, on a timetable a lender and a combatant commander can both trust. President Trump has taken up that second question with paper that can move money and equipment, an April determination and a September delegation, rather than another speech about abundance.

Heritage’s Brent Sadler has pressed the defense version of the point for years. Fuel security lives in a network of refineries, pipelines, storage, and transport. A break anywhere in that network can slow wartime operations even when headline production looks impressive. The military burns finished product. So do the trucks that move grain and the aircraft that leave a carrier deck. Once that is admitted, the refinery stops looking like one more private plant that will look after itself.

If the product is this valuable, private capital should have built more of it already. Demand is not what is missing. What is missing is a lender willing to believe that a plant costing billions of dollars will be permitted, finished, operated, and paid off across decades. Every uncertain government decision on that path raises the cost of capital. Jason Hayes of the America First Policy Institute described the same trap in March. Litigation exposure, shifting permitting interpretations, and political pressure on banks all discourage investment in plants the country still needs. The California Energy Commission, hardly a conservative shop, admitted in 2025 that “increasing petroleum business uncertainty in California is leading to reduced industry confidence to invest in the state.” When the regulators write that sentence, the argument is no longer a talking point.

On April 20, the President issued a formal determination under the Defense Production Act. He found that domestic petroleum production, refining, and logistics are essential to national defense, and that industry cannot supply those capabilities promptly on its own because of financing constraints, long equipment lead times, permitting obstacles, and infrastructure bottlenecks. He directed the Energy Department to use Section 303, which permits federal purchases, purchase commitments, and investment in industrial equipment and facilities. On September 8, an executive order expanded the delegation so Interior, Commerce, and Energy can each exercise specified priority powers on their own. Taylor Rogers, speaking for the White House last week, said expanding that capacity is a top priority for the President and his energy team.

The financial logic is the one shipyards already live by. Jim Fein at Heritage put the defense industrial base in four words in March: contracts and orders dictate capacity. A yard does not pour new slipways because an analyst forecasts more hulls someday. It pours them when it has orders that can carry the debt. Section 303 lets the government make purchase commitments that give a lender a customer against which to underwrite construction, and it lets the government put money into specific equipment and facilities. Title I, through Section 101(c), lets agencies issue rated orders that move a transformer or a compressor to the front of a manufacturer’s queue. The statute covers equipment needed to construct or maintain energy facilities, refining included. A rating will not invent a factory or compel a foreign supplier. If a plant’s completion date hinges on one delayed component, accelerating that delivery can decide whether steel goes in the ground this year or next.

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Ownership stays private. Selection stays with lenders and operators, not a ministry of industry. The statute changes the two risks that actually kill projects: uncertain revenue and uncertain delivery. Heritage’s 2019 analysis of the DPA, written by Emma Watkins and Thomas Spoehr, endorsed this kind of intervention where a genuine defense industrial vulnerability exists, provided the security connection is clear, and the terms are public. That pedigree matters because conservatives have spent a generation arguing against industrial policy that floats favored firms. The test they set, and the test this program has to meet, is whether the award buys identifiable capacity on disclosed terms.

Brownsville is the greenfield test, and the calendar there is unforgiving. America First Refining is developing a plant on more than 240 acres inside the Port of Brownsville, a deep-water foreign trade zone with rail and liquid docks, designed around domestic light shale crude at roughly 168,000 barrels a day. The site has survived ownership changes that would have killed a landlocked project. In March, the company announced a nine-figure investment and a binding 20-year offtake term sheet. Fluor received an engineering contract in April. In September 2 Matrix Service announced design work on the tank farm as a step toward a final investment decision. Company leadership has described major units arriving in 2028 and a first full operating year in 2029. Texas regulators granted the project a third and final extension in February, and if construction has not begun by October 19, 2027, the air permit becomes void. Ribbon cuttings will not satisfy that condition. Dirt has to move.

Existing plants can add barrels sooner, and Beaumont already proved the point. ExxonMobil began construction there in 2019 and started the expansion in March 2023. The $2 billion project added 250,000 barrels a day, roughly the output of a large stand-alone refinery, on land, utilities, and a workforce that were already in place. Construction peaked at about 1,700 contractors. Reuters reported last week that refiners advising the White House want federal support pointed at making working plants more efficient or expanding them. That preference is self-interested, and it is also the fastest route to usable product. A program that waits on one new site while ignoring the fleet already running will spend years producing drawings.

Some of the missing capacity is already poured in concrete and sitting idle. In September 2025, the EPA abandoned its reactivation policy, which had treated a major facility idle for two years as if it were newly built, after the Third Circuit ruled in Port Hamilton that the agency had exceeded its authority. That change runs on a separate track from the DPA, but the two tools complement each other. Regulatory reform improves a restart’s legal odds while a purchase commitment or a rated order can address the physical and financial gap. The Institute for Energy Research has identified shuttered facilities, including St. Croix, as candidates worth examining. Each still needs a credible operating plan and private capital that shows up, yet recovering docks, tanks, and pipe that already exist is cheaper than building the same plant twice.

A 2029 startup date will not bring diesel down this fall, and no serious person should pretend otherwise. Expansions at working sites and restarts of idle ones can move on shorter clocks, and every year the investment decision slips, the finish line slips with it. The question is whether American capacity grows over this decade instead of shrinking while utilization sits near 98% and the existing fleet is asked to run harder still.

The welfare objection should govern the terms. Federal support ought to buy something you can point to: a stated fuel requirement, a specified number of additional barrels, delivery obligations, matching private investment, and milestones with consequences if they are missed. Brownsville’s political connections make transparent selection and public terms especially important, and no DPA award to the project has been made as of this writing, so the case for the policy rests on capacity gained across every eligible project rather than on any one developer’s fortunes. Heritage insisted on that discipline in 2019. It still applies.

I argued at the end of 2023 that domestic refining constraints were limiting the benefit Americans get from their own oil, and in 2025 I supported using the DPA to build domestic rare-earth processing. Rare earths and diesel are different commodities. Both leave the country poorer when the raw material is mined here and finished somewhere else. Trump recognized the gap and put the statutory tools in place. The measure that matters is physical: financed projects, delivered equipment, plants running, and fuel produced on American soil. Hold him to that, not to the press release.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

Tehran has decided that my birthday (11/3/26) is the date that matters. The more honest clock is the one already running at Hormuz. Fresh Iranian crude moving through the strait has been interrupted since the blockade was reinstated on July 14, and the regime’s hope is that American voters will supply the relief the dwindling supply of Iranian missiles could not. President Trump should refuse the trade. He should raise the price of delay now, while the present Congress and the present commander in chief still hold the instruments, rather than let threats to shipping and a spike at the pump buy a pause that finances the recovery the campaign was built to stop. The election calendar can usefully concentrate minds in Washington. It should not be allowed to stand in for an export stream the regime no longer has.

The squeeze is already measurable. Three tracking services told Reuters on September 1 that they could identify no successful fresh Iranian crude transit to China since mid-July. August loadings were estimated at 220,000 to 255,000 barrels a day, against roughly 2 million in March. Vortexa’s Claire Jungman stated the comparison without decoration: “at no point did outbound flows fall to near-zero for a sustained stretch as they have since mid-July.” Iran still holds oil, much of it sitting in floating storage outside the Gulf, and selling those cargoes spends down a reserve instead of replacing the March stream that paid for parts, wages, and patronage.

That shortfall is why the regime has turned to the American electorate as a stand-in for customers. Gasoline prices hurt incumbents; a president facing a difficult midterm can be tempted to buy calm, and a new Democratic House would then try to starve the campaign of future money. The chain sounds intuitive in a campaign season. It is also weaker, at each step, than Tehran needs it to be.

Election Day is November 3rd. The new Congress convenes January 3rd. Between those dates sit 61 days of the current appropriations, the current majorities, and the current commander in chief. After January, a funding cutoff still has to pass both chambers and survive a presidential signature, or muster an override that no plausible majority now commands. Congress can refuse future money, and that is genuine leverage. Using it against an operation that has reduced Iranian missile production, cut Houthi resupply, and kept commercial lanes open would be a vote its sponsors would have to defend in public. Tehran is treating a predicted November result as if the money had already been cut off.

Political cost can push a president toward accommodation. It can also push him toward a result he can point to. Victor Davis Hanson made the second case yesterday: “If the midterms have any effect whatsoever, they might result in the opposite.” The administration’s September calendar fits Hanson’s reading better than it fits Tehran’s. Treasury launched Operation Economic Outcast on August 24, and Secretary Bessent left little room for a soft landing: “Our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone.” On September 8, the same department sanctioned Iran’s remaining airlines and suspended aviation authorizations. The Heritage Foundation has put the same choice to third countries in blunter language: clear your books with Washington or keep servicing a sanctioned oil state. If the administration were hunting for a pre-election off-ramp, September would be an odd month to ground airlines and expand financial isolation.

The strikes already flown keep their value only if the factories stay dark. CENTCOM reported more than 13,000 targets struck by April 6, among them missile and drone production sites, command facilities, air defenses, and naval assets. Those are official counts, not independently verified destruction totals, and the distinction matters. Even so, the scale is not seriously disputed. Iran rebuilds with foreign exchange earned from oil, with components imported through intermediaries, and with the banks, hulls, insurers, and airlines that move both. Richard Goldberg’s secondary-sanctions work identifies the joint: those intermediaries should have to choose Iranian business or access to the American economy. Rebeccah Heinrichs supplies the military half of the same problem. Intermittent strikes, a maintained blockade, and routine enforcement close the window a pause would open. Washington already tested the opposite sequence. The memorandum of June 17 suspended the blockade on June 18, and the regime enjoyed nearly four weeks of commercial access before enforcement resumed on July 14. That interval taught Tehran something it did not deserve to learn. It should not be offered again.

None of that pressure holds if gasoline becomes Tehran’s veto. Iran’s usable instrument against American staying power is the price at the pump, and the error would be to treat a rising energy bill as proof that the strategy has failed rather than as the problem the strategy has to solve. Goldberg’s pairing is the sound one. Keep pressure on Tehran and, at the same time, move Gulf oil to market, escort the traffic that needs escorting, and add barrels from American and allied producers so the regime cannot set household prices as a bargaining chip. The Congressional Budget Office estimate released today projects additional inflation and a continuing military bill, with Defense Department costs already at $38.1 billion through August 1 and roughly $2 billion to $3 billion a month at current intensity. Those figures argue for running the campaign tightly and protecting navigation so the public can live with it, not for paying Iran to stop a practice it will resume the moment the money arrives.

June already offered the cheaper-looking deal. The administration accepted an interim arrangement that dangled sanctions relief and a lifted blockade while leaving the nuclear file for later. Within a month, the blockade was back. I argued in June 2025 that verifiable diplomacy backed by force was the right frame, and that preventing nuclear blackmail is a different task from remaking Iranian politics. The frame still holds. What has sharpened is the distinction between interest in talks and performance that can be checked. Phone calls through Pakistani mediators do not meet that test, and neither do promises offered with a November deadline. Inspectors who can confirm enforceable nuclear limits do, along with a demonstrated and sustained end to attacks on shipping and a verified halt in weapons moving to the Houthis. A federal jury in June 2025 convicted Muhammad Pahlawan for transferring Iranian advanced weapons at sea off Somalia. The pipeline is real, maritime, and subject to interdiction. Aviation sanctions alone will not close it. Relief, if it comes, should arrive in stages that can be pulled, with unrestricted revenue last, not first.

