President Trump’s historic victory in the November election gave him a clear mandate from the American people. And so far, he hasn’t wasted any time getting to work. In his first month back in office, Trump signed 45 Executive Orders (EO) in an effort to put America first and undo much of the damage created by the Biden administration. And that’s especially true with his executive actions to unleash American energy.
Ending the Net Zero Climate Cult Fantasy
For four years under President Biden, the American people were forced to endure an administration that was hellbent on pursuing a net zero agenda. Across the country, they pushed these radical and costly climate action plans to fundamentally transform and restrict the energy options available to consumers. Along with this came calls from the Left to ban gas stoves, gas cars, gas-powered lawn equipment, and hundreds of other draconian ideas to limit the freedom of the American people.
If the high cost of these plans wasn’t enough, they have also proven to be unreliable. States and countries that have committed to energy sources like solar and wind as part of this net zero fantasy have experienced rolling blackouts, continually demand that their customers use less, and eventually have to make haste to open reliable sources of generation they had closed down. Isn’t that right, California?
But Trump’s Executive Order 14154 unleashes fossil fuel production and use in America while unwinding much of the damage caused by the Biden administration…
Exactly a century ago this year, the Supreme Court, in its decision in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, recognized the right of parents to direct the education of their children, writing that “[t]he fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children . . . The child is not the mere creature of the state.” Today, just as they did a century ago, parents rely on the courts to serve as a backstop against abusive government policy.
Sadly, some courts in America are shutting the door of justice in the face of parents seeking to vindicate their rights and the rights of their children. In a case out of Wisconsin called Parents Protecting Our Children v. Eau Claire Area School District in the Seventh Circuit, the federal court of appeals with jurisdiction over cases arising in Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana, parents challenged the school district’s policy directing school officials to hide a child’s “social gender transition” from their parents. As the school told its employees, “parents are not entitled to know their kids’ identities.That knowledge must be earned.”
Incredibly, the Seventh Circuit found that the parents’ harm in that case was merely speculative. Apparently, since plaintiffs must show harm to have standing to sue, parents must wait until they find out that their son’s school has been helping him dress as a girl and use the girls’ restroom for six months before they can challenge the policy.
The Supreme Court chose not to review the Seventh Circuit’s decision in that case. Justice Samuel Alito wrote a short dissent, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, explaining that the parents’ harm is not speculative and that “some federal courts are succumbing to the temptation to use the doctrine of Article III standing as a way of avoiding some particularly contentious constitutional questions.”
Nor is this an isolated incident of judges dodging the controversy of gender ideology. The Fourth Circuit, the appeals court with jurisdiction over Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, came to the same conclusion in John and Jane Parents 1 v. Montgomery County Board of Education. A district court in Ohio did the same in Doe v. Pine-Richland School District.
Parents’ fundamental rights to direct the upbringing of their children, and the right of children to be free from ideological indoctrination by school officials, depends on courts that are willing to protect those rights. That is why Advancing American Freedom is filing an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to take up Blake Warner’s challenge to an Eleventh Circuit rule which effectively requires parents to hire a lawyer before they can represent their children’s interests in court. Specifically, while people can bring their own claims in court without a lawyer, and parents can sue on behalf of their children, the Eleventh and some other courts have found that parents cannot sue on behalf of their children without hiring a lawyer. While Mr. Warner’s claim is not related to gender ideology, his challenge to this rule is essential because his success would ensure that parents who are unable to afford an attorney can still seek judicial protection for the rights of their children.
On Jan. 29, President Trump issued an executive order that, among other things, ordered the removal of federal funding from schools that engage in “social transitions of a minor student” and directed the attorney general to work with state and local officials “to enforce the law and file appropriate actions” against school officials who “facilitate the social transition of a minor student.” Trump’s order is important but know that gender ideologues will undoubtedly stage massive resistance. Parents must remain vigilant, and courts must begin to take their claims seriously. The Supreme Court should entrench parents’ rights by taking Mr. Warner’s case and striking down the counsel mandate.
Donald Trump’s renewed pledge to “Make America Great Again” requires nothing less than reigniting economic growth and prosperity. Wealth creation is essential. Yet as Congress prepares to extend and expand upon Trump’s landmark Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, he can take matters into his own hands by issuing an executive order to index capital gains for inflation.
Taxing inflationary “phantom” capital gains is an unfair and ill-advised policy that punishes risk and success.
Consider this: You invest $1,000, and after four years of Joe Biden in the White House, you sell that investment for $1,100. But since inflation raged during Biden’s tenure, the $1,100 you receive will be worth less in real terms than the $1,000 you invested. And yet, under current law, you will pay a tax on your $100 capital “gain.”
Talk about perverse!
“As has been well documented,” writes Alan Auerbach, University of California economist, “realized capital gains may be subject to tax rates that easily exceed 100% of real gains in the presence of inflation.”
But it’s the law. And not only would eliminating it be the fair thing to do for investors, it would ignite a surge of American prosperity.
