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Mike Pence could not have asked for a more welcoming audience. For nearly 30 minutes, the man who served as Donald J. Trump’s vice president was repeatedly applauded as he offered a vigorous affirmation of his support for Israel at a conference of mostly conservative Jewish leaders in midtown Manhattan.

He barely paused when his questioner, Zvika Klein, the editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post, asked Mr. Pence, an evangelical Christian, to lead the room in prayer for the Israeli hostages captured by Hamas on Oct. 7. “It would be my great honor: Let us pray,” he said.

His invocation drew applause and shouts of “Amen.”

In the seven months since he dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination, in the face of inevitable defeats in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, Mr. Pence has been seeking out friendly audiences like this one as he embarks on a mission to resuscitate his political career. But just as importantly, he is presenting himself as the guardian of the conservative traditions of a Republican Party that he grew up with and that have since been redefined by Mr. Trump.

He has begun turning up on high-profile television interviews to criticize Mr. Trump’s position on abortion, in one example. He announced that his political advocacy group would spend $20 million this year on appearances and advertisements that promote endangered conservative positions on issues including tariffs, government spending and America’s role in the world.

Mr. Pence is the most prominent Republican in the nation to declare that he would not endorse Mr. Trump, the man who chose Mr. Pence when he was governor of Indiana and put him in the White House. And he has made clear that, at the age of 65, he is not foreclosing another bid for the presidency.

“The role I want to play is to be a champion for a broad, mainstream conservative agenda that’s defined the Republican Party since the days of Ronald Reagan,” he said in an interview before his appearance at the conference. “I see some evidence that some voices in and around our party are departing from that — I want my voice, my organization, to be an anchor to windward.”

With his low-key, Midwestern presence, Mr. Pence stands in sharp contrast with the Republican Party of today, personified by Mr. Trump and, for that matter, by Mr. Bannon. In the interview, Mr. Pence, speaking softly as he settled on a couch, seemed taken aback by the suggestion that he had become an island in his own party, a Republican Robinson Crusoe standing alone as Mr. Trump remakes their party in his name.

“I hope not,” he said. “I hope I’m on a continent. I’m where I’ve always been since I joined the Republican Party.”

“When I was running for president, people would often say, ‘Mike Pence’s problem is that he’s running in a Republican Party that doesn’t exist anymore,’” Mr. Pence said. “That wasn’t my experience. Everywhere I went on the campaign trail, people, whether they were supporting the former president or supporting someone else, almost invariably would say, ‘I appreciate what you stand for.’ I’m convinced that this is still a conservative party.”

Yet the signs of his isolation are abundant. Mr. Pence said he had not spoken to Mr. Trump “for a long time.” Republicans say it is unlikely that he will be offered a prominent speaking spot when the party gathers for its convention this July in Milwaukee. A YouGov/Economist poll from March found that 52 percent of Republicans had an unfavorable view of Mr. Pence, compared with 42 percent who had a favorable view of the former vice president.

And despite the way he recalled his reception on the presidential trail, Mr. Pence never broke out of the single digits in most of the early polls, even with the advantage of being a former vice president. He was forced to drop out of the race before he even made it to Iowa.

The notion of a former vice president not supporting the president he served is so extraordinary that President Biden invoked it in a sharp-edged joke at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner this year.

By contrast, Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, and Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, who both drew far more support in their own unsuccessful bids for the Republican presidential nomination, said they would vote for Mr. Trump. Mr. Pence said he would not vote for Mr. Biden, but would not say who he might support.

“I like Mike very much — I strongly recommended him to Trump in ’16,” said Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House. But he said: “Mike Pence now finds himself in a party that sounds different than it used to while appealing to a constituency that is different from two years ago. And unfortunately for Mike, that tends to drive him into a corner. At his current trajectory, he is going to shrink down into the Never Trump vote.”

“There is no future in the Republican Party in being the anti-Trump,” Mr. Gingrich said.

Mr. Pence has walked a fine line as he has sought in these past months to distinguish himself — and criticize — a figure as enormously popular in the party as Mr. Trump, a former ally who is trying to muscle Mr. Pence out of the spotlight.

In the interview, Mr. Pence denounced the case against Mr. Trump that led to his convictions on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a $130,000 hush-money payment to a porn star. “I expect his felony convictions will be overturned. This case should never have been brought.”

