Campaign to put Trans Rights in Constitution

Sarah Holliday writes:

Today, voters in Missouri’s 1st Congressional District head to the polls for the Democratic primary. On the ballot is former Rep. Cori Bush, seeking a return to Congress after losing her seat in 2024. If voters give her another chance, she has made clear what her top priority would be: enshrining abortion and transgender “rights” into the U.S. Constitution.

Bush said she wants to advance the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) so that it becomes the 28th Amendment to the Constitution—which, in her view, could permanently lock abortion access and trans agendas into the nation’s foundational document. ...

Even in the early 1970s, critics foresaw serious problems. The STOP ERA movement, led by Phyllis Schlafly, warned that the amendment would likely trigger “government-financed abortion, the legal dissolution of biological differences between men and women, and restrictions on women’s legal rights in matters of divorce.” Those concerns never fully faded.

Migrant Invasion in Spain Sparked by Court Ruling

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

A total of 60,000 tough young men from Morocco suddenly arrived in a small town of Spain in northern Africa, many carrying their cell phones in plastic bags to protect them from the water they crossed by inner tubes and swimming. This migration is greater than the population of 95% of American cities and towns.

A recent pro-immigration ruling by the Tribunal Supremo, the Supreme Court of Spain, sparked this invasion, creating a lesson for our crisis of illegal aliens in the United States. A week after our own Supreme Court’s disastrous decision in favor of illegals getting birthright citizenship, Spain’s Supreme Court ruled that migrants captured at sea cannot be immediately returned to their native country, known as a “pushback.”

Spanish Territorial Policy Minister Ángel Víctor Torres specifically referred to the ruling as a factor contributing to unlawful invasion. He also said that legal experts think the decision will allow eventual deportation of these illegal aliens, but only after time-consuming due process is provided to each of the invading migrants.

The language of Morocco is Arabic. But Spanish is the language of the two Spanish territories in northern Africa, named Ceuta and Melilla, such that many of the migrants cannot communicate with local officials.

Ceuta is located on the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar, where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Mediterranean Sea, and residents receive their food as transported by trucks carried by the 30-60 minute hourly ferry ride from Spain. Melilla is located 250 miles eastward on the Mediterranean coast.

These migrants have overwhelmed the local facilities, and are sleeping on beaches with limited access to food or drinking water. Due to the court ruling, they must be admitted for processing in compliance with Spanish immigration rules, which takes time.

If released during this process, as many illegal aliens in America have been, they may not show up for court hearings or appointments with immigration authorities. They can roam about for years, and have rights to migrate further into any European Union country once they are lawfully in Spain.

Social media are being blamed for spreading the word that if migrants swam or boated to Ceuta or Melilla, they would then have a right to stay. This has been criticized as a misinterpretation of the court ruling, but the court did grant special due process rights to those who came by sea rather than by land.

This fiasco gives new meaning to the famous Longfellow poem which exclaimed about the signal to be sent by one or two lanterns in the belfry of Boston’s Old North Church: “One, if by land, and two, if by sea; And I on the opposite shore will be, Ready to ride and spread the alarm.” Spread the alarm, indeed.

The most common water route is a 3-mile swim or to hang on to an inner tube while paddling through treacherous waters. Only some young men are fit enough to do that, and reportedly more than 50 have died during this invasion with many dead bodies seen floating in the water now.

CBS News interviewed migrants after arriving in Ceuta, and they explained that they spontaneously jumped in the water and swam the three miles. Crossing the Rio Grande River at our southern border is much easier than that, and President Trump pointed out that it will happen here if Democrats take control again.

No jobs awaited these rugged men upon their arrival, and it is inevitable that local laws will be violated as they look desperately for food, clothing, entertainment, and shelter. Thousands of these men roam the streets, and frightened residents sheltered inside while shops closed up, afraid of vandalism and looting.

One Ceuta resident, Rocío Gil, said on Spanish television that “as a woman, you have to live this to understand what it’s like. It’s an invasion … and there is no law.”

Sound familiar? Judicial rulings in the United States against sovereignty and border security here have caused similar travesties, including the admission of at least a million illegal migrants during each year of the Biden Administration.

President Trump has been trying hard to return migrants who have been here on Temporary Protected Status (TPS), as brought in primarily by Democrat presidents. But repeatedly lower federal judges have been blocking President Trump’s orders to deport illegal aliens, and to detain them for deportation without releasing them on bond.

