Finish the Wall

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

President Trump stopped the flow of illegal aliens across our southern border by enforcing the law and deporting many of them. This is a remarkable achievement by Trump that many liberals have done everything they could to obstruct.

But illegal aliens are marching toward our border again in anticipation of gains by Democrats in the midterm elections. Already, 400 Honduran migrants were spotted entering Mexico on October 15, as they strode north on track to reach our border after Election Day.

Republicans had begun to build the long-sought border wall along the porous Texas-Mexico border, but Leftist lawfare has halted its construction. The wall is needed to prevent another influx of illegal migrants into our country once Democrats acquire some political power again.

Republicans secured funding in the One Big Beautiful Bill enacted last year for a mixture of sturdy 30-foot-high steel bollard walls, surveillance cameras, and vehicle barriers to stretch across our 2,000-mile southern border. This would bring us closer to the permanent security we need, and also save lives in the dangerous and expensive work of ferreting out elusive migrants who find a way to break into our country any way possible.

These migrants have families back home and that is where they should work toward their future. They can become active politically to import our constitutional government and Rule of Law into their own countries, for the benefit of themselves and their fellow citizens in a country where (unlike here) they speak the native language.

The Big Bend Sector includes 517 miles of the 1,254-mile Texas-Mexico border, and construction was ongoing there until federal district judge Kathleen Cardone ordered a halt on October 2. Bulldozers were merely clearing some land, but even that was too much for liberals who oppose this worthy project.

Judge Cardone has ruled in favor of illegal aliens before, as when she issued an injunction against Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s order to stop illegal aliens suspected of having Covid. This time she has enjoined construction of the border wall in the Big Bend region of West Texas, including Big Bend National Park, which is a corridor for illegal aliens to sneak into our country.

Most district court injunctions can take years to litigate through ordinary appeals, during which migrants could exploit this gap. Trump’s Solicitor General, John Sauer, has wisely taken this issue quickly to the U.S. Supreme Court by filing an application last week for the High Court to allow Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, to continue building.

Even experienced attorneys would be surprised to learn that the applicable federal statute prohibits appealing this type of injunction to the U.S. Court of Appeals, which is the typical procedure to run a case up the ladder. Instead, a provision added by the REAL ID Act of 2005 states that this district court injunction “may be reviewed only upon petition for a writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court of the United States.”

So Trump’s top attorney has done that. Sauer points out in his application that the district court lacked jurisdiction to interfere with the construction of this border wall, and thus the Supreme Court should issue a stay against the district court’s injunction and reverse it.

The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, as amended in 2005, contains a special jurisdiction-stripping provision as urged by Phyllis Schlafly for this and other issues on which liberals sue for activist rulings to interfere with implementation of the law. The statute takes jurisdiction away from federal courts for legal challenges on this issue, except for claims alleging violations of the Constitution.

There is no plausible constitutional objection to building a border wall. Sauer explained that Congress has granted the Secretary of Homeland Security “broad authority … to construct border barriers and roads ‘to deter illegal crossings in areas of high illegal entry,’ and expressly authorized the Secretary ‘to waive all legal requirements’ that he ‘determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads under this section.’”

Microsoft, meanwhile, is run by an immigrant and continues to hire many tech workers from India and elsewhere under the H-1B program. This displaces American workers and Microsoft has just announced its attempt to persuade one-quarter of its workforce — a whopping 60,000 employees — to quit in return for a buyout plan.

But workers want a job, not a cheap buyout plan. Fewer than 3,000 of these employees are expected to leave voluntarily, and an axe may fall next.

The Supreme Court set October 29 as the deadline for the plaintiffs who oppose the border wall to respond to Trump’s Solicitor General, who will then have a right to file his reply. This could become the first major decision by the Supreme Court after the upcoming elections.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

Trump Wins Again Against Illegal Migration

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The Supreme Court delivered another victory for President Trump on the issue of illegal migration on Monday. The High Court reversed a decision by an Obama-appointed judge that had blocked the termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for illegal aliens from Venezuela.

Enacted in 1990, the TPS program grants temporary protection for illegal aliens from being deported to countries harmed by wars, earthquakes, or other life-threatening disruptions. But “temporary” is the key word here; beneficiaries of the TPS program are allowed to remain only for a while before returning home, yet Justice Alito observed that “TPS designations in practice have often lasted for decades.”

