Colleen Hroncich In her recent State of the State address, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs painted the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program as an unaccountable “entitlement” riddled with fraud. This is a flawed portrayal that ignores the benefits of the program. ESAs enable parents to use state education funds to choose educational options that work best for their children. Interestingly, ...
Matthew Cavedon Yesterday, the Supreme Court decided Barrett v. United States. While the decision, written by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, was virtually unanimous (apart from a disagreement about a few citations to legislative history), in the background lurks a dispute among the justices over whether Congress or the Constitution should drive the reach of double jeopardy protections. The Fifth Amendment’s ...
Walter Olson Number 19 in our series of occasional roundups on election law and policy: Here’s the deal, says the US Department of Justice to states: We’re going to send you lists of voters we think are ineligible, and you’re going to take them off the rolls. That “would hand the federal government a major role in election administration, a responsibility ...
David J. Bier The State Department announced it will suspend immigrant visa processing for nationals of 75 countries starting next week. This ban builds on prior bans that had already barred immigrant visas for 40 countries, accounting for one in five legal immigrants. This new ban brings the number of banned nationalities up to 93, 42 percent of those in the world, ...
Jeffrey Miron As of late 2025, more than two dozen US states had enacted laws that partially or completely ban gender-affirming medical care for minors; roughly half of all transgender adolescents now live in states where such care is restricted or at risk of being banned. In addition, the federal government recently adopted measures that effectively ban gender‑affirming care for ...
Ryan Chan-Wei In recent weeks, the Senate has received dueling letters on whether Americans should be allowed to earn rewards for holding stablecoins. The Blockchain Association urged Congress not to “reinterpret and expand” the GENIUS Act’s ban on interest payments to stablecoin holders to include the payment of rewards by third-party platforms. The American Bankers Association (ABA) pressed the opposite ...
Peter Van Doren Most of the claimed benefits of federal regulation stem from air quality controls. Between 2006 and 2016, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) accounted for 71 percent of the monetized benefits and 55 percent of the costs of all major federal regulations. Of those benefits, 95 percent came from air quality rules, primarily those targeting fine particulate matter (PM2.5), ...
Alex Nowrasteh Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Kristi Noem, Border Czar Tom Homan, and others have repeatedly stated that being an ICE or Border Patrol agent is a dangerous job. The facts don’t support them. Two ICE agents have been murdered in the line of duty since 2003, neither in immigration enforcement operations. David Wilhelm was murdered ...
Scott Lincicome and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon Back in December, we created a flowchart to map out the US tariff regime, which has become increasingly complex and convoluted due to President Trump’s tariff actions under Sections 232, 301, and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The first version of this flowchart is available here, along with our analysis on the complexity of ...
Matthew Cavedon World-famous activist Greta Thunberg was arrested by British police right before Christmas. Her alleged offense: holding a sign praising hunger strikers belonging to Palestine Action, a protest group that the United Kingdom’s government recently classified as a terrorist group. British law forbids displaying placards supporting such organizations on pain of being imprisoned for up to six months. But ...