But at the Jerusalem Post forum, he barely talked about Mr. Trump other than to link himself to Mr. Trump’s decision, as popular in this room as the former president himself, to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Mr. Pence argued that it is Mr. Trump who has changed over these past four years, drifting away from traditional Republican positions.

“On a whole range of issues, I have seen the president running on an agenda that’s different than what we governed on,” Mr. Pence said. “I see the president moving in the direction of some of the isolationist voices in our party. Or the national debt — he never even tried to reform the entitlements that represented 85 percent of our federal spending.”

Mr. Pence has been particularly vocal in assailing Mr. Trump on abortion. While Mr. Pence and many other conservatives are pushing for a national ban on the procedure, Mr. Trump has called for leaving restrictions to the states. Mr. Pence’s position has earned him some admirers in important corners of the Republican coalition.

“He’s the steady rudder of the pro-life movement among Republican leaders,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a leading group opposing abortion rights. “He doesn’t change. He has never been a person who was testing the winds.”

Ms. Dannenfelser, whose organization is supporting Mr. Trump this November, said Mr. Pence would have a well of support from abortion opponents should he decide to return to politics in a post-Trump world.

“On the other side of this coming presidential race, there will have to be a gut check,” she said. “And he would be an important and essential part of that gut check.”

Tim Chapman, a senior adviser to Mr. Pence’s advocacy group, said that the former vice president saw himself as “a keeper of the flame during a pretty tumultuous time on the right.”

The Biden administration is shattering records in all the wrong ways. From the surge of illegal migrants overwhelming our border, to the alarming rise in crime rates across America’s largest cities and skyrocketing inflation, the American people are witnessing the real-time, unprecedented consequences of Biden’s failed policies.

A new report from Advancing American Freedom shows the economy in particular has suffered devastating setbacks, with inflation hitting 40-year highs and prices skyrocketing nearly 18% since the day President Joe Biden took office, leaving American families paying $15,133 more each year for the same necessities.

What’s worse, the Biden team is poised to expand an already ballooning administrative state, pushing costs on to the U.S. taxpayer. His regulatory agenda is spiraling out of control, posing a serious threat to American prosperity.

The harsh reality of life under Biden stands in stark contrast to the achievements of the Trump-Pence administration. Gone are the days of the lowest unemployment rate in half a century, with income rising in every metro area, and record low unemployment for African Americans, Hispanics, and veterans.

Under Trump-Pence, small business optimism broke a 35-year record, and American households saw an extra $3,100 every year thanks to the elimination of unnecessary regulations, striking eight old regulations for every one new regulation. Before a global pandemic unleashed historic destruction around the world, the U.S. economy was achieving record success as a direct result of the Trump-Pence administration’s pro-growth policies.

Over the past few years, the Biden administration has done its best to chip away at these hard-won gains. Biden has already overturned three-quarters of former President Donald Trump’s historic deregulatory actions. After repealing 98 environmental deregulation policies from the Trump-Pence administration, Biden added 102 environmental regulations of his own and proposed 71 more.

He’s “mobilized even far-flung agencies” to focus on his green agenda, mandating that the federal government find ways to “erase its carbon footprint by 2050.” As part of his climate agenda, Biden has proposed over 100 regulations to enforce new mandates on common household appliances while pushing sweeping changes in vehicle fuel efficiency standards on cars used by everyday Americans.

Since taking office, Biden has implemented over 209 Economically Significant Rules, already far surpassing predecessors in the last four decades. In total, the Biden administration has rolled out nearly 900 final rules, with a significant portion released in the first four months of 2024 alone.

Administering so much regulation has required a gross expansion of the federal bureaucracy. Over the course of 20 years, executive branch civilian employment has seen a steady increase, from around 1 million in 2000 to 2.2 million employees by 2021. However, the bureaucracy has ballooned at a particularly alarming rate under Biden.

The Biden team is now sending the bill for big government to hardworking Americans. The President’s regulatory actions in 2022 alone were projected to cost American taxpayers roughly $10,000 per household. Biden regulation has increased the cost of essential items such as household appliances by thousands of dollars, while vehicle emissions regulations and efforts to promote electric vehicles have artificially inflated the average price of a new car.

Looking ahead, projections estimate that the Biden administration’s regulations will cause over $1 trillion to be spent over the next decade. Most of the American people’s hard-earned wages are no longer going toward rent, groceries or their children’s education, but toward lining the pockets of D.C. bureaucrats and their extreme liberal ideological agenda.

Unfortunately, even harder times may lie ahead for the American people. This ballooning regulation comes as Biden plans to end the Trump-Pence 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), the largest overhaul of the federal tax system in over three decades.

