​Religious organizations seeking official recognition on college campuses – and the same access to facilities as secular groups – are sometimes denied recognition. The reason?

Administrators have told student religious groups that they must open their leadership to people of all beliefs or no beliefs – otherwise, they would be guilty of discrimination. One such group at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, Ratio Christi, was told in 2019 that they had to leave their leadership positions open to all, regardless of their beliefs.

“It would be absurd for the university to require the vegan student group to appoint a meat-lover as its president,” observes Travis Barham, senior counsel at the Alliance Defending Freedom. “Likewise, the University of Colorado shouldn’t force Christian students to let atheists or other non-Christians to lead their Bible studies in order to become a registered club.”

Some universities, like Tufts, have reversed their positions. Ratio Christi reached a settlement with the University of Colorado after filing a lawsuit. But many universities continue to bar religious groups from becoming recognized student organizations. This might soon change thanks to the passage of a bill by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

The committee recently approved the Equal Campus Access Act, legislation that would require public colleges and universities to afford religious student organizations the same rights, benefits, and privileges they provide to other campus groups. Institutions that discriminate against religious organizations could lose access to federal funding.

The bill, introduced by Chairman Tim Walberg (R-MI), would protect religious organizations’ access to official recognition, campus facilities, and other benefits available to student groups. Crucially, these protections would apply regardless of an organization’s religious beliefs, practices, speech, leadership requirements, or standards of conduct.

“That protection is necessary because freedom of association means more than permitting students to gather in the same room,” said Bob Goodlatte, former House Judiciary Committee Chairman and Protect the First Senior Policy Advisor. “It includes the ability of an organization to preserve its identity and pursue its mission by selecting leaders who share its fundamental beliefs.”

A university would never insist that College Democrats select a Republican as their president or require an environmental organization to accept a climate-change skeptic as its spokesperson. Religious organizations deserve the same freedom to choose leaders who can faithfully represent their principles.

Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), who introduced the Senate version with Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), framed the issue in appropriately constitutional terms:

“Freedom of religion, speech, and association are Constitutionally protected rights in every place in America, including America’s campuses. This bill makes clear that public colleges must grant religious student organizations the same rights as every other student group.”

The bill would codify a 2020 federal rule requiring the withdrawal of federal support from public colleges and universities that deny religious student organizations the rights available to comparable secular groups. It is backed by 47 organizations representing Christians, Jews, Muslims, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as well as First Amendment organizations.

Public universities should encourage a vigorous diversity of beliefs, not force religious students to surrender the defining characteristics of their organizations as the price of participating in campus life.
​
The committee has acted. The full House and Senate should follow.

Journalist Judith Miller recently published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal recounting her 2005 incarceration for protecting confidential sources. She says that her experience 21 years ago and the recent Air Force One subpoena drama involving The New York Times starkly illustrate that, then as now, internal Justice Department policies are not enough.

“Reporters – and the public,” she writes, “need a federal shield law” to protect confidential sources. In short, we need the PRESS Act.

Miller points out that “Justice Department guidelines call for issuing subpoenas to journalists only as a last resort and after a thorough investigation fails to determine the source of the leak,” she notes. Yet those guidelines were ignored: “These subpoenas were issued two days after the paper published the first of two stories about the Qatari-donated plane.”

The House unanimously passed the Act in 2024, but it died ignominiously in the Senate. Miller writes that current objections to the legislation are nothing new – and nothing to fear, because the PRESS Act fully accounts for them:

1. As for compromising information vital to national security, the Act “would permit subpoenas to journalists to identify a perpetrator of terrorism, or to prevent a threat of terrorism, imminent violence, significant bodily harm or death.”
   
   
2. Miller admits that a second concern is a more daunting problem to solve in the digital era – defining who is a “journalist.”
   
   

She writes that the PRESS Act mirrors state shield laws and defines “journalist” as broadly and democratically as possible, as “someone who ‘regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, investigates, or publishes news or information that concerns local, national or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public.’”

It’s a much-needed evolution that prevents government foxes from guarding the chicken coop and deciding “who qualifies and who doesn’t.” Just as importantly, Miller adds, the Act “excludes earlier definitions that required a journalist to earn a living from reporting or be employed by an institutional news organization.”

Finally, she issues an important reminder: press shields need not come in either Republican red or Democratic blue, as administrations from both parties are equal-opportunity offenders, particularly when it comes to using subpoenas as political weapons.
​
It would therefore be a mistake, Miller writes, to see the need for the PRESS Act and other protections “as a response to Mr. Trump’s obvious disdain for reporters. President Obama, who had promised to run the most ‘open’ and ‘transparent’ government possible, prosecuted more leak cases than all previous administrations combined.”

