The House of Representatives returns to Washington on Monday for its first week back after a monthlong recess spent campaigning in members’ districts. From crucial spending packages to the SAVE America Act, denouncing socialism, combating transgender ideology, and securing the border, Republicans have a lot to accomplish ahead of the November midterms when they could possibly lose the majority.

The Senate left the House with a new version of a bipartisan continuing resolution. House Speaker Mike Johnson must pass it to fund the government through Dec. 11, which is after the midterms.

While the Senate stayed in town, taking its last vote early on a Saturday morning, it did not leave the House with any Senate-passed SAVE America language. Military spending, Pentagon funding, and the SAVE America language have all been passed by the House and will have to wait until the Senate returns later in September.

But while they wait, there are multiple pieces of Republican-backed legislation they could pass.

Denouncing Socialism and DSA

The House is set to bring forward a resolution condemning and denouncing socialism in all forms and affirming support for secure elections. With the rise of Democratic Socialists of America candidates and the fracturing of the Democratic Party, this resolution could see bipartisan support in the House. 

The resolution, which will have to go through the Rules Committee before appearing on the floor for debate, cites the failures of socialism, including famine and mass murder, leading to “the killing of over 100,000,000 people worldwide,” and states that “the State of New Jersey registered nearly 6,600 noncitizens to vote, with reportedly hundreds successfully voting in elections.” 

If passed, it would denounce the DSA and socialist policies, reaffirm support for secure elections and that American elections are for American citizens only, and call for the enactment of voter ID and proof-of-citizenship requirements to close loopholes that allow noncitizens to vote in elections. 

Combating Transgender Ideology

The Chloe Cole Act has been written and sponsored by numerous Republican members across both chambers. The legislation would prohibit prescribing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender-related surgeries for anyone under age 18. It would also create a legal path for families to seek financial damages for harm caused by what proponents call gender-affirming care. Just before recess, it passed a key committee stage and is ready to go to the full House for consideration.

If passed, Congress would be codifying President Donald Trump’s executive order, “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” which calls for “a private right of action for children and the parents of children whose healthy body parts have been damaged by medical professionals practicing chemical and surgical mutilation.”

The Title IX Clarification Act, introduced by Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, would help eliminate transgender ideology by clarifying that Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is based on sex rather than identified gender, similar to the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which seeks to amend Title IX to require the same.

Securing the Border

Late in July, House Freedom Caucus members made a deal with Johnson and were allowed to mark up the Permanent Trump Secure Border Act, which would do exactly that. It passed out of the Judiciary Committee; however, Johnson has not yet scheduled a vote on it.

Introduced by Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, it would permanently secure the border, even after Trump leaves office. Regardless of which party wins the majority, Roy is on a deadline to pass this legislation. Having run and lost the Texas attorney general race, he is leaving Washington in January when his term ends.

Reforming Education

The Less Bureaucracy, Better Education package is another goal Republicans could implement before the midterms. The legislation would carry out President Trump’s plan to shut down the Department of Education, which he says has been failing students and educators, by streamlining education programs and transferring their responsibilities to other agencies.

Introduced by Education and Workforce Committee Chairman Tim Walberg, R-Mich., the 10 bills would transfer statutory authority from the Department of Education to other agencies, including the Labor Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, the State Department, and the Interior Department.

“Washington has prioritized ballooning bureaucracy over effective education policy for too long,” Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action President Dr. Kevin Roberts said in the announcement. “The result was a parasitic Department of Education growing larger and more expensive while student outcomes stagnated. House Republicans are now taking an important step toward excising these bureaucratic leeches by putting students, parents, and taxpayers first.”

THE DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—Eight years before COVID emerged, a journalist issued a prophetic warning that risky viral research could usher in “doomsday” and damage the reputation of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Anthony Fauci groused in an email to an aide about that warning, then instructed the aide to permanently delete the exchange, documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation show.

The documents add to growing evidence that Fauci destroyed public records despite his sworn testimony that he never did. Deleting government records violates federal law.

Fauci did not respond to a request for comment.

In 2011, the advent of gain-of-function research—experiments that make viruses more infectious or deadly in the lab—caused its first major controversy. With funding from Fauci’s institute at the NIH, Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier had made an airborne strain of a bird flu with an estimated 50% fatality rate, which he described as “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make.”

Fauci and New York Times science writer Phil Boffey traded barbs in newspaper opinion pages about the work.

