RealClearPolicy Articles

The professional world has known, for decades now, that anything you put into an email will be stored as a record on a cloud or server and has the capacity to be used against you as evidence. The list of corporate executives who have been brought down by incriminating emails is extensive. Anyone with any business or political savvy today understands the often-used phrase: “Don’t put anything in an email you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of The Washington Post.” We are currently in a new age of AI transcription and note-taking tools which have quietly become...

From the moment he announced his candidacy with a splashy, effective marketing video in August 2025, Graham Platner seemed to be a teflon candidate. After months of rolling scandal, none of which seemed to dent Platner in the least, Politico has now reported a seemingly credible accusation that Platner sexually assaulted Jenny Racicot in 2021. CNN has also now interviewed the alleged victim, and Democrats like Ro Khanna have started walking back their endorsements. Khanna also urged him to end his campaign. Platner, as he has done so effectively throughout his meteoric political rise, has...

America's family farms are built on generations of sacrifice. The land, the equipment, and the livestock aren’t luxuries. They're the tools of the trade, passed down from parent to child as both livelihood and legacy. But a proposal that has surfaced repeatedly in Washington continues to loom over family farms across this country, threatening to force families to choose between their land and their tax bill. Not because they sold anything or cashed out, but simply because their property went up in value. That's the threat posed by a tax on unrealized gains. Consider the Miller family...

Americans are enthusiastically celebrating the 250th anniversary of independence from the shackles of British rule.  As you can read in the Declaration of Independence, Americans asserted their rights to make more of their own choices using more of their own resources.  It’s time to reaffirm that assertion, that right to have maximum control over one’s own domain. In one modern context, this increased control of resources would come from further lowering tariffs. Conservatives continue to praise the Trump-Vance Administration’s recent reduction from 25% to 15% of...

Vividly I learning about the importance of cotton in American history classes as a youth. The Industrial Revolution and Eli Whitney’s cotton ginfueling demand for clothes made from cotton gave a young American nation the economic muscle it needed to compete against its European rivals. The simple phrase “Cotton is king” has resounded to well throughout the decades that they even made a joke about it on Seinfeld! In May the US Department of Agriculture released The Great American Cotton Plan, a blueprint for making cotton king again. “America's cotton growers continue...

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has made eliminating fraud and waste a priority, with a focus on overpayments and price transparency for hospital and physician services. The rapidly expanding 340B drug discount program, prone to duplicated discounts recently highlighted in Sen. Cassidy’s report on the program, has escaped serious scrutiny. Pharmaceutical companies have asked qualifying hospitals for data to prove claims are legitimate. However, the association representing the hospitals that received the discounted drugs has asked the federal government to block...

Why would a small cadre of Republicans join in with all the Democrats on Capitol Hill to force employment contracts upon private citizen workers and private sector companies, determined by government bureaucrats. Moreover, why would Republicans try to force American companies to follow the failed European model? After all, the American jobs market has been humming, with sustained low unemployment rates and a trend of real wage increases that were accelerating materially before the interruption of the Iran War. Meanwhile, Europe sputters. Bigger picture, consider just how materially the United...

When the French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville studied American society in the 1830s, he marveled at the seemingly endless array of associations Americans created to champion causes great and small. “In the United States associations are established to promote public order, commerce, industry, morality, and religion… the liberty of association for political purposes is unbounded,” he proclaimed. Nearly two hundred years later, Americans still donate to charity and participate in civil society at levels that put other countries to shame. Yet association for...

As the Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo approaches its second anniversary, most commentary still treats it as a story about the courts — and for good reason. But Loper Bright has proven more immediately transformative for the executive branch — and it may still force Congress to confront responsibilities it has long avoided. When regulators decided to make herring fishermen pay the salaries of onboard monitors, the fate of that requirement rested on the 40-year-old Chevron doctrine. Faced with ambiguity over the Department of Commerce’s...

As president and CEO of D.A.R.E. America, I have spent my career working to keep our youth safe from dangerous substances that threaten their health, futures and ability to succeed. Today, however, America is facing a rapidly escalating drug threat hiding in plain sight: intoxicating hemp-derived tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) products that are flooding communities across the country under the false banner of being “legal” and “safe.”  What began as an effort to legalize hemp for benign uses such as in textile production has morphed into a multibillion-dollar...