President Biden extended TPS to more than 600,000 illegal aliens from Venezuela by misusing this program. All told, migrants from 17 different countries totaling more than 1 million illegal aliens were being harbored by the Biden Administration under the TPS program before Trump took office.

Trump has successfully terminated 13 of the 17 designations, and on June 25 the Supreme Court upheld Trump’s authority to shut these programs down in Mullin v. Doe. This set a clear precedent for Trump to terminate the remaining TPS programs, too.

TPS does not bring the migrants here. The South American migrants mostly crossed our southern border illegally and then the TPS program has been used by Democrats to shelter them from being deported.

Venezuela and Haiti were two of the remaining countries with TPS, of which Venezuela poses the greater risk. The terrible Tren de Aragua gang is in Venezuela, and young men associated with that gang snuck into our country illegally and yet were not deported by the Biden administration.

On Monday, three alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua were sentenced to 20 years in prison for kidnapping and torturing a Denver man in 2024, and a fourth defendant will be sentenced later this year. They had demanded a ransom from his wife and, when she did not pay it, they cut off the victim’s pinky finger.

President Biden granted special TPS protection to Venezuelans in 2021 and 2023. But there was no war in Venezuela, or a devastating earthquake, to justify keeping so many Venezuelans in our country.

Instead, there was a socialist regime, as is common in some South American nations, like Brazil today. The response to that is for the citizenry to defeat the socialist in power, as Brazilians took a step toward that on Sunday by voting against its incumbent President Lula.

When a gang of Venezuelan migrants besieged an apartment building in Colorado while brandishing guns, this became a campaign issue in 2024. The management company asserted that the migrants were also members of the notorious Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

Time to go home, Trump indicated, by terminating the TPS program for Venezuela, as Trump has done for more than a dozen countries. But an Obama-appointed judge has blocked this.

Federal District Judge Edward M. Chen accused Trump of having “animus” toward the Venezuelans, and of terminating TPS based on an improper discriminatory purpose. He held last year that this issue of animus could go before a jury to decide whether Trump and the Secretary of Homeland Security were improperly motivated by “animus,” which is silly because there is nothing unconstitutional about having animus toward aliens who enter our country illegally.

Trump’s Solicitor General John Sauer filed a petition to overturn this ruling with the Supreme Court on July 9, while the Court was on summer break. It reopened on Monday, and one of its first actions was to rule in favor of Trump by overruling the lower court decision against him.

The Court also held in favor of Trump on his partial termination of the TPS program for Haiti. Recall that the presence of tens of thousands of Haitians in Ohio, particularly in the town of Springfield, was a winning campaign issue that Trump forcefully spoke about at his debate with Kamala Harris.

Grassroots opposition to migration into Europe has led to success by conservative parties in elections there. The European Union tightened its rules against migration in response to the public opposition to it.

The current riots in the suburbs of Paris are concentrated where there are large immigrant populations, leading some to suspect that migrants are fomenting the unrest. The stated cause of poor school conditions seems unlikely to be the real source of the enormous violence.

Trump has kept that from occurring here by deporting foreign criminals and ending the sheltering of illegal aliens. This has prevented riots by disgruntled mobs that have blighted European countries, and which could happen in the U.S. if the pro-migration policies of Democrats return.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

Barrett Leaves Roberts in Ballroom Case

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The pattern of Justice Amy Coney Barrett siding with left-leaning Chief Justice John Roberts and the liberal bloc of the Supreme Court, to establish a 5-4 majority against President Trump in key cases, has been very disappointing to conservatives. But Justice Barrett recently returned to the conservative side in the Ballroom case, leaving Roberts to complain in dissent like someone who has been stood up at a prom.

Let’s hope Barrett’s return reflects a realization of who brought her to the big dance, and it wasn’t Roberts. In important decision after decision, she’s been siding with the liberal wing and Roberts against Trump on pivotal issues ranging from birthright citizenship, to accepting mail-in ballots after Election Day, to ruling against Trump’s tariffs.

Last year Barrett also joined Roberts and the liberal wing to forge a majority against Trump to refuse to allow him to withhold $2 billion in wasteful foreign aid. Barrett additionally joined Roberts and liberal Justices in rejecting Trump’s request to postpone his sentencing in the outrageous New York criminal case shortly prior to Inauguration.

The culture of Washington, D.C., is toxic and can be overwhelming. Conservative Justice Thomas has aptly described D.C. as a “hideous place,” and many lose their way after taking a job in the Swamp, where the media run the show.