​When it comes to freedom of expression, the law cannot discriminate against viewpoints. The First Amendment is neutral, making it a guardrail against today’s speech police on the right and the left. As much as some might wish otherwise, the First Amendment contains no exception for regulations protecting dignity, flags, or anyone’s idea of speech that is reasonable or unreasonable.

Nor does the Constitution say anything about course catalogs at universities, as a Trump-appointed judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit reminded Florida last week. The state’s 2022 Stop WOKE Act restricted how public higher education institutions can teach students about ideas concerning race and gender.

Judge Britt C. Grant previously ruled that by “limiting its restrictions to a list of ideas designated as offensive, the Act targets speech based on its content,” and that by “barring only speech that endorses any of those ideas, it penalizes certain viewpoints – the greatest First Amendment sin.”

In last week’s appellate ruling, Judge Grant doubled down, calling the law “a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse.”

Viewpoint judgments will always provide slippery standards for would-be speech police. Viewpoints cannot be effectively controlled or legitimately adjudicated by law, or by official pressure campaigns and jawboning.

Protect The 1st has long been critical of the ideological monoculture on many U.S. campuses. The proper response to one-sided academic ideology, however, is not to pass laws that attempt to dictate countervailing ideology. Such efforts are doomed to fail, and not just in court. Attempting to legislate or regulate the inherently slippery nature of speech is a fool’s errand.
​
The best approaches must be cultural. It is perfectly legitimate for legislators and donors to pressure universities to open discussion to all sides by declaring their institutions neutral forums – the very kind of spaces that should flourish under the First Amendment.

​If you ever had the chance to get close to one of the standard U.S. Air Force Boeing 747s that often fly under the call sign Air Force One, you might have noticed some odd features you wouldn’t find on a commercial airliner.

Strange, iridescent lenses shimmer under the wings. Bulbs protrude from the lower body and wings. Weird antennas stick out here and there.

These are defensive measures meant to protect the president, his staff, and Air Force personnel from aerial assassination. The planes on which the president flies are equipped with infrared sensors that direct lasers to zap incoming missiles, as well as chaff and flare dispensers that can divert heat-seeking missiles away from the plane.

On Thursday, The New York Times reported that the new 747, gifted to the administration by Qatar, lacks much of the defensive suite found on the rest of the Air Force One fleet. It has also been reported that the plane is lacking much of the secure communications suite that would be critical in a global emergency.

Many of the new plane’s shortcomings are obvious.

The Times reported: “Different parts of the defensive systems are visible on the old Air Force One, under the wing of the plane and on its tail. They are not observable in photographs of the new Qatari plane.” The Times attributed this observation to an Air Force official who requested anonymity.

The Times also broke the story that President Trump, after attending a summit in Ankara, Turkey, was forced to fly on one of the older Air Force One models at the insistence of the Secret Service. Ankara is little more than an hour’s flight from Turkey’s border with Iran, whose regime has vowed to kill the president in retaliation for his strikes on its leadership.

On Friday, the administration reacted to this story by dispatching federal agents to the homes of four New York Times reporters who produced the story. They delivered subpoenas requiring the journalists to testify about their sources before a federal grand jury on Wednesday.

“The appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and press freedom it protects,” The Times quoted its newsroom lawyer, David McCraw, in a statement.

Protect the First’s Take on the Story

As an organization that defends the First Amendment, we find the unusual delivery of subpoenas to the homes of journalists heavy-handed, even goonish.

As this case proceeds, count us skeptical that the four subpoenaed Times reporters revealed information that eluded foreign adversaries. We presume that foreign intelligence analysts can compare photos of the new and older planes. We also presume that foreign intelligence agencies understood exactly why the president was forced to change planes to return home.

This story is a textbook example of why we need a free press to reveal government incompetence and malfeasance. If the president has been flying around the world on an unsafe plane, and hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent upgrading a Qatari plane that is still unsafe, that is information that the American people need to know.

Legal Jeopardy Remains

From the standpoint of the law, however, the position of the journalists is far from clear. If anything, this ongoing story reveals vulnerabilities in how federal law treats the press.

Under existing law, these reporters might face legal jeopardy if they received classified information about the security details of the plane. It is likely that they will refuse to divulge the names of their sources to the grand jury in New York on Wednesday. And if that happens, they will be subject to imprisonment. If you doubt this, consider the plight of former Times reporter Judith Miller, who spent 85 days behind bars.

What we take from this story is the need for a federal law, modeled after those in most U.S. states, that grants journalists limited protection for their confidential sources. The Protect Reporters from Excessive State Suppression Act is a bipartisan bill that has unanimously passed the U.S. House of Representatives. As with the state statutes, it would shield the confidential sources and notes of reporters from the prying eyes of prosecutors, with reasonable exceptions for emergencies.
​
Passage of the PRESS Act would not grant blanket protection to reporters who divulge classified information that endangers national security. But it would level the playing field, so that the government doesn’t hold all the cards, showing up on reporters’ doorsteps to play the heavy.

