'Captain Curtis is also my dad!'

A judge appointed by former President Joe Biden made a nationwide decision Tuesday to stop federal agents from making arrests in immigration courthouses. California-based federal Judge P. Casey Pitts stated in the ruling that the Trump administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) policy allowing civil immigration arrests at courthouses violates the Administrative Procedures Act (APA). […]

“As we passed on, it seemed those scenes of visionary enchantment would never have an end.” So said Meriwether Lewis as he and William Clark led the Corps of Discovery through territory obtained from the Louisiana Purchase all the way to the Pacific. As they journeyed, the Corps of Discovery crossed vast prairies, followed the mighty Missouri to its headwaters, scaled the Rocky Mountains, and finally wintered on the banks of the Columbia.

Then, as now, the grandeur of America’s natural beauty resonated deeply with the men who saw it. More than two centuries later, that same landscape remains one of America’s greatest inheritances. But the parks, trails, and historic sites allowing millions of Americans to collect their inheritance have fallen into disrepair after decades of deferred maintenance.

Recognizing both the beauty of these public lands and the growing backlog of repairs threatening access to them, President Donald Trump launched a renewed effort to improve America’s parks through his “Making America Beautiful Again by Improving Our National Parks” initiative. The president argues conservation and stewardship are essential components of preserving the nation’s heritage.

Today, Congress can codify President Trump’s initiative and ensure our natural beauty remains protected for generations of Americans to come.

The Great American Outdoors Act 250 (GAOA 250) would invest nearly $1.9 billion annually for five years to restore America’s decaying national parks and public lands in celebration of America’s 250th anniversary. The bill would build on the original 2020 Great American Outdoors Act by creating a legacy restoration fund to ensure national parks would have the money they need to perform routine maintenance and repairs.

It has bipartisan support, marking it as a rare across-the-aisle win in an increasingly polarized country. And beyond support in Congress, the GAOA 250 is backed by organizations like the National Parks Conservation Association and Pew Charitable Trusts.

Perhaps best of all, the funding would be partially offset by visitors from other countries through increasing and standardizing fees for foreign tourists. After all, America’s treasures belong first and foremost to her own people who support upkeep through their taxes. It is common sense that international visitors should also contribute to their upkeep.

President Trump himself ordered the Department of the Interior to “preserve these opportunities for American families in future generations by increasing entry fees for foreign tourists, improving affordability for United States residents, and expanding opportunities to enjoy America’s splendid national treasures.”

For some conservatives, conservation carries uncomfortable associations with environmental alarmism, expansive regulation, and activist politics.

Yet, conservation is not the Left’s domain. Historically, conservatives have been the faithful posterity. Effective stewardship demands accountability, though not through the Left’s preferred endless taxpayer subsidies or ever-expanding bureaucratic bloat.

The GAOA 250’s funding model reflects conservative priorities by demanding international visitors contribute realistic sums to maintenance commensurate with their usage, rather than asking American taxpayers to shoulder the burden alone.

The original Great American Outdoors Act embraced this principle by addressing long-neglected maintenance needs in national parks and public lands, ensuring future generations can experience the same grandeur Lewis and Clark encountered two centuries ago.

This is conservation rooted in common sense. Protect our parks. Preserve our history. Maintain our public lands. And do so in a way that respects taxpayers while strengthening the places defining the American story.

The same spirit that carried the Corps of Discovery to the Pacific should guide us today. Congress must pass the GAOA 250 and pass America’s natural heritage to a whole new generation of Americans.

Lewis and Clark were fortunate enough to witness those scenes of visionary enchantment firsthand. Our responsibility is to ensure that 250 years later, Americans still can.

He does the combat drill as the firecrackers go off

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has concluded that the U.S. Agriculture Department’s (USDA) favors for “socially disadvantaged” groups unconstitutionally discriminate based on race and sex. […]

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The Iran war has taught us that America needs even more oil and natural gas production to protect consumers from events overseas, but Alaska’s Senate seems intent on reducing production. Lawmakers took a tax reform bill and turned it into a tax hike that risks wrecking investment in the oil and gas industry and ultimately raising prices for Alaskans specifically and Americans broadly.

House Bill 381 passed on June 12 with overwhelming bipartisan support. It would swap a punishing, inefficient property tax for a leaner volumetric tax on gas throughput—a change that would finally make the economics pencil out on billions of dollars in new energy infrastructure investment.

The Senate decided to undo that logic, grafting a tax hike on privately held oil and gas companies into the bill—even though the House had already rejected this same proposal, even though industry warned the tax kills investment, and even though Alaska’s major business associations begged lawmakers to leave it out.

The Alaska Oil and Gas Association called it what it is: a discriminatory tax on a narrow group of producers that was never adequately vetted or modeled. When the people who actually produce Alaska’s energy tell you a tax will chase away investment, that’s not noise. That’s the market talking.