The TCJA’s historic tax relief provisions spurred job creation, increased real wages, boosted the economy and expanded opportunities for millions of Americans. Ending it now threatens to undo these vital gains, especially in such uncertain economic times.

As American businesses struggle under crushing regulations, Biden’s promise to reverse the TCJA and hike the corporate tax rate will deliver a final death blow to an already crippled business environment and, ultimately, the economy.

This course is unsustainable for our country and unfair to the American people. The Biden administration’s overreach only serves to grow executive branch power, not the U.S. economy.

With Americans barely able to afford necessities in this economy, President Biden appears unwavering in his desire to grow the government on the backs of their hard work. We know the policies of the Trump-Pence administration led to higher wages, more jobs, and greater opportunity for all. Under Biden’s watch, the American dream is slipping away, drowned in a sea of regulations and economic mismanagement.

Read more here on FoxNews.com.

May 17th. 2024

Mike Pence is not on Plan A. “I was expecting to be in the fourth year of our second term, at this point,” the former vice president tells me in the D.C. office of his nonprofit organization, Advancing American Freedom (AAF). “But the American people and the good Lord had other plans. So, we’re just trusting in that.”

The AAF suite is located on Pennsylvania Avenue, a short walk from the White House. Pence’s office features a large mahogany desk, on which lie a stack of his memoirs and an open Bible. On one side is an American flag, on the other a framed map of Indiana. Behind the desk is a bookcase featuring family photos, a Reagan bust, and memorabilia from the Trump administration.

On the wall hangs a photograph of the White House Situation Room on October 26, 2019, during the killing of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. It features Robert O’Brien, Pence, Trump, Mark Esper, Mark Milley, and Marcus Evans and is signed in an unmistakable black scrawl, Donald J. Trump. It hangs above a stand-alone brown leather chair. Later, I’m informed that it’s Pence’s cabinet chair, purchased as a gift by all his staff and presented to him after January 6.

In 2016, Pence was sold as the vice-presidential pick who could smooth out some of Trump’s rougher edges. In person, you remember why. His manner is quietly assured. He listens intently and thinks carefully before he speaks. Yet the partnership was forged on more than personality.

“I joined the national ticket because I sensed there was alignment between the policies that have defined my career and what candidate Donald Trump was advocating,” Pence says. Back then, Trump was committed to a conservative agenda — a “centerpiece” of which was the “commitment to advance the right to life through policy and judicial appointments.”

Pence gives Trump due “credit” for his “determination to do the things we said we would do in the campaign.” But relations between them soured after they left office. January 6 is the obvious turning point, when Trump asked Pence to “put him over the Constitution” and thereby disqualified himself, in Pence’s view, from future office. These days, however, Pence has more to say about their policy disagreements.

On fiscal policy, he accuses “the former president and, frankly, many Republicans in Congress” of adopting “the same posture” toward entitlements as President Biden. On foreign policy, he says that Trump is “signaling more openness to the rising tide of Republican isolationism” — a stark move away from “what defined our administration.”

Take Trump’s recent wobble on the Chinese ownership of TikTok. In response, Pence and his colleagues at AAF launched a $2 million ad campaign ahead of a Senate vote on legislation that would force either a sale or a shutdown of the company. After the bill passed, Trump stated: “Just so everyone knows, especially the young people, Crooked Joe Biden is responsible for banning TikTok.” Pence, meanwhile, penned a letter thanking every member of Congress who had voted for the bill, according to the New York Post.

Pence’s decision not to endorse his former running mate is unusual. Even, some would say, unsporting. To qualify for the GOP-primary debates, Pence, along with the other candidates, signed a pledge to “honor the will of the primary voters and support the [Republican presidential] nominee in order to save our country and beat Joe Biden.”

The Washington Post reports that those close to Pence have a letter-of-the-law justification, pointing out that “the written pledge said ‘support,’ not ‘endorse’ like a similar document in 2015.” When I ask about this, Pence simply reasserts the reasons he will not endorse Trump: “principled differences” related to January 6, foreign and fiscal policy, and “the cause of life.”

During the Trump administration, there was a clear and unifying aim in pro-life politics. Appoint to the Supreme Court originalist justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. With that goal achieved, the more daunting task of persuading the American people would begin. Yet some Republicans have given up before they’ve tried. Pence views Trump as chief among the quitters.