A campaign this expensive also needs a vote it can defend, not an implication drawn from leftover accounts. Trump should ask Congress for explicit authorization and adequate appropriations. The House passed a measure limiting unauthorized hostilities on June 3 by 215 to 208, and Republican members were among the yes votes. That tally was a warning. The useful response is to put a concrete set of aims in front of the chamber and ask for the authority and the money to match them: constrained replenishment, secure navigation, verified nuclear limits. Allies who live off Hormuz traffic should put hulls and money into the same effort in proportion to what they take through the strait. Washington can, without pretending to run a revolution, also support Iranian access to uncensored information and to the ordinary tools of peaceful organization, because the people who have to live under this government remain the people best placed to change it.

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The internal picture is already worse for the regime than it was in March, which is what pressure is supposed to produce. A six-party Kurdish coalition has called a general strike for September 16 to mark the anniversary of Mahsa Amini’s death. Reza Pahlavi urged government employees on August 23 to obstruct the state during the currency crisis. Reporting in late August described arguments inside the leadership over the economy and over negotiations, including instructions attributed to Mojtaba Khamenei against any public talk of weakness. The regime has announced 29 protest-related executions since March 18. That last figure cuts in two directions at once. It records severe repression, and it records that the security apparatus still carries out orders. Nothing in the open record suggests enforcers refusing the chain of command. The record does show a government whose revenue, bargaining position, and internal cohesion have all deteriorated since early spring.

Making regime change the test of success would stretch the objective past what the campaign can control and would invite Washington to assume responsibility for a country of 90 million people. The aims that can be demanded and measured are narrower: less Iranian capacity to threaten Americans and allies, slower reconstitution of the missile and drone plants, open sea lanes, and nuclear limits inspectors can actually see. If Iranians turn those conditions into a political transformation, the result could matter the way 1989 mattered, because a Tehran that dropped proxy warfare and maritime coercion would shift the balance in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and Gaza. Call that a gain if it happens, but do not write it into the mission. American policy can create the opening. Iranians have to decide what to do with it.

The objection that deserves the most weight is cost. Persistance is not free, and CBO’s own uncertainty about the real bill is a reason for Congress to demand cleaner accounting from the Pentagon rather than another round of implied consent. But the alternative carries a price as well; it simply hides the invoice until the next crisis, because a regime paid to stop threatening shipping will threaten shipping again the moment it needs another payment, and the missiles it rebuilds with restored oil revenue will be pointed at the same traffic, the same bases, and the same partners as before. Paying for quiet on those terms is a subscription, not a settlement.

Time helps a government only when it can still sell what it pumps. Use the next 49 days to take that option away, week by week, in barrels, in parts, and in the intermediaries who move them, rather than spending them auditioning for a calm that Tehran will sell back to Washington at a higher price later.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in a sponsored partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

Consider a woman who spent six years as a deportation officer in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Los Angeles field office. She followed her training, obeyed lawful orders, and never drew a complaint. In 2028, she applies for a clerical job at a county library. AB 1896, the measure the Legislature titled the GTFO Act, treats that prior service as a presumptive bar. The only statutory escape runs through a hiring agency’s approval of her entry into a Peace Officer Standards and Training basic course. She wants work among the stacks. The statute offers her a gate built only for recruits who mean to carry a gun.

The Senate passed the bill on August 30 by 29 to 10. The Assembly concurred on September 1 by 52 to 19. The enrolled text went to Governor Gavin Newsom on September 14. The California Constitution gives him until September 30 to sign or return it, and a bill he neither signs nor returns becomes law without him. Other blue states will take their cue from whatever he does.

California can refuse to lend its own officers to ICE. Printz and the anti-commandeering cases already protect that choice. The enrolled text goes further and puts a disability on the Americans who already did the work.

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Beginning January 1, 2028, Section 1025 of the Government Code disqualifies anyone previously employed as a sworn law enforcement officer or individual contractor who personally engaged in defined immigration enforcement. The disqualification covers public employment generally, with the state, cities, counties, districts, and other public agencies. Police departments are only one corner of that map. Earlier drafts had drawn a window around President Trump’s second term, from January 20, 2025 to January 20, 2029. The enrolled version dropped the window. The final text asks whether the applicant performed qualifying service at any time. An officer who lawfully served under Obama or Bush is covered as fully as one hired last year.

Applicants for peace officer appointment or a POST basic course must submit a declaration, under penalty of perjury, stating whether they have ever done that work. False statements become evidence in the suitability review. Hiring agencies may consult news articles, verified social media, and civil complaints when they run the background investigation. The Legislature wrote those extra sources into the file. Sacramento is asking more than whether the applicant can do the job in front of him. It is asking whether he once did a federal job the Capitol now treats as a moral stain.

The Legislature did not hide the theory. The findings accuse immigration agents of an “indiscriminate mass terror campaign.” They treat the claim that agents were “unwilling to stand up to orders” as proof of unfitness for any California public job. Assemblymember Mark González, the author, went further, condemning agents as civil rights violators. “Time and time again, we have seen these agents show they are unwilling to stand up to unlawful orders,” he said. “These agents disgust me, and they have no place, no right to serve the public here in California. So, I am proud to stand with the Speaker in drawing a line: if you want to choose violence, if you choose to violate civil rights and follow blatantly racist orders from this oppressive federal administration, good luck finding a job here in the Golden State.” Speaker Robert Rivas signed on as coauthor. The findings behind their bill recite shootings, deaths in custody, and family separations, then leap from those incidents to a rule that covers every covered officer and every covered public job. Individual wrongdoing can be proven in a file. Service cannot substitute for proof.

Critics should describe the exception as it is written, because the state’s defense will live there. A hiring agency may finish a background investigation and approve the applicant for a POST basic course. That approval lifts the immigration-service disqualification. The bill also says that disclosure of prior service, standing alone, cannot justify denying appointment, certification, or enrollment. Those clauses make the law more defensible than a flat lifetime ban.

However, the exception does not lift the classification. Other applicants start under ordinary standards. This class starts under a statutory disability and must earn a special clearance to escape it. The clearance mechanism is a police academy gate, which fits a would-be officer and fits no one applying to catalog books, process payroll, or staff a county clerk’s counter. Senator Catherine Blakespear, defending the bill on the Senate floor, said: “There is an off ramp.” In the same speech, she conceded unresolved problems with jobs that never pass through POST and said the Legislature would work on them next year. She was describing an exception cut for one category of work and then bolted it onto every public job in the state.

Intergovernmental immunity is the doctrine that stops this statute. In 2022, the Supreme Court restated the rule in United States v. Washington. Washington had written a workers’ compensation scheme that treated federal contractors less favorably than comparable private and state workers. Olympia called the motive benevolent. The Court still struck down the law. A generally applicable rule that happens to raise federal costs can stand. A classification aimed at the federal relationship cannot.

California will say the officers covered by AB 1896 have already left federal payroll, so the immunity left with the badge. Davis v. Michigan Department of Treasury and Dawson v. Steager give that claim a short life. James Dawson was a retired deputy US marshal. West Virginia taxed his pension more harshly than a state trooper’s. The Court refused to treat the end of federal service as the end of federal protection. Those were tax cases under a specific statute, and they do not decide a hiring dispute on their own. They do establish that a state may not wait for the federal career to end and then attach a disability to the fact that the career was federal.

The nearest recent analogy sits in the Ninth Circuit, the court that would hear a challenge to AB 1896. In United States v. King County, decided in 2024, the county used its ownership of Boeing Field to stop private firms from servicing ICE deportation flights. It called the move a landlord’s prerogative and a policy protest. Judge Daniel Bress, writing for the panel, held that a general objection to a federal mission, dressed as a property rule, still discriminates against the United States and those who deal with it. California will answer that choosing a clerk is closer to an employer’s core function than regulating an airport tenant. The enrolled design undercuts that defense. A genuine fitness screen would look like a misconduct inquiry or a training requirement tied to the job at hand. AB 1896 instead writes a statewide disability, justifies it with collective moral condemnation in the findings, and extends it to work for which immigration experience is irrelevant. Heritage’s constitutional scholars draw that same line between neutral costs on federal operations and discrimination aimed at them. Even Cato’s Ilya Shapiro and Josh Blackman, who defended California’s right to withhold its own assistance from immigration enforcement, condemned targeted restrictions on the people who cooperate with it.

The Constitution forbids bills of attainder, legislative acts that name a class and punish it without trial. The Court has long treated exclusion from an occupation as punishment. United States v. Brown struck down a ban on Communist Party members serving as union officers even though Congress framed the ban as prevention. AB 1896 defines its class by past lawful service, declares that class morally unfit in the findings, and then withholds public employment. The POST exception is the state’s best reply, because courts will spare a measure that actually tests professional fitness, as Nixon v. Administrator of General Services shows. The reply thins out the moment the disability reaches jobs that never touch a badge and service that predates every incident the findings recite.

Leave California’s misconduct machinery where it is. The state already investigates whether an applicant lied, used excessive force, abused authority, or violated constitutional rights. Its certification system already strips officers found to have done those things. A challenge to AB 1896 would not touch that apparatus. Lawful service and misconduct are seperate inquiries, and the statute collapses them. A federal badge is neither a shield against those standards nor evidence that its holder broke them.

A career penalty for taking a federal assignment discourages people from taking it. How large that effect is remains a question for a record, not a slogan, yet the incentive is written into the enrolled text. Serve in the disfavored federal role and face an extra barrier when you come home looking for work; today, the disfavored role is immigration enforcement, and tomorrow a different legislature could decide that lawful service in the IRS, the ATF, or the Border Patrol reveals values it will not house. National law cannot function if states may turn its execution into a personal liability.

Newsom should veto the bill. If he signs it, or lets it become law by silence, courts should enjoin the discriminatory employment provisions and leave ordinary background investigations and misconduct standards standing. California keeps the power to decline assistance and to reject an applicant who actually abused authority. What it should lose is the power to make an American’s next job depend on Sacramento’s approval of the policy he was lawfully assigned to carry out.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

On Tuesday evening, September 8, at 8:04 PM Eastern, an account on 𝕏 with almost no history posted a thread. Its author, Jacob Coxon, said he had resigned from Anthropic and that both his former employer and OpenAI were gambling with human lives in a race toward self-improving superintelligence. Within 24 hours, the thread had been viewed more than 123 million times. A US senator cited it within 15 hours, a governor within 16, and Elon Musk said he couldn't recall such a reception for a post from a new account with almost no prior activity.

The Wall Street Journal had already published its exclusive. The paper posted at 7:46 PM, roughly 18 minutes before Coxon told the world. A newspaper does not learn of a resignation before the resigner announces it unless someone arranged the briefing. The story was written in advance and timed to land with the thread. The Journal accidentally published a few minutes early.

David Sacks, the White House AI adviser, laid out that sequence on the All-In podcast, and his critics treated the observation as conspiracy-mongering. The public record does not need a hidden plot. It needs a look at who moved first, who paid the movers, and what those same people have already said they want the government to do.

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Sacks asked the question the coverage skipped. What did Coxon actually bring forward? When WIRED asked whether Anthropic was cutting corners, Coxon said, “No, not yet.” He produced no buried memo, no dataset, no incident the company had hidden. His complaint was a forecast about what competition might someday pressure a lab to do. Forecasts can be honest and still be opinions. The press treated the forecast as a disclosure, and that treatment did the work a leaked file would have done.

The first three quote-posts arrived, according to the investigator Parker Thayer, within 15 minutes, two of them within 10. They came from Nathan Calvin, general counsel of Encode AI, which helped shape California’s AI legislation; from Peter Wildeford of the AI Policy Network; and from Daniel Kokotajlo, who leads the AI Futures Project and who happened to have a Joe Rogan appearance circulating at the same moment, using much the same language about AI killing everyone. The 14th quote-poster, about 27 minutes in, worked on AI safety at Coefficient Giving. Perhaps three professional advocates each independently happened to be watching a dormant account at 8 PM on a Tuesday. Sacks’s narrower claim is easier to test. The message reached the public through an existing advocacy network, not through strangers’ organic curiosity.