Once the liberal media began to mock David Souter, he flipped from Republican to align himself with Democrats despite having been appointed to the Supreme Court by President George H.W. Bush. Souter even timed his early retirement to allow Obama to replace him, contrary to the tradition of Justices retiring when the party that appointed them is in power to nominate their successors.

Roberts has Republican credentials and a bit more authority due to his position as Chief Justice, so he can seem like a leader whom another Republican appointee can safely follow without creating waves. But when Barrett does that, she provides the swing fifth vote for Roberts and the liberal bloc on the Court.

That’s why Barrett’s casting of the deciding vote on August 31 in favor of Trump on the Ballroom has more significance than White House architecture. Roberts’ squealing in dissent, which failed to hold Barrett’s vote, further suggests that the future alignment of the Court may have been at stake in this little shadow docket case decided without oral argument.

Barrett agreed with conservatives that there is insufficient legal standing to block White House construction when the lawsuit is based on an aesthetic disapproval by merely one D.C. resident, who expects to visit the area “about once a month.” The Court majority stated correctly that it “has not found standing in circumstances like these before,” and declined to do so here.

Barrett’s shift back to the conservative side may come just in time as highly contentious new cases are lining up at the Court for speedy decision. The most important of these is the liberal challenge to new postal regulations about how mail-in ballot envelopes must be marked before the U.S. Postal Service will deliver them to election officials.

Working hard over Labor Day weekend, on Sunday Trump’s splendid Solicitor General John Sauer filed an emergency application to the Supreme Court to stay an injunction issued on Friday by Obama-appointed Judge Indira Talwani against sensible new requirements issued by the Postal Service for delivering mail-in ballots.

The new postal regulation creates “standardized design and review requirements for ballot envelopes that build on practices the Postal Service has long recommended,” Sauer explains. The new rule “requires States to upload the name, address, and barcode information of intended recipients of ballot mail in an online portal – information that election officials would necessarily already possess to send ballot mail under the Rule to those recipients.”

This federal regulation does not “dictate ballot content, mailing or receipt deadlines, or ballot-counting procedures.” Contrary to liberal criticism of this new rule, it “plainly does not seize control of States’ administration of elections – it simply imposes reasonable preparation requirements for certain election-related mail.”

Just two weeks ago the Supreme Court held in favor of Trump on this issue, by finding that the liberals’ lawsuit against it was premature. But the same federal judge in Boston then decided in favor of the plaintiffs again, compelling Trump to seek Supreme Court intervention yet again to reduce potential fraud in the upcoming midterm elections.

The Democrat Party relies heavily on mail-in voting, which is more easily harvested by paid campaign workers without adequate verification that a voter knowingly filled out the ballot in secrecy to ensure its integrity. Too often, a Republican candidate wins based on in-person voting, but a swarm of late-arriving mailed ballots is then counted after Election Day to change the result, as occurred in 2020.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

Trump versus the Courts on Immigration

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The immigration issue remains near the top of voters’ priorities as the midterm elections rapidly approach. Liberal judges appointed by Obama and Biden continue to thwart President Trump at nearly every turn on this all-important issue.

On Friday another federal judge ruled against Trump, this time blocking his order to suspend visas from 75 mostly Third World countries. On January 14, 2026, nearly a year after Trump took office, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the pausing of visas to nationals from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, and many other similar nations that most Americans could not find on a map of the world.

The reason for Trump's policy was sensible: admitting future immigrants from those countries is likely to impose a financial burden on American taxpayers. He ordered the State Department to undertake “a full review of all policies, regulations, and guidance to ensure that immigrants from these high-risk countries do not utilize welfare in the United States or become a public charge.”

Data from the Council of Economic Advisers show that more than 30% of immigrant households from these 75 countries depend on public assistance programs. Those who do not are taking jobs from Americans on employment-related visas, and that causes indirect harm to American citizens.

Yet Biden-appointed Judge Jeannette Vargas, who was confirmed to the bench just seven weeks before the 2024 election, decided that Secretary Rubio had exceeded his statutory authority by declining to issue visas to persons from these countries. The federal judge held instead that remote consular officers overseas have the exclusive authority to approve or deny individual visa applications, and her ruling tells them to continue to do so without regard to Trump’s policy.

Ordinarily a judge making a decision like this would remand the matter back to the agency, in this case the State Department, to develop a new policy based on the judicial ruling. But this arrogant judge took the extraordinary step of declaring her ruling final without giving the Trump Administration an opportunity to address what the court held.

