ABOUT THOSE MEDICAID ‘CUTS:’ We’ve all heard a thousand times in the media in recent weeks all about how those evil House Republicans are going to destroy Medicaid by slashing $625 billion. As usual with the mainstream media when it comes to reporting on proposals to limit federal spending in any way, there’s a whole lot more to this story than is being reported, according to Issues & Insights (I&I).

“First, let’s dispense with the claim of ‘devastating’ cuts to Medicaid. The House reconciliation bill would reduce Medicaid spending by $625 billion. That might sound like a lot, but it’s stretched out over 10 years, at a time when Medicaid is on track to spend $8.6 trillion. Medicaid spending will still go up every year under the House bill, just a tiny bit more slowly,” according to I&I.

Second, there is a tax-and-spending scam whereby state governments can shift much of the costs of their official share of Medicaid spending back on to the shoulders of federal taxpayers. It’s such a scam that even Joe Biden called it that way back in 2011. Just fixing this regulatory scheme would save virtually of the money on which GOPers are focused.

But there’s more, much more. Go here for the rest of this story.

TODAY’S LEFT IS NO MORE NEW THAN THE 60’S ‘NEW LEFT:’ In fact, according Richard Pollock, a veteran organizer of demonstrations like the anti-Vietnam protests of 1971 that sought to shut down D.C., those three House Dems at the Newark ICE detention were using the same old tired techniques. Richard tells all in my latest for The Washington Stand. 

SENATE JUDICIARY DEMS BLAST BONDI, SILENT ON OBAMA MEDIA ABUSES: Attorney-General Pam Bondi’s recent announcement of new rules making it easier for Department of Justice (DOJ) officials to subpoena journalists drew a blistering letter from the 10 Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats.

All the usual stuff  about “threatens press freedom” are in the letter, but it was crickets when The Washington Stand asked spokesmen for the 10 what their bosses said back in the day when issuing subpoenas was far from the worst media abuses of the Obama administration.

Maybe they just forgot since that was “old news,” right?

WHAT’S REALLY AT STAKE IN TRUMP’S CIVIL SERVICE REFORMS: Dr. Donald Devine was “Reagan’s Terrible Swift Sword” back in the 1980s and he accomplished more to make government work more efficiently in five years as Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director than all the rest of the individuals who ever held the position.

All of which is a round-about way of saying Devine gets what President Donald Trump’s federal civil service reforms are all about. As Devine explains in this American Spectator piece, Trump is not at “war” with the federal bureaucracy (as incessantly claimed by the Left media, especially the Washington Post), he’s working to make it much more responsive and accountable to the American people.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I was privileged to work with Devine as Assistant Director of OPM for Public Affairs for three great years (1982-1985), so I may be just a teeny, tiny bit biased.

HOW OUT-OF-TOUCH ARE DEMS? So far out they might as well be on another planet, according to the results of the latest Cygnal National Voting Trends poll. Turns out that 43 percent of swing voters want Congress to make inflation, spending and waste its top priorities, compared to only eight percent who see “threats to democracy” as the number one issue. And that’s just for starters!

SUPERB BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP PRO/CON: There’s a huge amount of foggy  misunderstanding of the issues involved in the issue of Birthright Citizenship under the 14th Amendment following its adoption after the Civil War.

But along comes tech entrepreneur Rod Martin and Yale Law Professor Christina Rodriguez to cut through the fog and provide a much-needed demonstration of the priceless value of civil, informed discourse on great issues. They do so on “The Disagreement,” a Substack based program devoted to advancing the restoration of such discourse and ably hosted by Catherine Cushenberry.

Even if you think you know this controversy backwards and forward, give yourself an hour to listen to Rodriguez and Martin as they sort through the arguments and history of an issue that has come to intense prominence

LIB POLLSTER WARNS DEMS NOT TO FOCUS SO MUCH ON TRUMP, MUSK: Here and there on the Left are faint signs that sanity and at least a distant connection with reality are still there.

Impact Research, which boasts of having knocked off more marginal GOP representatives than anybody else, provides Exhibit A, as reported in my latest at The Washington Stand. 

