RealClearPolicy Articles

In this era of hyper partisanship, an opportunity for two-party, commonsense legislation is always welcome. The recent passage of the bipartisan affordable housing act, for example, was a welcome respite from the usual Congressional acrimony and a huge win for both Congress and the American people. Now, another bipartisan opportunity is on the horizon, one that could deliver a substantial win by paving the way to boost U.S. jobs, manufacturing and competitiveness. It could also help secure our nation’s status as a leader in advanced manufacturing and recycling technologies. Earlier this...

Washington is finally beginning to ask a question about Puerto Rico that should’ve been asked years ago: are federal disaster recovery dollars being used to rebuild critical infrastructure in the best interests of American taxpayers, or are they being diverted toward corrupt purposes right under our nose? Puerto Rico receives more disaster recovery funding than any other state, but an illogical and illegal tax is inflating reconstruction costs for the federal government, delaying rebuilding, and redirecting taxpayer dollars to unapproved uses. Allow me to explain. After Hurricanes Irma...

Ohioan John Ream is an accomplished aerospace engineer and brewery owner. He would like to try his hand at making Bourbon. However, federal law prohibits distilling spirited beverages at home. On Monday, he filed a petition in the Supreme Court of the United States asking it to hear his case, which raises important questions about the limits of federal power. Home distilling is, of course, as American as apple pie, and certainly a lot older. George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate featured a distillery that, by 1799, was producing more than 10,000 gallons of whiskey per year....

Wisconsin State Rep. Francesca Hong, in her bid to be the next governor of the Badger State, has proposed a statewide moratorium on AI data centers cleverly coined, “CONTROL-ALT-DELETE.” On her anti-data center campaign, Hong promises to protect Wisconsin families from environmental harm and higher electricity bills by proudly touting she is the only Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate calling for an outright data center moratorium.  In addition to suspending all AI data center development in Wisconsin, Hong’s campaign website states that “If a community...

In the race to make housing more affordable, building codes are not an obstacle. They are part of the solution. For more than a century, codes have made homes safer, more durable, and less costly to maintain. A debate unfolding in Washington will determine whether that record will be strengthened or undone in the name of short-term and short-sighted savings. Building codes were developed in the U.S. in response to catastrophes such as the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. To save lives and property, experts created standards to improve structural integrity,...

For decades, blast injuries were understood as the price of war. If service members survived explosions without visible wounds, the assumption was that they had escaped serious harm. That belief is collapsing under the weight of evidence showing that repeated exposure to blast overpressure, even at levels long considered safe, can quietly damage the brain. Blast overpressure is the pressure wave generated by explosions or by firing heavy weapons such as mortars, artillery, and breaching charges. Unlike shrapnel or blunt force trauma, its effects are often invisible and cumulative. Service...

Earlier this year, one of the largest asset managers in the world did something a financial institution should never have to do. It started training electricians. BlackRock committed $100 million to move 50,000 Americans into the skilled trades. Its chief executive, Larry Fink, was blunt about why. The country needs an estimated $10 trillion in infrastructure investment by 2033, he said, and capital is no longer what’s in short supply. The U.S. is racing to build data centers, a more resilient power grid, semiconductor plants, the physical scaffolding of the age of Artificial...

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...