In April, a piece that Pence penned for the New York Times bore the title “Donald Trump Has Betrayed the Pro-life Movement.” The article itself is generally more temperate: Trump has “retreated” from his commitment, or “walked away” from it; he’s “leading other Republicans astray.” More harshly, on social media Pence described Trump’s recent statements that abortion should be left to the states as “a slap in the face” to pro-life Americans.

“To restore the sanctity of life back to the center of American law, you have to remain clear with the American public that that’s the objective,” Pence tells me. “You have to have moral clarity in saying abortion is wrong.”

So far, Trump has delivered moral ambiguity. In his abortion message in April, the former president said, “At the end of the day, this is all about the will of the people” and “You must follow your heart on this issue.” He recently told Time magazine, “I’m leaving everything up to the states.” Everything?

Even the former president’s position on late-term abortions appears to have weakened. In 2018, Trump said he “strongly supported” a 20-week national ban. Now, he has said he wouldn’t even sign such a bill if it reached his desk. He has described himself as “the most pro-life president in American history.” And yet he has criticized Florida for its “terrible” heartbeat bill and said, when reporters asked whether the Arizona state supreme court went “too far” in recognizing its pre-Roe near-total abortion ban, “Yeah, they did and that will be straightened out.” He said:

And now the states have it, and the states are putting out what they want. It’s the will of the people. So Florida’s probably going to change. Arizona is definitely going to change. Everybody wants that to happen. And you’re getting the will of the people. It’s been pretty amazing.

Everybody? Some pro-lifers remain optimistic that Trump’s rhetoric is just an election strategy and that — should Trump win in November — he would roll back the Biden administration’s pandemic-era policy of allowing abortion pills to be prescribed by telehealth, as well as make use of the Comstock Act to prevent abortion drugs and equipment from being sent through the mail to states where the practice is outlawed.

But Trump has made no such promises. Were he to win in November, pro-lifers would need him more than he needs them. Pence explains: “Part of what animated my run for president was that I’ve tried without success to convey to people that the former president was not running [this time] on the agenda we governed [by]. And I know him well enough to know that he’ll do what he says he’s gonna do.”

To Pence, the Supreme Court returned the issue of abortion not only to the states but to the American people: “And the American people elect governors and state representatives. They also elect presidents and congressmen and senators.” He cites Governor Brian Kemp’s six-week bill and reelection: Kemp won “decisively in the most competitive governor’s race in the country.” He notes that Governor Mike DeWine in Ohio “won in a landslide” despite favoring a six-week ban. And in general he dismisses as “left-wing spin” the claim that the pro-life movement has become a major political liability. As for the 2022 midterms, “the common denominator that I saw in 2022 is candidates that were focused on relitigating the past did not fare well,” he explains, referring to campaigns that stressed Trump’s claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. Candidates “focused on the future did fine.”

“There’s two ways to do public life,” Pence says. “Number one is, You can tell people what your values are. Tell them what your vision is. And then if you win the election, you go stand for those things.” Alternatively, you can try to “calculate the least defensive pathway for getting into office and then try to calculate what you can accomplish.” True leadership, Pence says, largely consists of the former.

Pence cites majority support, 72 percent of Americans, for restricting abortion after an unborn child can experience pain. He points to Europe, where restrictions are common after 15 weeks and, in some countries, even after twelve. “Surely we could have a minimum national standard that didn’t leave unborn children to the devices of the radical Left in California and Illinois and New York.”

But is a nationwide minimum standard politically achievable? Many, including the former president, have dismissed the idea as a nonstarter in Congress. “How do you know?” Pence says. “It’s that old saying, ‘You don’t know till you try.’” Even if Congress proves obstructive, “what a president should do is go to the American people with the moral, the legal, the intellectual, the historical case for life.”

Whatever criticisms he has of his party or its leadership, Pence emphasizes that “the real gap in all this is between the party that is arguing over where we solve the problem” and “another party that literally believes in abortion on demand up until the moment of birth and supports taxpayer-funded abortion.” He illustrates the point by noting that he was the first vice president since Roe to visit a crisis-pregnancy center, adding that “my successor just distinguished herself as being the first vice president to visit an abortion clinic.”

“I don’t think, in my lifetime, I have ever seen a wider gulf on a more important issue than between the Democratic Party’s position and the Republican position,” he adds. Nevertheless, in the absence of stronger pro-life leadership, the Overton window may have opened further for abortion extremism on the left. Pro-life Americans may find themselves faced with a choice between a party that favors all abortions and one that tends towards the European-style consensus: legal in the first trimester, with exceptions and loopholes for later stages. Though whether they are single-issue voters is another matter.