The grants make the claim institutional rather than personal. The Survival and Flourishing Fund, the philanthropic vehicle associated with Jaan Tallinn, lists 2025 recommendations of $516,000 for Encode AI, $1.635 million for the AI Policy Institute, and more than $2 million across two entries for the AI Futures Project, plus $505,000 for AI Futures in 2024. AI Futures itself names the fund as a principal source of its money. Tallinn is not merely a patron of AI-doom advocacy. He led Anthropic’s $124 million Series A in May 2021, with Dustin Moskovitz among the participants. The same man sits on both sides of the story, as an early owner of the company whose researcher resigned and as the funder of the organizations that amplified the resignation within minutes.

No document shows Tallinn directing a post. But the organizations presented to the public as independent safety voices grew from the same financial soil as the company they claim to be warning about. When those organizations demand rules governing who may build frontier AI, a citizen should ask about their independence before asking about their model of the future.

At 9:27 PM, 83 minutes after the thread, Evan Hubinger, who leads alignment science at Anthropic and still works there, endorsed the warning and assigned a greater-than-10 % probability of human extinction within the decade. When a serving executive attaches a number to a departed colleague’s warning, the opinion starts to look like a company estimate. Anthropic has not disavowed him. Chamath Palihapitiya’s explanation is probably correct. Management cannot disavow him because a substantial faction inside the company believes the same thing. It is fair to ask what a company that believes this intends to do about it, and what it intends to tell the investors it hopes to court in a public offering.

Five days before Coxon resigned, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar announced legislation to ban artificial superintelligence and pause advanced AI development pending federal rules. The remedy was already written. What it lacked was a witness. On the morning of September 9, Sanders supplied one, citing Coxon to justify his bill, and Governor JB Pritzker followed 42 minutes later. Sacks was explicit that he does not think Sanders planned any of this, and he is right not to claim it. A legislator with a bill in hand needs no invitation to seize a viral warning. The statute did not spring from the thread. It was sitting on the desk when the thread arrived.

The organizations have not been shy about the prize. They want a federal AI regulator. Some want a pause or an outright ban on superintelligence. Four days after the resignation, Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, published a proposal calling for embedded outside evaluators inside the labs, coordination among frontier companies in democratic countries, international coordination, and regulation to bind any developer unwilling to join voluntarily. He even discusses a government waiver for the antitrust problems that arise when competitors sit down to set a common pace. That is the CEO describing the ask in his own essay. The leading companies would like permission to coordinate, and they would like the government to compel the companies that will not.

A firm that has already crossed into a valuable market has every reason to praise a drawbridge, even one that costs it a toll. Scholars at the Heritage Foundation have argued that a licensing model for frontier AI would follow the same public-choice logic that already governs occupational boards, where the first firms through the gate help write the rules that follow. Researchers at the Mercatus Center have shown how those rules function as a privilege for incumbents, raising their wages, shrinking the field of rivals, and leaving later entrants, including startups and university labs, to climb a compliance wall the incumbent can already afford. The conservative case and Sacks’s case meet on that point without anyone needing to invent a plot. A compliance shop staffed by hundreds of lawyers is a moat when your competitor is a garage project.

The entrants who cannot cross at all are the open-source projects. Sacks put it directly: “The ultimate target is open source.” No statute has to use the word “ban” to get there. Anthropic’s own published position on open weights concedes the mechanism. Released weights cannot be recalled, and their use cannot be monitored. Any rule that conditions approval on the ability to monitor, control, or withdraw a model excludes open models by construction. Amodei says he opposes a blanket ban, and he may mean it sincerely. The relevant question is the effect of his proposed standards, not the label he prefers, and the effect would be a frontier occupied by a handful of licensed firms whose own researchers announce, with numerical precision, that their product may end the world.

Plenty of the researchers are probably sincere, and sincerity is not the test. A free society asks what they intend to do with the authority they seek. David Friedberg framed the pause proposals with a line that belongs in a hearing room: “Someone is controlling the gas pedal.” Who holds it? By what right? And when, if ever, do they hand it back? A pause is a license to decide when others may resume, and whoever holds that license holds the industry.

Nor does the argument require the most aggressive thing Sacks said. He suggested that Coxon, having spent at most a few months at Anthropic after a fellowship at Newspeak House, a political-technology network, and a 2022 scholarship of roughly $20,000 from a Good Ventures program, may have joined already planning this exit. That is an allegation, and Coxon told Bret Baier he worked with no one, and I will not pretend that a fellowship and a scholarship prove otherwise; they do not; they fit either story. What would settle it is simple enough. Produce the communications that put the Journal’s reporter in touch with a junior researcher, and the calender that placed three advocates at their keyboards at 8:04 PM. Sacks was prepared to ask Coxon about them on air. Coxon canceled that morning.

Once the plant allegation is set aside, the bargain on offer is unchanged. A lab that will not retract its own executive’s extinction number is asking Washington for the power to set the pace of everyone else’s work, and the open models that cannot be recalled are the first systems the new standards would exclude. Americans should keep the right to build, own, inspect, and run these systems themselves. Developers should answer in court for the concrete harms they cause. That is accountability without handing the keys to the firms already inside the gate, and if the fire alarm is real, the last office that should be wired to it is the one that sells the extinguishers.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in a sponsored partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

Somewhere in China, a researcher opened a chat window and went to work. Over several weeks, he assembled roughly 16 software modules for electronic warfare and suppression of enemy air defenses, taking the suite through 12 versions with an American AI model serving as an assistant. The code ranked targets and scored jamming options. Midway through the project, the default scenario flipped. It now listed 12 targets on Taiwan: a command bunker, an early-warning radar, Patriot and Tien Kung batteries, major air bases, and a regional combatant headquarters. Anthropic later tied the account to research institutions in the People’s Republic of China, including the PLA Academy of Military Sciences. This was development work, not an attack. The intended use was still obvious. An American model was speeding software that would matter in a campaign against a democratic island the United States has pledged to help defend.

The episode occupies pages 119 through 122 of a 154-page report Anthropic released on September 10. The document catalogs attempts by China and other hostile services to turn Claude toward weapons, surveillance, and theft. Two days earlier, the NSA, the FBI, and CISA issued a joint advisory warning that Chinese companies were extracting American AI capabilities at industrial scale, likely with the Chinese government's knowledge. I have not seen a cleaner pairing of evidence for a point conservatives have been making for years. The United States has to win the AI race, and the margin is national security, not bragging rights for a ‘lab’. Anthropic shows what hostile users already try to do with a frontier model. The agencies show how those users are trying to obtain the American capacity that makes the work possible.

The same habit appears in procurement files, not only in targeting code. A China-based actor that Anthropic assessed as tied to a defense manufacturer used Claude to draft an anti-torpedo fire-control specification, write software components, and assemble a proposal of more than 200 pages for a PLA Navy acquisition effort. A separate Chinese actor mined the model for directed-energy weapons material destined for leadership briefings. Then there is the cyber case that should unsettle anyone who still thinks talent is the scarce ingredient. Chinese operators, two of them identified as university undergraduates, ran an espionage operation against roughly 50 organizations. They used autonomous vulnerability research and parallel AI agents. Anthropic reports actual compromises and data theft. The scarce part of the job, the analysis and the code, no longer required a bench of experienced operators.

The human-targeting files are uglier because the victims are named by faith and by exile. Anthropic identified a China-based, government-aligned operation compiling dossiers on Catholic cardinals, Taiwanese Presbyterian leaders, Tibetan Buddhists, Falun Gong practitioners, and Christian missionary networks. The templates asked for scandals and leverage. A second PRC-aligned operation used Claude to support recruitment aimed at Uyghurs in Syria, looking for pressure points such as financial distress and relatives still living in Xinjiang. Translation and analysis that once required specialists arrived on demand. The gain went to officers compiling pressure on priests, monks, and refugees.

Iran, Russia, and a cell in northern Yemen took the same shortcut. An Iran-linked actor used Claude to assemble targeting recommendations against US naval forces, stitching together naval-movement data, commercial imagery, and sailors’ names scraped from public military photographs, then probing weaknesses in shipboard systems. On September 11th, the Wall Street Journal stated the finding without ornament. Iran used American-developed AI to try to target US Navy ships in the Middle East. Russia-based developers wrote software for autonomous attack-drone swarms that select a target and detonate without a human in the loop, and they got as far as hardware testing. The Yemen cell used the model on guided-weapons work and returned for troubleshooting after what looks like a failed live rocket test. None of that proves a fielded system. It proves that the path from intent to prototype is getting shorter.

If the models are this useful in hostile hands, why keep building better ones here? Evidence in the same document runs the other way. A consultant used Claude to engineer a surveillance platform for Mali’s intelligence service, targeting about 25 million SIM cards. Anthropic banned the account. The deployed system had already been moved onto local models and kept running. In another cluster of incidents, an access platform redirected refused biological requests to more permissive models and restored access after enforcement. The report records five concerning dual-use cases involving avian influenza, orthopoxviruses, and toxins. Saying no inside one American company does not retire the demand. The work migrates to whoever will take the query, and that provider is, more and more often, Chinese.

The federal advisory is the industrial half of the same story. The NSA, FBI, and CISA describe extraction as central to the development strategy of named Chinese companies, DeepSeek, Moonshot, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI among them, and they assess that the campaigns likely proceeded with Chinese government awareness. Anthropic gives the volumes. It attributes more than 151 million exchanges to Alibaba’s distillation campaign between May and July, more than 23 million to Moonshot in the same window, and more than 12.1 million to DeepSeek across 14 days in July. Distillation here means querying a strong model at enormous volume so a weaker one can be trained on the answers. The agencies note that the method shortens timelines and cuts training costs. American research is covering part of China’s bill.

Two details in the Anthropic report take the matter out of the licensing file. Extracting general reasoning can lift dangerous capabilities in biological and cyber work even when the harvested chats contain little material on those subjects. Ordinary coding sessions can be reused later on tasks no one billed as weapons research. Anthropic also states that its safeguards do not travel with unauthorized distillation. The copy gets the competence. It does not get the refusal layer.

A further complication is easy to miss if the whole affair is filed under theft and forgotten. Anthropic found that Moonshot forwarded selected customer requests to Claude and showed Claude’s answers to people who thought they were using Moonshot’s own model, Kimi. DeepSeek used similar tactics. Some of that forwarded traffic exposed likely PLA-affiliated surveillance work, Chinese police-system development, and credentials tied to a Russian defense-related government agency. In some cases, customers of Chinese AI services were receiving American output. As long as the traffic still touched an American stack, the company could see the work and shut it down. Once the capability has been copied and stood up at home, that authority disappears.

American hosting is worth defending for reasons that do not reduce to pride. The better model reaches our own operators first. The company that runs it can still shut off an account. It can also see hostile work while the traffic is still on an American stack. Those last two goods last only as long as hostile users still need the American model. The extraction campaigns exist to end that need. A lead has value only if the United States keeps moving, keeps its weights and methods from walking out the door, and puts the systems it already has into the hands of people who will use them. The present dependance is not a comfort. It is the thing the other side is spending millions of queries to abolish.

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Winning, in that light, is not a mood. It is leading models, laboratories that can be secured, computing capacity that actually exists, electricity that shows up when the racks need it, and adoption fast enough that the Pentagon and critical-infrastructure operators are not waiting out a procurement cycle. It is also the unglamorous work of breaking the fraudulent access networks the report describes, and of treating organized distillation as the national-security problem the advisory says it is. President Trump’s AI Action Plan already joins innovation, infrastructure, and security in one frame, and its authors were right that the country with the largest AI ecosystem will write the standards everyone else has to meet. Gold Eagle, launched in July, is a working piece of that design, a clearinghouse that uses frontier models and government-industry coordination to find vulnerabilities and patch them before an adversary does. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has put the aim in plain language, harness frontier AI and stay ahead of the people who want to use it against us. Heritage Foundation work on the China competition has treated technological superiority as the cheap form of deterrence, cheaper than trying to match an opponent system for system after the gap has closed, and the files in this report are what that claim looks like in practice.

