The Insider Report from The New American

Texas State Legislator Calls for Special Session to Combat Birth Tourism

After the U.S. Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship in Trump v. Barbara, contrary to the original meaning of the 14th Amendment, Republicans largely condemned the decision. A Texas state legislator, however, is calling on state leaders to take substantive action to combat birth tourism.

On July 1, Texas Representative Brian Harrison (R-Midlothian) issued a statement declaring that “Texans deserve action, not just rhetoric, from their state leaders.”

He continued:

Texas must start acting like the sovereign state it is and stop taking it on the chin when actions from DC threaten to destroy the very fabric of our republic. Texas must not simply act like a powerless bystander but take bold and decisive action to protect liberty for future generations. I am publicly demanding an immediate special session to combat the harms from mass birth tourism, pressure the federal government to fix birth tourism, and to protect the value of citizenship that countless paid the ultimate price for.

Harrison ended his statement by stating, “I hope every elected Republican in Texas joins my call for immediate action. Delay is unacceptable for a state like Texas!”

On July 7, he issued another statement calling on the Texas Department of State Health Services to stop issuing birth certificates to noncitizens, arguing that the agency already had authority to take such action. Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, earlier made the same call, noting that “the correct response to the [Supreme Court’s] traitorous decision … is nullification.”

Top Texas officials have not directly responded to Harrison’s statements. However, the Legislature is examining whether to ban surrogacy for foreigners, and on July 7, Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Texas Health and Human Services Commission to investigate a South Texas hospital for promoting birth tourism. Additionally, Representative Chip Roy (R-Texas) responded to Harrison’s call for a special session by noting that “Texas should do this — and more.”

Harrison’s call for a special session raises an important principle: Constitutionally, the states retain their sovereign authority to restrict immigration within their borders — and they must act to protect American sovereignty and deter mass migration. In fact, Texas acted itself to secure its border with Mexico, including by building border barriers, spending record sums on border security, and criminalizing illegal migration. Having a Republican occupy the U.S. presidency does not absolve the states from this duty.

Texas state officials must heed Harrison’s call and act boldly to stop mass migration and nullify all unconstitutional federal acts. — Peter Rykowski

Second Circuit Upholds New York Vaccine Mandate Against the Amish

A federal appeals court has reaffirmed New York’s strict school-vaccination requirements, dealing a setback to Amish families seeking religious exemptions. In Miller v. McDonald, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that the state’s elimination of religious exemptions does not violate the First Amendment-protected rights of Amish parents and private schools. The decision imposes significant fines for noncompliance.

The case stems from New York’s 2019 repeal of religious exemptions during measles outbreaks. Three Amish schools and parents, facing more than $118,000 in combined fines, argued that mandatory vaccination conflicts with their faith’s emphasis on separation from the modern world, Divine Providence, and moral objections tied to vaccine development (e.g., the use of aborted fetal tissue). They invoked Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), which protected Amish educational autonomy, and claimed the policy targeted religious practice. However, the Second Circuit upheld the mandate with the precedent of Employment Division v. Smith, a 1990 U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruling that the government generally does not have to provide religious exemptions from a law if that law is neutral and applies equally to everyone, even if it incidentally burdens religious practices.

Should the case reach SCOTUS, as legal experts expect, the decision could have nationwide implications for religious exemptions in all 45 states that currently allow them for school vaccines.

The controversy intersects directly with principles of biomedical ethics outlined by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress in Principles of Biomedical Ethics. The framework rests on four pillars: respect for autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. Autonomy — respecting individuals’ capacity for self-determination and informed choice — holds priority. Forcible or heavily coercive vaccination policies abrogate this by overriding sincere conscientious refusals, treating communities as means to public-health ends rather than autonomous moral agents.

True ethical public health favors accommodation and least-restrictive alternatives over compulsion. Supporters of the ruling counter that school attendance creates a compelling state interest in preventing outbreaks, and uniform rules prevent free-rider problems.

The Amish plaintiffs in Miller v. McDonald are not seeking special treatment. They are asking to be left alone — to live in private, self-sufficient, rural communities, educating their children in isolated, Amish-only schools, as they have for more than 200 years. The measles outbreak New York cited in justifying its 2019 exemption repeal occurred primarily in an Orthodox Jewish community in Rockland County, not among the Amish. The Amish community poses, by any reasonable epidemiological assessment, minimal public health risk from within its insular, geographically separated communities.