The tax hike targets S corporations—privately held companies bound by strict shareholder limits, typically smaller and more capital-constrained than publicly traded C corporations like ExxonMobil. The top marginal tax rate would be a whopping 9.4%, the fourth highest in the nation.

Proponents claim this “closes a loophole,” but that’s incorrect. S corporations pay no Alaska income tax today because Alaska has no personal income tax, and pass-through income flows to the owners. That is not a loophole but is the entire design of pass-through taxation, working as Congress intended.

This tax hike is also reckless because lawmakers cannot even agree on which companies the tax would hit. It’s insane to rewrite a corporate tax structure and leave unanswered the most basic question of all: Who pays it? The amendment touches every aspect of the oil and gas industry: production, transportation, treatment, carbon capture, LNG processing, etc.

Every privately held energy company doing business in Alaska is in that scope, including the Cook Inlet gas suppliers that the state is desperate to keep operating. That should stop everyone cold.

Hilcorp produces roughly 85% of Cook Inlet’s natural gas, the fuel that heats homes and powers the lights for the 70% of Alaskans who live along the Railbelt. There’s already a supply crunch: Utilities warn of a shortfall as soon as 2027, and prices are climbing now, with imported LNG expected to run at least 50% higher than local gas.

The Senate’s answer to a looming energy crisis is to tax the very companies still producing it, a surefire way to get less energy and higher prices.

The novelty of this tax is its own warning label. No state imposes an entity-level income tax specifically on S corporations in a single industry. The federal code has no framework for it. Invent a tax with no precedent, no case law, and no regulatory guidance, and the answers default to unelected bureaucrats deciding by regulation how it applies and whom it reaches.

A company headquartered in Texas with one engineer on the North Slope could suddenly owe Alaska tax on income earned thousands of miles away—an open invitation to years of litigation, and the uncertainty alone is enough to send investors looking elsewhere.

The stakes are not small. Glenfarne—an investment management firm heavily involved in energy infrastructure—estimates a full Alaska LNG project at $44.5 billion to $54.5 billion, with the first-phase pipeline alone running $13.2 billion to $16.9 billion. Capital does not commit to a project of that scale on hope.

Two-thirds of LNG projects worldwide come in over budget, with overruns averaging around 70%, so investors treat tax stability as a prerequisite, not a footnote. Alaska’s own Department of Revenue estimated this tax would extract nearly half a billion dollars per year from Glenfarne if the pipeline gets built—an amount that could easily flip an investment from profit to loss. Massive rule changes like this broadcast that Alaska will move the goalposts whenever its budget gets tight.

And the damage won’t stop with the energy sector. By singling out specific companies for a new tax, the State Senate has put every other privately held business in Alaska on notice: You could be next. That uncertainty suppresses investment across the whole economy—in a state that cannot afford to bleed capital.

The Alaska Legislature and the governor should focus on increasing energy production and lowering costs for Alaskans. When the conference committee reconvenes, it will have the opportunity to strip out this proposed tax hike and get back to real tax reform that the Alaskan economy needs.

The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence has reignited an old debate on the Right between the immoderate defenders of “creed” and the equally immoderate advocates of “culture.” The either/or nature of this argument was already stale 50 years ago in the lead-up to the Bicentennial, and it hasn’t improved with age.

Harry V. Jaffa, whose students founded the Claremont Institute, was a key figure in the intellectual wrangling over the meaning of America in 1976, and his name is still invoked today—wrongly—as a champion of the extreme “creedalism” position. Though his argument has often been misinterpreted, Jaffa demonstrated that American republicanism requires both creed and culture and showed why both are necessary. What both the creedalists and the culturists miss is that American constitutionalism was a moral and intellectual solution to a set of problems that had been afflicting Western civilization for more than a thousand years.

What Shakespeare Almost Saw

In his monumental work, A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa turns to Shakespeare to clarify the moral and political problems of medieval Europe that the American Founders were trying to escape. For centuries, two doctrines—the divine right of kings and state-sponsored religion—had dominated European politics. But by the early 17th century, Shakespeare could see the growing tensions undermining the stability of both. Hereditary monarchy had never been able to unite legitimacy (Who is the king’s rightful heir?) with competence (Why shouldn’t the most able claimant to the throne rule?).

At the same time, there was never a satisfactory accommodation between ecclesiastical and political authority. Monarchs claimed to rule by God’s dispensation, yet they chafed at the interference of meddling popes. Citizens were caught between the commands of priest and prince, which did not always coincide. In Henry V, Shakespeare offers an exquisite portrayal of these unresolved conflicts. As Jaffa explains, the play examines both “the disjunction between the fate of the individual and the fate of his [country]” and the misery of perpetual civil war: “The crown is always being contested, and there is no peaceful way of deciding the contest.”