Infrastructure belongs here because computing is physical. Data centers draw power, and the administration’s expanded Ratepayer Protection Pledge is the right America First answer: build what the race requires, and make the data centers cover their attributable costs so households are not asked to subsidize the effort. Some conservatives are uneasy about the scale of this build-out, and I understand why the bills look large, the footprints look ugly, and the county fights are real; the unease is not frivolous. A smaller build-out does not produce a quieter world. It produces a world in which hostile services do the same work with tools as good as ours, or better, and answer to no one who can turn the system off.

Anthropic’s report spends 154 pages on what adversaries intend to do with the most powerful tool of the century. The response that fits the evidence is to make sure they never do it with the best version.

If you enjoy my work, please subscribe https://x.com/amuse/creator-subscriptions/subscribe

Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in a sponsored partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

I am angry, and I am not going to dress that up. This September, James Talarico is still running television ads that treat a Waco child’s sexual abuse case as inventory for a US Senate race. The boy lives in that market, but even worse, the ads have found their way onto social media sites like TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and 𝕏. His family has already said they're tired of being used. Talarico has ignored their pleas to leave their child alone.

On Friday, his campaign aired a new spot. The pictures are of Adam Hoffman leaving jail. The text on screen says he is leaving after sexually abusing a child, that Ken Paxton offered him one day in jail, and that Hoffman’s lawyer represented one of Paxton’s biggest donors. It closes with the line Talarico has been workshopping since summer. “We don’t need any more pedophile protectors in Washington.” A second Talarico ad still circulating this month accuses Paxton of “giving an Epstein-style sweetheart deal to an admitted child predator.” The ads, running nonstop, are on televisions in the hometown of the child whose abuse Talarico has turned into a campaign product. The “one day” line is the first offer a visiting judge threw out. Judge Roy Sparkman raised the term to 60 days. Hoffman served 29. Talarico knows that the claims have been debunked and that Paxton had nothing to do with the case. The ad does not trouble itself with those facts.

I keep coming back to that fact because the rest of the argument hangs on it. A Senate candidate can dislike a plea. He can demand records. He can stand on a courthouse lawn and give a speech. What he does not get to do is keep dragging the same boy back onto the screen after the family has begged and pleaded with him to stop revictimizing their child day after day.

In July, Melissa Dieterich, speaking for the victim’s family, posted the note the campaign has spent two months pretending not to hear. “We have not given any statement to Talarico. We have not spoken to him. We are tired of being used in this election.” Talarico had told reporters his team had been in contact. The family said that was not true. They are tired of Talarico’s lies, tired of watching their son revisit his two-year ordeal, and just tired. That was midsummer. The ads are still running, and they’ve found their way to social media, where the boy and his friends see them constantly in their feeds.

The file Talarico is selling did not begin as a favor. It began as a conflict. Adam Hoffman, a Waco lawyer, was arrested in 2022 and charged with continuous sexual abuse of a child, a first-degree felony that carries 25 years to life. McLennan County District Attorney Josh Tetens recused his office because Hoffman had sought legal advice from him before Tetens took office. The case didn’t land on a political desk out of ambition. It landed at the Office of the Attorney General because the local prosecutor could not touch it. Nobody in Austin went looking for this file. It arrived because someone had to take it.

Two line prosecutors took it up. Brenda Cantu has 29 years of prosecution behind her. Dorian Cotlar has 25 years of criminal law practice and is Board Certified in Criminal Law. Between them they have handled thousands of child sexual-assault cases. They are not political appointees dropped into Waco to do a friend a kindness. They are the people who spend careers in rooms most of us would not enter. In May, they wrote a letter to state Rep. Jeff Leach laying out, in their own names, what happened in their own courtroom. That letter is the record Talarico has to beat. He has not beaten it. He has talked over it.

They charged Hoffman with the gravest offense available. Continuous sexual abuse of a child is not a courtesy count. You do not reach for a mandatory life statute if you are trying to walk a defendant out the side door. You reach for it if you mean to put him away. In June 2025, they tried the case for four days. The child testified. People who were in the room described that testimony as an act of courage. Under cross-examination, he admitted that he had embellished or exaggerated some of his claims. The jury could not agree to convict Hoffman. It hung 7 to 5, seven for conviction, five unwilling to get there. A Texas felony conviction requires all twelve. Five jurors who heard the same evidence declined to say the state had met its burden. That is not a scandal cooked in Austin. That is a hung jury in Waco.

The office was ready to try it again. Cantu and Cotlar told the family so and later said so in writing. The child, having already endured the first trial, made clear he would not take the stand a second time of his own will. A retrial without his voluntary testimony would have required the state to compel him, by subpoena, to sit again in the same room as the man who had abused him and submit again to hostile questioning. The prosecutors judged that they would not do that to him. I think they were right. A person can hate the outcome and still see why two career child-abuse prosecutors refused to drag a traumatized teenager back into the box against his wishes for a second roll of the same dice.

Without that forced testimony, they could have secured an admission of guilt and jail time. On April 16, 2026, Hoffman pleaded guilty to two Class A misdemeanors, indecent assault and displaying harmful material to a minor. Visiting Judge Roy Sparkman rejected the first, thinner version of the deal. He raised the jail term from 30 days to 60 after the boy’s mother told the court it was not enough. Hoffman also surrendered his law license, took a lifetime protective order barring contact with the victim, and left the state. He served 29 days in the McLennan County Jail and was released on good-behavior credit, which is how that jail routinely credits time. The misdemeanor offenses did not trigger Texas sex-offender registration because the written admission did not specify the victim’s age. That last fact is ugly. It is also the product of a plea entered after a hung jury and a witness who would not return, not a whispered friendship in the Attorney General’s private office.

Talarico’s answer to all of this has been to collapse the file into a slogan. He stood on the steps of the McLennan County Courthouse in June under a sign that read “Release the Hoffman Files” and called the plea an Epstein-style sweetheart deal. He has repeated the phrase until it sounds like a finding. It is not a finding. Hoffman’s own defense lawyer, Gerry Morris, a man who told reporters he cannot stand Ken Paxton and called himself a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, said Paxton “had absolutely nothing to do with the plea deal in this case.” Morris is not a Paxton spokesman. He is the last person with a motive to cover for him. If the friendship theory were true, the defense lawyer who cut the deal would be an odd place to find such a clean denial.

The Attorney General’s office employs more than 750 lawyers and handles upward of 20,000 cases a year. Ordinary charging decisions in a Waco file do not travel to the elected official’s desk. Cantu and Cotlar have said Paxton learned of the matter when it became a campaign weapon. He does not know Hoffman. He has not met him or spoken to him. The friendship is the premise of Talarico’s ad, not a fact in any pleading.

Some people will still call the plea a defeat, and I understand why. If the child takes the stand again and twelve jurors agree, Hoffman belongs in prison for the rest of his life. That is not the case the office actually had. It had a 7-5 hung jury, a witness who had asked to be left alone, and a second trial that would have required force against a child. The live choices were a plea with an admission and jail, or a retrial that would most likely end in dismissal or acquittal and send Hoffman home with no finding of guilt at all. The plea is a floor. Nobody wanted it. It is what the evidence and the witness could still support.

Cantu and Cotlar closed their letter with one request. They asked that the boy’s privacy be respected and that his decision about how to move forward with his own life be honored. Talarico’s answer has been to make the boy and his attacker recurring figures in a statewide race. He did it at the Waco courthouse in June. He did it again in July after the family said they had never spoken to him. He is doing it this week on television and social media. I find that contemptible. I find it worse than a bad plea, because a bad plea at least pretends to be about the case. These ads are about a candidate who has discovered that a child’s worst years will move numbers if you say “Epstein” often enough. Don’t forget that the largest donor to Talarico’s election effort is Epstein-pal Reid Hoffman, who gave $11.5 million to fund these deplorable ads.

Talarico keeps calling himself the boy’s defender. The prosecutors who sat with that boy through a four-day trial asked the public to stop using him. The family has repeatedly asked Talarico and his campaign to stop. The ads kept running. I have run out of polite ways to describe that. A prosecutor who accepts a lesser plea after a hung jury is doing ugly, constrained work. A candidate who keeps the same child on television in September, after being told to stop, is doing something else. He is mining a wound because it polls.

Prosecutors who have spent decades in those rooms for a reason make charging decisions. Their job is to get what the evidence and the witness will still bear. Talarico’s job, as he has defined it this fall, is to keep the story warm until November. The public can tell which of those jobs has been listening to the child, it is not the man who recieved a family’s plea to stop and answered it with another flight of commercials in the boy’s own hometown spots that keep the abuse alive on the evening news so a Senate race can have its monster, and I am done pretending this is what concern for a child looks like.

If you enjoy my work, please subscribe https://x.com/amuse/creator-subscriptions/subscribe

Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in a sponsored partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

Ask a voter in a Waco diner what he thinks of politicians, and you will hear the same sentence you hear in Midland and McAllen. They are all crooks. He does not offer it as a theory. He offers it as weather. Most officeholders live inside that weather their whole careers, suspected in general, pinned to nothing in particular, and never forced to stand still long enough for the suspicion to be tested.

Ken Paxton is the exception, and not because he asked to be. In May 2023, the Texas House impeached him. In September, the Senate sat as a High Court of Impeachment for two weeks and tried him on 16 articles. The House Board of Managers had subpoena power, a press corps already writing the obituary, and a Republican establishment that wanted him gone. The State Auditor later put the public cost of preparing and conducting that trial at $5.1 million, with the total cost of the investigation estimated at $13 million. Every rumor that had followed Paxton for a decade was typed into an article and walked in front of a jury: the kitchen, Nate Paul, the outside lawyer, the alleged mistress, the charitable trust.

The Senate acquitted him on all 16. Not one article carried. Only 2 Republican senators voted to convict on any count. Tony Buzbee said the quiet part in closing. They thought he would quit. He did not quit. The Senate sent him back to work.

Someone will say an acquittal is only reasonable doubt, that juries let guilty men walk, that the most we can claim is the House failed to prove its case. In a normal criminal trial, that would be fair. This was not a normal defense. Paxton’s lawyers did not poke holes and sit down. They put documents on the screen and made the accusations smaller until they disappeared.

The bribery story was that Nate Paul paid to remodel Paxton’s kitchen. Drew Wicker, the aide who overheard a contractor say he would check with Nate, became the House’s human exhibit. On cross-examination, he admitted he was never in the room for any agreement and knew nothing about Paul paying for anything beyond lunch. Before-and-after photographs showed the same tile counters and the same cabinets. There was no granite. The remodel that had lived in the newspapers for months did not exist. Bank records showed Paxton wired about $121,000 of his own money to Cupertino Builders.

The moral center of the House case was the staff revolt of late 2020. Ryan Vassar was one of the deputies who walked into the FBI on September 30. Asked under oath whether they had reported the elected Attorney General for a crime without any evidence, he said they had no evidence. He later tried to dress it up as our experience. The Senate heard the first answer. A man who reports a crime is supposed to bring something with him. These men brought guesses.

The same week tells you what the revolt was for. On September 30, they went to the FBI. On October 1, they signed their letter and texted Paxton. On that same day, George P. Bush applied to reactivate a law license that had sat inactive for 10 years. Jeff Mateer was shown the bar record in the chamber and had to read the date. He resigned the next morning. Days earlier, the group had already retained Johnny Sutton, a former US Attorney from the Bush orbit, and Sutton worked the matter for nearly 3 years without collecting a fee from them. The General Land Office, then run by Bush, paid Sutton’s firm roughly $180,000 in taxpayer money in 2022. Bush then ran against Paxton. Paxton beat him 68% to 32%. Buzbee told the Senate there are no coincidences in Austin, and that the Bush era in Texas ends today.