This lawsuit was filed by two nonprofit organizations, five citizens of other countries who sought employment-based visas, and six other family members. Employment-based visas take jobs away from Americans who are struggling to find good-paying work.

Many might be surprised to learn that the lead plaintiff in this case is the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC), which encompasses a network of 400 Catholic and community-based immigration legal-service providers in nearly every state and 3,000 employees. Although initially started by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), CLINIC is an independent nonprofit that has long been dependent on millions of dollars in federal funds.

The Left objects to any government funds flowing to Catholic schools, but is just fine with CLINIC receiving taxpayer money as it litigates against President Trump’s America First policies. CLINIC filed its lawsuit in the Southern District of New York along with another pro-immigration group called African Communities Together.

Anna Gallagher, the executive director of CLINIC, praised the ruling by saying that it helps keep families together. But families can just as easily be reunited in their native countries rather than in the United States.

CLINIC applauded the disastrous Supreme Court decision in June granting birthright citizenship to nearly anyone born here with foreign-born parents. “In our amicus brief, we explained how the values of Catholic social teaching, the particular realities of undocumented immigration in the United States, and our nation’s legal history make upholding the tradition of birthright citizenship the most just outcome of this case,” CLINIC cheered back then.

But none of the Catholic countries of Europe – Poland, Italy, Spain, and Ireland – accepts or allows birthright citizenship. Catholic Spain is currently struggling to ship back the recent influx of thousands of African migrants into Ceuta, who were incited to swim into that territory by a judicially activist ruling by Spain’s supreme court.

On Saturday the State Department responded to the latest court ruling against Trump by pointing out that his administration is “protecting the American people by upholding the highest standards of screening and vetting of visa applicants.” It will surely appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which also presides in New York City, and if necessary to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Federal courts have ruled against or temporarily blocked Trump more than 200 times during his second administration. In June a federal court invalidated his temporary $100,000 fee to discourage use of H-1B visas by employers to bring in cheap labor from other countries, and the Democrat-dominated First Circuit rebuffed Trump’s motion for a speedy reversal of that decision.

Trump recently responded with a new regulation to make this fee permanent at $103,265, which could generate $8.8 billion to help fund the costs of immigration enforcement. The flood of migrants is harming Americans by taking jobs and soaking up government benefits.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

Birthright Citizenship Must Be Reversed

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The dire consequences of the birthright citizenship decision by the Supreme Court on June 30th are sinking in. It impedes deportation and it gives millions of future votes to the Democrat Party, which is increasingly electing socialist candidates.

Texans had already been in an uproar about foreigners taking over entire communities there. Texans do not want to be subjected to future socialism as voted in by birthright citizens whose parents were illegals or sojourners.

A week after the Supreme Court’s ruling, the backlash in Texas prompted Gov. Greg Abbott to order an investigation into whether “birth tourism” is being encouraged by hospitals there. Birth tourism is foreigners coming to the U.S. to give birth here, and thereby claim birthright citizenship for their children.

Gov. Abbott took action only after several prominent Texas Republicans rebuked the Supreme Court decision and called for Texas to assert its sovereignty by refusing to issue birth certificates to children of foreigners. State Representative Brian Harrison (R-Midlothian), who previously worked in the Trump Administration, demanded that Gov. Abbott call a special session of the legislature to push back against this Court decision.

“I hope every elected Republican in Texas joins my call for immediate action. Delay is unacceptable for a state like Texas!” Rep. Harrison posted on X.

The next Texas Railroad Commissioner, which is one of the most powerful offices because it regulates the oil and gas industries, is Bo French after winning a stunning upset against the establishment candidate. He successfully campaigned against the rise in Islamic culture among migrants into Texas, and he boldly demands that Texas assert its sovereignty against the Supreme Court ruling on birthright citizenship.

“The correct response to the traitorous decision today on anchor babies is nullification,” French declared. “Texas can just do things and we should. Texas is sovereign. If I have anything to say about it, Texas will not recognize them as citizens.”

Bo French and Brian Harrison show where the next generation of Texas leaders are headed. Gov. Abbott’s call for an investigation into birth tourism may have been a reaction against the younger, charismatic Bo French, who could run against the aging Abbott for governor one day.

Politicians in D.C. have failed in their initial attempt to downplay this birthright citizenship decision. Proposals in Congress to legislate around this ruling are unlikely to succeed, both because the votes are not there and because the Court declared birthright citizenship to be a constitutional right.

