Update: Leftism Controlling Education

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The largest teachers’ union, the National Education Association, held its annual convention over the July 4th weekend. Once again, its resolutions provide a horrifying glimpse of the leftist ideology that controls our public schools (and quite a few private schools, too).

Fifty delegates to this teachers’ convention submitted New Business Item 10: “The National Education Association will call for the impeachment, conviction, and removal of Donald Trump from the US Presidency.” This resolution seeks a “National March on Washington D.C. to remove Trump before the November 2026 midterm election.”

At a time when fewer than a third of fourth-graders can read at their grade level in public schools nationwide, teachers should focus more on education than on politics. Instead, they proposed spending $5 million in teachers’ dues on a highly publicized demonstration against President Trump just before voters head to the polls.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has presidential aspirations, so let’s look at how well his state schools are doing. A generation ago, when Ronald Reagan was governor, the sprawling University of California system was widely considered a crown jewel of public education.

But under Gov. Newsom’s tenure the University of California stopped using the standardized SAT and ACT scores in its admission process, and the result has been catastrophic. The Obama Administration’s Janet Napolitano, who was the high-salaried president of that system after serving as Obama’s Secretary of Homeland Security, admits that what she still insists was a “worthwhile experiment” to drop standardized admissions testing needs to be “revisited.”

Even the New York Times is appalled, devoting its entire editorial column on July 6th to explaining how that formerly great university betrayed its mission by adopting test-blind admissions in 2020. More than half the students who enter Cal Berkeley, its most prestigious campus, cannot solve elementary equations, such as finding the values of x for which x-squared is greater than 4, and its English Prof. Janet Sorensen observed that she “got students who could not write a sentence.”

The NEA spreads these errors nationwide. It is the largest labor union in the United States, having approximately 3 million members, which is more than enough to swing the outcome of a national election.

Its annual budget is based mostly on public employee dues, which are mandatory in many states, totaling about $400 million. It has a large staff of hundreds in its headquarters, which of course are located in Washington, D.C.

NEA members typically have summers off and thus lots of time to attend liberal conventions and campaign for Democrat candidates. Many teachers retire early with substantial pensions.

Roughly 10% of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention are public school teachers, so its platform as adopted every four years largely reflects the views of the NEA and its smaller rival, Randi Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers. Both groups oppose laws that protect girls’ school sports against intrusion by biological boys who seek to compete with girls.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently rejected the NEA’s effort to force West Virginia to allow boys to compete as transgender girls in girls’ school sports. The NEA also wants to require schools to use opposite-sex pronouns demanded by transgender students.

Many Americans have been abandoning public schools in favor of alternatives, and the declining birth rate has contributed further to a drop in public school enrollment. Since 2020 there has been a decrease of 1.4 million public school students, creating pressure to close many schools and thereby requiring longer commutes by the students who remain.

But rather than becoming more mainstream to attract more students, the teachers’ unions continue to veer leftward and demand more funding. Dumping more money into the system has not improved it.

Liberal ideology in education has infested the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, at federal taxpayer expense. A new 162-page report by the White House Domestic Policy Council demonstrated for our Independence Day how far afield our treasured national museum system has strayed from our proud heritage.

Spearheaded by Vince Haley, this report observes that the Smithsonian Institute “has not met its obligations to the American people.” Entitled “Saving America’s Story” and subtitled “How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage,” the report condemns the shift “from straightforward historical education and scholarship toward an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.”

Examples provided in this report of the distortions of our history are indeed shocking. An 1840 statue of George Washington is depicted as merely “the perceived courage of the American people,” rather than the “exceptional courage of the American people” as often proven.

There is “no major exhibit dedicated to America’s founding era” at the Smithsonian Museum. Instead, many founders are disparaged for having some connection to slavery, despite how most worked to end the slave trade and to put slavery on a path to extinction.

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 Most Important Women in American History

The New Republic magazine published a list of the ten Most Important Women in American History.