Manmade pandemic viruses are a “risk worth taking,” Fauci insisted in a December 2011 Washington Post editorial, because they could help drugmakers and public health get a jump start if they emerge in nature. NIH Director Francis Collins and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Vaccine Research Center Gary Nabel co-authored the op-ed.

The New York Times published an op-ed apparently written by Boffey in January 2012 arguing that NIH created an “engineered doomsday” that could kill “hundreds of millions of people.” The new emails reveal the author of the un-bylined op-ed for the first time.

“The consequences, should the virus escape, are too devastating to risk,” he said in an apparent reference to the title of Fauci’s op-ed.

Boffey wrote a follow-up in March 2012 titled “The Truth About the Doomsday Virus?” Under scrutiny from the press, Fouchier had backpedaled on his earlier statements about his virus’s lethality. Fauci meanwhile pushed to publish the Fouchier experiment despite biosecurity experts’ concerns the information could fall into the hands of a bioterrorist.

As the question marks suggests, Boffey was skeptical of Fouchier’s assurances. Experts who had read his initial description of the experiment said it stated the airborne virus remained as lethal as the natural one, he wrote. 

One sentence really rattled Fauci: “Now, this country’s National Institutes of Health, which financed the research and has its own reputation on the line, is asking the [NSABB] to reconsider its call to redact details before publication.”

“Phil Boffey is really off base here,” Fauci wrote to Collins, on March 4, 2012. “He is acting like a mischievous guy.”

“Clearly, people are getting to Phil Boffey and he is swallowing it,” Fauci sounded off in a more candid email to a subordinate the next morning.

Fauci strongly opposed a recommendation from the NIH’s biosecurity advisors to not publish sensitive details about Fouchier’s experiment. He said that if the advisors did not change their recommendation “the field of research on influenza … has a serious problem.”

“Please delete this e-mail and then delete from the deleted file,” Fauci said on his NIH email in apparent violation of federal record-keeping laws.

Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul highlighted two other instances of Fauci apparently seeking to delete public records in 2020, despite his sworn testimony before another committee in 2024 that he never did.

Fauci ultimately persuaded NIH’s biosecurity advisors to allow the Fouchier experiment to be published in full.

Boffey and Fouchier did not respond to a request for comment.

Fouchier And COVID’s Origins

When the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, Fouchier worked with Fauci and other virologists to downplay the possibility of a lab origin. Fouchier ghostwrote a key argument in “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” a paper dismissing a possible lab origin of COVID. Fauci would frequently cite the paper and its authors over the years without revealing he collaborated with them behind-the-scenes.

Yet privately the paper’s authors described Fouchier as “unbelievably conflicted.”

“Ron … is not going to want it to be a GOF [gain-of-function] escape,” one author said.

Indeed, Fouchier said he didn’t support publicly addressing the possibility of a lab leak in the “Proximal Origin” paper.

Fouchier said that it could lead to “harm to science” through renewed debates about biosafety.

“This manuscript would be much stronger if it focused on the likelihood of the first two scenarios as compared to intentional or accidental release,” Fouchier said. “That would also limit the chance of new biosafety discussions that would unnecessarily obstruct future attempts of virus culturing for research and diagnostic purposes for any (emerging/zoonotic) virus.”

Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Welcome to the seventh in our series “Landmark Speeches in American History.” We are celebrating America’s 250th anniversary with articles by prominent authors about how some of the greatest speeches in our history—by celebrated orators like Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr.—honored the vision of our founding document, the Declaration of Independence.

Today’s federal government employs over 2 million people. It is composed of over 400 agencies that often combine legislative, executive, and judicial powers. These agencies regulate nearly all areas of life from cradle to grave. We may take this arrangement for granted, but it is far from what the Founders envisioned. For them, the federal government was meant to have a limited range of power. And these powers were to be assiduously separated, checked, and balanced by the constitutional system they crafted.

How did we go so far astray? The progressive era marks a key turning point. Woodrow Wilson, foremost among progressives, offered a candid vision of a new form of government in his 1912 presidential campaign speech. 

In this speech, which would later be published under the title “What Is Progress?”, Wilson argued that government should be adapted to the latest theory of Darwinian evolution. “Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice,” Wilson explained. “Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must develop.”

According to Wilson, the Founders’ political theory was modeled upon the prevailing scientific theory of their day: Newtonian physics.