There is a 25-day window for President Trump to seek a rehearing and reconsideration of this erroneous decision by the Supreme Court, which Trump said he would do. The Court has on its own initiative reheard momentous cases in the past, such as the Citizens United case about campaign funding, although it has been more than half a century since the Court has granted a request by a party for a rehearing.

Birthright citizenship is that once-in-a-century issue justifying a rehearing. The harmful impact of this on the sovereignty of Texas and every other State is at stake, just as the notorious Dred Scott decision in 1857 wrongly interfered with States that prohibited slavery.

If the Supreme Court had reconsidered and reversed its Dred Scott decision after seeing the Republican-led backlash against it, then perhaps the lives of 750,000 American soldiers would have been saved by averting the Civil War. The Supreme Court is supposed to act to unite the country, not divide it with a 5-4 decision that invents a new constitutional right for foreigners who are not even domiciled in the USA.

Chief Justice John Roberts seems unlikely to reconsider his pet theories about English feudalism to hand the future of America over to foreigners who will become voters under his decision granting them citizenship. But Justice Amy Barrett, who silently provided the swing 5th vote for Roberts’ ruling, may be willing to listen and reconsider.

A survey just conducted by the Idaho Freedom Caucus, which is a coalition of some of the most conservative legislators in our country, found that stopping illegal immigration remains the #1 issue among the grassroots. This makes the birthright citizenship decision the new equivalent of Roe v. Wade, against which Republicans campaigned for nearly 50 years until the Supreme Court overruled it.

It won’t take that long to overturn this decision that jeopardizes Texas sovereignty. States control the issuance of birth certificates, and as a practical matter they can decide whether to grant one to someone born here to foreign parents as legislation introduced in 2011 in Arizona sought to do.

This argument should resonate with Justice Barrett, who has favored state autonomy on other controversial issues such as the power of states to ban transgender procedures or to protect girls’ sports against intrusion by boys who present themselves as transgender girls.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

Supreme Court’s Blunder on Birthright Citizenship

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The Supreme Court just blundered badly on birthright citizenship, undermining the credibility of the Court while devaluing American citizenship. By a mere 5-4 majority, the Court declared a new constitutional right to citizenship for millions of children of illegal aliens, tourists, and those on worker visas, which was never intended by anyone who wrote the U.S. Constitution.

This decision suddenly grants a future right to vote to millions of illegal aliens, tilting the outcomes of elections away from the candidates preferred by native-born or naturalized American citizens. Chief Justice John Roberts, who is on the Court only because millions of illegal aliens were not allowed to vote in 2004, wrote a decision that hands the future of the United States over to the children of illegal aliens and other foreign citizens.

The notion that the 14th Amendment, which was ratified nearly 160 years ago in response to the Civil War, somehow requires this result is unfathomable. As Justice Thomas explained in his 91-page dissent, this is another judicial distortion of the meaning of a constitutional amendment whose purpose was “to secure equal rights for the freed blacks.”

No Republican will be electable as president in a decade if this decision stands, because of the millions of children born to illegal aliens allowed in during the Clinton, Obama and Biden Administrations. In Republican states flooded with illegal aliens, such as Arizona and Texas, the voting power of these illegal alien children as newly declared American citizens virtually ensures a future Democrat takeover.

“I am not sure that today’s opinion will stand the test of time,” dissented Justice Thomas in his modest style. Justice Alito dissented by observing the Court “confers citizenship on virtually everyone who happens to be born in this country, including the children of ‘birth tourists,’ women who come here solely for the purpose of giving birth to a child and then promptly return home.”

Now the millions of illegal aliens who have been persuaded by the Trump Administration to return voluntarily home have a strong incentive to stay long enough to give birth to another child. Those children will then automatically have a right to vote in our elections and to legalize their lawbreaking parents.

Roberts’ decision was made possible only by the support of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who has repeatedly given a one-vote majority to Roberts’ coalition with the three liberal justices. Barrett seems to cling increasingly to Roberts, perhaps overwhelmed by the liberal D.C. culture while taken in by Roberts’ superficial reasoning.

Dating back to his politically tinged memos as a D.C.-based government attorney in the 1980s, Roberts has always been more interested in politics than scholarship. Roberts just outdid prior liberal judicial activists by diluting the future voting power of all rightful American citizens.

This Court decision devalues American citizenship for all. No longer is citizenship reserved to the children of Americans and those who went through the rigorous process of naturalization, but now it includes anyone born in the United States to a mother who was here illegally or who traveled here for school, work, or tourism.