T-10. Phyllis Schlafly The slayer of the Equal Rights Amendment, Schlafly mobilized “the housewife image to fulfill her deep political ambitions—a model for everyone from Ann Coulter in the 1990s to the tradwives of today,” wrote Vanderbilt University’s Nicole Hemmer.

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.

8 Americans who Shaped History

The NY Times reports:

U.S.A. at 250 These 8 Americans Shaped History. We Just Don’t Agree on How. ...

Schlafly presented an unapologetic vision of family values that resonates with many Americans to this day.

When Donald J. Trump eulogized Schlafly at her funeral in September 2016, he cast both himself and her as underdogs — perhaps reasonably. Mr. Trump looked like the most long shot presidential nominee in living memory. Schlafly, who gave him a rare early endorsement, had in the 1970s slayed the Equal Rights Amendment, which sought to give women equality under the Constitution — a seeming shoo-in, until she got involved.

By 2016, much of American life had turned nightmarish for someone like her.

Gay marriage: widely accepted. Abortion: legalized. Gender-neutral bathrooms: commonplace on many campuses. Many women no longer measured their success in marriage and children, but in financial independence and personal fulfillment.

These days, though, her arguments ring anew in our ears, as a new generation of conservative women challenges feminism’s gains.

Today, anti-feminists hold powerful roles in Washington. Social media has gone frilly with tradwives. Their reasoning echoes Schlafly’s: Homemakers enjoy special status, protected and provided for by their husbands. Why give it up?

Decades before battles erupted over unisex bathrooms for transgender people, Schafly warned that the Equal Rights Amendment would spawn co-ed bathrooms. Long before “America First” and “stop the steal,” the ultra-isolationist Schlafly accused shadowy “kingmakers” of conspiring to nominate “America Last” candidates for president. She tarred feminists as radicals, just as her heirs do now.

To combat the E.R.A., abortion and gay rights, she mobilized formerly apolitical evangelical Christians, helping to build the coalition of religious conservatives that propelled Ronald Reagan to victory and eventually ousted social moderates from the Republican Party.

The political divisions that defined those 1970s debates “only got more pronounced over the years,” leading to today’s hyper-polarization, said Marjorie J. Spruill, the author of “Divided We Stand.” “And Schlafly’s tone had a lot to do with it.”

Schlafly’s victories came wreathed in paradoxes: She presented herself as a model wife and mother, breastfeeding all six of her children, yet she had resources (her husband, a lawyer, came from wealth) and a housekeeper that allowed her to run political campaigns and churn out books, newsletters and commentary. While exalting homemaking, she lobbied (unsuccessfully) for a top post in the Reagan administration.

Calmly, she deflected accusations of hypocrisy, saying that she had raised her children before embracing what she called her “hobby” — politics. Career and homemaking, she said, came “at different times in my life.”

Feminists never tire of leveling similar charges today, against women like Erika Kirk, the conservative activist who now leads the influential organization started by her late husband, Charlie Kirk; and Katie Miller, the prominent Republican political operative who promotes motherhood as women’s highest calling.

Yet many young women are veering further left, and their conservative peers aren’t necessarily sticking to homemaking, either. At a recent Turning Point USA conference for conservative young women, several speakers openly discussed balancing family with high-powered careers. You could see Schlafly’s influence. You could also see feminism’s.

the other 7 historical figures profiled in this article were: the Minutemen; Charles Curtis; John Brown; Booker T. Washington; Madam C.J. Walker; D.W. Griffith; Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Sports Gambling Triggers Legal Drama

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The UFC Freedom 250 gladiator fights on the White House lawn were not the only high-profile bouts this week. The conservative Attorneys General Kris Kobach (R-KS) and Ken Paxton (R-TX) faced off against each other in a high-stakes legal battle precipitated by the crisis of gambling on college sports.