“They were scientists in their way … those fathers of the nation. [Thomas] Jefferson wrote of ‘the laws of Nature’—and then by way of afterthought—’and of Nature’s God,’” he states. “Politics in their thought was a variety of mechanics. The Constitution was founded on the law of gravitation.”

If the Founders’ system of government was based upon outdated scientific models, then we should update it according to new scientific breakthroughs if government is to remain effective.

Hence Wilson’s request:

“All that progressives ask or desire is permission— in an era when ‘development,’ ‘evolution,’ is the scientific word—to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.”

If society is a living organism, then government should not be constrained by mechanisms like checks, balances, and so forth. “No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live,” said Wilson. It should be able to grow, adapt, and act as a coordinated whole.

Darwin’s theory, strictly speaking, didn’t have much to say about social and political life—though many apply natural selection to cultures with various degrees of plausibility. Wilson and other progressives adapted Darwin’s theory of natural selection to “artificial selection,” which suited their own ends. This was the idea that humans can control their environments such that they shape society and human nature. And human nature is seen as plastic, so there are no built-in limits to what we can do or become.

The Founders would’ve seen this proposal as naïve and reckless. Aside from some passing mentions, they were not relying on Newtonian physics in crafting the U.S. Constitution. They were relying on millennia of tradition and experience, reflections on human nature, and more recent historical memory of Britain and Colonial America.

When Jefferson and the Founders appealed to the “laws of nature”, they were not speaking simply of physical laws like gravity as Wilson suggests. They were appealing to a moral order—a standard of justice that can be known by reason and that tells us crucial facts about what humans are.

For all their differences, the Founders generally agreed humans are “rational animals” endowed with intellect and will. But as revelation and observation show, we are also fallen. Passions often override our reason. Too much power can corrupt even the noblest of men. 

This is why the Founders crafted the form of government they did. The seemingly “mechanical” Constitution arose from a sober view of human nature. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” as James Madison observed.

Wilson dismisses this understanding of human nature and with that the need for constraints upon government. As the Declaration of Independence states, governments exist to secure certain unalienable rights. These rights derive from certain unchanging features about man and from our status as created beings. 

But just as he rejects fixed constitutional limits, Wilson also reinterprets the declaration as an ever-evolving program of action.

The declaration, he argues, is of no use “unless we can translate its general terms into examples of the present day….” It is “not a thesis for philosophers, but a whip for tyrants; not a theory of government, but a program of action.”

For Wilson, the only enduring principle in the declaration appears to be the contest between freedom and tyranny. And that is historically contingent. The relevant questions, then, are:

“What is the special form of tyranny we now fight? How does it endanger the rights of the people, and what do we mean to do in order to make our contest against it effectual? What are to be the items of our new declaration of independence?”

In other words, the declaration is a permission slip for government to address present-day injustices and pursue new ideals and aspirations. While the Founders believed government exists to secure certain preexisting rights, Wilson’s government exists to create new rights and expand its scope to secure them.

Taken together, Wilson’s reinterpretation of the declaration and his dismissal of the Constitution’s checks and balances points toward a much more expansive national government. If rights are evolving, and government must evolve to secure them, then limits placed on government begin to look more like obstacles than safeguards.

Beneath the appeals to Darwinism vs. Newtonian theories is a deeper conflict over human nature and the purpose of government. Wilson saw the purpose of government as administration by experts who could keep up with social progress. The Founders, by contrast, recognized the need for constraints within government, stemming from certain unchanging features in human nature.   

For them, just government was not so much a matter of scientific or technical expertise as it was of prudence—the highest virtue of the statesman.

Wilson notes that some will insist on clinging to old political forms and ways of life. These “stand-patters,” as he calls them, don’t know a “procession is under way.” “The world has a habit of leaving those behind who won’t go with it,” he states. “The world has always neglected stand-patters.”

The world does go on, but looking back on this procession should show that some things remain the same. Humans remain fallible creatures, capable of virtue but prone toward vice. Too much power in the hands of one or a few is always bound to corrupt.

Wilson may have justified expanding the government to combat tyranny. But the form it produced—effectively a “fourth branch” of government in which offices combine legislative, executive, and judicial powers—is what Madison described as “the very definition of tyranny.”

Contrary to his intentions, Wilson’s speech should prompt us to cling even more steadfastly to the perennial truths that lay at the heart of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of this nation, we should take pride in being the “stand-patters” Wilson bemoans.