American citizenship now includes many millions who have no known allegiance to the United States. Many illegal aliens demonstrate their hostility to the values of our country by their criminal conduct and failure to assimilate, but the Supreme Court just prevented deportation of millions of them by declaring them to be citizens.

The response to this needs to be, as to prior calamitous mistakes by the Supreme Court, clear and unequivocal. As the future president Abraham Lincoln stated in his immediate response to the Dred Scott decision in favor of slavery in 1857, “We know the court that made it has often overruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it to overrule this.”

The Republican Party was built on opposition to the Dred Scott decision, which was decided with a larger majority (7-2) than this birthright citizenship decision. In both cases, the Court went far beyond what was needed to decide the controversy before it, as Justice Kavanaugh pointed out in his concurrence explaining that a 1940 law, which Congress can change, should have been the sole basis for this citizenship decision.

Instead of Justice Kavanaugh’s judicial restraint, the Court’s 5-member majority issued a ruling that only a constitutional amendment can change. Such an amendment on this issue would be nearly impossible, but Congress could deny any appropriations to enforce this decision as Congress did in response to court decisions to remove the Mojave Desert Cross from federal land.

Pew Research reports that American adults (who include non-voters) are evenly divided, 50-49%, on the question of whether illegal immigrants’ children born in the United States should be automatically granted American citizenship. This 49% is greater public support than Republicans have on other topics, and should become a campaign issue.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

The Vanishing Conservative Supreme Court

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The Supreme Court is 6-3 Republican-appointed, including three justices picked by President Trump. Yet as we reach the annual end of the Supreme Court Term, which customarily wraps up before July, there are remarkably few conservative decisions to halt the advance of the liberal agenda.

For example, the Santa Clara County Office of Education in Silicon Valley has imposed a teaching guide requiring teachers to be pro-LGBTQ+ even in math problems. One of the recommended books for young children is the “Pride Puppy,” which invites three- and four-year-olds to look for certain images at a pride parade including an “intersex” flag, and a drag “king” and “queen.”

Last year the Supreme Court decided in favor of religious rights for parents in Mahmoud v. Taylor, but the opinion was so weak that school districts continue to impose the transgender curriculum on unsuspecting parents without giving them a meaningful opportunity to opt out. Parents have just sued in California over this issue that should have already been firmly resolved in favor of parents by the Supreme Court.

Trial court judges have been overwhelmingly opposed to Trump’s position on the transgender and other issues. Language in some of their decisions have been scathing against Trump, as reported by CNN, while the Supreme Court has failed to rein them in.

The Supreme Court held only 58 oral arguments this Term, which is merely a third of the number of oral arguments heard annually when liberals controlled the Warren Court in the late 1950s and 1960s. During this entire current decade the Supreme Court has heard an average of only about 60 cases per year, the lowest average since the Civil War.

A vote of only four Justices is needed for the Supreme Court to accept a case and schedule it for oral argument, and then render a decision on its merits. In important petitions for Court review, conservative Justices Thomas and Alito have often voted to “grant cert” while the three Trump appointees failed to join them, thereby ducking important issues that should be addressed.

There is a pattern in the issues that the newer Republican-appointed Justices are avoiding. Abortion, transgender, vaccine mandates, and parental rights cases are all being avoided by them.

While the aging Justices Thomas and Alito, who are courageous, continue on the Supreme Court, now is the time to establish strong precedents that can last for decades. The younger Trump nominees need merely to vote silently with Thomas and Alito, yet too often are unwilling to do even that.

Most of the Trump-appointed Justices repeatedly voted against granting cert in a string of conversion therapy cases, until they finally took a case from Colorado and declared the therapy to be a First Amendment right. That decision should have been rendered years earlier to stop the widespread infringement on conservative counselors’ freedom of speech, and by delaying the Trump-appointed Justices allowed infringement.

Far from being the bold MAGA Court that Trump supporters campaigned so hard to attain, this Court has retreated to near irrelevancy. It treads water rather than swimming, thereby inviting future Democrat appointees to take charge.

Kamala Harris gave an interview to Don Lemon last week and called for Democrats to add four more Justices to the Supreme Court at the first opportunity. If that happens, the newly empowered Justices will not timidly avoid social issues as Republicans have.

In the most recent abortion case, all of the Republican nominees except Thomas and Alito sided with abortion pill manufacturers to allow them to continue to distribute their product widely in pro-life states without an in-person dispensing requirement. Neither the Trump nominees nor Chief Justice Roberts explained their ruling, for now, in favor of the abortion pill that causes two-thirds of all abortions.