At a cost of $5 million, Texas Tech had recruited a star quarterback named Brendan Sorsby for its football team. Then it was discovered that the 22-year-old athlete had gambled more than $90,000 on college sports, placing more than 9,000 bets including 40 on his own Indiana Hoosiers team while a freshman there.

Millions are wagered daily on sports due to the Supreme Court ruling in Murphy v. NCAA (2018), which invalidated the federal ban on sports gambling outside of Nevada. Some $167 billion is bet on sports annually now, most of it by young men, and the World Cup that just started is expected to become the most gambled-on sporting event ever.

Most parents would be shocked to learn that an estimated 30-50% of 16-year-old boys are placing bets through their phones today. Many of the college athletes of the future are betting on sports in high school.

The NCAA prohibits gambling on college sports by its players, but Brendan Sorsby is surely not the only college athlete who has been placing bets and the NCAA ban is difficult to enforce. He just happened to admit it, and the NCAA predictably reacted by banishing him permanently from competing in college football.

Not so fast, a Texas state court then ruled by reinstating him to play for nearly this entire season. The NCAA immediately appealed, while other colleges in its Big 12 athletic conference complained about the harmful impact on the integrity of the game.

Historically, players have been banned from competing if found to have gambled on teams in their own sport. The Chicago White Sox players who were caught fixing the 1919 World Series were banned from professional baseball for life.

Pete Rose was excluded from the Hall of Fame for the rest of his life after his gambling on baseball was discovered. His highly respected teammate, the Hall of Famer Johnny Bench, agreed with that ban based on Rose’s admitted gambling.

But as other colleges began threatening to boycott Texas Tech in their schedules, the conservative Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sprang into action. Epitomizing the sentiment of “Don’t mess with Texas,” Paxton indicated that his office would take action against any conference or college that ostracized Texas Tech.

The University of Kansas and Kansas State are members of the same Big 12 conference as Texas Tech. Their conservative Kansas Attorney General, Kris Kobach, then got into the game by saying that the conference and other colleges have the right to take Texas Tech off their schedules if Texas Tech allows an admitted gambler to play.

The Big 12 conference filed a federal lawsuit against Paxton and Texas Tech seeking a declaration of the athletic conference’s First Amendment rights to enforce its policy against gambling. Texas Tech had a state court order requiring the NCAA to allow Sorsby to play, but the conference sought a federal court order allowing it to discipline Texas Tech.

As all this drama unfolded, Texas Republicans were holding their biennial state convention in Houston. The delegates approved strengthening their platform against gambling, in a state where pro-gambling interests spent more than $10 million in the primaries to try to expand gambling there.

Sorsby has not been charged with any crime. Sports gambling is legal today in roughly 40 states, and in the other 10 states people are doing essentially the same thing on so-called prediction markets like Kalshi.

The NFL has been permissive about this issue, and allowed another player who bet on college sports, Kayshon Boutte, to play in the NFL without any suspension. He was accused of placing 8,900 bets while playing college football, and admitted that he bet until he “was completely broke.”

“I’d wake up early in the morning, and the first thing I'd do was bet,” Boutte explained. “I’d stay up late and bet. All day. All night. I had insomnia, so if I woke up in the middle of the night, phone next to the bed, I'd bet.”

On Monday, Brendan Sorsby entered the supplemental NFL draft, so that he might be selected to play for an NFL team rather than for Texas Tech. To become NFL-eligible he had to abandon his college eligibility and leave Texas Tech, moving the drama to the NFL.

But no one expects this to end the growing crisis caused by sports gambling. College athletes are kids and, as the pandemic of sports betting ensnares teenage boys and young men, it is bringing down the integrity of sports with them.

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 Catholic Patriotic Minute #50: Phyllis Schlafly

Catholics for Catholics has posted a nice tribute to Phyllis Schlafly.