​A bill protecting reproductive and transgender healthcare services has become snagged in controversy in the New Jersey Assembly. But it is not the underlying philosophy of the bill that is generating controversy in this socially liberal blue state.

The problem is a clause in the bill that would criminalize, as “interference” with gender-affirming healthcare, speech that “would cause a reasonable person to suffer: (a) damage to the victim’s business or personal reputation; (b) financial harm; or (c) pain and suffering mental anguish or emotional harm.”

Really? You’re going to try to call out the police to impose polite speech in New Jersey?

The Garden State, after all, is the birthplace of Chelsea Handler and Joe Piscopo. It is where the irreverent Bostonian Bill Burr got his start in the business of being insultingly funny. Across the Hudson River lies the home of George Carlin, Don Rickles, and Andrew Dice Clay.
Good luck with that!

New Jersey Attorney CJ Griffin, who calls herself “an LGBT person,” told Dana DiFilippo of The New Jersey Monitor that while she applauds the intent of the bill, “you can’t unconstitutionally punish speech you don’t like … I get that lawmakers have constituents that are pushing very hard for this. But their biggest constituent needs to be the Constitution.”

The New Jersey Press Association also issued a statement urging legislators to remove this clause of the bill.

“Language around the vague term ‘reasonable person’ enables broad claims to ostensibly protect reputations or hurt feelings,” an association spokesman explained.

“For example, contrary to what the Constitution requires, the expansive language means a reporter could be civilly or criminally liable for publishing an article about the troubling practices of a reproductive healthcare services provider, even if the reporting was well-documented and fully accurate. A provider could simply assert his or her reputation or emotions were harmed by that truthful reporting.”

The slowdown of a bill that appeared to be fast-tracked indicates that second thoughts are taking place among the bill’s supporters about that clause. We would not be surprised to see the bill return with the speech-regulation clause removed.

This episode remains, however, a sobering reminder of how many people in positions of responsibility are still somehow able to graduate from high school, college, even law school, and not understand how the First Amendment operates.

The word “jawboning” was popularized by John Kenneth Galbraith during World War II. Galbraith picked up the term after witnessing bureaucrats at the federal Office of Price Administration using verbal intimidation to harass businesses into keeping their prices low.
 
The federal government no longer uses jawboning to control prices. But during the Biden administration it tried to do something much more sinister: use jawboning to control speech. At one time, teams of government agents – from the FBI to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency – were tasked with monitoring social media and contacting platforms to demand that certain content be taken down. What began as a crackdown on those who questioned the efficacy and safety of vaccines soon expanded to suppress wide range of conservative speech. Some sites, like PragerU, actually disappeared for a while from Google and YouTube, being placed in “restricted mode.”
 
“These people from the Biden administration would call up our team and scream at them and curse,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan on his podcast last year. As a result, many conservatives began to wonder why their posts and organizations were being shadowbanned, de-posted, deplatformed, and demonetized.
 
This dangerous use of secret power created a situation in which the federal government was actively managing the national conversation. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said last year:

“It is dangerous for the government to abuse its authority and act as the speech police. No free society, built on an informed citizenry and public discourse, can thrive when government censors lawful speech and sets itself up as the arbiter of truth. With growing bipartisan interest in protecting free speech, I am increasingly hopeful Congress can advance legislation to stop government jawboning and safeguard every American’s right to free speech.”
 
That bipartisan interest bore fruit. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) joined Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) to introduce the JAWBONE Act to stop federal agencies from pressuring social media and tech companies to censor lawful speech. The legislation aims to provide Americans with a robust legal right to sue and seek monetary damages if the government pressures platforms to remove, demonetize, or suppress their content. 
 
What the JAWBONE Act Does
 
The JAWBONE Act outright bans government coercion of platforms, whether it is to remove or add content. Observing the legal principle that a right without a remedy is no right at all, this bill contains a provision that gives Americans a private right of action against government officials who violate their First Amendment rights.
 
The bill would also compel the government to disclose its attempts at jawboning, revealing certain communications with social media and AI companies, and broadcasters.
 
This bill, as it moves forward, might be clarified on some points. For instance, does the ban on jawboning – which covers government officials and employees – extend to the president and vice president? Does it extend to Congress? After all, presidents can exert enormous power over platforms. Powerful committee chairs in Congress can issue subpoenas and launch investigations.
 
It is also not clear whether the bill would restrict the use of regulatory authority – like that exercised by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr and Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson – in pressuring news organizations to change their coverage.
 
But this bill meets the central and urgent task of confronting what has become a common practice – that of violating American norms and the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech.
 