Religious liberty is supposedly fashionable with this Court, but it declined to take the appeal of Amish grade schools hit with massive fines by New York for not requiring their children to be vaccinated. New York has eliminated the religious exemption from vaccines, and the Court punted this case back to an appellate court rather than uphold a religious right to decline vaccination.

The Court refused to “grant cert” in at least three appeals concerning the unfair transgender invasion into girls’ sports, until finally taking a pair of cases that it is deciding now. The Court has repeatedly declined to grant cert in cases concerning parental, particularly fathers’, rights.

The effect of the Republican Justices declining to grant cert in significant controversies is that bad decisions by liberal lower courts are left standing. The younger Republican Justices may be worried about possible impeachment by a future Democrat majority in Congress, but if so that would reinforce the need to nominate older justices willing to stand up against D.C. liberals.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

Transgender Movement on the March

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

On Monday the Colorado Supreme Court, by a wide 5-2 margin, ordered a Colorado children’s hospital to resume transgender treatments and surgeries on minors based on state law, even though the decision could force the hospital to lose its federal funding. The Trump Administration has taken strong action against the transgender movement, yet it marches on.

Last December the Trump administration threatened to withhold federal funding from facilities that provide transgender treatment to children, but a Biden-appointed federal judge in Oregon named Mustafa T. Kasubhai blocked that rule. Children’s Hospital Colorado had wisely suspended its program of applying hormonal treatments and puberty blockers to children due to the threatened loss of funding.

A lower court upheld the hospital’s decision against a legal challenge. Children’s hospitals depend heavily on federal funding, including their services under Medicaid, and thus ordering the hospital to continue with transgender treatment would do more harm than good.

The practice of medicine is historically regulated by state law, but since health care providers receive billions of dollars of federal funding, the Trump Administration said it would cut federal funding from facilities that continue to perform harmful procedures aimed at altering a child’s gender. Recently the American Medical Association and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons reversed their guidance on such procedures, urging a delay in transgender surgery prior to the age of 19.

Dominated by federal employees, Virginia has become like Colorado and other blue states in pushing the transgender agenda. When a police officer in Norfolk in southern Virginia objected to orders requiring him to use transgender pronouns, he was ordered to leave, stripped of his gun, suspended, and then fired.

Norfolk has historically been conservative, with many military veterans. It is alarming that police officers in Norfolk have been suspended and even fired for objecting to the use of the women’s locker room by a man purporting to be a transgender woman.

State courts in the mostly conservative states of Kansas and Montana are also imposing the transgender ideology on their residents. In Kansas last Friday, a county judge appointed by Democrat Gov. Laura Kelly issued a 117-page injunction against a good Kansas transgender law, which had been passed by the Republican legislature over her veto.

The ACLU brought this lawsuit against the Kansas ban on transgender operations and treatments for children. The county judge blocked the law based on an activist decision by the liberal Kansas Supreme Court, which invented a right of “personal autonomy” to expand abortion there even though those words cannot be found in its 167-year-old state constitution.

Meanwhile, the Montana Supreme Court has rendered multiple Leftist decisions, despite being in a red state that Trump won by 20 points in 2024. On April 14, the 5-2 court held that birth certificates and driver’s licenses must be changed to accommodate transgender demands.

The Montana Supreme Court ruled, based on its state constitution, that state agencies cannot refuse to alter birth certificates and driver’s licenses to accommodate transgender demands. Despite being born male, for example, a resident of the Big Sky Country can now change his birth certificate to state falsely that he was born female instead.

These Kansas and Montana decisions were based on their state constitutions, and the Colorado ruling was based on state law. This reasoning generally shields such decisions from review by the U.S. Supreme Court which, regardless, has avoided review of many important transgender cases that it could have decided.

The 7-2 decision last week by the U.S. Supreme Court in favor of abortion pill manufacturers was the result of all three Trump appointees crossing over to the liberal side of the Court, without explanation. Justices Thomas and Alito expressed their dismay at how well-established principles of law were disregarded to allow the continued distribution of the abortion pill without sensible safeguards such as in-person dispensing, and without compliance with a longstanding federal ban on abortion-by-mail.

The entire Democrat Party is lockstep in support of the transgender agenda, due to how Planned Parenthood supplements its revenue by offering transgender treatments. Only a few courts have been willing to defend children against harmful transgender procedures.

