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Powerful teachers union influenced CDC on school reopenings, emails show – Unions around the country—from main offices in Washington, D.C. to local chapters in Philadelphia, Chicago and elsewhere—have been lobbying to keep schools closed to in-person learning even when scientific evidence, including the rates of transmission in schools, has indicated that students are less likely to contract or spread the virus than adults in their communities. Unions have lobbied to keep schools closed even as student grades have suffered and districts have lost contact with tens of thousands of students. When schools were closed to in-person learning, union members lobbied for a slate of progressive causes, including removing police from schools and cancelling rents and mortgages. These emails make taxpayers question whether agencies such as the CDC are consistently following science or pressure from special interest groups. Heritage expert: Jonathan Butcher

Caitlyn Jenner opposes transgender girls in girls' sports, calls it 'a question of fairness' – Everyone should listen when one of the greatest Olympians of all time says what everyone already knows: that girls and women shouldn’t be forced to compete against males in athletics. When males and females compete in sports, it is their bodies, not their declared identities, that determine the winner. At the 1976 Olympics, legendary decathlete Bruce Jenner’s male body ran faster, threw farther, and jumped higher and longer than all the fittest female athletes in the world. Women and girls should have equal opportunities in every area of life and sports should be no exception. When males enter women's competitions, they rob girls and women of something important they have worked their whole lives to achieve. Jenner is right that “it just isn’t fair” to replace the best girls and women with mediocre males. Heritage experts: Emilie Kao and Jared Eckert

How apportionment is defrauding American citizens – Illegal aliens don’t even have a right to be in the country, let alone have representation in Congress. Aliens who are here legally also have no right to representation in Congress and are barred by federal and state laws from voting. Including them, particularly illegal aliens, in apportionment is fundamentally unfair to citizens since it distorts political representation in the House and dilutes the votes of citizens. It also incentivizes states like California, Illinois, and New York to obstruct enforcement of federal immigration law and attract illegal aliens with sanctuary policies. How bad is this distortion? In 2015, the Congressional Research Service did an analysis of how representation in the House would have changed after the 2010 Census if apportionment had been based on the 2013 estimated citizen population. The result illustrates how much some states are benefitting from trying to nullify federal immigration law. Instead of losing just one seat, California would have lost four seats because it has the largest population of illegal aliens of any state in the country. Texas, Florida, and New York would have each lost one seat. The states who would have gained one congressional representative each were Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma and Virginia. Heritage expert: Hans von Spakovsky

Critical Race Theory Drives Students Apart. Idaho Lawmakers Had Enough. – The critical race theory dogma on display in this Idaho middle school is a philosophy that originated in Germany in the 1920s among a group of Marxist intellectuals. Originally termed “critical theory,” it teaches that we must consider society as being inhabited only by oppressors and the oppressed. This worldview influenced professors in American law schools in the mid-20th century, inspiring a generation of lawyers, legislators, and legal scholars to apply the idea to an interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and legal system, arguing that American law is systemically oppressive. President Joe Biden even used this term in his speech before Congress earlier this week. Still other intellectuals and academics in the U.S. expanded critical theory into what is now known as critical race theory, which believes that racial discrimination causes the constant state of oppression in society. Heritage expert: Jonathan Butcher

Will Biden channel LBJ's ghost? – We live in an age of great power competition, one in which Russia and China are growing increasingly aggressive. Foreign policy cannot be put on hold in this environment. Yet when it comes to addressing these adversaries, Biden's instinct seems to be to start with the minimalist, most passive position and work from there. So he scolds Russia, but immediately offers talks and demurs from sending U.S. ships into the Black Sea. In Afghanistan, he decides, against military advice, to pull out and hope for the best. What if these tentative policies don't work any better than LBJ's tentative approach in Vietnam? Not wanting to be seen as a weakling unable to stand up to an increasingly emboldened China, Russia, Iran and/or North Korea, the president will be forced to do a smidge more "over there," to flex the muscle a bit harder to keep the bad guys in line. Heritage expert: James Carafano

If the US is going to tackle infrastructure, let's start with shipyards – While the debate on our nation’s infrastructure heats up, it would be a mistake not to consider the Navy’s and the nation’s maritime industry as strategic infrastructure. Efforts to reverse the slow erosion of the nation’s shipyards are a welcome change to decades of divesture of naval infrastructure. By funding the SIOP and building new shipyard capacity, Congress and the Biden administration have the opportunity to reverse a decades-long disinvestment and atrophying of naval infrastructure – and use this spending to fulfill a constitutional duty to provide and maintain the nation’s Navy. Heritage experts: Maiya Clark and Brent Sadler