Bob Goodlatte, former Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and PT1st Senior Policy Advisor, said:
 
“Protect The 1st is proud to endorse the JAWBONE Act, and we commend Senators Ted Cruz and Ron Wyden for crafting this legislation. This bill addresses the insidious, behind-the-scenes use of government pressure to control and censor speech in America. The JAWBONE Act counters this toxic trend, including with a sorely needed remedy for First Amendment violations. We look forward to working with the senators to advance this bill into law.”

​The First Amendment protects far more than freedom of the press. It protects the right of Americans to speak, associate, worship, petition the government, and express political views without fear that the government is secretly monitoring their activities.

Yet those freedoms are increasingly threatened by the government's growing reliance on administrative subpoenas – demands for records issued by executive branch agencies without prior approval from a judge.

Unlike traditional warrants, administrative subpoenas often allow agencies to obtain sensitive information without demonstrating probable cause or convincing a court that the request is justified. As Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) put it:

“Americans’ constitutional rights should not disappear just because they made a phone call or sent a text. Yet today, federal agencies can secretly demand your phone records and personal data from tech companies as often as they want without ever stepping inside a courtroom.”

The danger is not limited to privacy. It strikes at the heart of First Amendment freedoms.

Consider what modern communications records can reveal. Phone logs, text messages, email metadata, web browsing records, social media activity, and app usage can expose a person's political affiliations, religious beliefs, advocacy activities, friendships, and associations. Such records can reveal who attends a protest, communicates with a political campaign, seeks counseling from a religious leader, participates in a grassroots movement, or belongs to an unpopular organization.

The Supreme Court has long recognized that compelled disclosure of associations can chill free expression. Americans are less likely to speak freely, join controversial causes, or engage in political activism if they believe the government can secretly assemble a detailed picture of their activities without meaningful judicial oversight.

The risks are especially acute in an era when so much speech occurs through digital communications. A subpoena directed at a technology company can reveal not only what people say, but also who they communicate with, what they read, what videos they watch, and what causes they support.

Journalists are not the primary victims of this authority, but their experience illustrates how easily government access to records can chill protected expression.

Recent controversies involving government efforts to obtain reporters' records – including, most recently, subpoenas directed at reporters for The Wall Street Journal – have highlighted how authorities can expose confidential sources and chill investigative reporting. The Obama administration and the current Trump administration have used subpoenas issued by courts or grand juries to probe the notes and phone logs of reporters.

Are administrative subpoenas also being used to investigate journalists? Perhaps the better question is: How would we ever know?

Bob Goodlatte, former Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and a Senior Policy Advisor to Protect The 1st, aptly described the constitutional problem:

“The very term ‘administrative subpoena’ is an oxymoron that is offensive to the Fourth Amendment. It avoids judicial oversight and gives the executive branch the ability to make legitimate-sounding demands to inspect our houses, papers, effects, and data, when it is in fact just illicit government overreach.”

That is why Protect The 1st endorses the bipartisan Subpoena Abuse Prevention Act, sponsored by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), along with a bipartisan group of House members.

The legislation would require the government to obtain judicial approval before accessing phone records, require officials to certify under penalty of perjury that subpoenas are not being used to monitor protected speech, and prohibit bulk collection requests, such as demands for records identifying everyone who watched a particular video, visited a website, attended an online event, or downloaded a specific app.

These reforms would restore an essential constitutional safeguard – independent judicial review.

The Founders understood that freedom of speech, religion, the press, and association cannot survive if government officials possess unchecked power to identify critics, monitor dissenters, and map private networks of communication.
​
In an age when our political, personal, and religious lives increasingly exist in digital form, Congress should ensure that constitutional rights do not disappear whenever an agency decides to issue a subpoena.

​Freedom of expression withers when governments are always watching. Our First Amendment freedoms to think, speak, publish, and worship as we choose are strengthened by the privacy protections of the Fourth Amendment.

For this reason, defenders of the First Amendment have much at stake in the looming reauthorization debate over Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). This surveillance authority, which Congress enacted to allow the surveillance of foreign threats on foreign soil, has been used extensively by the FBI to conduct warrantless surveillance of Americans millions of times in the last five years.

Section 702 was last reauthorized with a two-year extension in April 2024 under the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA). It is now up for a reauthorization by April 20. Will the U.S. House reauthorize Section 702 the right way – by installing robust constitutional guardrails? Or will the House choose a “clean” reauthorization – rejecting all reform amendments – and continue to allow Americans’ personal communications to be swept up in a web of warrantless, at-will surveillance?

Protect The 1st General Counsel Gene Schaerr described how disregard of the Fourth Amendment has directly undermined the pillars of the First Amendment in testimony before Congress:
​

• Freedom of Religion: Under Section 702, the FBI illegally searched the communications of religious leaders who applied to the FBI's “Citizens Academy.” The FBI has shown an appetite to spy on the religious, from surveillance of “traditional radical Catholics” to Americans who attend their local mosque. If federal agencies can use collected data to generate comprehensive “religious dossiers” on every American, what’s next?