The U.S. Supreme Court delivered a victory for Trump in late June by authorizing him to deport Haitians and others on TPS status without interference by lower court judges. The High Court said that these presidential decisions to deport are largely unreviewable and yet, not long after this decision was rendered, another federal district court judge blocked Trump again on this issue concerning Somalis.

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.

Dr. Fauci takes the Fifth

Gen Z Turns to Socialism in Desperation

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Gen Z men, the pivotal swing voters under age 30 who helped elect President Trump in 2024, are supporting socialist candidates in shocking numbers. As many as eight members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) could be elected to Congress in three months.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has a sky-high approval rating of 58%, more than double his disapproval rating, after Gen Z voters elected him in a landslide last fall. None of the conservative criticisms of him has made a dent in his popularity.

Some Republican consultants hope the Democrats’ shift to socialism will make it easier for Republican candidates to win in the general election. But there is no sign of a significant migration of traditional Democrats or Independents to the Republican Party.

It would help if more voters understood what the DSA really stands for. Their platform includes abolishing the Presidency, Senate and the Supreme Court, while opening our borders and emptying our prisons.

DSA members seek to abolish corporations and impose government rent-controlled housing. They want a “single payer” government-run health care system, which would cause Canadian-style shortages, and vow to “finish Reconstruction” by imposing a race-based woke agenda.

But explaining the DSA platform to young voters has not deterred them from casting ballots for the socialists. Instead, Republicans need to recognize that many young Americans are in dire financial straits, and seek to alleviate that.

Annual college tuition and expenses can exceed $100,000 at private colleges, yet D.C. politicians continue to pump money into higher education while doing nothing to bring down this exorbitant cost. Likewise for health care, such that insurance premiums surpass even mortgage payments for many young couples.

The job of government is not to impose price controls, but to rein in inflation. Yet the cost of groceries has risen by 33% since 2019.

A new Texas Public Opinion Research poll on the Senate race in Texas, which Republicans must win to keep control of the upper chamber, shows Democrat James Talarico leading the Republican Ken Paxton by 45-40%. By far the top issue for voters there is affordability and the cost of living, about which Gen Z is particularly distressed.

Mayor Mamdani’s approach to this problem is doomed to fail, as happened in Chicago, where 7 publicly subsidized Save A Lot stores are closing. Undeterred by this lesson, Mamdani promised that 5 city-operated grocery stores will sell a core basket of food at 30% less than privately owned stores, at prices fixed for an entire month to prevent the current sticker shock of many unexpected increases.

Mamdani’s first city-owned grocery store won’t open until next year in the Bronx, and the second one will not welcome shoppers until 2029, so this initiative is mostly symbolic. But to his credit, his stores will not sell lottery tickets, or alcohol and cigarettes.

The liberal Chicago Tribune, which supported the publicly funded scheme to address so-called “food deserts,” admits that “city-owned grocery stores … are not the answer.” Meanwhile, the German-owned Aldi chain, which somehow manages to sell a broad range of fresh foods and groceries at prices that average 30% less than other chains, recently announced a massive expansion with a target of 3,200 stores across the U.S.

But Republican officials have been creating an impression of pandering to oligarchs rather than making life more affordable for young people. Only 20% of Gen Z own stock outside of a retirement plan, and yet national policy seems devoted to what is good for the stock market rather than for the struggling consumer.

The Wall Street Journal recently published the best responses on this issue by members of Gen Z at college, and observations included the fact that wages have not kept pace with inflation since 2009. Rent eats up 40% of income, while medical debt is steep.

The debt that Gen Z men are incurring due to the growing addiction to gambling is staggering, too. Americans, mostly young men, are spending twice as much money on sports gambling now than on books, music, movies, and museums combined.

Congress held another ineffective hearing on the sports gambling crisis last week, again failing to make progress on this issue. Meanwhile, gambling interests are suddenly pouring many millions of dollars into elections, such that many politicians are afraid to stand up against them.

Enter the socialists with their promises to protect and help Gen Z, by improving affordability, ending the oligarchy, and stopping predatory business practices. Sometimes the socialists deregulate, as Mamdani recently did for small businesses in New York City by terminating duplicative licensing requirements.

There is still time for Republicans to announce a new “Contract with America” that was so successful in the 1994 midterm election that it became a GOP landslide. The agenda should start with what would be good for Gen Z, the key voting bloc that should not be ignored any longer by the Republican Party.

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.

Party’s Over for Foreigners at College

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

New rules announced by the Trump Administration are addressing the flood of foreign students at American universities. Half a million of them are illegal aliens, while more than a million additional college students are here from foreign countries on student visas.