During my 18 years serving in the United States Senate, I was honored to represent the people and communities of Louisiana, while advocating for our country’s energy industry, which is vital to America's prosperity and security. I want to share an observation about something happening in Washington right now that should concern everyone in the energy business, or for that matter, in any business. It used to be that when the federal government signed a contract with a company to secure a lease on federal land or signed a document committing to a joint project, that meant something across...

The United States is rewiring supply chains, and the new map is being drawn right now. Over the past year Washington has moved from policy statements to capital deployment, committing more than a billion dollars to critical minerals and infrastructure across Latin America and convening more than fifty countries at the first Critical Minerals Ministerial in February. Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru attended and walked away with renewed attention and financing. Honduras was not on that list. That absence is the most important fact in Honduran economic policy today, and it is...

Electrification and automation may have started the next automotive transformation, but software and AI will determine who leads it. The global race for automotive leadership is now centered around who integrates and orchestrates the core ecosystems that increasingly define how vehicles operate – software, sensors, AI, and connected technologies – into unified systems that deliver unparalleled user experiences. The shift is profound, the pace is accelerating, and the stakes could not be higher. In the software-defined vehicle (SDV) era, automakers that fail to master software...

When Nicolás Maduro’s regime froze Venezuela’s banking system in 2020, doctors and nurses kept showing up anyway. They came before dawn, on foot, through neighborhoods where the electricity had stopped and the shelves had been bare for months. Their paychecks had stopped without warning. The bolívar had collapsed so completely that even those who still received a salary watched it evaporate before they could spend it. Hospitals ran out of gloves, syringes, and basic medications. Venezuelans in exile watched this from abroad and refused to accept it. They...

President Trump has reached an agreement with Iran, but Iran is only part of the overall regional conflict. The struggle between Jews and Palestinians in the Holy Land is, and always has been, the center of the entire regional conflict. Yet, America has abandoned the  long-standing consensus solution, a two-part homeland for Palestinians, needlessly providing Iran and its proxies a justification - or cover - for their mischief. America used to recognize the co-equal rights of Jews and Palestinians to a home in the Holy Land, both rights born of a unanimous UN resolution adopted in 1947....

We’ve all been there, planted somewhere in a car’s passenger seat as someone in control of the radio showcases their ghastly taste in music or talk radio. Powerless over the auditory assault, we hope the slight gnashing of our own teeth helps drown out the sound. Now imagine that same sinking feeling becoming part of our everyday lives if the government itself dictated what political discourse we must listen to. This affront on our freedom to choose what we listen to comes courtesy of FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s efforts to revive the “equal time” rule against...

One of the key challenges that all markets face is how to protect consumers while fostering legitimate commerce.  For regulators and policymakers, it is part of their core mission, as reflected by Federal Trade Commission Chairman (FTC) Andrew Ferguson’s testimony at the recent Senate Commerce Hearing that there are “lots of honest workers, business owners in the direct selling industry, and it's important that we root out the bad apples.” These comments were reinforced by recent commentary from the Direct Selling Self-Regulatory Council (DSSRC). For Herbalife, and...

A few years ago, the wireless industry promised Americans that 5G would change everything. Doctors would perform remote surgeries. Driverless cars would eliminate traffic accidents. Smart cities would run on wireless networks connecting everything from traffic lights to refrigerators. Congress heard similarly sweeping claims: “winning the race to 5G” had to be prioritized over all other spectrum policies and would unleash up to $1.7 trillion in economic growth and create millions of new jobs. Fast forward to today. Most Americans carry a 5G-capable phone in their pocket, yet most...

It is no secret that Americans continue to be squeezed by high housing costs. President Trump and Congress recognize the need to solve this kitchen table issue. Their biggest roadblock? Housing affordability is driven largely by state and local policies that limit supply and drive up costs, leaving Washington with relatively few effective tools at its disposal. A bipartisan housing bill snaking through Congress, if done correctly, can make a difference, but there are better ways to build more housing. Rents and mortgages have ballooned in many areas due, in large part, to government-imposed...