TIME TO GO FOR TERM LIMITS AMENDMENT? Analysis by Democratic firm of responses in four recent focus groups made up of swing and soft partisan voters finds disgust with and distrust of government is deep and bipartisan.

They don’t mention it but I do in my latest PJ Media column: Is such bipartisan disgust and distrust evidence that a Term Limits for Congress constitutional amendment would fare better than the one that died under the Contract with America GOP Congress in 1995?

YOUR FINGERPRINT AND THE HUBBLE TELESCOPE: We hear a lot more about the Webb Telescope these days, but it wasn’t that long ago that the Hubble was star. So check out this interesting look on HillFaith at the connection between the latter and a human fingerprint.

ALBERTA, NOT CANADA, FOR 51ST STATE: Few folks in either country took seriously President Donald Trump’s several quips about Canada becoming America’s 51st state and references to then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “Governor Trudeau.” But Liberal Party were sufficiently agitated that Trudeau’s successor, Mark Carney, should thank Trump.

As Rod Martin points out in the most intelligent analysis of the Canadian scene I’ve read in years, things might have turned out differently had Trump focused in on the real brewing crisis in Canada, the intensifying alienation of conservative voters in the western province of Alberta:

“Alberta doesn’t belong in this Canada.

“That’s not treason. It’s not even radical. It’s a simple observation of cultural, economic, and political reality — a reality growing starker by the year. Albertans have known for decades that something is deeply broken in the Confederation they were born into. But it’s only recently, as Ottawa’s indifference curdled into hostility, that many have begun asking the inevitable question: What if we left?”

Where would, should Albertans go? Go here and Martin will lay it out for all to see. If you aren’t following this guy, you should because he sees the world through clear eyes.

FREEDOM GAINED INCH BY INCH: Family Research Council (FRC) chief Tony Perkins spent most of last week in Israel, a visit that inspired a Washington Stand meditation on underlying principle for both those Oklahomans who asked the U.S. Supreme Court to allow a digital Catholic school to receive public funding and the prayers of a Jewish rabbi on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

“Religious freedom is seldom handed to the passive; it is claimed by those who exercise it even when a hostile culture says they may not. That reality came home to me this week as two very different arenas — Jerusalem’s Temple Mount and the marble halls of the U.S. Supreme Court. In both instances, they posed the same enduring question: Will people of faith fight for the liberties our Creator endowed, or will they surrender them to bureaucrats and bullies,” Perkins asked.

Read the whole column as it poses something worthy of extended contemplation by liberty-minded religious and non-religious folks alike.

TRUMP 142 – CONGRESS 5: That’s as in the Chief Executive has signed 142 Executive Orders since January 20, most of which directly advance the agenda voters overwhelmingly elected him to implement.

Meanwhile, Congress has approved and sent to Trump’s desk five, count’em, five bills. The Issues & Insights crew points to a disturbing pattern in congressional strategy planning:

“When Democrats controlled Congress at the start of Bill Clinton’s, Barack Obama’s, and Biden’s administrations, they cast votes on tax hikes, Obamacare, and Biden’s massive spending splurge – with no GOP support – knowing those votes would likely cost them their majorities in either the House or Senate. But they were smart enough to know that once you get a law on the books, it’s nearly impossible to get it off, and that they’d eventually regain control of Congress.

“So, Clinton’s tax hikes paved the way for more tax hikes. Obamacare is still the law of the land. And even Republicans are acting squeamish about Trump’s plan to simply cut domestic spending back to where it was before COVID, while wetting themselves over changes that would do the same for Medicaid.

“Every day that Republicans dawdle increases the odds that they will fail to get a good tax and spending cut bill across the finish line. Every delay causes more anxiety among businesses and consumers. Every misstep gives Democrats more time to rearm.”

FLOOR OR CEILING? Good question, especially in the context of how President Donald Trump’s 2026 budget proposal is viewed, says OpenTheBooks CEO John Hart. As an “opening bid” in the congressional budget struggle, Trump has put down a marker in what should become a genuine negotiation about the future size and power of the federal government.