Until recently many states, including Republican-controlled Texas, have allowed illegal aliens to benefit from low in-state tuition rates while Americans from out of state were forced to pay much higher rates. The unfair difference over four years can exceed $100,000 per student.

In July 2023 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled against a challenge to how a public Texas university charged only in-state tuition to illegal aliens, while charging much higher out-of-state tuition to American citizens. But this month the same court upheld by a 2-1 vote a settlement with the Trump Administration whereby Texas agreed to stop enrolling illegal aliens at preferential tuition rates.

More than a million students in American universities are foreigners here on visa programs, almost entirely from non-Western countries having political systems unlike or opposed to ours. Texas has brought in many non-Christians as collegians and is reacting now against communities they’re forming.

Many of the international graduate students are receiving salaries or other compensation from American taxpayers, in the form of direct government subsidies at public universities and federal grants at private ones. Trump unsuccessfully attempted to cut off the flow of billions of dollars from the federal government to Harvard University.

For half a century foreigners could enter graduate programs and take many years, far more than 4, to complete their PhD programs while remaining in the U.S. without any deadline to leave. The F-1 visa program has been allowing foreigners to remain on visas here for the “duration of their status” at their university, with no time limit.

Trump has just ended this racket. Under a new rule issued by Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, most new F-1 students will receive visas that expire after a fixed period of time, usually four years.

This puts healthy pressure on universities and students to reach the finish line as scheduled, rather than dawdle indefinitely in the academic cocoon. The average length of time in graduate studies has ballooned to more than 7 years for a PhD, which harmfully causes students to delay having families and finding employment.

Trump is also cutting back on the period in which foreigners may linger in the U.S. after completing their programs, reducing it from 60 to 30 days. International students who line up jobs here can seek other visa programs, but most should be returning to their homelands.

Trump’s regulatory changes also restrict transfers by foreigners from one university to another, while here. Restrictions are being imposed on foreigners switching academic programs within their schools, too.

Graduate programs are generally funded by universities and government grants, so it is fair to question why there are any foreigners in these positions. Academic teaching positions are particularly scarce, such that in STEM fields there are academic jobs available for fewer than 10% of those who obtain PhDs.

Only 4.2% of applicants to Harvard College were admitted in its Class of 2029, which is the most recent data available. Every admission of a foreigner takes a spot away from an American applicant.

The blockbuster summer movie is The Odyssey, based on the ancient Greek classic that became a foundation of Western Civilization. Its concepts like the “Trojan horse” have become staples of our culture, and the Texas State Board of Education recently included this book in its new reading list of great texts including the Bible.

For decades movies have been shifting away from live-action films into animation. The popularity of The Odyssey as a live-action movie, along with the acclaim it has received from movie critics, demonstrates that the traditions of Western Civilization remain relevant and inspiring.

Yet most international students in our universities are from non-Western countries whose culture and traditions are entirely alien to American history, culture, and way of life. It would take several generations to assimilate the millions of foreigners already here, and a moratorium on new immigration should be seriously considered.

Universities are already complaining about a decline in international students in graduate programs, which they attribute to Trump’s occasional travel bans and freezing of some federal grants. The drop in high-school enrollment (which is mostly due to the declining birth rate) means there will be fewer American students in the pipeline for universities in the future.

But universities have only themselves to blame if there is a shortage of American students. Liberal political ideology dominant at universities leans strongly against child-rearing, and if more students are wanted for the future then there should be more encouragement now by academia for Americans to have and raise their children.

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.

Family not merely a private arrangement

@writersabstract aka abstractruth writes:

In conducting research for my upcoming book about American culture, I came across the controversial figure of Phyllis Schlafly. I remember her as someone my mother liked, as she was exactly the demographic Phyllis tried to reach: a Christian homemaker. I vaguely remembered the controversy surrounding the Equal Rights Amendment growing up, and the argument that while its supporters claimed they wanted “equal rights for women,” its detractors believed it would strip women of certain protections and privileges, such as exemption from the draft. ...

Now we come to the usual complaint about Schlafly, other than the fact that she was not a Marxist feminist in the style of today—or even the 1970s. Even those attempting to be “fair” to her often lapse into the same condescending refrain: “She was so intelligent and ambitious, yet she wanted to deny rights to women. Such a paradox.” Or: “She left the home, but wanted to trap all other women inside it.”

By now, these observations are so trite and thoughtless they hardly merit serious attention. ...

To Schlafly, the family was never merely a private arrangement. It was the central institution through which morality, memory, culture, and continuity were transmitted across generations. ...