Pence has also been outspoken about an adjacent life issue, in vitro fertilization. In April, he co-authored a piece with John Mize for the Wall Street Journal in which he criticized the rashness of the Alabama GOP state legislature in granting total immunity for embryo destruction to IVF clinics after the state supreme court ruled that embryos were legal persons under the state’s wrongful-death statute.

“To me, the objective is how we preserve access to fertility treatments but create a framework around that which recognizes the rights and interests of parents and protections for unborn life,” he says. Including embryos in IVF storage facilities? “Yes. I really believe that.”

Pence has some street cred on the issue. He and his wife used fertility treatments to expand their family after struggling with infertility in the 1990s. “I fully support fertility treatments and I think they deserve the protection of the law,” Pence told CBS News in 2022. But protection for whom?

Pence told CBS’s Margaret Brennan that he and his wife, Karen, used IVF. In his memoir, he wrote that they used “IVF and GIFT procedures.” How did he navigate that, given his respect for the sanctity of life from conception? He explains: “All of our procedures were gamete intrafallopian transfer [GIFT]. We happened to be Catholic at the time. And we took guidance from the church about that procedure. I described it [as IVF] in the book so that people would know what it was.”

In GIFT, gametes are placed directly into the fallopian tubes so that the couple’s sperm and egg might meet and conception occur as in a natural pregnancy. The procedure has success rates similar to those of IVF but is rarely performed in the United States. It requires the woman to undergo general anesthesia and laparoscopy. But it avoids the creation of extra or, in the industry jargon, “supernumerary” embryos that will be frozen or destroyed.

To most Americans, the distinction between GIFT and IVF may seem trivial. But to critics of the IVF industry’s handling of embryos, these details are significant. (For Catholics: GIFT with the married couple’s own gametes has the same status as embryonic adoption and intrauterine insemination by sperm obtained through intercourse and is neither approved nor prohibited by the church.)

“Back ten years ago, there were roughly the same number of couples reporting unexplained infertility as there were abortions in the country,” Pence says. “Which means essentially there’s no unwanted child.” He and Karen were nearly adoptive parents themselves. They had signed up for adoption and were matched with an expectant mother when Karen learned that she was expecting. Knowing that the family next in line was clinically infertile, they decided to step aside “and trusted God that Karen would go to term with Michael, who’s now 32.”

Pence’s commitment to life goes beyond opposition to abortion. He advocates adoption reform, funding for women in crisis pregnancies (as Texas established but “got no credit for”), and the continued availability but increased regulation of fertility treatments. “I’m not a Europhile, but there are European countries that limit the number of embryos that can be created,” he says. “There are protections in place.” He thinks it is time for “a serious discussion in this country about medical ethics around the creation of unborn human life.”

“I think the destiny of our country is tied up in some way in restoring the sanctity of life to the center of American law,” Pence says. “If we continue to erode the notion that every life born and unborn is precious, then we risk tearing at the very fabric of the American experiment.” For years, Pence has described himself as “a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order.” He laments seeing “many in my party following the siren song of populism unmoored to conservative principle, away from American leadership in the world, away from fiscal responsibility, even away from the right to life.”

Neither his party nor this chapter of his career has gone in the direction he’d hoped. Still, he seems unperturbed. Recalling Jeremiah 29:11, the Bible verse that has hung over the mantel of his family home since Christmas 1999, he recites from memory: “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’” To Mr. Pence, the most enduring victory is already won.

Read more here at NationalReview.com.

April 9th, 2024

A political advocacy group connected to former Vice President Mike Pence is pressuring Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to hold a vote on a bill that could ban TikTok.

Advancing American Freedom has launched a new ad supporting the bill, which would require TikTok’s China-based parent company to divest from the popular app or face a ban on U.S. app stores and web hosting services.

The $2 million ad campaign will run in Washington, D.C., and several key Senate swing states, including Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to Politico.

“Chinese TikTok is building a profile on every American user and has become a digital fentanyl,” the ad says. “Republicans and Democrats in Washington agree on one thing — we need to stop China by stopping TikTok.”

The House easily passed the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act last month in a 352-65 vote. However, the bill since has stalled in the Senate.

Following the House vote, Schumer appeared noncommittal about bringing the legislation to the floor.