Eight years ago, the late Treasury economist Gary Robbins estimated that indexing capital gains for inflation would, by 2025, create an additional 400,000 jobs, grow the U.S. capital stock by $1.1 trillion and boost GDP by roughly $500 billion. Because capital gains were never indexed, average household income today is $3,600 lower than it could have been otherwise.
However, it’s never too late to start doing the right thing.
Congress has repeatedly toyed with indexing capital gains. In fact, indexing capital gains used to be a bipartisan issue. In the early 1990s, congressional Democrats touted indexing as an effective way to boost economic growth and benefit workers.
“If we really want to increase growth,” said a youthful Chuck Schumer, the then-future Senate minority leader, “there are proposals that we can do. I would be for indexing all capital gains, savings and borrowings.”
Having mastered the ways of the D.C. swamp, Schumer now opposes indexing capital gains. Listen to Congressman Schumer, not Senator Swamp.
Indeed, as Trump emphasized in 2019, “Indexing is something that a lot of people have liked for a long time. It’s something that would be very easy to do. It’s something that I am certainly thinking about.”
Looking forward, the Congressional Budget Office estimated last month that federal capital gains tax receipts will total $2.8 trillion over the decade ahead. If only one-fourth of those tax receipts—a conservative estimate—are due to taxing phantom gains, American taxpayers will pay $700 billion in taxes on income that doesn’t exist.
Opponents of capital gains indexation say the subsequent revenue loss would be too great. But inasmuch as inflationary gains should not have been taxed in the first place, a revenue loss is a good thing. It represents the correction of a tax injustice.
The second-order effects that Robbins documents should remove any reservations based on revenue loss. Without the federal tax on inflationary gains, asset prices will adjust until they reach a new, higher equilibrium. Investors will see their portfolios appreciate bigly.
It’s a safe bet that millions of American investors and pensioners would choose a Dow Jones average of 50,000 with indexation over a Dow Jones average of 44,500 without indexation.
As taxpayers realize real capital gains, the federal government will collect billions of dollars in new tax revenue. Federal tax revenue may ultimately be higher with indexation, not lower.
There is the question of whether Trump has the legal authority to issue an executive order instructing the Treasury secretary to issue new regulations indexing the capital gains cost basis for inflation. It comes down to whether the governing Internal Revenue Code section covering the definition of the word “cost” is sufficiently ambiguous to allow regulatory reinterpretation. Congress never specifically mandated that “cost” was to be determined in nominal terms, nor did it prohibit the use of real valuation.
According to a watershed 2012 paper by Charles Cooper and Vincent Colatriano in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, “jurisprudential developments over the last two decades have confirmed . . . that Treasury has regulatory authority to index capital gains for inflation.” With that justification, Trump has little reason to hold back.
James Carter is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation and a principal with Navigators Global. He previously headed President Donald Trump’s tax team during the 2016-17 transition and served as a deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for then-President George W. Bush.
During his campaign and since taking office, President Donald Trump often repeated his desire to bring back the same “drill, baby, drill” oil and gas agenda that characterized his first term in office.
But that term began 8 long years ago and much has changed in the domestic oil business since then. Current market realities are likely to mitigate the industry’s response to Trump’s easing of the Biden administration’s efforts to restrict its activities.
Trump’s second term begins as the upstream segment of the industry has enjoyed three years of strong profitability and overall production growth by employing a strategy of capital discipline, technology deployment and the capture of economies of scale in the nation’s big shale play areas. Companies like, say, ExxonMobil and Oxy and their peers are unlikely to respond to the easing of government regulations by discarding these strategies that have brought such financial success in favor of moving into a new drilling boom.
This bias in favor of maintenance of the status quo is especially likely given that the big shale plays in the Permian Basin, Eagle Ford Shale, Bakken Shale, Haynesville and the Marcellus/Utica region have all advanced into the long-term development phases of the natural life cycle typical of every oil and gas resource play over the past 175 years. Absent the discovery of major new shale or other types of oil-or-natural gas-bearing formations, a new drilling boom seems quite unlikely under any circumstances.
One market factor that could result in a somewhat higher active rig count would be a sudden rise in crude oil prices, if it appears likely to last for a long period of time. Companies like Exxon, Chevron, Oxy and Diamondback Energy certainly have the capability to quickly activate a significant number of additional rigs to take advantage of long-term higher prices.
But crude prices are set on a global market, and that market has appeared over-supplied in recent months with little reason to believe the supply/demand equation will change significantly in the near future. Indeed, the OPEC+ cartel has been forced to postpone planned production increases several times over the past 12 months as an over-supplied market has caused prices to hover well below the group’s target price.
But it is wrong to think the domestic oil industry will not respond in any way to Trump’s efforts to remove Biden’s artificial roadblocks to energy progress. Trump’s efforts to speed up permitting for energy projects of all kinds are likely to result in a significant build-out of much-needed new natural gas pipeline capacity, natural gas power generation plants and new LNG export terminals and supporting infrastructure.
Instead of another four years of “drill, baby, drill,” the Trump efforts to speed energy development seem certain to result in four years of a “build, baby, build” boom.
