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Rustic Renaissance: Education Choice in Rural America <[link removed]> - No one school can meet the needs of all children who just happen to live nearby. Families in rural areas deserve more education options. By embracing education choice policies, state lawmakers can deliver on the promise of America’s education system and ensure that all children have access to the learning environment that best meets their individual needs. Policymakers who want to increase education options for rural families should enact education choice policies, such as K–12 education savings accounts, and
broaden charter school laws to make it easier to open them in rural areas. Heritage Expert: Jason Bedrick <[link removed]>
South Carolina Supreme Court Strikes Down State’s ‘Heartbeat’ Abortion Law <[link removed]> - Citing privacy decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court and several other state high courts, Hearn wrote that “few decisions in life are more private than the decision whether to terminate a pregnancy.” Hearn applied the “strict scrutiny” standard, which requires that a law involving a fundamental right be narrowly tailored to serve a compelling governmental purpose. She concluded that the state’s interest in fetal health was inadequate because in early pregnancy “the fetus cannot be considered its own legal entity.” Similarly, she wrote, the “fetus’s interest” is not compelling before viability, when the child might survive outside of the womb. Heritage Expert: Thomas Jipping <[link removed]>
Federal Appeals Court Upholds Florida’s Transgender Bathroom Ban. Now What? <[link removed]> - Regarding Adams’ claim of discrimination under Title IX, Lagoa wrote that the plain and ordinary meaning of “sex” in 1972, when Title IX was enacted, was biological sex. Because of that (and through its implementing regulations), Title IX envisioned the kind of sex-segregated bathrooms that the school board’s policy required.  What’s more, the school board had attempted to accommodate transgender students by providing single-stall, sex-neutral bathrooms, which Title IX neither requires nor prohibits. Heritage Expert: Sarah Parshall Perry <[link removed]>
December jobs
report’s real numbers are anemic not robust. Here’s why Americans should be wary <[link removed]> - How much faith should we put in this data? The Labor Department’s statistic of 10.5 million job openings, should be viewed warily, too. That survey’s response rate has plummeted to just 30.6 percent. When more than two of every three businesses fail to respond, the data may be significantly biased. Meanwhile, the household survey—which shows less than half a million jobs added since pre-pandemic levels—has had a relatively steady response rate near 75 percent. That should carry considerable weight when economists attempt to evaluate the economy’s health. Heritage Expert:  EJ Antoni <[link removed]> and Joel Griffith <[link removed]>
 
Election Integrity 2022 in Review: More Improvements Than Damage <[link removed]> - If no candidate wins a majority in the initial count,
the candidate with the fewest number of votes gets dropped from the ballot, and the people who selected that candidate as their top choice automatically have their votes changed to their second choice. The ballots are then counted again (and again) until one candidate is finally awarded a majority of votes, even though those votes may be the second, third, fourth or last choice of most voters. Heritage Expert: Jack Fitzhenry  <[link removed]>







Wokeness’
at the Fed could easily create another banking crisis <[link removed]> - You expect your money to be safe in a bank, but if the Federal Reserve gets its way, that may not be the case soon. That’s because the Fed, which has a tremendous amount of
regulatory power over the nation’s financial institutions, has begun using its authority to put politics before fiscal stability. If the Fed’s New Year’s resolution was to destabilize America’s financial system, it’s off to a great start. Heritage Expert:  EJ Antoni <[link removed]>

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