“The Senate will review the legislation when it comes over from the House,” the Senate majority leader said in a statement at the time.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.), who has supported the TikTok bill, also said late last month that he didn’t have the “foggiest idea” when a vote might be held.

“They moved obviously very aggressively and quickly in the House. I’m not sure the Senate has that same kind of timetable,” Warner said.

Read more here at TheHill.com.

April 9th, 2024

Former vice president Mike Pence’s policy organization is launching a seven-figure ad campaign pushing Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to move the TikTok divestiture legislation to a full floor vote.

Advancing American Freedom, Pence’s 501(c)(4) conservative advocacy group, will be spending $2 million on TV and digital ads in Washington, D.C, and Nevada, Montana, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, National Review has learned. Each of those states is home to a Democratic senator up for reelection in 2024, with Montana Senator Jon Tester and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown being particularly vulnerable.

“TikTok is the Chinese Communist Party’s way to feed America’s youth their propaganda and collect data on all TikTok users,” Pence said in a statement provided to National Review.

“Last week, TikTok launched a $2 million ad campaign to stop the legislation that would disentangle the app from the CCP, but AAF is fighting back, launching an ad campaign to urge Congress to get the bill passed and signed into law. We can’t cede our national security to the Chinese Communist Party. The time for the Senate to act is now.”

Pence noted his opposition to TikTok’s current ownership when he announced last month his decision not to endorse former president Donald Trump. Trump came out against the TikTok bill on the grounds that it would benefit Facebook parent company Meta, which Trump called “an enemy of the people.” The comments represent an about face for Trump after his administration previously attempted to force a sale of the platform. Trump announced his position on the bill after meeting with billionaire Club for Growth donor Jeff Yass, an options trader who has a significant stake in TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance.

Pence noted his opposition to TikTok’s current ownership when he announced last month his decision not to endorse former president Donald Trump. Trump came out against the TikTok bill on the grounds that it would benefit Facebook parent company Meta, which Trump called “an enemy of the people.” The comments represent an about face for Trump after his administration previously attempted to force a sale of the platform. Trump announced his position on the bill after meeting with billionaire Club for Growth donor Jeff Yass, an options trader who has a significant stake in TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance.

Prior to the house floor vote, TikTok flooded the zone with lobbyists and placed a pop-up notification urging users to call their lawmaker and advocate against the legislation. The lobbying campaign caused lawmakers to be inundated with calls from concerned TikTok users, many of whom were teenagers unaware of the specifics of the legislation. Some members even received graphic threats from callers. TikTok’s push ultimately backfired, and the bill passed through the House Energy and Commerce Committee unanimously.

TikTok is widely used by Millennials and Generation Z, and its highly addictive video algorithm has been linked to a range of mental-health issues. A new parents-rights organization has put forward ads focusing on the child welfare concerns surrounding TikTok and its ties to China.

Read more here at NationalReview.com.

April 9th, 2024

A coalition of conservative groups led by former Vice President Mike Pence’s Advancing American Freedom wrote a letter this week calling on congressional Republicans to once again ban earmarks.

A pair of spending bills to fund 12 agencies of government over fiscal year 2024 contained some 8,099 earmarks with a total cost of $14.6 billion.

‘This never should have happened. However, the remedy is simple and the same as always: ban earmarks,’ the letter, obtained by DailyMail.com, read.

It was signed by leaders from 17 advocacy groups, including Heritage Action, Family Research Council and the State Freedom Caucus Network.

‘Washington uses earmarks to grease the skids for runaway spending, Advancing American Freedom executive director Paul Teller told DailyMail.com.

Washington’s sentiment on earmarks has changed over the years. Directing funding for members of Congress’ pet projects back in their district was banned for a decade. At one point President Obama threatened to veto any bill that contained earmarks.

The practice of directing federal money for specific state and local projects began in the 1980s and swelled until they became codified in 2007.

Around that time concerns grew about corruption that peaked with the Alaskan ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ — where Rep. Don Young and Sen. Ted Stevens led the direction of $223 million of taxpayer funds to construct a bridge between a small Alaskan town and an island with a population of 50 that housed an airport.

In a 2005 incident, Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Calif.) resigned from Congress and admitted to accepting $2.4 million in bribes from military contractors for directing earmarks to them. Other lawmakers were found to have gotten campaign contributions in exchange for submitting earmark requests.

In response to the outrage, Congress enacted a 10-year moratorium on earmarks in 2011.

Earmarks made their return on 2021 when both parties agreed among themselves to allow the practice once again.