Attorney Greg Glaser, general counsel for Physicians for Informed Consent, responded to the ruling: “Informed consent and informed refusal are the bedrock of medical ethics. Banning religious exemptions effectively legalizes medical bullying by proxy, forcing families to forfeit their children’s education if they choose to exercise informed refusal.”

The Second Circuit’s ruling demolishes the first pillar of biomedical ethics entirely. Autonomy is not merely a philosophical preference. It is the hard-won lesson of history’s most horrific medical atrocities. The Nuremberg Code of 1947, drafted in direct response to human medical experimentation, established as its first and most fundamental principle: “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.” The Declaration of Helsinki, adopted by the World Medical Association in 1964 and revised repeatedly since, reinforces that no medical intervention may be performed without free and informed consent.

These are not abstract academic principles. They are the medical profession’s own solemn commitments, made precisely because governments and institutions have repeatedly demonstrated, across documented history, that they cannot be trusted with unilateral authority over human bodies. — Rebecca Terrell

WH Exposes Smithsonian Coup: Taxpayers Fund War on U.S. Heritage

The Smithsonian is working to undermine U.S. history and indoctrinate generations of young Americans with Marxist ideas — at taxpayer expense. The White House is now punching back.

Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars are being weaponized by the Smithsonian Institution to wage all-out war on American history, values, heritage, and greatness. That is the stunning conclusion of a White House report exposing the tax-funded ideological poison being marketed to Americans, children, and visitors from around the world. But it can be stopped. And for the sake of the nation, it must be.

The July 4, 2026, release of the White House Domestic Policy Council report “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage” delivered a devastating indictment. It revealed how one of America’s most iconic, taxpayer-funded institutions has been captured by radicals. These radicals see U.S. history through the lens of Marxist critical theory to be exploited for political warfare, rather than as a shared inheritance of liberty and achievement.

The 162-page document, issued under President Donald Trump’s March 2025 Executive Order 14253 (“Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”), documents how the National Museum of American History (NMAH) has abandoned its founding mission. Instead of fostering “informed and honest patriotism,” it advances an activist agenda that divides Americans by race, gender, sexuality, immigration status, and nationality while erasing or even demonizing the principles of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

This is not neutral scholarship, of course. And it is certainly not “history.” As the report makes clear, this is the weaponization of public institutions and tax dollars against the very people who fund them — a deliberate effort to undermine the greatest constitutional republic in human history and replace it with something collectivist and totalitarian. The agenda seems to be to burn down the American system by turning Americans against it, and then “Build Back Better.”

The Report’s Core Indictment

The report concludes that NMAH leadership has adopted “an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.” It explicitly identifies the framework as “institutionalized … intersectional critical theory — an intellectual framework rooted in Marxism that seeks to radically transform society by revealing and challenging alleged ‘overlapping systems of oppression.’”

Smithsonian National Museum of American History Director Anthea Hartig has described history itself as “a prime tool of social justice.” The museum’s mission was rewritten to drop references to the “infinite richness” of American history and to escape anything resembling an “America First” mentality. The result: a national museum that refuses to affirm the exceptional courage and heritage of the American people and instead frames the nation’s story as one of “regret, tragedy, and shame.”

Erasing the Founders and the Founding

Perhaps the most shocking revelation is what visitors will not find. There are no major exhibits dedicated to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, the Continental Congress, the American Revolution, the Christian history that produced the U.S. Constitution, or the core principles of ordered liberty. The 250th anniversary of the Founding has been “problematized,” with programming emphasizing “gaps” and shifting away from any “Anglo-centric” focus. Flag Day and Independence Day events were notably absent in 2025-2026.

Exhibits that do touch the founding era selectively quote documents while omitting natural rights, God-given liberties, separation of powers, and the civic virtues required to sustain a republic. Christianity is portrayed primarily as a tool of conquest rather than a wellspring of abolitionism, individual liberty, economic prosperity, God-given human rights, and constitutional order. The 1619 Project’s false reframing of America as founded on slavery and genocide is openly embraced by leadership.