David Maxwell was offered to the senators as a saint in a Ranger hat. He spent 24 years in the Texas Rangers and later ran law enforcement at the Attorney General’s office. Treat the halo as a costume. Maxwell came into the agency under Greg Abbott in 2010. Paxton named him Director of Law Enforcement in June 2015 on the advice of First Assistant Chip Roy. When the 2020 mutiny began, Roy was among the first prominent Republicans to tell Paxton to resign. The day Maxwell testified, Roy posted that he stood squarely alongside him. On the stand, Maxwell spent more than an hour asking Dan Cogdell to repeat questions, then admitted he had been pretending not to hear in order to throw Cogdell off. A Hall of Fame investigator staging a hearing problem is not a neutral cop. He is a man in a fight. In 2026, he endorsed Democrat James Talarico against Paxton for the US Senate and cut an ad calling Paxton corrupt. That is not new information. That is the same axe, still grinding.

Maxwell had already decided Nate Paul’s complaint about a tainted federal warrant was ludicrous. He would not investigate his old colleagues. Mark Penley would not investigate the feds. Paxton’s instruction to Brandon Cammack, the young Houston lawyer hired as outside counsel, was to seek the truth. Cammack testified that he found the referral persuasive, not baseless, and that if the allegations were true it would be a big deal. Staffers had tried to veto a contract only the Attorney General has statutory authority to sign. The House called Cammack a secret prosecutor. The young man on the stand described a junior lawyer who thought he was asking whether the government had cheated. And hanging over the whole trial was a fact the managers never answered. Nate Paul got nothing. No case died. No warrant was pulled. A bribe never paid and a favor never landed is a rumor with a filing fee.

The FBI and the Justice Department under President Biden had the same allegations for years, with grand juries and the power to flip witnesses, tools a state Senate does not have. That administration would have been delighted to indict a Republican Attorney General who had spent those years suing it. They charged nothing. Buzbee called the silence crickets. He said they did nothing because there was nothing to do.

Someone will raise the later civil settlement with the fired deputies. The Texas whistleblower statute pays employees who report their bosses, whether or not the report holds up. A judge’s reading of that statute is not a finding that Paxton committed the acts the Senate already rejected. On that basis, the Texas legislature declined to pay the so-called ‘whistleblowers’.

The diner voter is right to distrust politicians as a class. He has no test that reaches most of them. The man running against Paxton has never sat through two weeks of cross-examination on his official conduct, and neither have the House members who voted to impeach. Their reputations rest on the absence of a trial. That is the ordinary condition of political life. It is not a compliment.

Paxton’s voters know something those other voters do not. They know the worst his enemies could assemble with millions of dollars and subpoena power was a kitchen that was never remodeled and a deputy who took no evidence to the FBI. They know the Biden Justice Department looked and walked away. They can say, with more warrant than most electorates ever get, that whatever else Ken Paxton may be, he is not a crook. He is combative. He picks fights with Washington on purpose. Those are questions of taste. Corruption is a question of fact, and the people least inclined to clear him are the ones who cleared him.

They did not mean to give him that. The House managers told reporters the evidence was 10 times worse than the public knew; they leaked to the papers for months, they suspended an elected officer without pay before a single sworn witness had testified, and when the moment came to show the Senate what they had, they showed it a countertop that did not match the photograph and a Ranger who admitted he was playing deaf; that is the whole method in one breath, and it is why the thing collapsed. Overreach has a seperate cost they never priced. Had they left him under the ordinary cloud, the cloud would still be there. By throwing everything and landing nothing, they lifted it themselves.

Dade Phelan is the last piece. After Paxton told the Speaker he had embarrassed himself presiding over the House and should resign, the impeachment sped up. Buzbee said Phelan got his feelings hurt. That is a rotten reason to remove a statewide officer elected by 4.2 million people, and it is the reason that fits the calendar.

Conservatives keep treating the impeachment as a wound. It is the strongest page on the resume. Every other Senate candidate asks voters to trust a reputation that has never been tested. Paxton is asking them to read a record written by people who wanted him destroyed. On the rare occassion a politician is tried by his adversaries and cleared, the sensible response is not to apologize for the trial. It is to point at it.

The Senate wrote two words into its journal in September 2023. The Justice Department later added silence. Not guilty then. Not guilty now. Texas Republicans had already heard every syllable of this story and returned him to office over the man who wanted his job. Anyone who recycles the impeachment as a reason to keep Paxton out of the US Senate is not offering new evidence. He is asking the public to overturn a verdict already rendered twice.

If you enjoy my work, please subscribe https://x.com/amuse/creator-subscriptions/subscribe

Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

This month, in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, Hyundai and POSCO broke ground on a $5.8 billion electric-arc mill built to pour 2.7 million tons of automotive sheet metal a year. It is the first purpose-built automotive mill of its kind in the country, and it anchors Hyundai’s $26 billion American program. Officials put the local effect at 1,300 direct jobs and roughly 4,000 indirect ones, with the first coil targeted for 2029. The steel is meant for vehicle bodies assembled in Alabama and Georgia, coil that would otherwise have been stamped from imported steel. Contractors are already on the site in Ascension Parish.

The week before, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sat down on CNBC and put a number on the wider map. The United States, he said, now holds $1.2 trillion in commitments to build semiconductors on American soil. When this administration took office, America produced less than 2% of the world’s chips. The path Lutnick described runs toward 40%, and toward 50% if Intel’s foundry holds.

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Liberation Day tariffs put a charge on access to the American consumer and turned the world’s richest market from a free good into a scarce one. The July 2025 tax law then changed the plant’s return. 100% expensing of equipment and qualified production property lets a firm deduct the full cost of a factory in the year it builds it. Power finished the argument for the projects that swallow electricity. American energy abundance made the American data center and the American fab among the few sites that can feed an AI load at scale. European industrial power is still expensive, and several Asian grids cannot promise the same firm load on a construction calendar, which is why data centers and leading-edge semiconductor fabs keep landing here. Reciprocal trade frameworks did the last piece of work. Tariff relief became a multi-year investment vehicle from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Europe’s industrial champions. Lutnick stated the bargain plainly. If you make it here, you don't pay tariffs, but if you don't, be prepared to pay to enter the greatest market in the world. Kevin Hassett, the president’s economic adviser, added the tax half. Tariffs are pushing people to onshore activity, and expensing is making them want to invest like crazy.

The plants themselves have counties and start dates, which is the evidence that finally matters. TSMC arrived in Phoenix under the prior administration with a $65 billion program. In March 2025, standing beside President Trump, it added $100 billion. In July 2026, after the US-Taiwan trade and investment agreement, it added $100 billion more. The Arizona program now totals $265 billion across ten fabs and two packaging plants. The company’s own chairman calls it the largest foreign direct investment in American history, and the first fab is already in high-volume production of 4-nanometer chips. Micron’s memory program has been lifted to $250 billion. Add Texas Instruments and GlobalFoundries, and four companies alone account for more than $440 billion.

Medicine has begun to move on the same terms. Eli Lilly’s chief executive, David Ricks, said his company hadn’t built a new American site in more than 40 years until the first Trump tax cuts changed the arithmetic. In February 2025, with pharmaceutical tariffs on the table, Lilly pledged four new plants and 13,000 manufacturing and construction jobs. Virginia came first, then a $6.5 billion site in Houston, then a $6 billion plant in Huntsville that stands as the largest single-site investment in Alabama history, and finally a $3.5 billion injectables facility in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. Three of the four will make active pharmaceutical ingredients, the link in the medicine supply chain the country had exported to Asia. Lilly is not an outlier. On August 31, nine additional drugmakers posted at least $19.6 billion in new American manufacturing commitments, bringing the pharmaceutical total the Commerce Department now puts above $600 billion. Add the first new primary aluminum smelter in 45 years, a $4 billion Oklahoma project that doubles domestic capacity, and the industrial map starts to look different county by county.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis counted $232.2 billion in new foreign direct investment expenditures in 2025, and the total investment President Trump and his team have secured is now over $11.2 trillion over the next 4 to 10 years. That $232.2 billion BEA figure is a 49.5% jump after four consecutive years of decline, with manufacturing taking $121.8 billion of the flow. Nominal private nonresidential fixed investment hit a series high of $4.62 trillion annualized in the second quarter of 2026. Factory-construction employment has grown by nearly 100,000 jobs since Inauguration Day, with 16,000 manufacturing jobs added in August alone. TSMC’s first Arizona fab is already running. Hyundai’s contractors are in the dirt in Louisiana. Even Bloomberg Economics, examining an earlier $9.6 trillion version of the White House list with every intention of trimming it, still found about $7 trillion it was willing to call real investment pledges, and then conceded that the trimmed figure exceeded all the foreign direct investment accumulated in the United States since statistics were first collected. Even a hostile trim, then, left a figure larger than every dollar of foreign direct investment booked in the United States since the series began.

In January 2025, the outgoing Biden White House closed its books by claiming over $1 trillion in announced private-sector investments catalyzed by its three signature laws across four years. Same scoreboard, same class of claim. Set the two ledgers next to each other, and the ratio is hard to talk past: $11.2 trillion in 20 months against $1 trillion in 48. If the announcement standard was good enough to crown the Biden industrial policy a success, it is good enough to measure its successor at 10 times the scale in less than half the time.

For a generation, Washington wrote grant checks and hoped the factories would stay. This term treats the taxpayer as a partner with a claim on the result. In August 2025, the government converted Intel’s unpaid CHIPS grants into 433.3 million shares at $20.47, a 9.9% stake purchased with money already appropriated, plus a warrant for another 5% if Intel ever surrenders majority control of its foundry, and by June 2026 the president could mark that position above $60 billion after the stock’s re-rating so that money already appropriated did not vanish into a finished plant but remained an asset the public still held. The same design appears in the golden share in US Steel, which carries a veto over plant closures, in preferred stock in MP Materials, and in positions in Lithium Americas, Korea Zinc, Vulcan Elements, and L3Harris Missile Solutions. One count puts those equity-linked arrangements at 39 and the total at $27.7 billion.

Japan’s $550 billion framework is the hardest version of the same idea. Washington selects the projects, and after Japan recoups its capital, the United States keeps 90% of the profits. A Hudson Institute review of the memorandum noted that Tokyo puts up the capital and Washington chooses the projects. Access to the American customer used to be treated as a given. It is now priced, and payment arrives as plants and fabs rather than as a note that can be rolled over. Once Japan crosses the threshold of getting its capital back, the residual does not stay in Tokyo. The donor state pays and then watches the appreciation accrue somewhere else. The ownership state pays once, keeps a claim, and can vote when a plant is slated to close.

Alexander Hamilton wrote in 1791 that a country’s independence and security are materially connected to the prosperity of its manufactures. The Marshall Plan spent about $13 billion in then-dollars, roughly $170 billion today, rebuilding allied industry so that allies could buy American goods. What is underway now runs that sequence the other way. Allied treasuries and allied champions are rebuilding American industrial capacity as the price of admission to the American customer. For four decades America gave its market away and watched the factories follow the giveaway. This term reversed the bargain. If you want the customer, you build the plant here, and in the strategic sectors the taxpayer keeps a warrant. Today, that claim is $11.2 trillion in announced commitments, a steel mill rising in a Louisiana parish, and a stock certificate in the public’s name.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in a sponsored partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

In 2023, with roughly 1.4 million Gazans displaced and some 641,000 of them crowded into 150 UN shelters running at nearly 3 times their intended capacity, Ismail Haniyeh appeared on Al-Mayadeen television and said it plainly. Speaking of the women, children, and elderly of Gaza, the chairman of Hamas’s political bureau declared, “We are the ones who need this blood.” That blood, he said, awakens the revolutionary spirit. It is worth noting that Haniyeh’s net worth was between $3 and $4 billion.