Schlafly’s whole life was a tremendous leap, powered by the dedication to hard work she learned from her parents and her courage to serve Americans through her pen and speech. Relentlessly, Schlafly’s early writing evolved into writing and public speaking, warning against the dangers of Socialism and Communism and advocating for the life of homemakers, the natural distinctions between man and woman, and the dignity of human life. Phyllis Schlafly passed away on September 5, 2016.

College Grads Hurt by H-1B Visas

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

There is a grim unemployment crisis for college graduates who majored in STEM – science, technology, engineering or math. An estimated 8% of recent STEM graduates are completely unemployed, which is double the national unemployment rate.

This is amid a high-tech boom producing billionaires nearly as often as coffee cups. Only a few hundred thousand American STEM graduates want a job in their field, and it should not be so difficult to make good jobs available to them.

Foreigners coming in on H-1B visas are being hired rather than Americans for many entry-level STEM jobs. There is supposed to be high growth in AI software development, but Big Tech has filled this field with H-1B foreigners, too.

The National Foundation for American Policy found that more than 80% of new H-1B applications and filings by Amazon, Apple, Facebook (Meta), Google, and Microsoft are for foreign workers to fill American jobs in AI and software development, and data science jobs.

Big Tech prefers H-1B visas because the workers become bound to the employer by the program and can then be paid less while prevented from switching to a competitor. If the visa holders want to quit to work for a rival, then they would typically lose their right to remain in the United States and could be deported.

The net result is that everyone is harmed by the H-1B program except the owners and executives of a few Big Tech companies, and the foreigners who steal the good jobs. American workers lose access to jobs taken by H-1B workers, American consumers are harmed by this interference with better competition that often results from job mobility, and entire communities are taken over by foreigners brought in on visas.

On Monday, federal Judge Leo Sorokin in Boston invalidated Trump’s long overdue reform of the H-1B visa system, by which Trump last year imposed a $100,000 surcharge on new visa applications. Liberals have been filing many of their anti-Trump lawsuits in Boston because that is now the most Democrat-appointed judicial venue in our country, reinforced by the nearly all-Democrat First Circuit Court of Appeals.

Judge Sorokin relied on the Supreme Court decision invalidating many of Trump’s tariffs by viewing them as taxes that needed to be considered first by Congress. “These federal judges are really giving us a hard time,” observed Trump.

“Between 2022 and 2023, the top companies using the H-1B program laid off 85,000 American workers, while simultaneously bringing in over 34,000 guest workers from abroad,” Sen. Bernie Sanders stated in a press release last year. He sought “to substantially increase the guest worker fees large corporations pay,” which Trump did but the federal judge in Sanders’ backyard struck it down.

Sen. Sanders claims that he’s opposed the harmful H-1B visas since his “first days as a U.S. senator,” but Phyllis Schlafly opposed this racket years before that. She wrote against H-1B visas in 2003 because they “allow corporations to displace U.S. citizens with skilled labor imported from foreign countries.”

Phyllis urged congressional Republicans to block renewal of the H-1B visa program back then. But politicians in D.C. caved to the lobbyists and voted to continue this harmful program.

The stunning upset last Tuesday in Iowa should send shock waves through every Establishment politician. Their favored candidate was Randy Feenstra, who did not even bother to participate in the debates with his primary opponents.

But Zach Lahn (pronounced Lane) seemingly came out of nowhere to win with a campaign ad promising to ban state government and universities from employing H-1B visa holders. He vowed to require disclosure in state contracts of how many Iowans would be hired, which he pointed out would “be inversely correlated to how many H-1Bs you have.”

“I reject the idea that our people won’t do these jobs,” Lahn said in criticism of the H-1B program. “We have some of the most hardworking kids in the country. I want to be hiring those Iowans here, that’s why we need to bring our kids back home, and that’s what we’ll be fighting for as governor.”

Texans are in an uproar over the H-1B program, as the fast-growing boomtown of Frisco, an hour’s drive north of Dallas, is being overrun by foreigners, many of whom arrived on worker visa programs. The enrollment by Asians is 44% of the Frisco Independent School District (FISD), and one-fifth of the town is Indian now.