The above is part of an article by The New American senior editor Alex Newman, reprinted with permission from his Liberty Sentinel Substack. To read the entire article click here.

Trump Admin Implements More Than Half of Project 2025, Heritage’s President Claims

Donald Trump’s administration has implemented more than half of the recommendations in Project 2025, according to The Heritage Foundation’s president.

According to a June 23 fundraising email obtained by The New American, Heritage President Kevin Roberts asserted that “the Trump administration has already implemented 53% of Project 2025’s policy recommendations.” Roberts cited “strengthening border enforcement and tightening asylum standards,” “eliminating wasteful government agencies like USAID,” “removing leftist ideologies like DEI from government policies,” and “lowering taxes on hardworking Americans” as among the policies implemented.

Roberts’ announcement is consistent with data from other groups. For example, the leftist Center for Progressive Reform estimated in February that the Trump administration had “initiated or completed 53 percent of Project 2025’s domestic administrative policy agenda,” or “283 of the 532 recommended actions” that the group identified. And according to the website Project 2025 Tracker, the administration had implemented 54 percent of 320 “objectives” tracked, as of mid-July.

Although the left-wing media reacted hysterically to Project 2025 during the 2024 presidential campaign, it is merely the ninth installment of The Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership, a list of policy recommendations for the federal government that the organization has published periodically since 1981.

By comparison, Heritage’s website boasts that the Ronald Reagan administration implemented “nearly two-thirds of the 2,000 policy recommendations” from the 1981 Mandate for Leadership. Additionally, in its first year, the first Trump administration implemented 64 percent of the 334 recommendations in the 2016 edition. Instead of emphasizing how much of Project 2025 has been implemented, the media should ask why the Trump administration has adopted such a small percentage compared to previous administrations.

As The New American noted in May 2024, although Project 2025 contains some constitutional proposals — including abolishing the Department of Education and opposing UN “sustainable development” schemes — it is primarily a “conservative” document that does not fully align with constitutional principles. For example, it accepts Social Security, does not question the existence of most federal agencies, and calls for “reforming” Medicare instead of abolishing it.

This demonstrates the importance of looking to the Declaration of Independence, which outlines the purpose of government, and the U.S. Constitution, which established a government structure based on the principles of the Declaration, as goalposts. When politicians or organizations fail to do this, their policy proposals become unmoored from America’s founding principles.

This does not require rejecting incrementalism. As Thomas Jefferson asserted in a 1789 letter to James Madison, “If we cannot secure all our rights, let us secure what we can.” However, that incrementalism must be moored strictly to Americanism. Instead of focusing on how much of Project 2025 the Trump administration has implemented, we must examine to what extent the administration has followed the U.S. Constitution. — Peter Rykowski

The World’s Biggest Shell Game

In 2001, Enron’s collapse revealed that a corporation could manufacture the appearance of financial health by creating thousands of shell companies, the purpose of which was to buy the real corporation’s toxic assets, keeping them hidden from investors and regulators. Enron created more than 3,000 such shell companies, officially dubbed “Special Purpose Vehicles” (SPV). When the shell game unraveled, $30 billion in hidden debt materialized overnight.

Lehman Brothers used this principle with “Repo 105,” temporarily moving $50 billion in assets off its balance sheet at quarter-end to SPVs, then retrieving them days later after reporting deadlines passed. Lehman’s bankruptcy examiner documented the fraud across 2,200 pages. No one went to prison.

Citigroup ran $80 billion through off-balance-sheet structured investment vehicles. When the commercial paper market froze in 2008, Citigroup had to re-absorb $58 billion, requiring a $45 billion government bailout. Bear Stearns created hedge fund SPVs housing toxic mortgage securities. When they imploded in 2007, they served as the canary in the coal mine for the entire financial system.

The crucial question is: Does the same architecture operate at the level of nation-states? It does, through the mechanism of dollar reserve requirements and Treasury market structure.