Two years of American argument have treated those deaths as if they arrived by accident, or as if the only live question were whether Israel has been careful enough. Haniyeh told his audience the deaths were useful to him.

Urban guerrillas have always fought in cities. That fact, by itself, proves almost nothing. Human shielding is the deliberate placement of fighters and weapons among civilians so that the enemy must either hold fire or kill innocents. The laws of war forbid it because it exploits the protections those laws give civilians. Hamas has gone further. Its leaders have treated the resulting deaths as a political harvest: mobilization at home, pressure on governments that watch the footage. Photographs of rubble cannot prove that intent. Hamas’s own recorded words can.

The words are not new. In February 2008, years before this war, Hamas parliamentarian Fathi Hammad boasted on Al-Aqsa TV that “death has become an industry” and praised human shields assembled from women, children, and the elderly. On October 24, 2023, Ghazi Hamad told Lebanese television that Hamas was proud to sacrifice martyrs and promised to repeat the October 7 attack again and again. The next raid was already priced in.

Three days later, Mousa Abu Marzouk was asked on Russian television why Hamas had built hundreds of kilometers of tunnels, a network it had claimed exceeded 500 kilometers as early as 2021, without building bomb shelters for civilians. “We are fighting from inside the tunnels,” he said. Protection of Gaza’s civilians, he added, was the job of the UN and of Israel. The organization solved the engineering problem of keeping its fighters alive underground, then announced on camera that the 2.2 million people above ground belonged to someone else.

In June 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported messages in which Yahya Sinwar called civilian losses “necessary sacrifices” and calculated that mounting deaths worked to Hamas’s advantage. A 2019 study from the NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence had already mapped the loop: civilian proximity deters strikes on Hamas assets, while strikes that kill civilians impose reputational costs on Israel. Hamas collects in both directions.

Critics will say this is Israeli messaging. Check the provenance. UNRWA itself, not the IDF, announced the discovery of roughly 20 rockets in one of its schools in July 2014, then announced 2 further discoveries within the same month. Ban Ki-moon’s office condemned those responsible for turning schools into potential military targets. Amnesty International, no friend of Jerusalem, documented at least 23 extrajudicial executions of Palestinians by Hamas during the 2014 conflict, some processed through an interrogation site at al-Shifa hospital. The US Treasury assessed Hamas’s covert investment portfolio at more than $500 million in 2022, which is not the balance sheet of a militia too poor to pour concrete for shelters. In January 2026, the Treasury sanctioned 6 Gaza-based organizations that posed as humanitarian groups while supporting Hamas’s military wing. A movement with half a billion dollars in assets built tunnels for its gunmen and nothing for its children. That was a choice. The men who made it have explained the choice in their own words.

The design still requires an audience. A pressure campaign aimed at Western opinion works only if someone converts casualty imagery into political leverage. After October 7, a large share of that conversion happened on American campuses. High school chapters, undergraduate coalitions, and recent graduates were the fastest to circulate footage stripped of context and the quickest to fold a massacre into the seminar language of decolonization. On October 8, 2023, before Israel had mounted a ground response, campus coalitions called the slaughter resistance. They were doing the work Haniyeh’s sentence assigns to sympathetic foreigners: making the blood count. Hamas does not need American or F-1 students to fire rockets. It needs them to keep the pictures moving.

The conversation now has a faction inside the Democratic Party. The Islamic Marxist wing organized through the Democratic Socialists of America, and personified now by figures such as Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani, has made Gaza its central moral drama while refusing to describe Hamas’s method in the words Hamas uses. New York City’s DSA chapter promoted the October 8 rally at which the massacre was celebrated, an event the organization continues to justify. Mamdani, now among the most prominent elected Islamic Marxists in the country, spent a mayoral campaign declining repeated invitations to condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada.” El-Sayed has built a national profile on the premise that the salient evil in Gaza is Israeli conduct, full stop. The movement’s energy depends on the casualty narrative Hamas manufactures. Naming the manufacturer would cost it the story. A politics that cannot repeat Haniyeh’s sentence, out loud and on tape, has made itself useful to him. If that blend of Islamist apologetics and socialist organizing captures a major American party, the strategy will have a permanent office in American politics.

Marco Rubio's campaign to revoke the visas of foreign students who endorse or materially support Hamas has been denounced as an assault on free speech. The First Amendment protects persons in the United States from punishment for their views. Citizens who march for Hamas may not be jailed for the marching, however shameful the cause. A student visa is a grant of hospitality, and federal immigration law has long treated endorsement of designated terrorist organizations as a ground of inadmissibility. A foreign national may praise Hamas. The United States does not have to underwrite the praise with a visa. Once Western campuses are understood as part of the apparatus that turns civilian deaths into diplomatic pressure, Rubio's policy is a way to shrink the apparatus. Criticism of Israeli operations, sympathy for Palestinian suffering, and demands for humanitarian access remain open to citizens and visitors alike. What should close is the pipeline by which beneficiaries of American universities serve the propaganda arm of an organization that Amnesty caught executing the Palestinians it claims to represent.

A Palestinian child is not an asset on Hamas’s books. The people who take that seriously refuse to let Hamas collect a political dividend from the child’s death. Civilians suffer in every urban war. Hamas’s leaders called that suffering useful, hid the fighters, left the people exposed, and put wepons in the schools and hospitals those people need. Refusing to reward that method is how you protect Palestinians. Refusing visas to the foreigners who help sell it is how you protect the country. Both refusals start with the willingness to repeat what Hamas has already said about itself.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in a sponsored partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Chancellor Kamar Samuels announced that New York City public school students may not use student-facing generative AI for the 2026-2027 year. The rule reaches from 2-K through 8th grade and covers nearly 600,000 children, about two-thirds of the system. High schools receive a tightly rationed pilot, capped at 50,000 students citywide and no more than five classes per building. In a system of roughly 280,000 high schoolers, most of them get nothing. Every high school student will instead sit through two 45-minute modules on AI doomer and anti-data center propaganda each year. Companion chatbots are barred in every grade. Teachers may still use the same tools to plan lessons and grade papers. The mayor and the chancellor announced all of this under the banner of putting students first.

Picture a child who adds fractions by adding the denominators. A competent tutor notices the error, shows why the shortcut fails, offers a picture, asks her to try again, and steps back once she has it. If her brother finishes early, the same tutor hands him a harder problem instead of telling him to sit quietly. That is ordinary differentiated instruction, the thing a classroom of 29 cannot reliably do and a family of ordinary means cannot buy by the hour. The city has now told that child she may not have the machine version of that help at school for a year.

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Mamdani’s justification at the press conference was blunt. “I have yet to see a study showing that AI is beneficial for students in elementary and middle school.” Mandani may not have looked, but the research is plentiful. Stanford’s education researchers maintain a repository of work on AI in K-12 schooling, and by March of this year it held more than 1,100 studies. From that pile, the Stanford team pulled 20 rigorous causal studies for close review. The pattern is the ordinary one in educational research: real gains under careful design, weaker results under sloppy design, and a reminder that the tool matters less than how a school uses it. It does not argue for a citywide prohibition.

The newer work is harder to wave away on grounds of age or sponsorship. In August, economists at the University of Toronto released results from a two-year randomized experiment in 18 Tennessee middle schools, the exact grades New York just closed. Students given Khan Academy with its Khanmigo AI tutor gained about 1.3 national percentile ranks per term. A companion experiment with more than 6,000 middle schoolers found that adding AI assistance to a math practice platform improved students’ ability to recover from their own mistakes. The funders were the Smith Richardson Foundation, Canadian public research councils, and J-PAL at MIT. No chatbot company wrote the check.

The evidence is not limited to adolescents. A randomized study of more than 1,000 students in grades 3 through 6 gave their human tutors an AI copilot that suggested better explanations in real time. Mastery rose 4 points overall and 9 points for children stuck with the weakest tutors, at a computing cost of roughly $20 per tutor per year. In North Carolina, a randomized trial across 63 middle schools and nearly 6,000 students found that structured computerized math feedback raised state test scores by a tenth of a standard deviation a full year after the program ended. In Nigeria, a six-week after-school program using a general-purpose AI assistant produced a 0.31 standard deviation gain, measured on a test the students took without the AI in front of them. At Harvard, a purpose-built AI tutor more than doubled the learning gains of the university’s celebrated active-learning physics classes. Some of these are working papers. Some involve older students. All of them exist. The mayor said he had not seen a study that showed benefit, but I wonder if he bothered to look. He had seen a reason to stall.

The reason the stall costs so much is older than any chatbot. In 1984, the psychologist Benjamin Bloom showed that a child with a personal tutor performed better than 98% of children taught in a conventional classroom. He called it the two-sigma problem because nobody could afford a tutor for every child. A conservative does not need to treat a language model as magic to notice what has changed. A tool that can teach at the pace of the learner, at odd hours, at near-zero marginal cost, is the first plausible mass answer to Bloom’s constraint. It still has to be tested with adults in the room and with exams the student takes unaided. New York made that test illegal for most of its children.

The politics of the decision are not mysterious. Mamdani is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. The most powerful institution in New York education is the United Federation of Teachers, and the UFT’s parent union, the American Federation of Teachers, has already told the country what it wants from the technology. In July 2025, AFT president Randi Weingarten announced a $23 million academy, built with Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic, and housed at UFT headquarters in Manhattan, to train 400,000 teachers, declaring that, with it, “teaching and learning can be enhanced.” Teachers may use the tools to draft a unit and mark a stack of essays. The child sitting in front of the teacher may not use them to learn, which is a rule that protects the teacher’s workflow and denies the student a chance to catch up.

Los Angeles made the same move in the same week. Los Angeles Unified, the second-largest district in the country, blocked generative AI on district devices for students in every grade while leaving teacher access in place. Other large districts are reviewing their rules on the same timetable. A pause can be dressed as prudence. In a school year, it is a 7th grader’s lost instruction, and a 7th grader does not get the year back. Families who can pay will route around the rule. Alpha School’s New York campus, which builds its day around AI-driven personalized instruction at 180 Maiden Lane, charges $65,000 a year. The professional-class child will have the tutor at home whether or not the chancellor permits it at school. The child in a Bronx public school will not. A movement that campaigns in the name of the working class has, in practice, arranged for the working class to learn more slowly than the rich.

The replacement curriculum is the part of the policy that will linger after the year is up. Those two mandatory 45-minute modules are not instruction in how to use a powerful tool, how to check its answers, or how to build something with it. By the city’s own framing, they are lessons in caution and harm. New York banned companion chatbots in every grade, then wrote an hour-and-a-half of high school time whose premise is that the machine and the data center are to be feared. Beijing mandated at least 8 hours of AI education per year for every primary and secondary student beginning last fall, with the work folded into assessments. President Trump’s April 2025 executive order made AI literacy and teacher preparation a national priority on the theory that early exposure “sparks curiosity and creativity.” One government is teaching children to build. New York is teaching them to flinch, and it is doing so on a separate track from the teachers who will receive the $23 million academy downtown.

The standard reply is that the science is young and that caution costs nothing, but every part of that reply is wrong the science is not young it is 1,100 studies deep and growing by the month and caution is the most expensive habit in education because its cost is paid in years a child cannot recover and the people demanding more study will demand still more study when the next round of results arrives because delay was the product. Nobody serious proposed putting an unsupervised chatbot in a kindergarten. What the research supports is supervised, evaluated use, with tests taken unaided so the learning can be seen. That is the experiment Mamdani closed to 600,000 children.