There is a shortage of medical residency spots in the United States such that roughly 8,000 American medical school graduates are unable to find a place in a residency program, which is required to become a practicing physician. Yet 10,000 physicians working in the U.S., including some medical residents, are foreigners here on H-1B visas.

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.

College Crisis Caused by Judicial Activism

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The crisis in college sports is having a ripple effect, causing colleges to eliminate programs, which then decreases their enrollment as fewer students have a reason to go there. As enrollment declines, colleges go out of business, and at least a quarter of colleges teeter on bankruptcy even during good times.

In April, President Trump issued an executive order explaining that “financial perils” caused by the crisis in college sports “could impact [colleges’] capabilities and responsibilities as Federal contractors and grantees,” and also that the “health of the university system is integral to the Federal Government’s basic functioning.”

A federal court in California caused this crisis by allowing a class action on behalf of college athletes seeking compensation, and then approving a $2.8 billion payout to college athletes dating back to 2016. Known as the “House settlement,” this includes a whopping $750 million payout to attorneys which neither colleges nor the NCAA can afford.

With the exception of men’s basketball and football, college sports programs are money-losers that serve the purpose of attracting enrollment in the college. The judicial activism from a federal court against college sports is bringing down entire colleges in the collapse.

This class action lawsuit is on appeal to the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. Seven different groups of athletes are appealing, including women who receive almost none of the back pay, men in underappreciated sports like wrestling, and walk-on athletes who made their college team as many aspire to do.

College enrollment depends on the opportunity for all students to try to make the team in their favorite sports, without having been recruited in high school. The movie Rudy featured a walk-on who tried out and made the Notre Dame football team, and is considered one of the greatest sports movies ever made.

For more than a century, college sports worked well by keeping professionals out, and students played for the love of the game, not money. “I’d like to go exactly back to what we had and ram it through a court,” Trump said in March, and his instincts are right.

He could do that by intervening in the “House” litigation. Trump’s Solicitor General who represents the U.S. in the Supreme Court, John Sauer, was himself a “walk-on” college wrestler who became the team captain at Duke, and he could argue for a return to allowing colleges to keep compensation out of their sports.

The Senate Commerce Committee is holding a hearing on Wednesday for the misnamed Protect College Sports Act, which would mandate as federal law the opposite of what has long worked. This new federal law would force colleges to allow compensation for players by allowing them to take money for their name, image, or likeness (NIL), to the detriment of team spirit.

The Protect College Sports Act would micromanage college sports in additional ways, such as adopting team roster size limits, which makes it harder for a student to become a walk-on. This bill would place wage controls on the compensation of agents who will negotiate lucrative contracts for a few students, when there should not be any agents or compensation at all in college sports that thrived with amateur athletes.

This federal bill would prohibit the two most successful conferences, the Southeastern Conference (SEC) and the Big Ten, from expanding or merging. Never before has a federal law interfered with private associations like this.

A generation ago, college was part of the American Dream. College sports attracted students and donations by alumni, and millions of students obtained a good education and a solid foundation for the rest of their lives by attending college to play sports.

The federal lawsuit encourages NCAA Division I colleges to pay their players $20 million annually, but for most schools the money simply isn’t there. Most sports do not have a sizable television audience and will be eliminated, to save money to pay a handful of top basketball and football players who have little interest in academics.

Even before this court-ordered $2.8 billion burden on colleges, many were already going out of business. A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia predicted in 2024 that as many as 80 colleges might close in the next five years.

Last year 28 colleges went out of business, and during the past eight years more than 100 colleges have closed. The Huron Consulting Group found that roughly 25% of the private, nonprofit universities and colleges could close or merge in the next ten years.

Congress could help college sports by allowing a return to the amateur model, thereby ending what Trump has described as an “out-of-control financial arms race.” The Trump Administration could also stop granting visas to foreign athletes to play on college teams, which worsens this “arms race.”