Here is how it works. The United States issues Treasury bonds to finance deficit spending. Under the post-Bretton Woods dollar reserve system, central banks worldwide are expected (and in practice effectively required) to hold significant portions of their foreign exchange reserves in U.S. dollar-denominated assets, primarily Treasury securities. The Bank for International Settlements and International Monetary Fund frameworks for reserve adequacy create structural pressure on smaller countries to accumulate Treasuries as a demonstration of financial stability and as insurance against currency crises.

The result: Japan holds approximately $1.1 trillion in U.S. Treasuries. China holds approximately $760 billion. The United Kingdom, Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands, Belgium, and Ireland each hold hundreds of billions. Together, foreign countries hold approximately $8.5 trillion of the $36 trillion U.S. national debt.

These countries are not freely choosing to hold American debt the way a private investor chooses a stock. Many are incentivized, and in some cases coerced, into doing so by the international monetary system.

Countries that attempt to de-dollarize their reserves face currency instability, reduced access to dollar swap lines, and in some cases direct U.S. diplomatic and financial pressure. Iraq announced it would price oil in euros in 2000. Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi proposed a gold-backed African currency to replace the dollar for oil transactions. Both countries experienced U.S. military intervention shortly thereafter. Correlation is not causation, but the pattern has not gone unnoticed by smaller nations.

Without foreign central-bank demand structurally supporting the Treasury market, the interest rates required to attract voluntary buyers would be considerably higher. Foreign reserve requirements effectively subsidize American borrowing costs, suppress Treasury yields, and support the dollar’s reserve status in a mutually reinforcing cycle that benefits the issuer enormously.

Enron’s SPVs kept toxic assets off the balance sheet, allowing rating agencies such as Moody’s and S&P to maintain investment-grade ratings until days before the collapse. The structural foreign demand for Treasuries similarly influences how sovereign debt markets evaluate American creditworthiness. When Moody’s downgraded the United States from Aaa to Aa1 in May 2025, it cited the $36 trillion debt and deficit trajectory,

but the downgrade was decades late relative to what the raw numbers would suggest.

The difference between Enron’s SPVs and the sovereign SPV system is that Enron collapsed suddenly. The dollar reserve system is unwinding slowly — through BRICS de-dollarization efforts, bilateral currency swap agreements between China and trading partners, Saudi Arabia’s acceptance of yuan for oil sales, and the gradual diversification of central bank reserves away from Treasuries toward gold, which global central banks purchased at record rates in 2022, 2023, and 2024.

When enough of the SPV network decides to stop absorbing the parent’s liabilities, the parent’s true balance sheet becomes visible. What happened to Enron in 2001, and to Lehman in 2008, will eventually happen to any entity that has confused the appearance of solvency with its substance.

The shell game always ends the same way. — Rebecca Terrell

The EU’s Growing Surveillance State

The European Union is developing a growing, intrusive surveillance state, which two recent developments demonstrate.

In late June, the Daily Mail reported that the European Commission is considering a measure to require “every new vehicle to be fitted with a device that limits engine power for anyone driving too fast.” This device would use GPS to track how fast one is driving and limit his or her speed based on the posted speed limit.

Since July 2024, all new vehicles sold in the EU and Northern Ireland have been required to be equipped with speed limiters, also called “intelligent speed assistance” (ISA). This technology is currently optional, meaning that drivers can override it. However, the European Commission is seeking to make it mandatory — which it originally sought to do.

The Daily Mail reports:

Earlier proposals for ISA also included a function that would automatically restrict the vehicle to the speed limit but lobbying by car manufacturers resulted in the plan being watered down and the technology became optional.

Multiple industry sources, however, told this newspaper that European Commission officials are now quietly talking to major car firms and safety organisations about making it mandatory.

‘This was always just an interim stage,’ one well-placed source said. ‘Let’s tell the driver, let’s warn him, let’s beep [when exceeding the speed limit]. But eventually we will just fix the speed of the car so you can’t go over the speed limit.’

The European Commission is aiming to put this into effect in 2030.

Although this policy would apply only to EU members, it could affect more countries. For example, the Daily Mail notes that “experts say almost all manufacturers would still install the technology in models sold [in the United Kingdom] because it would be too expensive to make exceptions for UK vehicles. And that would make it easier for the UK to [introduce] its own legislation later.”