The conservative program is narrower than the rhetoric around it. Let AI into the classroom under a teacher’s eye. Measure what children can do afterward without it. Publish the results, cancel what fails, expand what works, and tell parents the truth about both. Give the public-school child the same kind of paced help the private-school child already buys. AEI’s John Bailey told the Senate last fall that AI “places expertise within reach of anyone willing to learn and apply it.” Expertise for everyone has been the promise of public education since Horace Mann. It has not been this close to a practical form.

Lincoln told Congress in 1862 that as our case is new, we must think anew and act anew. The American child’s case is new in one respect only. For the first time a patient expert can sit at her elbow in every subject, at hours a building cannot staff, at a price a district can bear. New York considered that fact and reserved the tool for union members. Parents in the Bronx cannot buy the Alpha product on Maiden Lane. They can demand that the public school stop treating a $20 tutor-copilot as contraband, measure the child without the machine in front of her, keep what raises the score, and kill what does not. Mamdani chose the pause. That choice is now the record.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

Opponents of the data center boom have taken to calling Virginia the canary in the coal mine, and the geography is fair. If these buildings drain local water, drive household power bills through the roof, and leave counties poorer than they found them, the damage should already be visible in the state that has hosted the densest cluster on earth since the mid 1990s. Northern Virginia has lived with that concentration for thirty years, and the wreckage the models keep announcing has not shown up in the bills, the taps, or the tax rate.

Virginia now hosts roughly 385 operating data center buildings, totaling on the order of 75 million gross square feet. Measured by square footage, that is about 5 times what Texas has, roughly 7 times California, roughly 7 times New York, and roughly 10 times Florida. Adjusted for population, the gap widens. Virginia has nearly 5 times as many data centers per resident as Texas, 6.2 times as many as California, 5.9 times as many as New York, and 8.5 times as many as Florida. Northern Virginia is the largest data center market in America and the largest in the world, and Loudoun, Prince William, and Fairfax counties alone account for roughly 80% of the Commonwealth’s inventory. Other states are still arguing from models of what might happen if a campus were to arrive. Virginia already has the record of what did happen after the campuses arrived in force and stayed.

The water claim is the one that travels fastest. Critics say the facilities will drain a community’s supply and then poison what remains with their discharge. A large share of Virginia’s data center buildings do not use meaningful quantities of water after the tanks are filled. About 40% are exclusively air- or dry-cooled, meaning they reject heat mechanically and consume almost no energy once the system is charged. Another 35% are hybrid, running dry through most of the year and switching to evaporative assistance only in the hottest stretches of summer. That leaves roughly 25% that depend on water. The phrase “data centers use water” treats those three machines as a single entity.

Virginia’s fleet consumes about 2.1 billion gallons of water a year, of which roughly 780 million gallons are discharged. The fair test is what the same land and the same 75 million square feet would demand as ordinary offices. Federal Energy Star benchmarking puts median office water use at about 14.48 gallons per square foot per year. Multiply that out, and you get roughly 1.086 billion gallons of annual use and roughly 619 million gallons of annual discharge. The data center stream is larger by volume, somewhere in the range of 16% to 26% depending on which assumptions you carry through the arithmetic.

A treatment plant cares less about the raw gallon count than about what is dissolved and suspended in those gallons. Cooling tower blowdown contains elevated levels of salts and dissolved minerals. Office discharge, on the other hand, carries human sewage. Of that 619 million gallons, roughly 229 million to 294 million gallons would be restroom wastewater containing urine, fecal matter, toilet paper, and the associated pathogens. EPA figures place untreated domestic wastewater at something like 1 million to 10 million fecal coliform organisms per 100 milliliters, a burden that cooling tower blowdown simply does not carry. The restroom fraction alone imposes something like 7 to 17 times the biological treatment demand of the equivalent data center stream, and if the whole office stream approaches domestic strength, the multiple runs from 18 to 36 times. Replace the campuses with an equivalent quantity of ordinary office space, and you would trim discharge volume somewhat while multiplying the pathogen and biological loading on local plants by an order of magnitude. The volume argument, taken alone, is the wrong measure of what a wastewater plant is being asked to do.

Virginia has also done what the moratorium campaign insists cannot be done. It engineered the water problem downward instead of legislating the industry out of the state. Loudoun Water laid its first reclaimed water pipelines in 2010, well before anyone in Ashburn was talking about an AI boom, and it built them specifically to serve industrial cooling and the county’s growing data center sector. That network now runs about 20 miles. In 2025, it delivered more than 750 million gallons of reclaimed water to customers, displacing an equivalent volume of potable water. Set that against the statewide total and the scale becomes easier to hold. Virginia’s entire data center fleet uses 2.1 billion gallons a year, and a single county is now recycling 750 million gallons back into industrial service, with the program still expanding and neighboring jurisdictions laying pipe of their own. Virginia’s nonpartisan legislative auditors reviewed the full picture and concluded that data center water use is sustainable, accounting for less than 0.5% of statewide withdrawals, while sensibly noting that it should be measured and managed as it grows.

Electricity was the prediction offered with the most confidence. If concentrating this much computing load in one state drives residential rates through the roof, Virginia should post the highest household bills in America. Households there paid an average of 16.69¢ per kilowatt-hour through mid 2026, 8.1% below the national average of 18.16¢. Virginians pay roughly 49.7% less than Californians, 44.5% less than Massachusetts residents, and 43.7% less than Mainers. California, Massachusetts, and Maine are not data center hubs. They are states that have spent years treating energy abundance as a problem to be managed rather than a condition of growth.

The economics are the same ones that apply to any large industrial customer. Infrastructure carries high fixed costs, and when a very large, very steady, and very creditworthy user arrives and spreads those costs across a bigger base of consumption, the per-unit burden on everyone else falls. Mario Loyola of the Heritage Foundation put the general point cleanly when he observed that soaring demand ought to be good news, because it signals a flourishing economy. Bills rise when supply is blocked. They rise more slowly and almost always fall when a new load helps pay for wires and plants that would have been expensive either way. Virginia’s commercial customers pay about 11.11¢ and its industrial customers about 10.08¢, rates that manufacturers in California can only envy, and if Texas took the cluster to Virginia’s density, the same arithmetic would push Texas rates lower still. None of this means Virginia rates never moved. They have risen with fuel and inflation, as rates have almost everywhere, and anyone who claims otherwise is selling a cleaner story than the monthly filings support. The comparative fact is still the one the campaign keeps missing. The densest market in the country still sits below the national average, and far below the states that constrained generation and then went looking for a villain.

There are real issues in the record, and Virginia has been treating them as engineering problems rather than as proof that the industry cannot be hosted. Water use is heavily skewed, which supports targeted standards for wet-cooled facilities rather than a statewide freeze. Summer consumptive demand in the Potomac basin spikes well above the annual average, which supports seasonal planning and the need for more reclaimed water already moving through Loudoun. Large new loads should pay for the generation and transmission built on their behalf, which is precisely why the State Corporation Commission established a separate GS-5 rate class with 14-year take-and-pay commitments and minimum monthly obligations covering at least 85% of transmission and distribution costs. That tariff is scheduled to take effect in 2027 for the largest customers. It is the ordinary discipline of a state that wants the industry and does not intend to hand the bill to households.

Meanwhile the ledger on the other side is not close, the industry now supports roughly 74,000 jobs across the Commonwealth directly and indirectly, generates about $5.5 billion in annual labor income, and adds around $9.1 billion to Virginia GDP, and in Loudoun County the data centers added $16 billion to the real property portfolio in a single year, bringing their assessed value to $41 billion, producing almost half of all county property tax revenue, and allowing the county to cut its real property tax rate from $1.285 per $100 of assessed value in 2008 to $0.805 today while the schools kept getting funded. A homeowner in the most saturated county in the world now hands the county a third less of the house’s assessed value than that homeowner would have handed over in 2008, which is the fiscal result of letting a high-value industrial use sit on land that used to throw off far less revenue.

Texas, Georgia, and the other states now fighting this out in zoning halls already have a completed record sitting one region over. Virginia put the cluster where the critics said the harm would show first, and after thirty years the household bill, the school budget, and the property rate are the reading. The canary has been singing the same note for a long time. The live question is whether the rest of the country will trust a thirty-year result or keep listening to the Chinese propaganda being fed to them on a daily basis.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in a sponsored partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

Last week, in a Bronx courtroom that drew almost no cameras, Judge Audrey Stone found Dimone Fleming not responsible by reason of mental disease or defect for stabbing her sons, Daishawn Fleming, 3, and Octavius Canada, 11 months old, to death. The prosecution stipulated to postpartum psychosis. Fleming will not go to prison. She remains in custody for a psychiatric evaluation and returns to court this month. Assistant District Attorney Tiffany Wichman explained afterward that “prosecuting mothers does not and cannot prevent these crimes from happening, but public discourse might.” The New York Times recorded the outcome in a single clause: she will avoid prison.

This morning in Plymouth, Massachusetts, a jury of nine women and three men is back for a fifth day on the case of Lindsay Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse who killed Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, on January 24, 2023. She does not deny the acts. She denies responsibility for them. The Commonwealth says she sent her husband out of the house and carried out a plan. On Tuesday, the jurors told Judge William Sullivan they were unable to reach a unanimous decision, and he sent them back to keep working. Outside the courthouse, supporters in pink have treated her as the injured party, and a fundraiser for her family has drawn hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Eighteen days before the Fleming ruling, Governor Maura Healey signed the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act, stripping the Massachusetts 24-week abortion limit and leaving late pregnancy to a physician’s “professional judgment.” So the same commonwealth that will not mark a line at a viable unborn child is now asking twelve jurors whether three deadborn children amount to a crime or a medical episode. The jurors’ hesitation is not a failure of nerve. It is what happens when a culture has spent a generation teaching that a child’s claim on life yields when the child depends on a mother who no longer accepts the cost.

Judith Jarvis Thomson’s 1971 essay remains the most cited philosophical defense of abortion in the English-speaking world. She granted the fetus full personhood and argued anyway. Her case is the unconscious violinist strapped to your kidneys for nine months. You may unplug him, she said, even though he will die, because a right to life is not a right to the use of another person’s body against that person’s will. The argument does not turn on whether the violinist is human. It turns on whether you may be forced to keep him alive with your own tissue, sleep, and time.

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A born child still lives off his mother, on her breasts or on the wages she earns for formula, on her sleep and her attention, and when those give out, on her sanity. The late fetus needs her to keep existing. The 8-month-old needs her to work, on purpose, every few hours through the night. If the moral fact doing the work in Thomson’s essay is unwanted dependence, delivery does not shrink that fact. It enlarges it. Postpartum depression, which afflicts roughly 1 in 8 American mothers, and postpartum psychosis, which occurs in 1 to 2 of every 1,000 births, are the mother’s body and mind refusing that dependence in clinical form rather than in a slogan. The slogan “my body” was never, examined closely, a claim about a uterus. It was a claim about who can be required to keep another human being alive.

That is why the implication is ugly and why it keeps getting restated in journals rather than on campaign literature. A society that permits a woman to end her child’s life before birth because the child depends on her has not produced a principle that stops at the cord. The infant is still drawing on her body and her hours. If wantedness and burden were enough in the womb, they remain enough in the crib, and postpartum psychosis is precisely the kind of psychological break in which the burden becomes, for the mother, unbearable.

Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva said this in the Journal of Medical Ethics without much throat-clearing. “Killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be,” they wrote, including cases in which the newborn is healthy, and only “the well-being of the family is at risk.” They coined the term “after-birth abortion” so no reader could pretend they meant palliative care. If “economical, social or psychological circumstances change such that taking care of the offspring becomes an unbearable burden on someone,” they added, then “people should be given the chance of not being forced to do something they cannot afford.” Postpartum psychosis is a psychological circumstance. A newborn is offspring. Peter Singer had already supplied the ranking that makes the conclusion feel tidy, holding that human infants are not persons and that a newborn’s life is worth less than a pig’s.