• Freedom of the Press: The expansion of what is called the “make-everyone-a-spy provision” under RISAA allows the government to force providers of office space, including landlords for media organizations, to facilitate warrantless surveillance. The FBI’s searches of journalists’ and political commentators’ communications have become a recurring practice.

• Freedom of Speech and Political Expression: “Backdoor searches” are another favorite FBI tactic – and when used to illegally surveil presidential campaigns and transitions, they amount to interference in political expression. Not to mention the warrantless search of the communications of 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign. “Political dossiers,” anyone? Better watch what you post on social media.

• Freedom of Assembly and Association: By purchasing sensitive digital data from brokers, the government acquires information that reveals Americans’ political activities and associations. Case in point: The FBI searched (without a judge-approved warrant) the communications of individuals participating in mass gatherings, specifically Black Lives Matter and January 6 protesters.

• The Right to Petition the Government: In a direct affront to citizens interacting with the justice system, the FBI conducted warrantless searches of victims who approached the Bureau to report crimes. The FBI also spied on a state judge who reported suspected civil rights violations committed by a local police chief.

As these examples illustrate, attempted reforms like RISAA in 2024 offered little in the way of meaningful guardrails on Section 702 operations. Congress has one more chance to get this right. The House must legally require government agents to obtain a warrant to search through Americans’ communications, with reasonable exceptions for emergencies.

Given that 80 percent of Congress’s constituents want these changes to become law, it seems like it should be easy. This is the time to reinforce that the “consent of the governed” still matters.

​Rumors have swirled on Capitol Hill that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is drafting legislation to let Americans – whether skeptics of the COVID-19 origin story or late-night talk show hosts – sue the government for monetary damages when they are censored.

Sen. Cruz has now confirmed that he is indeed crafting such a bill, one that would create new legal remedies for those silenced by government pressure. His bill would also restrict “jawboning” – the process by which officials pressure social media companies or news outlets to suppress disfavored views. The Senate Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee, which Cruz chairs, held a hearing Wednesday that explored government censorship and how to stop it.

• The first witness was famed legal scholar and Protect The 1st Senior Legal Advisor Eugene Volokh, who presented testimony explaining that “jawboning” can be defined benignly as an act of persuasion. It can also be:

“Government officials trying to coerce through the explicit or implicit threat of retaliation stemming from their position of authority, e.g., through the threat of enforcement or regulation. As a practical matter, the two meanings are closely intertwined, especially since it may be hard to tell whether there is an implicit ‘or else’ behind a request.”

Volokh raised the subtle issue of precisely defining what constitutes government coercion. Sen. Cruz emphasized the “or else” threats implicit in jawboning campaigns by powerful government agencies. On the other hand, Volokh asserted, no law should restrict the ability of government officials to communicate with journalists. For example, a White House press secretary should be allowed to tell journalists that they got a story wrong.

But Volokh made it clear – citing a strong line of legal precedent – that “a government official cannot do indirectly what she is barred from doing directly.” Quoting from the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous opinion in NRA v. Vullo, he said “a government official cannot coerce a private party to punish or suppress disfavored speech on her behalf.”

• Sean Davis, executive director of The Federalist, gave a vivid account of what it feels like to be on the receiving end of speech coercion. Davis described the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) and how it targeted domestic news outlets:

“Despite the fact that GEC was explicitly prohibited by both the U.S. Constitution via the First Amendment and by the very statute which created and authorized the agency from targeting domestic speech, it nonetheless sought to drive us out of business by funding, developing, and distributing technologies and tools to reduce our reach, by bullying advertisers into blacklisting us and many other conservative outlets, and by coercing Big Tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google to throttle access to our content. In essence, our own government secretly and without any due process charged us with thought crimes, convicted us, and sentenced The Federalist to death.”

• Alex Berenson, journalist and author – whose reporting on COVID-19 was censored by Twitter – testified that social media companies did not want to censor users, but acted out of fear of the government. (The same dynamic is visible today when the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission publicly hints at regulatory action against broadcasters who air views he dislikes.)

About his ordeal, Berenson reflected on the dilemma of social media companies: 

“They viewed having to sacrifice speech from some users as the price they had to pay to stay in the administration’s good graces. Every company faces this calculus, whether a Democrat or Republican is in the White House.”

No American should have to calculate that one’s protected speech might trigger censorship or a regulatory crackdown.

Eugene Volokh added a grace note with a personal reflection that underscored the stakes. Fifty years ago to this day, he said, his parents brought him out of the Soviet Union.
​
Volokh concluded simply, that he wanted to “thank the United States of America for letting me in.”

​President Trump last week issued several executive orders that command AI developers to refrain from building in “ideological biases or social agendas” in their artificial intelligence services. The orders deploy the federal government’s procurement power to enforce ideological neutrality on AI Large Language Models (LLMs).
 