If mandatory speed-limiting technology is implemented in EU vehicles, there’s no guarantee that it will be accurate. Last month, Thatcham Research, a U.K.-based vehicle-research group, published a study finding that such technology shows the wrong speed limit up to a quarter of the time.

The EU is imposing a mass-surveillance state in other ways, too. For example, the European Parliament voted on July 9 to continue a policy allowing mass surveillance of private communications.

The policy, known as “Chat Control 1.0,” had been rejected by the European Parliament in March, but Parliament President Roberta Metsola, working with the European Council, forced another vote. Although a majority of voting MEPs rejected the policy — 314 to 276 — the measure failed to receive an absolute majority, or 360 MEPs, to block it. Accordingly, “Chat Control 1.0” will remain in effect until April 3, 2028.

The EU’s excuse for mass surveillance of private communications is that it will help catch instances of online child sexual abuse. However, MEP Patrick Breyer, a member of the German Pirate Party, a left-leaning party that generally supports internet privacy, objected to this rationale:

Trying to protect children with suspicionless mass surveillance is like frantically mopping the floor while the faucet is still running. Blanket chat control is just as unacceptable as indiscriminately opening everyone’s physical mail. For five years, this failed system has served as a smokescreen to delay real action, all while overwhelming the police with false alarms.

This surveillance is especially striking not only because of how pervasive it is, but because it is being implemented regionally — by an international organization — and not at the national level. Originally established in 1952 as an economic union called the European Coal and Steel Community, the EU was intended from the start to eventually become a full-fledged federal state. Furthermore, as a regional union, the EU serves as a steppingstone toward a one-world government — and it serves as a model for a potential North American Union. The EU’s surveillance-state policies demonstrate how much power this globalist body has already accumulated.

Similar forms of surveillance already exist or are being implemented in the United States. For example, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is currently in limbo, effectively allows warrantless surveillance of American citizens.

Additionally, communities across the country are installing AI-powered vehicle cameras, including those operated by Flock Safety. The 2021 federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included a provision requiring vehicles sold after 2026 to include “kill-switch” technology that monitors drivers for impairment. The U.S. House of Representatives rejected amendments by Representative Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) to stop this provision from going into effect. And in 2023, the National Transportation Safety Board publicly called for installing ISA technology in American vehicles — a policy some states are already implementing. The construction of AI data centers will further cement these technologies.

To combat these tyrannical policies and restore adherence to Americanist principles, an informed and vigilant electorate is more important than ever. — Peter Rykowski

$4.7 Trillion in Federal Payments From the Treasury Were Untraceable

In February 2025, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced a striking discovery about federal financial accountability: Approximately $4.7 trillion in U.S. Treasury payments had been missing a critical identification code that links disbursements to specific budget line items, making traceability “almost impossible.”

The code in question is the Treasury Account Symbol (TAS), a standard identification tool used to classify every federal financial transaction for reporting to the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget. According to DOGE’s February 17 post on X: “In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible.”

The fix was immediate. As of that Saturday, DOGE announced the TAS field had been made mandatory. De-facto DOGE leader Elon Musk called it a “major improvement in Treasury payment integrity,” noting it was “a combined effort of @DOGE, @USTreasury and @FederalReserve.”

The $4.7 trillion is a cumulative figure across a volume of payments, not a single year’s untracked spending. Federal expenditures for fiscal year 2024 totaled approximately $6.75 trillion. The missing TAS codes represent a systemic, pre-existing gap in federal accounting infrastructure. DOGE identified the problem and closed it by mandating the field’s completion going forward.

Senator Rick Scott (R-Fla.), joined by Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), introduced the LEDGER Act (Locating Every Disbursement in Government Expenditure Records) to permanently require the Treasury to track all payments and disbursements. Scott’s statement captured the common-sense argument: “There’s not a single family or business in America that operates this way — we look at our bank accounts and credit card statements to make sure we know where our money is going and stay on budget.”