Indeed, the industry is already responding in a big way in the LNG export sector of the business. During Trump’s first week in office, LNG exporter Venture Global launched what is the largest energy IPO by value in U.S. history, going public with a total market cap of $65 billion.
With five separate export projects currently in various stages of development, all in South Louisiana, Venture Global plans to become a major player in one of America’s major growth industries in the coming years. Trump’s Day 1 reversal of Biden’s senseless permitting pause on LNG infrastructure is likely to kick off a number of additional LNG projects by other operators.
The Trump effect took hold even before he took office when the Alaska Gasline Development Corporation entered into an exclusive agreement in early January with developer Glenfarne to advance the $44 billion Alaska LNG project. The aim is to start to deliver gas in 2031, with LNG exports following shortly thereafter.
America’s oil and gas industry has demonstrated it can consistently grow overall production to new records even with a falling rig count in recent years. Now it must grow its related infrastructure to account for the rising production.
That’s why Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” mantra is likely to transform into “build, baby, build” in the months and years to come.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
Another election has come and gone, and once again Arizona showed the nation that it doesn’t know how to count votes. Like a bad movie we are forced to watch every two years, rampant delays in processing early ballots left voters waiting over a week to find out who won key races in the state.
Virtually everyone around the country watching our slow-motion election train wreck, from major media outlets to national pundits, agreed that fixing Arizona’s tabulation process is long overdue.
Everyone, that is, except Governor Katie Hobbs and her partisan Democrat allies in the legislature.
This shouldn’t be a total shock to those who have followed previous attempts to reform our election system. Over the last couple of years, Democrats have opposed popular election reforms like requiring basic proof of citizenship to vote, all while millions were pouring in illegally through the southern border. They argued against commonsense voter ID laws, claiming our elections are safe and secure without them (and California democrats even banned voter ID outright).
And now, after Arizona was again one of the last states to finish ballot processing, the Democrats remain opposed to ensuring we have election night results…
The Left has done a great job of influencing the issue of birthright citizenship. Most Americans oppose granting automatic citizenship to children born to illegal immigrants, but they also believe that we’re stuck with this policy.
They’re told repeatedly that the practice is enshrined in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, that it has been affirmed by the Supreme Court, that the jurisprudence around it is settled law, and that challenging the matter now is unconstitutional and disloyal.
None of that happens to be true, but in the meantime, we’re saddled with a logically incoherent immigration system. Yes, immigrants are central to America’s story. But immigration law must be dedicated to the common good, not the benefit of those willing to flout our laws.
Immigrants should be vetted to ensure that they are likely to assimilate and be of value to their adopted country. Instead, we incentivize illegal immigrant mothers to cross the border before birth so their offspring can be entitled to lifelong citizenship.
So, did the writers of the 14th amendment botch the job, subjecting their descendants to such a dysfunctional system? No. In language more commonly understood at the time, they plainly stated, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein in they reside.”
The 14th amendment was written in 1868 to clarify that the newly emancipated slaves were granted all the privileges and rights of citizenship. There is nothing in the historical record to suggest that the authors had the slightest intent to grant citizenship to all born on American soil, much less those with parents living here illegally. The jurisdiction language was added specifically to prevent such an interpretation.
Advocates of constitutional originalism should also note that the author, Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan, explained it was meant to describe “a full and complete jurisdiction, the same jurisdiction in extent and quality as applies to every citizen of the United States now.”
He clearly is not describing an illegal alien. Senator Lyman Trumbull, an influential supporter of the amendment, also emphasized “jurisdiction meant not giving allegiance to anyone else.”
The legal scholar Lino Graglia points out that, as the authors would have understood it, those who are born to parents legally in the US “are subject to the jurisdiction there of and so would have constitutional claim to birthright citizenship.” Just as plain is the fact the 14th Amendment, as written, would not apply to those born to illegal aliens, soldiers posted in a foreign country, or foreign diplomats.
Birthright advocates claim that the 1897 Supreme Court case of Wong Kim Ark clinches their claim that children of illegal immigrants born here are entitled to the full citizenship. Wong had traveled back to China with his parents and was unjustifiably denied reentry until the decision was overturned by the Court. They ruled that to bar Wong would be “to deny citizenship to thousands of persons of [European] parentage who have always been considered and treated as citizens of the United States.”
That makes sense, since Wong had the necessary documentation and his parents had been on American soil legally at the time of his birth, there being no laws defining them otherwise at the time. This is exactly the reason why this much ballyhooed ruling does not apply to the practice of granting citizenship to the children of illegal aliens. In fact, the Supreme Court has never opined on the question.
The clear intent of the amendment, the language, and the historical record are all in accord. Yet the 14th Amendment has been completely untethered from its original meaning and impact. The Left and the Democratic Party have taken something meant to right a wrong and manipulated it to the advantage of those entering the country illegally.
There are at least 5 million children in America who have received citizenship inappropriately, or about one in eight U.S. births. That works well for those who relentlessly seek ways to produce millions of future Democrats.
The rest of us should continue to respect our Constitution and our history. The incredible privilege of citizenship should go only to those who merit it.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