The president’s concern is understandable. Google’s AI image-generator Gemini, in an effort to provide racial and gender balance, portrayed both the American founders and Nazi soldiers as Black, the Pope as female, and National Hockey League players as women.
 
What was going on here?
 
“Well, it turned out that Google was aware that Gemini’s data, which draws from the entire internet, was flawed,” said Bobby Allyn, an NPR technology correspondent. “It perpetuated stereotypes. There are more images of male doctors than female doctors. There are more photos of white CEOs than executives of color. So every time someone asked for an image, Google placed secret code into the request that basically said, make the images more diverse.”
 
What had begun as a commendable tweak turned into a monstrous distortion of reality. Conservatives note that LLMs are also apt to give progressive answers on controversial social issues. One conservative reported that ChatGPT refused to create an argument for how fossil fuels enhance human civilization. It was willing to write poems extolling former President Biden but not one about President Trump.
 
On the other hand, when we asked ChatGPT about the 1619 Project, which asserts that America’s true founding began with the importation of slaves and not the Declaration of Independence in 1776, it answered: “The claim that America's ‘real founding’ was in 1619 is a provocative reinterpretation, not a universally accepted historical fact.” We would score that as a solid and unbiased answer.
 
So what is going on with the more biased answers? LLMs compose responses extracted from terabytes of public and copyrighted material vacuumed up from the internet. It is all too easy to forget that humans originate AI’s raw material. It necessarily absorbs the biases of society, of the right as well as the left. The old saying about computer programming – “garbage in, garbage out” – should apply to the contents of the human brain as well.
 
We also do not preclude the built-in biases the president’s executive order aims at. Whether ChatGPT or X, the design parameters often reflect the views of their creators.
 
Though the president’s executive orders aim at a real problem, his approach has two flaws. The first is that when the government uses its purchasing power to manage speech, it is clearly encroaching on First Amendment territory. Over the years, government influence over AI could bend this technology in one political direction or another.
 
This points to the second problem – that language is slippery. The 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein warned against the “bewitchment of our intelligence” by language. Words are simply too malleable and subject to interpretation to codify under an order. What are the boundaries of “woke”? Where does the ideological hobbyhorses of the DEI movement end and a simple dedication to racial fairness begin?
 
These are real questions that no government regulation could or should answer. Only time, criticism, free markets, and free speech can do that.

In recent years, we’ve chronicled the rising tide of states – 18 now, with recent legislative victories in Texas and New Hampshire – that have embraced universal school choice.

But what about parents who live the other 32 states? Thanks to decisive action in Congress (yes, you read that correctly), the ability of parents to choose high-quality private schools, whether religiously based schools, STEM-oriented or arts-centered, will gradually increase.

Congress – with the leadership of Rep. Adrian Smith, chairman of the subcommittee of jurisdiction on Ways & Means in the House, and Sen. Bill Cassidy in the Senate – passed the Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA) just before the July 4th holiday. This bill made available a 100-percent federal income tax credit of $1,700 for donors. This credit is available to donors in all 50 states to support scholarship-granting organizations that allow parents to send their children to a high-quality private school.

There are several aspects of this new law that will transform the American educational landscape from the national level, as governors are doing in the states.

• This tax credit is permanent. It would take a future act of Congress to undo it, something that once granted would be politically difficult to achieve.

 

• It will only take future amendments to the law to increase the tax credit and to broaden the base of donors to include businesses and other well-resourced groups.

 

• The law does limit scholarships to students who live in states in which the governor or designated agency under state law decides to opt-in to the program. But nothing keeps donors living in an “opt-out” state from donating to scholarship organizations around the country.

 

• Even in states in which politicians have been hostile to school choice it will be difficult for governors to turn down free money from the federal government to support private schools options in-state.

We again quote a recent Chicago Tribune editorial, where politicians have long been resistant to competition in education:

“Opponents of school choice believe that education is a zero-sum game, and that private schools are a threat to the public system. We believe the opposite – that a thriving private and charter system and a strong traditional public system create an educational ecosystem that can serve everyone’s needs. There are things private schools can do that public ones can’t, and the same is very much true in reverse.

“School choice remains popular in Illinois, with a clear majority of residents supporting the concept.”

With polls showing overwhelming support for school choice among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, expect to see intense pressure from parents to allow these scholarships in every state.

Another big win came with the passage and signing into law of the Student Empowerment Act, which expands 529 plans – a tax-advantaged investment account designed to encourage saving for future education expenses, such as college or K-12 tuition – to help families save for public, private, religious, and homeschool students and families.

• This bill – passed with the leadership of Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. Kevin Hern – will allow parents to transfer any unused funds in a 529 account from leftover college expenses to, for example, the private religious elementary school of grandchildren.

These two measures, coupled with the rising tide of states that have embraced universal school choice, show that the school choice movement – and its support for First Amendment values – is not only here to stay, but to grow as well.

