Gun Control Groups Twist Heritage Foundation Data Out of Recognition in Court Documents – Worse, the gun control groups spun this as The Heritage Foundation, among others, having “acknowledged that the ability to fire more than 10 rounds of ammunition without reloading is not necessary for defensive purposes.” (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.) These are incredible claims in the most literal sense: They lack any credibility. At best, the legal brief’s characterization of my monthly articles on defensive gun use is lazy to the point of recklessness and wrongly attributes to my employer, The Heritage Foundation, a policy position that it doesn’t hold. At worst, this constitutes an intentional effort to manipulate a federal court with a blatantly misleading representation of Heritage’s work on defensive gun use.  Heritage Expert: Amy Swearer

Judicial Appointments in the 117^th Congress - Previous Heritage Foundation reports (here and here) have documented how Democrats changed several long-standing confirmation-process norms during the Trump administration. From 1789 to 2016, for example, only 7 percent of confirmed judicial nominees had any opposition. This jumped tenfold to 73 percent under Trump and was 96 percent during the last two years. Any opposition, however, does not distinguish between a nominee’s receiving just a few negative votes and one whose confirmation requires the vice president to break a 50–50 tie. Before Trump took office, confirmed judicial nominees received an average of just 1.2 negative votes. This average level of opposition soared to 22.9 negative votes under Trump and to 38.4 under Biden. Heritage Expert: Thomas Jipping

Title 42 is a border enforcement red herring - Biden and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas say they want a "safe, orderly, and humane" immigration process at the border. What they mean by this is that every person presenting at the U.S. land frontier, from any place in the world, should have the right to enter the U.S. and make a claim to stay, no matter how unfounded. No limits. Under former President George W. Bush, only a few hundred humanitarian parole requests were granted a year, and 75% of applications were denied. Under Biden, parole is given to almost anyone with a pulse. Heritage Expert: Simon Hankinson

Food prices soared in 2022, Americans hope for improvement in 2023 - American families are bearing the cost of profligate spending by liberals in Congress and the Biden administration, especially when it comes to food prices. While overall prices have risen 14 percent under Biden, the cost of food has risen even faster, shooting up 17 percent in that same time. In just the last year alone, food prices are up 11 percent. Things are even worse for working families with relatively low incomes because they rely more on staples like eggs and flour, which have risen much faster than overall food prices. Heritage Expert: EJ Antoni

Yet More Problems for Ligado - The problem for Ligado is that its signals will be two billion times as powerful as received GPS signals, and hence may cause interference to vital GPS signals. According to the Space Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Advisory Board, which provides independent advice to the federal government, “virtually all receivers will be degraded if they are too close to a Ligado Transmitter.” Heritage Expert: Diana Furchtgott-Roth

Anti-abortion groups are handing the incoming House Republican majority a list of demands as the new Congress begins—Dozens of influential conservative, religious and anti-abortion advocacy groups are pressuring the new GOP House majority to pass bills implementing national restrictions on abortion — even though the legislation would go nowhere with Democrats in control of the Senate and White House. Details: The demands include a national ban on abortion after the detection of fetal cardiac activity, which usually occurs around six weeks of pregnancy, and a ban on abortions after a diagnosis of Down syndrome, according to a letter shared first with POLITICO. The organizations behind the effort — the Heritage Foundation, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, March for Life and several others — also want Republicans to override the FDA’s ruling that abortion pills can be prescribed by telemedicine and mailed to patients, defund Planned Parenthood and undo a rule proposed last week by the Biden administration, which protects access to abortion in cases in which medical providers have a religious or moral objection to the procedure. Heritage Experts: Roger Severino, Melanie Israel, and Emma Waters

Fentanyl poisoning among youth a health crisis - The American public needs to understand these fentanyl deaths aren’t classic overdoses among addicts. These aren’t broken kids with “substance use disorder.” The overwhelming majority aren’t actively seeking fentanyl at all. In a time where drug use among our youth is as much a rite of passage as alcohol use, illicit fentanyl hit the stage, and it’s killing them. When medication is ordered online or when recreational drugs are passed out by an acquaintance at a party, it is far too often illicit fentanyl, and it kills before the victim even realizes what is happening to them. Additionally, those who do suffer from substance use disorder are all future opportunities to recover stolen from them by fentanyl-contaminated drugs consumed without knowledge or intent. Heritage Expert: Virginia Allen

Rachel Levine Targets Transgender Heresy for Big Tech Suppression - Levine supported online censorship in a virtual address to the Federation of State Medical Boards in May in a speech about the COVID-19 pandemic. (The speech has attracted renewed attention online in the past few days.) After addressing medical misinformation related to the pandemic, Levine turned to “another area of substantial misinformation that is directly impacting health equity in our nation, and that is the health equity of sexual and gender minorities.” Heritage Expert: Tyler O’Neil