The usual reply is that birth is a bright legal line and that what I have just described is already a crime. The reply is weaker than lawyers like to admit. The United Kingdom’s Infanticide Act of 1938 charges a mother who kills her child under 12 months while “the balance of her mind was disturbed” by birth or lactation with infanticide rather than murder, and prison is rare while hospital orders are the norm. Roughly two dozen countries run a version of that statute. The Boston Globe, covering Clancy on August 1, called the US an “outlier in prosecuting infanticide,” which is a polite way of saying that American juries and prosecutors are late to a settlement much of Europe reached before the Second World War. Illinois has already written postpartum depression and psychosis into its sentencing code as a statutory mitigator, at 730 ILCS 5/5-5-3.1(a)(17), after Public Act 100-0574. Massachusetts advocates spent this summer pushing H.1924 to import the same logic, requiring expert screening for mothers charged within a year of birth and treating the diagnosis as a reason to reduce a sentence.

The federal record is not a hypothetical either. On January 23, 2025, the House passed the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act 217 to 204, with a single Democrat, Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas, voting yes. The White House said the bill would “protect the most vulnerable and prevent infanticide.” Senate cloture had failed the day before, 52-47, with every Democrat present voting no. The Heritage Foundation has spent years pointing out that CDC and state reports already record infants who survive abortion attempts and then do not receive ordinary care. A party that will not require that care for a child who has already been born, and who survived an attempt on his life, has answered the personhood question in the only register that counts. Governor Ralph Northam said in 2019 that after a live delivery the infant “would be kept comfortable,” resuscitated only “if that’s what the mother and the family desired,” and that then “a discussion would ensue.” A discussion, with a living newborn in the room, about whether the newborn continues. That is after-birth abortion spoken by a sitting governor, and the country treated it as a gaffe that expired in a news cycle.

No legislature will pass a bill titled the Infanticide Permission Act, because it does not have to. It needs findings of no criminal responsibility, hospital orders instead of verdicts, statutory mitigators, juries that cannot agree, and a prosecutor of two dead boys who offers public discourse as the remedy. The practice is already here. It arrived through diagnosis rather than through a floor speech.

I do not accept the premise that got us here. Thomson’s violinist is a stranger strapped to you by an accident you did not choose. A son or a daughter is not a stranger, and the duty that follows birth is not a kidney you may disconnect because the night has become unbearable. The inferences from Thomson to Giubilini to a Bronx courtroom are tidy, which is why the starting point cannot be kept. Daishawn Fleming was 3 years old. Octavius Canada was 11 months old. Cora Clancy was 5, Dawson was 3, and Callan was 8 months. No diagnosis, no statute, and no rally in pink turns those names into a footnote about somebody else’s suffering. Unlimited abortion is wrong for the same reason the quieter sequel is wrong: a small human being’s life does not belong to anyone else’s convenience, comfort, or crisis, however genuine the crisis may be.

We have ended roughly 67 million lives since Roe, and that figure is almost certainly conservative because the newer counts leave out self-managed medication abortions obtained outside the formal US health-care system. National Right to Life and the Charlotte Lozier Institute, working from Guttmacher’s own revisions, have been raising the cumulative total as the clinic and telehealth numbers were restated upward. This was a national committment made without a single election that ever put the full cost on the ballot in those terms. Meanwhile the general fertility rate in the US has fallen to record lows near 53 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age, and a country that cannot talk itself into having children should at least stop talking itself into discarding the ones already here, the collapse is not a mystery of economics alone when the official ethic keeps teaching that a child’s claim is negotiable the moment the child becomes costly. We need more babies, more households that can stand a crying night, and more neighbors who notice when a new mother is coming apart. If more mothers are reaching the point where they cannot stop themselves from killing their own children, the answer is not to rename the killing after the fact. The answer is to reach them beforehand, to build the screening, the family, the church, and the block that catch a woman before psychosis takes the wheel. Save the mothers if we can, but the children are not a remainder.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

On the morning of June 23, 2016, the Supreme Court disposed of one of the largest immigration cases in American history in a single sentence. The judgment below was affirmed by an equally divided Court. Behind that sentence sat a Texas lawsuit, a 26-state coalition, and a nationwide injunction that stopped President Obama’s DAPA program from granting deferred action and work permits to as many as 5 million illegal aliens. Even the New York Times conceded that the deadlock had ended what Obama hoped would stand as a central legacy. The attorney general who built the case was Ken Paxton. His summary of the holding remains the cleanest account of the principle at issue. “One person, even a president, cannot unilaterally change the law.”

This fall, Texans decide whether to send Paxton to the US Senate or James Talarico (CIS), a state representative from Austin best known for woke viral floor speeches and his blasphemous seminary studies. Coverage likes to treat the race as a clash of temperaments. That framing is convenient and also a way not to read the files. The two men have occupied public office to different ends. Talarico has used the office to share his radical agenda. Paxton has used it to obtain injunctions, judgments, and settlements that carry dollar figures and compliance terms for the benefit of ALL Texans.

A constitution resembles a property line in one respect that matters here. It does not enforce itself. If a neighbor walks his fence a few feet onto your lot every season, the line on the plat becomes a courtesy unless someone sues. For a decade the federal government moved that fence on immigration, on speech, on elections, and on medicine. The live question in Texas was whether any state officer would push it back. Paxton’s answer was institutional rather than rhetorical. A state attorney general with standing, statutes, and a Fifth Circuit willing to read the Constitution as written can impose costs on Washington that hearings cannot.

The border makes the method visible because the paper trail is public. DAPA was blocked in 2015, affirmed on appeal, and left dead by the Supreme Court in 2016. When President Trump formally rescinded the memo in 2017, he was closing a file Texas had already emptied. Years later, the Biden administration sued to rip out the concertina wire and the floating barriers Texas had placed in the Rio Grande at Eagle Pass. Paxton took the buoy case en banc. In July 2024, the full Fifth Circuit vacated the removal order. That November, another panel barred federal agents from cutting the wire. Then came Senate Bill 4, the state law making illegal entry a Texas offense. After the Supreme Court’s 2012 Arizona decision, conventional wisdom treated statutes of that kind as finished. Texas passed one anyway. In April 2026, the en banc Fifth Circuit dissolved the injunction against it. Paxton’s response was short. “Texas’s right to arrest illegals, protect our citizens, and enforce immigration law is fundamental.” Reagan warned that a nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation. Paxton treated the warning as a docket.

The money is harder to wave away, if only because ledgers do not care about tone. In 2019, Paxton recovered $235.9 million from Xerox, the contractor Texas had paid to review Medicaid orthodontic claims, which instead rubber-stamped them for eight years. His 2018 suit against Purdue Pharma ended with Texas’s $286.5 million share of the national Sackler settlement, part of $3.347 billion in total opioid recoveries that now fund an abatement stream in a state that has lost more than 76,000 lives to overdoses since 1999. The Sacklers were permanently barred from the American opioid business. In 2024, Meta paid Texas $1.4 billion for running facial recognition on nearly every uploaded face for a decade without consent, the largest data-privacy recovery a single state has obtained. In 2025, Google paid $1.375 billion to settle a lawsuit over tracking users’ locations after they turned off tracking. For scale, the next-largest single-state Google privacy settlement was $93 million. A 40-state coalition managed $391 million, nearly $1 billion less than Texas collected alone. Add the $10 million Texas Children’s Hospital settlement, and the office’s decade comes to roughly $6.37 billion returned to Texans.

Some will say a large settlement measures only appetite. Fair enough. Ask what principle each recovery actually established. Xerox stands for a simple rule. When the state hires a gatekeeper and the gatekeeper becomes a rubber stamp, the contractor pays, not the taxpayer. Meta and Google stand for another. Texas law reaches firms that treat the country as a data commons with no owner. After the Google settlement, Paxton put it without ornament. “In Texas, Big Tech is not above the law.” Writers at the Manhattan Institute and AEI have argued for years that when Congress will not pass a privacy statute, single-state enforcement is the mechanism that prices the harm. Texas is now the ceiling those essays cite.

The same office took a children’s case to the Supreme Court and won it. In Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, decided 6 to 3 in June 2025, the Court upheld the Texas law requiring pornography sites to verify age. Justice Thomas, writing for the majority, refused the industry’s main claim. No person, adult or child, has a First Amendment right to access such material without first submitting proof of age. The attempt to constitutionalize anonymous access for minors failed because Texas did not stop at a press conference.

Election work in the office has been equally specific. Senate Bill 1 banned paid vote harvesting and required mail-ballot ID numbers to match registration records. District judges enjoined both provisions. The Fifth Circuit restored both. Judge Andrew Oldham’s August 2026 opinion said what election-integrity advocates at the Heritage Foundation and the Honest Elections Project have been saying in plainer settings for a long time, that mail-in ballots are prone to fraud and that unsecured mail voting puts the integrity of the count itself at risk. After SB 1, mail-ballot rejection rates fell from roughly 11% to 2.7%. That is the pattern one expects if an ID rule is catching errors rather than chasing lawful voters out of the electorate. Meanwhile, Paxton sued ActBlue, the platform that has processed more than $16 billion in donations, after investigators completed contributions using false identities and prepaid cards the platform had told Congress it no longer accepted. When a three-judge panel blocked the Legislature’s new congressional map, Paxton defended it to the Supreme Court. The Court stayed the injunction in December 2025 and preserved the map for 2026. That order is the difference between a 25-13 Texas delegation and a path to 30 Republican seats.

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The fight that may last longest did not begin at a rally. It began in a hospital billing office. Texas Children’s Hospital, the largest children’s hospital in the country, billed Medicaid for gender-transition interventions that state law prohibited. Paxton treated the billing as Medicaid fraud. The August 2026 settlement is built to survive a news cycle. The hospital paid $10 million. Five physicians lost their privileges permanently. Bylaws were amended so that any doctor who repeats the conduct is stripped automatically. Transition services ended. The nation’s first dedicated detransition clinic, free to patients for five years, is required to open by October. Parallel suits against the NCAA and US Masters Swimming rest on a claim that does not require a seminar to follow. A ticket to a women’s volleyball game is a representation of the competition. Selling seats to a contest that includes biological males without saying so is consumer fraud under the Deceptive Trade Practces Act. The buyer of women’s sports is entitled to women’s sports.

Is winning those cases the same skill a senator needs? Not identically, and it would be silly to pretend otherwise, yet the overlap is larger than the campaign vocabulary admits because a senator’s actual work is oversight of executive agencies, the drafting of statutes that can survive a court, and the confirmation of judges who will read the law as written, and the lawyer who spent a decade testing all three in open court already knows which statutes have teeth, which agencies slip their leashes, and which nominees will do what they claimed at the hearing. Talarico offers fluency. He is, by every ordinary account, a gifted speaker, a former teacher with a seminarian’s timing, and the speeches travel. A floor speech has not lifted a buoy injunction, refunded a defrauded Medicaid program, or opened a clinic. Texans are hiring someone to keep the state’s claims intact, not someone to narrate them.

California, New York, and Illinois spent the past decade suing to expand benefits and to block enforcement. Texas spent it recovering $6.37 billion and putting enforcement back on the books, and you can see the difference in the river at Eagle Pass, in the statute book, and in an abatement trust that pays for treatment rather than press releases. The first duty of government is protection, of the border, of the treasury, of children, and of the ballot. Paxton’s tenure is the long proof that he treats that duty as work. The Senate has no shortage of people who can describe the duty. It is short of people who have already imposed it on presidents, on platforms, and on defendants who could afford to wait everyone else out. On the files as they stand, the choice does not require much theory.

If you enjoy my work, please subscribe https://x.com/amuse/creator-subscriptions/subscribe

Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com . Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.