• Both the ECCA and the Student Empowerment Act give religious schools the same access to these programs as any other kind of private school.

​
With victories in the states and in Washington D.C., the national success of the school choice movement now appears to only be a matter of time.

Protect The 1st applauded the Senate’s passage of landmark school choice legislation with tax credits as part of the president’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”
 
“A seemingly small provision in the budget reconciliation bill passed by the Senate will uplift American school children and promote the future health of our nation,” said Bob Goodlatte, former Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and Senior Policy Advisor for Protect The 1st. “With support from the House, for the first time in American history the right of parents to choose the best school for their children will be supported by a federal tax credit.
 
“This day is a great achievement by Sen. Majority Leader John Thune, Senate Finance Chairman Mike Crapo, supported by the longtime leadership of Sen. Bill Cassidy and Sen. Tim Scott,” Goodlatte said. “Their leadership, along with Sen. Ted Cruz, made the day.”
 
Gene Schaerr, Protect The 1st general counsel, said: “The measure is the mustard seed that is sure to grow into a sheltering tree. With 19 states having passed some form of universal school choice, this national bill will facilitate private school scholarships that will elevate the lives of American students and their families for decades to come.
 
“These scholarships will allow children from low-income households to have access to quality education previously reserved for well-to-do families,” Schaerr said. “And it will allow families to exercise their First Amendment rights by selecting the quality religious or secular school of their choice.”
 
Goodlatte added: “The House, having passed this once, now has the happy duty of advancing the measure in its current form and getting it to President Trump’s desk.”

The Senate Finance Committee just released its text for the budget reconciliation bill, a.k.a. the One, Big, Beautiful Bill. The text (see p. 168) builds upon the provisions the House passed a few weeks ago for a national federal scholarship, the Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA).

The Senate language creates $4 billion a year in permanent tax credits that grant 100 percent, non-refundable credits against individual income taxes for donations to qualified scholarship granting organizations. These scholarships would be available for student families to pay for private-school tuition, books, and teaching materials for home schooling expenses, and educational therapies for children with disabilities.

“Credit goes to all the energetic supporters of this bill in the Senate Finance Committee, including Finance Chairman Mike Crapo and the bill’s sponsors, Sen. Bill Cassidy and Sen. Tim Scott,” said Bob Goodlatte, Senior Policy Advisor to Protect The 1st and former Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. “Of course, the Senate and the House will need to work out a few differences. Then the way should be clear to get it to the president’s desk.
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“Those who support this bill will be aligning themselves with the supermajorities of Americans of both parties who want families to have options in the quality and character of their children’s education,” Goodlatte said. “Abundant evidence shows that competition in education is proven to improve the quality of public schools, and it is certainly in the best interests of America’s schoolchildren.”

​Sen. Tim Scott’s latest legislative effort – the High-Quality Charter Schools Act – should be welcomed by anyone who values liberty, educational opportunity, and the full expression of our First Amendment rights. The South Carolina Republican is introducing a 75 percent federal tax credit for charitable donations to nonprofit charter school organizations with proven excellence. The aim is clear – to break down the financial barriers that prevent communities from opening the schools their children need.
 
“No matter their background, race or zip-code, every child deserves access to a good school,” Sen. Scott said in his introduction of this bill. “Millions of families – including thousands across South Carolina – choose charter schools for the high-quality education they provide.” He said that this bill will strengthen the best educational opportunities for families that need it the most.
 
For Protect The 1st, this bill isn’t just sound policy. It is a way to fulfill the promise of the First Amendment. Parents have a right, grounded in part in that Amendment, to guide their children’s education in ways that reflect their values and beliefs across generations. School choice empowers families to act on that right, whether through religious schools, charter schools, or other educational models.
 
The First Amendment protects both free speech and religious liberty. School choice legislation like this honors both. It enables families to seek out educational environments – secular or religious – that align with their convictions, without government interference.
 
We’ve seen this principle in action with the Educational Choice for Children Act. That measure, now part of the reconciliation package before the Senate, would offer similar tax credits for donations to organizations that fund scholarships for private and religious schools. It’s about using private donations to give families more options and students better chances. In Sen. Scott’s bill and the ECCA, money comes from voluntary donations, not state tax dollars.
 
Moreover, contrary to arguments by critics, there is abundant evidence showing that competition from school choice actually improves public schools. Out of 28 studies that explored the causal relationship between school choice and the performance of public schools, 25 found that school choice improves educational attainment in traditional school systems. “In terms of social-scientific validity, that’s a slam dunk,” writes Alexander William Salter, economist at Texas Tech University. When families have options, everyone wins.
 