They were rebranded as ‘community funding projects’ and new guardrails were meant to weed out ethical conflicts.

The difference between earmarks and the regular appropriations process is that they are generally targeted at projects that serve only a local or special interest, rather than giving a lump sum to an agency to distribute through its own evaluation process.

Without earmarks, members of Congress could encourage groups to submit grant requests to relevant agencies or argue for funding before a committee.

Democrats were the first to embrace earmarks, and Republicans were at first more reluctant – only around half of them requested earmarks in 2022. Then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who was in leadership when the practice was banned a decade earlier, did not request any for his own district.

After the GOP took the majority in 2023, they further embraced earmarks, and this fiscal year some two thirds of the Republican Conference stands to score funding for district projects.

Some examples of pet projects in this year’s funding bills include:

The Waadookodaading Ojibew Language Institute in Wisconsin will get $5 million courtesy of Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin.

New York Democrat Rep. Jamaal Bowman clinched $1.65 million to build and ‘artists’ living and workspace’ with the Environmental Leaders of Color.

Louisiana Republicans Rep. Garrett Graves and Sen. Bill Cassidy got $1 million for sugarcane research in their state.

Another $1 million will go to ‘electric vehicle infrastructure ‘masterplan’ in Chicago, thanks to Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.

In Providence, Rhode Island, $1 million will go to a ‘city-wide climate assessment.’

Rep. Greg Steube, a Republican of Florida, will get $190,000 for a ‘shark repellent study’ in Sarasota.

Juvenile Pacific Salmon Research in Alaska will get $4 million thanks to Sen. Lisa Murkowsi, R-Alaska.

A 50-acre business development site in Lexington, Ky., known as Legacy Business Park will get $10 million thanks to Rep. Andy Barr, R-KY.

Public housing residents in Democratic Rep. Nanette Barragan’s California district will get $1 million for an electric vehicle car share thanks to her.

Alabama state route 167 will get $20 million thanks to GOP Sen. Katie Britt.

The NAACP headquarters in Baltimore will get $500,000 thanks to Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md.

A boy scout camp, Camp Maluhia, will get $1 million for a new dining hall thanks to Sen. Brian Schatz.

Read more here at TheDailyMail.com.

April 9th, 2024

By Paul Teller and Jason Snead

Imagine a Super Bowl referee bending the rules to give his favorite team the win. Few would call that fair. Yet that is precisely what the Left wants to do to America’s elections. From noncitizen voting to lawsuits inviting activist judges to rewrite our election laws, left-wing activists are taking every opportunity to change elections permanently for partisan gain.

Their latest tactic is to undermine the basic principle of “one person, one vote” with a new scheme called ranked choice voting.

As we speak, liberal special interests are leading a sophisticated national campaign to push ranked choice voting in nearly every state. They have hired lobbyists, formed astroturf activist groups, and are financing state ballot measures across the country. This year alone, more than a half-dozen states, including battlegrounds such as Arizona and Nevada, are facing initiatives to change their elections with ranked choice voting.

Ranked choice voting’s proponents cloak it in deliberately misleading messaging. Advocates say it “make[s] elections more fair and more democratic.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, ranked choice voting makes voting harder and puts the public’s trust in elections in jeopardy.

The most common form of ranked choice voting being pushed nationwide is called “Final Five Voting,” and it is designed to upend elections in two fundamental ways. First, it replaces party primaries with California-style jungle primaries in which all candidates compete in a single contest. That means no more Republican and Democratic nominees and no guarantee that voters will have a choice between the two parties in November.

Then, for the general election, voters must rank up to five candidates in each ranked choice voting race. In federal election years, ballots typically feature a dozen or more major races. That means voters must wade through and carefully rank 60 or more candidates each election.

It only gets more complicated from there. If no candidate wins a majority of the vote, ranked choice voting manufactures one. Tabulators strike the candidate with the fewest first-place votes and redistribute his or her ballots to each voter’s next-highest choice. These elimination rounds continue until someone (often the person who initially came in second or even third place) wins a majority of the remaining votes. Needless to say, the ranked choice voting process takes much longer to tabulate, leading to delayed results, recounts, and frustrated voters.

Only a few dozen localities and two of the smallest states, Maine and Alaska, use ranked choice voting. Their experience shows how quickly ranked choice voting can go off the rails. In 2022, for example, officials in Oakland, California, certified the wrong winner in a school board race and failed to catch their own mistake. It took four months and a lawsuit to seat the true winner. In Alaska, officials concealed full election results for 15 days while the state labored to gather and tabulate votes.