The lack of government transparency may be not just a bug in the system, but a feature. Back in 2017, Former Housing and Urban Development Assistant Secretary Catherine Austin Fitts and Professor Mark Skidmore (in a separate investigation) documented a missing $27 trillion from the government. When they started poking around, the institutional response was swift and revealing. Shortly after their research gained public attention, Skidmore discovered that key documents had been removed from the Department of Defense Inspector General’s website. On October 5, 2017, a link to the report “Army General Fund Adjustments Not Adequately Documented or Supported” was disabled. Within days, links to other OIG (Office of the Inspector General) documents they had identified were also disabled. Skidmore documented that the sequential, non-random nature of the disabling “suggests a purposeful decision on the part of OIG to make key documents unavailable to the public via the website.”

Then came a bombshell.

On October 4, 2018, while national media were consumed with the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, federal officials quietly accepted the recommendation of the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB) that the government be allowed to misstate and move funds in order to conceal expenditures if deemed necessary for national security. The new standard, Statement of Federal Financial Accounting Standards 56 (SFFAS 56), applied not just to classified black-budget programs, but potentially to all federal agencies.

The revelations by DOGE regarding the Treasury’s opaque accounting practices are part of a larger pattern of government opacity that Fitts and Skidmore drew attention to almost a decade before. — Rebecca Terrell

NRC Ends ALARA, Boosts Nuclear Energy

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has proposed one of the most significant changes to nuclear regulation in decades by moving away from the long-standing ALARA principle — short for “As Low As Reasonably Achievable.” Although the phrase sounds sensible, the standard has imposed enormous costs on nuclear power while producing no measurable improvement in public safety.

Since the early 1990s, the NRC has required nuclear facilities not merely to keep radiation below legal limits, but to reduce exposure even further whenever it is considered “reasonably achievable.” In practice, this has meant adding expensive engineering features and procedures to reduce radiation doses that are already well below levels known to cause harm.

The NRC now proposes replacing that approach with one that allows regulators and plant operators to weigh the costs of further reducing radiation against any actual safety benefit. According to the agency, the change is expected to save the nuclear industry millions of dollars annually while modernizing reactor licensing.

The proposal addresses one of the chief complaints of nuclear engineers and energy advocates: that excessive regulation has made nuclear plants far more expensive to build and maintain than necessary.

However, more needs to be done. ALARA is based on the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) model. Under this theory, any amount of radiation, even an extremely tiny dose, is assumed to risk causing cancer or other maladies. The lower the dose, the lower the risk, but the risk is never considered to be zero.

Many radiation scientists dispute that model. No convincing evidence has shown adverse health effects from the low radiation levels typically encountered around nuclear facilities. In fact, there is much evidence to the contrary. The NRC’s current annual public exposure limit is 1 millisievert (mSv), while many experts note that harmful effects have not been demonstrated at doses anywhere near that low.

This distinction is important because radiation is a natural part of everyday life. People absorb ionizing radiation from food, cosmic rays, rocks and soil, medical imaging, and even each other. Residents of some regions naturally receive several times more background radiation than people elsewhere without suffering higher cancer rates. Public fears about radiation far exceed any danger.

The 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan, for example, generated media-induced worldwide alarm. Yet numerous scientific investigations concluded that the radiation released has not and will not cause death or disease among the general population. The tragedy resulted not from radiation exposure, but from the earthquake, tsunami, and stress of mass evacuations. Yet the term Fukushima still connotes terrifying radiation effects.

Even though the NRC is pitching ALARA, it is stubbornly adhering to LNT. If federal regulations continue to rely on that erroneous model, many costly requirements will remain in place. The NRC estimates that modifying ALARA will save roughly $9.5 million annually; some analysts believe removing the foundational LNT standard could reduce costs by tens of billions of dollars over the coming decades.

Opponents argue that maintaining conservative radiation standards provides an important safety margin and helps preserve public confidence in nuclear power. We would instead argue that it does nothing to improve safety, harms health, perpetuates irrational fears, increases costs, and prevents consumers from enjoying the most reliable, economic, efficient, and safe form of power generation available on the planet. — Rebecca Terrell

Lindsey Graham’s Warmongering Legacy

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) died on Saturday, July 11, after suffering a ruptured aorta. He was 71. Graham had been in Kyiv the day before, meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky before returning to Washington, D.C., where he was scheduled to appear on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday morning.