Sen. Scott’s focus on charter schools adds another dimension, supporting schools that often serve low-income and minority students. It offers alternatives where the public system has failed. Sen. Scott’s bill respects American pluralism and helps close the gap between educational ideals and the lived reality of American families. Perhaps most important, it gives parents greater control over the destiny of their children. It does this by supporting institutions – charter, religious, and independent – that reflect America’s diversity while enabling the fullest exercise of the First Amendment.

​Under the leadership of Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo.), the House Ways and Means Committee approved the Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA) on Wednesday as part of the tax package in President Trump’s “big, beautiful” reconciliation bill. This measure provides $20 billion in tax credits over the next four years to non-profit Scholarship Granting Organizations to pay private school tuition and educational materials for children throughout the United States.
 
“This is hopeful news for millions of American students and their parents,” said Bob Goodlatte, former Congressman and Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Senior Policy Advisor to Protect The 1st. “Giving parents the ability to choose the best school for their children is a powerful expression of the First Amendment across the generations. Whether parents choose a private school that specializes in the sciences and technology, or the arts, or a religious school, they are free to make the best choice for their children.
 
“Our gratitude goes to Chairman Smith and all of his colleagues who stood behind the ECCA,” Goodlatte said. “We are also grateful to the followers of Protect The 1st who answered our call to let House Members know how important this legislation is to the families and children of America.
 
“We urge more Members to get behind the passage of this bill by the full House and the Senate, and its delivery to the president’s desk.”

​James G. Blaine is little remembered today, but in post-Civil War America he bestrode the American political landscape like a colossus. A U.S. Senator, Speaker of the House, Secretary of State, and Republican nominee for President, Blaine (derided by Democrats as the “continental liar from the State of Maine”) was one of those figures – like Daniel Webster or Henry Clay – who were more significant than many presidents.
 
Blaine’s legacy lives on as eponymous “Blaine Amendments” – language in state constitutions that prohibits public funding for schools run by religious organizations. These are the children of Blaine’s proposed but failed U.S. constitutional amendment crafted when many Americans panicked about Irish and Italian immigrants, corrupting America with their “Romanism.” The blatantly anti-Catholic purpose of Blaine’s proposal came at a time when most public schools had an overtly Protestant bent.
 
Blaine amendments are now in the constitutions of 37 states. They remain consequential, denying equal access to public funding for schools run by the Catholic Church and other religious organizations that meet state-mandated standards in English, science, math, and other core subjects.
 
This is problematic for South Carolina, which recently passed the Education Savings Trust Fund Act, which would have allowed low-income families to use state-provided scholarships for private school tuition. But the South Carolina Constitution prohibits using public funds for the “direct benefit” of private educational institutions. The South Carolina Supreme Court was forced to strike down this school voucher program, dealing a harsh blow to families seeking educational freedom.
 
That decision has left families scrambling to find alternatives after their financial support was cut off mid-school year. David Warner, a South Carolina father, described the ruling as “a kick in the stomach,” knowing he now has to tell his son in sixth grade he can no longer afford the school he loves.
 
Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), a vocal advocate for school choice, has called school choice the “civil rights issue of our time.” His words resonate with many South Carolina families who view school choice not just as an educational policy, but as a step toward opportunity and empowerment. For many, the local public school might not provide an environment for their children that allows for the transmission of their values. Many public schools are often not even safe.
 
The Protect The 1st Foundation in our amicus brief explained the civil rights principles at stake in this program before the South Carolina Supreme Court. Our brief told the court that the scholarship program “promotes the exercise of First Amendment-protected religious and speech rights by enabling families who could not otherwise afford to do so to choose among a wide variety of schools and find those that align with their own varied beliefs and values …
 
“It is no surprise, then,” Protect The 1st explained, “that the data show that school choice programs like the one challenged here lead to higher graduation rates, better test scores, and greater civic engagement – not only for students who receive scholarships through the program, but also for students who choose to remain in public schools.”
 
If this sounds improbable, consider the research of Alexander William Salter, an economics professor at Texas Tech University. Salter reports that out of 28 studies that explore the link between school choice and district-school outcomes, “25 found that school choice improves educational attainment in traditional school systems. In terms of social-scientific validity, that’s a slam-dunk.”
 
For now, the South Carolina court’s decision closes the door on a program that gave 5,000 students a chance to explore other educational opportunities. Yet, while the court acknowledged there is public demand for school choice, it also pointed out that any change must come from amending the state constitution.
 
South Carolina has amended its constitution 100 times since 1974, including twice in 2022. But even if the Palmetto State removes its Blaine Amendment and opens the way forward for needy children to get a quality education, there will be 36 other states in which quality schools that meet state standards are officially discriminated against.
 
Congress can resolve this matter by overriding Blaine Amendments, enshrining recent U.S. Supreme Court opinions (Espinoza v. Montana and Carson v. Makin) into national law. That ought to be issue one for Speaker Mike Johnson, the new Senate Majority Leader John Thune, and Education Secretary nominee Linda McMahon.