Texas Can Keep Securing the Border. Supreme Court Didn't Prevent It

• Critics claim that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s intention to continue securing the border, including with barbed wire, is "unconstitutional" and that he is violating the Supreme Court’s Jan. 22 order. They’re wrong.
• There has been no such finding by the Supreme Court, and nothing in that order prevents the governor from trying to protect Texans from the massive wave of aliens illegally crossing the border with the connivance of the Biden administration.
• The bottom line here is that this case is far from over. While the Biden administration may have won one round, there are a lot more to go.
• Hopefully, when this case gets to the Supreme Court on the merits, Texas will win by a knockout. If it doesn’t, aliens, drugs, smugglers, terrorists, and human traffickers will continue flooding across the Texas border and making their way to every city and county throughout the country.
• Contrary to the Biden administration’s claims, Texas is not interfering in the federal government’s enforcement of federal immigration law. All of the concertina wire was placed on state or private property whose owners granted Texas an easement on their property. It is the federal government that is trespassing and destroying state-owned or private property.

Schedule an Interview: Hans von Spakovsky

America’s Families Would Be Slammed by House Panel’s Expansion of Welfare

• A major feature of the House Ways and Means Committee’s “tax bill” is an expansion of the child tax credit. This expansion was necessary to secure Democrats’ support for the corporate tax provisions in the bill, but the trade isn’t worth the cost.
• The welfare-related child tax credit provisions are a massive departure from the status quo. Together, they move the country in the wrong direction on welfare policy after years of pro-family, pro-work progress.
• The problems with the committee’s bill are many: It would increase welfare subsidies for single parents rather than further promoting and strengthening married, two-parent households; it would undermine rather than strengthen work requirements in welfare; it would increase, not reduce, fraud and excess benefits; and it would provide more welfare to illegal immigrants.
• If enacted into law, it would be a major victory for the Left and a heavy blow for American families. It also would be a big step backward on the road to reform of America’s broken welfare system.

Schedule an Interview: Robert Rector

Crime Rates Are High, No Matter What the Media Say

• Gallup polls show that 63% of Americans think the crime problem is “extremely or very serious,” up from 54% in 2021. Crime rates have exploded since 2016, after a 30-year decline. And that is a political millstone around the necks of the so-called reformers. To survive in their political positions, they need crime rates to come down.
• Here are the facts: Crime exploded in 2016 and peaked in 2022 in many blue cities. Last year, in some cities, some crimes took a slight dip. That slight dip, celebrated by the Left, is an infinitesimal step in the right direction, but rates are still way above where they were in 2015.
• Starting in 2015, prison abolitionists and other “reform” radicals, including “defund the police” zealots, planted the seeds that led to a new crime spike in the blue cities that implemented such so-called reforms. And in cities with the toxic trio of defund the police, demoralize the police, and the election of Soros-backed rogue prosecutors, crime exploded.
• It’s understandable that those who planted the cancerous seeds of “reform” throughout the U.S. are engaged in deception by calling rising crime rates “fake news”—because acknowledging the reality of their crop would be tantamount to admitting that their “reforms” actually made matters much worse.
• But when the media parrots their lies and refuses to look at the data over time, they are doing the public a disservice. And they are doing so at the expense of public safety and people’s lives.

Schedule an Interview: Cully Stimson and Zack Smith