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 Rejects EO on AI

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The draft Executive Order that Trump abruptly rejected last Thursday would have expanded federal power under the guise of pre-screening AI. Trump was right to cancel a blue-ribbon ceremony scheduled at the White House to sign this, which the heads of leading AI companies including Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg had found excuses not to attend.

The draft Executive Order has been leaked to the media, and it’s a Deep State doozy. Using AI slop like “Secure Frontier Model Deployment” and “covered frontier model,” the EO would have expanded federal power that is already far too great.

The EO would have prioritized prosecution for anyone who uses AI, empowering the federal police state which should be downsized instead. The EO would make the Department of War, which lacks any AI expertise, a Big Brother over all new AI breakthroughs by asking AI developers to submit to the Feds their innovations “for a period of up to 90 days before they plan to release such models to other trusted partners.”

“Other trusted partners”? The Deep State attempted, through the EO, to become the foremost trusted partner of AI developers, so that the federal government would receive all new AI developments in advance of everyone else.

This program would start as voluntary, but what begins as a voluntary government program usually becomes mandatory. The EO would have placed AI development under federal supervision, which has never been done before for any emerging industry.

The federal bureaucracy in D.C. is corrupt beyond repair. Giving it any authority over AI innovations, even if initially voluntary as the Executive Order proposed, would be an invitation to interfere with and thwart beneficial developments.

Thankfully, Trump said he was unhappy with the proposed EO and refused to sign it. The approach taken by whoever wrote it should be discarded and not revived in any form.

Military uses of AI are only a small part of its future, and the prominent AI developer Anthropic walked away from its profitable business with the Department of War rather than cave in to its demands that Anthropic remove ethical restrictions on its use. The War Department might take control of AI developments by declaring them to be national security risks, thereby stifling innovation without justification.

Rather than lobby the Department of War for business, a co-founder of Anthropic was at the Vatican, urging the Pope to include ethical limitations on the use of AI in his religious teachings. On Monday Pope Leo released a 42,300-word encyclical letter that condemned unethical uses of AI by militaries and to undermine jobs, and appeared to contain some of Anthropic’s ideas.

Graduating college students appear to agree with the Pope’s criticisms of AI, as commencement speakers were nearly booed off the stage whenever they praised AI. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was remarkably booed for minutes on May 15 during his speech at the University of Arizona graduation.

The booing was not limited to the Big Tech billionaires who are presumably profiting from AI. Boos greeted a music executive, Scott Borchetta, when he said about AI in his speech to Middle Tennessee State University, “It’s a tool. Make it work for you.”

Boos were the students’ response to even a real estate executive, Gloria Caulfield, when she told University of Central Florida graduates that AI is the “next industrial revolution.” College graduates are upset at the loss of jobs due to AI, and how their resumes are filtered by AI now rather than being read by real recruiters.

Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple who was the brains behind the engineering in its early products, has never put dollars above people and only he drew applause for his remarks to graduates about AI. “You all have AI—actual intelligence.”

“I was at a company where the engineers figured out how to make a brain,” Wozniak added. It “takes nine months,” he said, referring to the time we all spend in our mother’s womb.

Outside of college, ordinary folks are furious at how AI is causing unwanted data centers to build on hundreds of acres in their small communities, blighting the landscape, soaking up scarce water, and overloading the energy grid. In Festus, Missouri, a small town near St. Louis, citizens have initiated recall petitions against the mayor and three councilmen who approved a mammoth data center there.

The federal government is investing $2 billion in quantum computing, which is another reckless high-tech boondoggle. AI benefits from trillions of dollars in private investments, and there should not be any federal or local subsidies for AI at taxpayer expense.

Many feel that Covid was caused by taxpayer-funded gain-of-function research, which escaped from a laboratory. Actual intelligence should take priority over the artificial kind.

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.