Ranked choice voting’s track record is a litany of failed promises. Studies show ranked choice voting makes campaigns more negative, makes candidates more reliant on “dark money” groups, discourages turnout, and disproportionately harms minority voters.

Unsurprisingly, buyer’s remorse is common with ranked choice voting. Oakland is now trying to junk this troublesome system, and Alaskans will have the chance to vote on a citizen-led ranked choice voting repeal this fall. Aspen, Colorado, repealed the system after just one election. And in Utah, half of the cities that signed up for a ranked choice voting pilot program have walked away.

Ranked choice voting pretends to be a bottom-up, bipartisan reform. But it is actually the product of a concerted national campaign bankrolled by an elite group of liberal megadonors such as John Arnold and George Soros. The backers of ranked choice voting on the Left are spending tens of millions promoting it, backing ballot measures to lock ranked choice voting into state constitutions, and hiring consultants and lobbyists, including voices on the Right — all to peddle a voting scheme aimed at pushing politics to the Left.

Fortunately, conservatives are fighting back. Our organizations are proud partners in a national coalition dedicated to stopping the spread of ranked choice voting. This important task is being carried out in states across the country. So far, five states have banned ranked choice voting, and more are advancing bills this year to halt this partisan scam in its tracks.

That is remarkable progress, but the fight for fair elections is far from over. Progressive elites are doubling down, aiming to lock as many states as possible into their partisan scheme before voters realize how flawed ranked choice voting really is. If they succeed, 2024 may be remembered as the year the Left permanently changed elections in America for their own gain.

Read more here at TheWashingtonExaminer.com.

March 26th, 2024

By: Mike Pence

The Food and Drug Administration was established to protect public health by ensuring the safety of medicine. Tragically, when the FDA illegally approved the dangerous abortion drug mifepristone, it abdicated this duty in the name of promoting abortion.

This week, the Supreme Court will have the opportunity to right that historic wrong.

In 2000, the FDA illegally approved mifepristone under rules that allow the agency to approve drugs that provide meaningful therapeutic benefits over existing treatments for serious and life-threatening illnesses, such as AIDS. Pregnancy, of course, is not an illness, and abortion is not a treatment. The FDA claimed otherwise, abusing its own regulation and illegally approving the abortion drug with tragic effects.

Chemical abortions are more dangerous to women than surgical abortions, as the FDA has known since it approved mifepristone. The rates of death from abortion pills are four times higher than that of surgical abortions. As of December 2022, 32 deaths have been reported as a direct result of mifepristone. Studies have shown that 10% of women who use mifepristone require follow-up medical treatment for a failed or incomplete abortion and 20% will experience adverse effects such as hemorrhaging or infections.

Yet, in the intervening decades since mifepristone’s approval, the FDA has continually placed women’s health at greater risk by further loosening restrictions regarding the use of the drug.

In 2016, the FDA under former President Barack Obama abandoned multiple safety protocols put in place when the drug was originally approved, including raising the maximum gestational age allowed for use from 7 weeks to 10 weeks. The risk of adverse events increases drastically as development progresses, yet the Obama administration disregarded science in the name of leftist ideology.

In 2021, the Biden administration made things worse by eliminating the requirement to meet in person with a healthcare provider, thereby allowing mifepristone to be prescribed through telemedicine.

Because of this action by the current administration, fewer pregnant women have had the opportunity for an ultrasound, which is critical in identifying the gestational age of the baby and in ruling out an ectopic pregnancy and other significant risks to the mother. Even worse, Biden’s telemedicine loophole makes it harder to confirm that a woman is not being coerced into performing an abortion against her will, leaving human trafficking victims open to even further exploitation.

Additionally, we know that abortion can leave long-lasting emotional scars. Our government should not allow women to be abandoned while undergoing the mental hardship that so often accompanies abortion.

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments this week in a case that seeks to address these injustices and correct the grave mistake made by the FDA more than two decades ago. The FDA originally approved mifepristone because it put ideology over the law. Likewise, the Obama and Biden administrations repeatedly expanded access to the drug because they put ideology over the law.

Now the Supreme Court can remind the agency’s left-wing ideologues that America is still a nation of laws. I encourage the court to reverse the FDA’s illegal approval of mifepristone and make a clear and unmistakable stand for women’s health and the right to life.

Read more here at the WashingtonExaminer.com.