RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
February 16 to February 22, 2025 In RealClearInvestigations, Paul Thacker explores the fraught legal history of "birthright citizenship" – as President Trump's order restricting it took effect this week -- and finds the matter oversimplified in the media: Birthright citizenship is not the slam dunk of a constitutional right many say it is. Attorneys general across the country have already sued to block what is being called the president’s “unquestionably unconstitutional” action, which would align U.S. policy with much of the developed world. But supporters of Trump’s order argue that the inclusion of five words in the Civil War-era 14th Amendment – “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” – upturns a straightforward assertion that anyone born on U.S. soil is a citizen. Although in the minority, various scholars have long doubted the validity of birthright citizenship because of that ambiguous phrase – and by applying what they see as basic common sense. Judicial moderates such as Richard Posner have long ridiculed the idea of birthright citizenship, pointing out that Congress passed the 14th Amendment to ensure citizen rights and protections for former slaves, not the children of “pregnancy tourists.” “Under the best reading of the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment, the citizenship status of the American-born children of illegal immigrants is not mandated by the Constitution,” argue two liberals rarely cited by the national media, Peter H. Schuck of Yale and Rogers M. Smith of the University of Pennsylvania. Further, dissenters say, the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” phrase invalidates the foundation for automatic citizenship, because it was never originally defined hundreds of years ago in British common law, which served as the basis for the 14tth Amendment. In RealClearInvestigations, John Murawski reports how dozens of dissident alumni groups have emerged to challenge the social justice activism dominant in higher education: The groups have formed at leading colleges across the country, including Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, UCLA, Williams, the University of North Carolina and the University of Virginia. Donald Trump’s return to the White House looks likely to boost their momentum. The dissident alumni organizations are well-honed machines, some raising hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. They have developed into a national movement with its own umbrella group, the Alumni Free Speech Alliance. They have invited as campus speakers prominent conservative and contrarian thinkers such as George Will, Nadine Strossen, Jonathan Haidt, Douglas Murray, Wilfred Reilly and Heather Mac Donald. In some cases, the alumni chapters pay thousands for their speakers’ private security. The Jefferson Council at the University of Virginia was billed $7,847 for Abigail Shrier’s appearance in 2023 to discuss her book, “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.” Over two years, The Jefferson Council was billed about $47,000 for security expenses in connection with controversial speakers. The dissidents vow no letup. “It’ll be a battle royale,” one says, invoking a ship infested with rats about to face the exterminator. Waste of the Day
by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books Politico's $44M From Gov't Subscriptions, RCI
NY Drivers Dodged $5 Billion in Tolls, RCI
City Still Paying for Chauvin’s Misconduct, RCI
$645,000 to Study Monkey Poop, RCI
A Subsidized $200K/Year Cancer Drug, RCI Trump 2.0 and the Beltway Zeldin EPA Finds $2B Stashed for Stacey Abrams-Tied Group, New York Post
No, Elon: Social Security Is Not Paying Millions of the Dead, Reason
USAID’s Strong Ties to Woke Nonprofits, Daily Signal
Rapped for Helping DOGE, SocSec Expert Now Runs Agency, Daily Wire
CIA Plans Bigger Role Fighting Drug Cartels, Washington Post
To Deport, Trump Moves to Expand U.S. Prisons, Marshall Project
Pentagon Funded 'Large Scale Social Deception' Program, Federalist
Trump's First VP, Mike Pence, Joins the Resistance, Associated Press
French Mogul Pulling Trump Strings to Avoid Tariffs, WSJ Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Days after Vice-President J.D. Vance warned Germany and other European nations about their creeping embrace of censorship, “60 Minutes” aired this largely approving report about German efforts to clamp down on speech the government considers false or hateful. Attempting to draw a contrast, the segment notes that while the U.S. protects almost all speech: Germany is trying to bring some civility to the world wide web by policing it in a way most Americans could never imagine. In an effort, it says, to protect discourse, German authorities have started prosecuting online trolls. And as we saw, it often begins with a pre-dawn wake-up call from the police. It's 6:01 on a Tuesday morning, and we were with state police as they raided this apartment in northwest Germany. Inside, six armed officers searched a suspect's home, then seized his laptop and cellphone. Prosecutors say those electronics may have been used to commit a crime. The crime? Posting a racist cartoon online. At the exact same time, across Germany, more than 50 similar raids played out. Part of what prosecutors say is a coordinated effort to curb online hate speech in Germany. One authority interviewed for the segment said that those targeted by the police do not think they did anything wrong. “They say, ‘No, that's my free speech.’ And we say, ‘No, you have free speech as well, but it also has its limits.’ " This article reports that religious extremists, military officers and Russian mercenaries have trained their ambitions on a broad swath of Africa – including Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger – known as the Sahel: Nowhere on Earth is seeing such a dramatic reversal of democracy, with military strongmen carrying out eight coups since the start of the decade. Nowhere, outside the war in Ukraine, has Russia proved so determined to expand its influence as Africa becomes another front in Vladimir Putin’s competition with the West. … One government after another has invited in Russian fighters, most recently Niger and Burkina Faso, as Putin seeks to restore the imperial sway lost with the fall of the Soviet Union. In six African countries, soldiers from the mercenary Wagner Group, now partially rebranded as the Africa Corps, battle government opponents, provide security for leaders, train local forces, and operate propaganda operations aimed at poisoning local minds against the United States and its allies. … Affiliates of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have escalated their attacks, seizing control over vast expanses of territory and inexorably carrying their offensive into new countries. Nearly half of all deaths in the world attributed to terrorism in 2023 occurred in this region, according to the Global Terrorism Index, with Burkina Faso alone accounting for a fourth. This article reports that “as the dictators, militants and Russians press forward, the United States has seen its influence in this part of Africa wane. These powerful and violent forces are converging in a new crossroads of conflict, with potential consequences well beyond this region and high stakes for much of the world.” This article paints a grim picture of the Alabama’s Phenix Lumber Co. Although it only employs about 50 people at any one time, at least 28 employees have reported injuries since 2010 – including lost fingers and broken bones. Some workers have been “mangled by machines. … Three had died. A medical examiner’s report detailed how just 23 pounds of one employee was recovered after he was caught in a machine. It had reached the point, some former workers said, that they would pray before the start of their $9-an-hour shifts.” The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which is tasked with keeping such workplaces safe, has tried to rein in the company: Since at least 2003, federal safety inspectors have fined the company nearly $5.3 million. They issued more than 180 citations for health and safety violations, accusing the company of knowingly ignoring workers’ safety “for monetary gain.” A quarter of the violations were deemed “willful,” the most severe category. But those efforts, this article reports, show the limits of OSHA’s powers: It cannot shut down companies even after years of repeated violations and penalties, even when workers die. It even lacks the power to ask a judge to do so. It can request a shutdown from the court only in rare cases of “imminent danger,” such as a looming roof collapse. Causing the death of a worker by willfully violating safety rules is a misdemeanor under federal law. The maximum sentence is six months in prison, less than the penalty for killing an endangered animal. In the past five years, OSHA sent fewer than 50 cases to the Justice Department for a criminal review, records show, and it’s unclear how many of those were prosecuted. Even as President Trump commits publicly to removing fraud, waste and abuse across the federal government, this article reports on a recently appointed senior adviser to the General Services Administration: Frank Schuler IV, whose real-estate investment firm specialized in tax transactions that a bipartisan Senate committee excoriated and that the IRS branded as "abusive" and among "the worst of the worst tax scams”: Schuler and his colleagues exploited a tax deduction that was created to reward landowners who give up development rights for their acreage, usually by donating those rights to a nonprofit land trust. When used as intended, conservation easements can preserve pristine land, sometimes as a park that the public can use, and reward the land donor with a charitable tax deduction. But middlemen like Schuler’s firm turned the tax provision into a highly profitable business, packaging easements into what were essentially outsized tax deductions for purchase. After snatching up a cheap piece of vacant land, Schuler and others typically hired a private appraiser willing to declare that the property had huge untapped development value – that it was suited to become anything from a gravel mine to a luxury resort – and was worth many times its purchase price. They then sold stakes in the easement donation to rich individuals, who claimed wildly inflated tax deductions based on the appraisal, cutting their taxes by twice as much as they’d invested. In a separate article published in 2020, RealClearInvestigations reported on the high stakes involved with such easements: The total amount of deductions claimed by taxpayers using these vehicles over the years is believed to exceed $230 billion, according to documents from the Senate Finance Committee. That total is nearly the amount the federal government annually spends on the combined budgets of the Education, Health and Human Services and Veterans Affairs departments. Ever read an article and puzzle over why it didn’t ask the key questions? That’s the case with this report that a compounding pharmacy providing injectable weight-loss medicines, sold through a popular app called Zappy, did not have the proper license to prove its facilities were sterile. (Compounding pharmacies, such as the one focused on here, Ousia, essentially sell copies of name-brand drugs, including Eli Lily’s obesity treatment, Zepbound): Compounding pharmacies are regulated at the state level. Ousia, in Spring Hill, Fla., didn't have what's called a sterile compounding license. The obesity drugs made by compounding pharmacies are given by injection, so attention to sterile production is critical to avoid contamination that could cause infections. The article reports that many customers were freaked out when they learned about the problem. "I bought three months' worth of medicine from this company," one woman said. Now she's afraid to use the drugs. "It was a big investment." While the lack of a proper license is concerning, the article ignores a key issue: are the medications dangerous? | 