Perceiving, vaguely, that a tremendous change is underway, in Othello and The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare traces what would become the commercial republic. The old feudal caste system is buckling; the rights of the common man are a dim glow on the horizon. But generations before Locke and Montesquieu, Shakespeare was not quite able to “provide any alternative theory of political obligation,” as Jaffa notes. Only with the American Revolution—when all the necessary ingredients were finally present—did it become possible to discover and implement a practical solution.

America’s Political Tradition

One might argue that the founders should never have fought a war for independence in order to establish a new nation, but instead ought to have remained colonists loyal to the British king. There are some extreme traditionalists who take this position even now. But if we set aside this peculiar minority view, we must answer the question: What form of government should the new nation have adopted once it achieved independence?

There was little support for replacing one King George with another in the person of General Washington, who didn’t want the job, as he had to remind one of his own renegade colonels in 1782. There was even less enthusiasm for creating a new class of degenerate nobility who enjoyed special privileges based on the happenstance of birth. Virtually all the colonists wanted a free society devoted to the aristocracy of merit. For that to work, however, the government had to be directed principally to protecting the equal natural rights of all the citizens, without hereditary class distinctions, and certainly without a royal ruler claiming to be appointed by God.

As Jaffa explains, the founders had what Shakespeare lacked: a doctrine of social compact, which finally offered an alternative to hereditary monarchy by vesting all legitimate authority in the sovereignty of the people. The natural right of consent, the checks and balances of a written Constitution, and the guarantee of religious liberty made it possible—at long last—to distill popular government from mob rule. Those innovations could work only because the American people possessed the requisite virtues of literacy, industriousness, and law-abidingness, which drew on the liberty-loving tradition they inherited from England. The intellectual and the moral ingredients were inseparable.

Under the circumstances, the framers had no choice but to devise new institutions and practices for a new kind of polity. The Declaration’s creed, therefore, is not an afterthought we can simply set aside; and its critics err in ignoring or diminishing this part of our tradition. The fantasy of an organic American “culture” stripped of universal principles of politics and human nature has no basis in historical fact. What self-respecting patriot would regard baseball and hot dogs as more essential to our national character than freedom of speech and property rights?

Of course, as the founders stated in numerous letters, speeches, and official documents, only a moral and religious people could make the republican experiment work. Self-government requires, first and foremost, that citizens govern themselves as individuals by exercising their own rights responsibly and respecting the rights of others. Moderation with spiritedness, strong families supporting vibrant communities, duty to God and country—these are all essential. But the founders knew, as Federalist 51 observes, “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

The advocates of traditional “culture” should know better than anyone that we are all sinners, and even the most virtuous human beings lapse into selfishness, anger, and intemperance. That is why the Declaration proclaims in such stirring terms that no man is by nature the ruler of another: legitimate political authority, in this earthly realm, arises only from consent. The framework ordained in the Constitution and explained in great detail in The Federalist Papers is arguably the best blueprint for a free society ever devised. That America has in many ways abandoned the original intent of the Constitution, as well as the underlying social compact theory of the Declaration of Independence, is no reason to reject principles as such.

Creedal Confusion

Does all this mean that the United States is only a set of ideas? Of course not. None of the founders believed anything so foolish, and neither did Harry Jaffa. (His critics never actually quote anything he wrote when they try to attribute this preposterous view to him.) The “proposition nation” argument is just as erroneous as the extreme culture position.

In fact, the radical creedalists don’t even understand the creed itself. The social compact theory proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence is the strongest argument against open borders and the absurd notion that anyone can become an American at will. The men who signed the Declaration pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to securing the rights of “the good People of these Colonies”—not the rights of human beings everywhere. The Revolution was waged by Americans for Americans. Though the founders hoped their bravery and prudence might be an inspiration to the world, they were clear that other nations and peoples must claim their natural rights for themselves.

Morality—though essential—is not enough, which is why the Declaration proclaims that the people never surrender their natural right to “institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” Harry Jaffa’s genius was to remind us of this great lesson: a virtuous people must have a sound theoretical understanding of human nature, along with a wise form of government.

Creed without culture is idle talk, but culture without creed is a dangerous delusion. Americans of faith should recall that moral freedom cannot exist in a political vacuum, and the need to establish prudent safeguards against tyranny has not abated since man was cast out of the Garden.

The post Harry Jaffa, America 250, and the Creed-Culture Debate appeared first on The American Mind.

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb said a newly formed federal advisory panel on unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs, will focus on gathering better data and helping the U.S. government determine whether unexplained objects are linked...

Alan Dershowitz told Newsmax he intends to sue a New York City coffee shop that banned Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., due to his support for Israel.