But perhaps Schlafly’s greatest insight was this: women traded away a profound form of civilizational power. They exchanged the ability to shape the culture of families, neighborhoods, communities, and future generations for peripheral participation in bureaucratic and corporate systems that neither know nor love them. Modern ideology snookered women to surrender deep and lasting influence for managerial status inside institutions built by technocrats.

Essay is reprinted here.

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.

Meet Gen Z's Phyllis Schlafly

Prominent feminist Jessica Valenti writes:

Over the past few months, the powerful Heritage machine has pushed out book promo for Waters, put her on panels, and given her a new podcast — “Rethinking Fertility.” In other words, they want her to be a Gen Z Phyllis Schlafly — advising young women to stay at home while she, herself, enjoys a high-profile career writing books, giving talks, and shaping national policy.

I don’t think she’d mind the comparison: in her book, Waters lauds Schlafly as a “revolutionary” who “didn’t abandon her home, her femininity, or her faith.” She also cites Schlafly as precisely who American women should strive to be: a “model of traditional womanhood [that] encourages public engagement, but only after family duties have been honored.” ...

That doesn’t mean Waters isn’t dangerous; of course she is. ...

Waters, like Schlafly, found a way to have her cake and eat it too: working while making it harder for other women to work, embracing her professional drive while telling young women their ambition will make it harder for them to be mothers. Most egregiously, she's robbing other young women and girls of the choices she was privileged enough to have.

I listened to a Waters podcast, and she is certainly not dangerous, not robbing girls of choices, or advising young women to stay home.

It is strange how upsetting it is for feminists to hear a woman who is happy to be a wife and mother.

NY Times Slant on Women in History

By Tim Graham, Newsbusters.

History? New York Times Puffs RBG, Paints Phylllis Schlafly as Hyper-Polarizing Hypocrite

In the newspaper on July 3, The New York Times tried to play Historian in a series of little profiles under the headline:

These 8 Americans Shaped History.

The Debate Over How Continues.

You could see the obvious contrast in the modern subjects: Phyllis Schlafly vs. Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Times reporter Jeremy Peters was pro-Ginsburg, except she took too long to retire. He began: “Ruth Bader Ginsburg had attained folk hero status as the notorious R.B.G. for her lifetime of legal work dismantling gender bias in the law. But her decision not to retire has put an asterisk on her legacy.”

Times reporter Vivian Yee complained "anti-feminist" Schlafly “slayed” the so-called Equal Rights Amendment, but the cultural Left was winning:

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.

In these eight profiles, Times reporters used “conservative” 12 times. There were no words like “liberal” or “left-wing” or “progressive” for Ginsburg. But Yee complained Schlafly “tarred feminists as radicals, just as her heirs do now.” The Left’s positions on abortion on demand, gay marriage, and biological males in women’s sports are never “radical.”

And then, Yee suggested Schafly was “divisive” – and somehow Ginsburg wasn’t?? They also accused Schafly of hypocrisy:

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.

NewsBusters acquired an unpublished letter sent to the editor of the New York Times from Anne Schlafly, Phyllis’s daughter:

America's 250th anniversary was an opportunity to reflect honestly on the men and women who shaped our nation. Instead, The New York Times has chosen to spotlight the shortcomings of eight influential Americans while giving comparatively little attention to the accomplishments that earned them a place in history.

Among those featured is my mother, Phyllis Schlafly, who is portrayed as a hypocrite because she championed the importance of mothers and homemakers while remaining active in public life. But that ignores an important fact: she raised her six children before devoting herself fully to politics, often saying that homemaking and public service came at different seasons of her life. Women do not surrender their voice when they have children, and mothers have every right to help shape the public policies that affect their families.

Without ever holding public office and while living in a Midwestern town of just 35,000 people, my mother inspired millions of American women to become engaged citizens. A decade after her death, Americans are still debating her ideas. That enduring influence is why she deserves to be remembered as one of our nation's most consequential figures, not reduced to a caricature.

Anne Schlafly told NewsBusters: “Why is The New York Times so reluctant to engage with competing viewpoints on issues like feminism? A publication that prides itself on open debate should be willing to examine whether the promises of modern feminism have matched the lived experiences of women, or whether alternative perspectives deserve a fair hearing.”

Feminists suggest they want women to have choices, but they really don’t believe it. They mock their choices if it’s being a housewife (God forbid being a “tradwife”) or working in conservative politics. Yee wrote "feminist never tire" of leveling the hypocrisy charge today, against conservative women like Erika Kirk and Katie Miller.

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.