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Here is the Heritage Take on the top issues today. Please reply to this email to arrange an interview.
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- The open border has enabled the Left to amass more political power. Democratic-controlled states have gained congressional seats by welcoming and harboring illegal aliens.
- As president, Donald Trump tried to halt this wrongdoing by ordering the Census to exclude all noncitizens from apportionment. But one of President Biden’s first acts in office was to reverse this policy as he began to open the border to millions of illegal aliens.
- Barring the Census from including noncitizens in apportionment is critical in making sure that American citizens – the only population who can and should vote in U.S. elections – are picking America’s leaders.
- Biden’s intentional border crisis has produced unprecedented apportionment issues, distorting the representation that states have in the House, and how many electoral votes they have in presidential elections.
- Congress must put an end to the electoral influence of a growing noncitizen population that is unfairly altering both representation in the House and the Electoral College. American citizens should not have their voting rights devalued or their congressional and presidential representation corrupted due to the inclusion of noncitizens in our Census.
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- Critics of the U.S. State Department’s “temporary pause” of additional funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA)—after shocking revelations that twelve employees actively participated in the October 7 terrorist attacks in support of Hamas—act as if the UNRWA will suffer a harsh financial blow. It won’t—at least not in the short term.
- According to State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller, the U.S. government had given UNRWA about $121 million, leaving only $300,000 unallocated. So, 99.8 percent of U.S. funding to UNRWA had already been delivered, leaving only .2 percent to “pause." If the United States wanted to send a strong signal of disapproval for UNRWA’s participation in terrorism, this wasn’t it. The message UNRWA and Hamas have received is that the Biden administration’s priority is to keep the U.S. taxpayer dollars flowing into Gaza regardless of their actions.
- The message UNRWA and Hamas have received is that the Biden administration’s priority is to keep the U.S. taxpayer dollars flowing into Gaza regardless of their actions. Congress should not tolerate this faux show of holding UNRWA accountable when the ultimate goal is to do the opposite.
- Quite simply, UNRWA is fundamentally compromised, and its activities are fundamentally at odds with its stated purpose of providing educational, health, and other services to Palestinians. In fact, UNRWA is part of the vicious cycle of violence orchestrated by Hamas.
- Congress should ensure that all U.S. funding for UNRWA is ended immediately and permanently, regardless of the findings of any self-interested UN body, and should apply particular scrutiny to any funds designated for humanitarian aid in any supplemental request from the Biden administration to ensure that those funds do not go to UNRWA directly or indirectly.
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- Renewables such as wind and solar are intermittent and largely unpredictable energy sources, with rapid swings in output from one minute to the next.
- This creates major challenges for operators of the nation’s electricity grid, because supply must equal demand, and the supply “curve” in a given area never tracks the output from intermittent renewable sources.
- What this means, ironically, is that the rush to deploy solar and wind is locking us out of the one energy source that could actually achieve a zero-emissions grid, namely nuclear, and locking us into fossil fuel sources of electricity generation such as natural gas.
- If environmentalists were serious about eliminating carbon emissions from the electricity grid, they would be pushing for a massive expansion in nuclear power, so that demand is satisfied as much as possible from nuclear baseload generation—"baseload” refers to that portion of demand that always needs to be satisfied around the clock.
- They are diminishing the rationale for baseload generation, thereby making grid management all about stabilizing the intermittency of solar and wind, rather than assuring reliance on the most dependable, efficient, and least carbon-intensive sources.
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