The U.S. Supreme Court indicated last year in the Skrmetti case that there is no right to transgender operations and treatments for children under the U.S. Constitution, but this good decision was silent about state constitutions. The Court upheld a law in Tennessee protecting minors against this harm, but this precedent does not protect children against pro-transgender state court decisions based on state law.

Under Skrmetti the federal government can act further to protect children against life-altering procedures and treatments pushed on them by the transgender ideology. In addition to withholding federal funds from facilities that promote transgender treatments, federal regulations could require transparency to the public about which facilities provide these objectionable treatments.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

Is SCOTUS Ducking Transgender School Cases?

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

If anyone feels that the transgender issue has been won by conservatives, think again. In the past eight days the U.S. Supreme Court has ducked not one, but two, important cases in which public schools encouraged students to socially transition to the opposite sex without their parents’ knowledge or consent.

Social transitioning means adopting a name, pronoun, clothing, and gender expression suitable to the opposite sex. Many public schools have a policy of reinforcing such behavior by students and concealing it from their parents.

The latest denial of cert by SCOTUS was on Monday, on a petition by parents which had been supported by many amicus briefs. Nearly half the states joined a brief in support of parents to be informed and have control over what public schools are doing to push their children toward transgender behavior.

In just the last two years, the Supreme Court has turned away five transgender cases in which parents object to the secret transitioning of their children in public schools. This latest denial by SCOTUS arose from a lawsuit initiated by Florida parents, in which the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit sided with the public school despite the swing vote on the three-judge panel describing the school’s treatment of the parents as “shameful.”

In that case, a 13-year-old girl had delays in development and struggled with learning, and began doubting her gender. Her parents hired a private therapist and informed the school that they were opposed to social transitioning.

But even in Republican Florida, school officials were allowed to meet secretly with the child, label her as “nonbinary,” mandate that all school personnel refer to her as “they” or “them,” allow her to use boys’ bathrooms, and prohibit anyone from informing her parents. The school rejected the parents’ objections, denied their request to participate in this process, and refused the parents’ request for school records of meetings with their own daughter.

The school was acting pursuant to a parental-exclusion policy, which the Eleventh Circuit held was “executive” conduct that parents could not prevail against. In an opinion that the swing judge sided with but said “makes no sense,” the Court held that parents must first prove that an infringement on their rights “shocked the conscience” to compel a school to comply with the parents’ request.

A week earlier, the Supreme Court likewise refused a petition by two Massachusetts parents who had “repeatedly directed their public middle school not to interfere with the upbringing and mental healthcare plan for B.F., their eleven-year-old daughter.” Despite the parents’ objections, “school officials followed district protocol and secretly facilitated B.F.’s social gender transition anyway” and treated her “as though she were nonbinary.”

The entirely Democrat-appointed First Circuit panel sided with the public school by holding that an 11-year-old’s desires had priority over parental rights, and that this transgender issue supposedly did not concern her mental health. The public school even provided counseling to facilitate the gender transition of the child despite the parents’ objections, and the First Circuit sided with the school.

With these two latest denials of cert, the Supreme Court has now denied petitions for its review from anti-parent decisions by the First, Fourth, Seventh, Tenth, and Eleventh Circuits. In each case, often over dissent by a conservative appellate judge, the federal judiciary sided with schools as they secretly transition children without the knowledge or even over the objection of the parents.

Washington, D.C., is the transgender capital of the world and the Supreme Court justices and their clerks are immersed in that culture. The percentage of law students who are transgender also continues to climb, who become law clerks at the Supreme Court to do most of the work in screening cases for review.

The Supreme Court did intervene in an emergency appeal from a case in California, to reinstate a district court injunction against a California law that prevented public schools from notifying parents about their child’s gender identity or sexual orientation. Captioned Mirabelli v. Bonta, this case continues to be litigated in federal court in California and does not directly affect the rest of the country.

This case is based on a “religious obligation to raise their children in accordance with those beliefs,” the 6-3 Supreme Court wrote in temporarily siding with the parents. California’s opening brief is due on July 6 in the left-leaning Ninth Circuit, which has previously held against parents.

It was this same Ninth Circuit that infamously declared two decades ago that a parent’s right over her child’s upbringing “does not extend beyond the threshold of the school door.” Phyllis Schlafly then led such an uproar against that arrogant denial of parental rights that the court extraordinarily amended its decision to reword its much-criticized statement. SCOTUS then denied cert in that case, too.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.