President Trump posted on Truth Social: “Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the greatest people and Senators I have ever known, is dead! He was always working, and was a true American Patriot. Lindsey will be greatly missed!!!” Israel’s President Isaac Herzog described himself as “shocked and heartbroken.”

The man who spent three decades pushing America toward war in the Middle East died returning from Ukraine, the latest front in the permanent war he spent his career building and sustaining.

Graham was first elected to the Senate from South Carolina in 2002 and was running for a fifth term. For more than two decades he was the Senate’s most reliable warmonger, consistently advocating for American military intervention in the Middle East.

He pushed heavily for the Iran War, having spent years calling for military action against Tehran. Just three weeks before his death, he told CBS’s Face the Nation: “Let’s try a diplomatic solution. I think it’s going to fail. What happens next? To all the people listening, if this diplomatic effort fails, President Trump is going to take the Strait of Hormuz. We’re going to run it.”

Graham’s political identity was inseparable from his decades-long partnership with the late Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.). In the popular imagination, the two were always linked together by foreign policy — traveling jointly to conflict zones, pushing for military interventions, and traversing the heroin corridors from Afghanistan to the Levant. While doing so, they rubbed shoulders with warlords, brigands, and CIA-connected rebel groups (who traded poppy fields for paramilitary hardware).

Unpopular in his home state, Graham nevertheless won the June 9 Republican primary with 56.8 percent of the vote — defeating businessman Mark Lynch, an appliance retail executive who had lent his own campaign $5 million and was endorsed by Project 2025 architect Paul Dans and former National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn. Lynch attacked Graham’s foreign-policy record throughout the campaign, earning Trump’s ire. Likewise, the Democratic nominee, pediatrician Annie Andrews, ran ads calling Graham “a warmonger” and “a swamp creature.”

Graham’s death triggered a special Republican primary to be held August 11, to select a replacement candidate for the November general election. Lynch is among potential candidates, as is Darline Graham (the late senator’s younger sister, who was sworn in on July 14 to serve out the remainder of her brother’s term); South Carolina GOP Representative Nancy Mace (another critic of Graham’s warmongering); Ralph Norman, another South Carolina GOP representative; and former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford.

South Carolina has not elected a Democratic senator since 1998, but the compressed timeline and the unresolved divisions exposed by the Lynch-Graham primary create genuine uncertainty about who will emerge as the Republican nominee in one of the most watched replacement races of the 2026 midterm cycle. — Rebecca Terrell

What Will Happen With “Reconciliation 3.0” With Lindsey Graham Gone?

The sudden death of U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has thrown a question mark into congressional Republicans’ agenda over the coming months — and this includes negotiations over whether to pass a third reconciliation bill, and what provisions to include in it.

Graham, the chairman of the Senate Committee on the Budget, had been working on legislation that would appropriate additional funding for the Department of Defense, among other priorities. As a reconciliation bill, it would require only a simple majority to pass, bypassing the Senate filibuster. The current Congress previously enacted the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB), U.S. President Donald Trump’s signature spending and policy legislation, and the Secure America Act, which provided funding for border security and immigration enforcement, using the same process.

With Graham gone, the U.S. House appears to be taking the lead on the process. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) is seeking to rally his GOP members around the proposal, and the House Committee on the Budget scheduled a meeting Thursday morning to consider the bill. Representative Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), the chairman of the House Committee on Armed Services, said Wednesday that the current proposal would appropriate an additional $67 billion to the Department of Defense and $11 billion for farm assistance, and create an election-grant program promoting policies in the proposed SAVE America Act.

In the Senate, Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) is set to replace Graham as chairman of the Budget Committee. Johnson is publicly supportive of a third reconciliation bill, and said on Monday that he had “already met with Lindsey’s staff” to discuss the legislation. However, Johnson is more conservative than Graham — he holds a lifetime Freedom Index score of 72 percent compared to Graham’s 57 percent — and is more skeptical about federal spending. He may seek greater spending cuts to offset the supplemental appropriations in the bill — and may be constitutionalists’ greatest hope of mitigating another OBBB-esque big-spending debacle.

There’s no guarantee that a third reconciliation bill will pass, particularly with the GOP’s slim congressional majorities. Regardless of the outcome, though, Graham’s untimely death is affecting the process. — Peter Rykowski