And as if to demonstrate just how serious he is about this, Hart offers this gem of a recommendation:

“My recommendation would be to reduce the number of agencies by 437 so we end up with four – the Departments of Defense, State, Treasury and Justice – just as Milton Friedman famously prescribed a quarter century ago. As a compromise, Congress could consolidate everything else into a Department of Interstate Commerce.”

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO COMMON SENSE? It sure seems to have left the Democrats behind, according to the crew at Issues & Insights.

‘SAIGON HAS FALLEN’ 50 YEAR LATER: It was half a century ago that Americans woke up to the news that the North Vietnamese Army had entered the capital of South Vietnam. Then came the haunting scene of the last U.S. helicopter on the roof of the U.S. Embassy with a long line of desperate people trying to escape.

Rod Martin reminds us today of what followed:

“What followed was not peace, but darkness. The swift collapse of South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos (turns out the Domino Theory was true) brought the subjugation of millions, and the opening act of a Communist bloodbath across Southeast Asia.

“At least a million were sent to the ‘re-education camps’ in Vietnam alone. Half a million were murdered. Another two million fled this brutal night by sea, on rafts wholly unsuited for the tumultuous ocean, in wild hope that an American aircraft carrier might happen upon them. Close to half a million died in the water.”

Thus was set a pattern enabled by failed U.S. leadership that is with us to the present era, as witnessed by the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, and what may be in the offing in Ukraine. Martin offers some bracing insights and recommendations.

DID THE LEFT’S CLOWARD-PIVEN STRATEGY FAIL? Depends on the numbers and the strategic assumptions you make, as I demonstrate on PJ Media this morning. If success is defined as eliminating poverty, the answer clearly is no. But even more clear is that Cloward-Piven has been a roaring success if it’s real purpose was moving America toward a substantially socialist model.

WHY DIDN’T CONGRESS FIND THE MASSIVE WASTE BEFORE DOGE? The answer is the last time (2022) the Democrats controlled the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform they ignored the issue entirely, while the same committee under GOP control in 2024 repeatedly demanded from executive branch agencies  documents, memos, emails, text messages and reports on the issue that were never produced, thanks to the Biden Wall of Resistance.

For the specifics, check out my first news analysis for The Washington Stand.

DO NOT MISS DON SURBER THIS MORNING: Why? Because he takes apart the federal judiciary’s illegal immigrant deportation insanity more effectively and completely than I’ve read anywhere else.

OBAMA’S ENDANGERMENT FINDING MAY DIE SOONER THAN EXPECTED: Steven Milloy has been fighting the environmental zealots of the Left for decades, so the man knows a thing or three about how confrontations are likely to turn out. In an important Issues & Insights column, Milloy explains his optimism about killing the Endangerment Finding (EF) from the Obama EPA, used to justify every major federal environmental initiative since 2009:

“Before the Trump administration’s shock-and-awe approach to shrinking government commenced in January, my colleagues and I imagined that the EF would be reversed more less in the same way that the Obama administration had promulgated it, through the cumbersome Administrative Procedures Act. There would be a proposal seeking public comment published in the Federal Register, mandatory consideration of the likely hundreds of thousands of public comments, a final decision and then years of litigation with an uncertain outcome.

“But that has all now changed.

“On April 9, President Donald Trump issued an executive order, “Directing the Repeal of Unlawful Regulations,” directing agencies to come up with lists of regulations that run afoul of recent Supreme Court decisions. Select illegal regulations, as determined by the Trump administration, will then be terminated without the notice-and-comment process of the Administrative Procedures Act. The rationale is simply that: (1) the regulations are illegal per the Supreme Court decision; (2) they are no longer operative; and (3) terminating them does not require any sort of due process, so to speak.”

In other words, forget about endless APA process, the EF could soon be no more, and, as Milloy further explains, those getting tax dollars under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act — what Trump calls the ‘Green New Scam’ — would be well-advised not to count on  such future revenues.

ANSWERING THE MOST VIP EASTER QUESTION: It’s who got the body, where did they hide it and how come nobody ever found it? Check out my latest PJ Media column.