The Insider Report from The New American

Congress Reasserts War Power

In a historic vote on June 23, the U.S. Senate passed a war-powers resolution directing President Trump to remove American military forces from hostilities against Iran. Though other such congressional declarations have happened over the decades, this marks the first time a war-powers resolution successfully passed both chambers of Congress.

The final vote of 50-48 included four Senate Republicans — Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, and Rand Paul of Kentucky — joining all Democrats except for John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who opposed the resolution. Two Republicans, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell and Pennsylvania’s Dave McCormick, did not vote.

The resolution directs the president to remove U.S. armed forces from hostilities against Iran unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or a congressional authorization for use of military force. The White House dismissed it immediately, calling it a measure with “no significance,” noting that it is a concurrent resolution that does not go to the president’s desk and carries no force of law.

Asked whether he had learned any “lesson” about the limits of his executive powers during the Iran war, the president replied: “There are no limits.”

With those four words, the current American president has sided with the old neocon formulation of the “unitary executive,” made famous by attorney John Yoo under the George W. Bush administration in the wake of 9/11. Unfortunately, Yoo articulated a theory of executive war power that the Founders explicitly rejected, that the Constitution explicitly forbids, and that every generation of Americans since 1787 has been warned against. Article I, Section 8 assigns the power to declare war to Congress — not the president, not the Pentagon, not a coalition of allied nations. Congress. The Founders placed that power in Congress deliberately (since that was the closest branch of the government to the people). They knew that executives throughout history had used war as the primary instrument of tyranny.

That division of power has eroded over time, as successive presidents have committed U.S. forces to overseas conflicts without congressional authorization. The last time Congress formally declared war was 1941. In the eight decades since, the United States has fought in Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, the Persian Gulf, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and now Iran — not one of them under a formal congressional declaration of war. Each undeclared war made the next one easier to start. The precedent has compounded across administrations of both parties until a president can now say, without apparent embarrassment, that his war powers have “no limits.”

The current resolution marks the 10th time the Senate has voted on an Iran war-powers measure since the beginning of the year. Nine previous attempts had failed to reach a simple majority. One might hope that the gradual accumulation of Republican votes willing to break with the president indicates that a new precedent is being set.

The war-powers resolution passed Tuesday is non-binding. It will not end the conflict. It will not override the executive. But it is the clearest statement Congress has made in a generation that it has not entirely abandoned its constitutional prerogative, and that at least some members of both parties understand what is at stake when a republic allows its war power to migrate permanently into a single pair of hands. — Rebecca Terrell

USMCA’s Future in Doubt as Renewal Deadline Approaches

Less than a week before the renewal deadline for the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) arrives, the trade deal’s future looks increasingly in doubt.

On July 1, the United States, Canada, and Mexico will need to decide whether to extend the USMCA for an additional 16-year period. According to Article 34.7, Section 2 of the USMCA, “On the sixth anniversary of the entry into force of this Agreement [July 1, 2026], the [USMCA] Commission shall meet to conduct a ‘joint review’ of the operation of this Agreement.” Section 3 elaborates, “As part of the Commission’s joint review, each Party shall confirm, in writing, through its head of government, if it wishes to extend the term of this Agreement for another 16-year period.” If any one of the three countries declines to extend the agreement, a series of annual reviews will commence, lasting either until all three countries agree to renew the agreement or until it expires in 2036.

U.S. President Donald Trump has indicated that he will not agree to a clean extension. In comments to reporters on June 10, he said that “I’m not looking to renew it,” and explained that “the primary reason I made the deal is that NAFTA was the worst trade deal I’ve ever seen.”

A week later, speaking to reporters in France, Trump said that he is “not a big fan” of the USMCA, and only “liked it because it got us out of NAFTA.” He continued, “I would rather not have the agreement, but I may sign it…. We do better as a country if we don’t have an agreement.”

Trump’s comments mirror those from U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, who on December 4 said that exiting the agreement is “always a scenario.”

Meanwhile, Republican U.S. senators are urging Trump to renew the agreement. For example, Senator John Boozman of Arkansas, chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, said that the “USMCA is very important, and I think that the president will ultimately negotiate a good deal.”

The USMCA, which replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 2020, is a major step toward a full-blown North American Union. Contrary to the narrative that the agreement is an improvement over NAFTA, it actually deepened regional integration toward a supranational structure resembling the European Union.

Although the joint-review process is an opportunity to restore U.S. sovereignty, it also risks further entangling the United States in globalist agreements. With annual reviews over 10 years — if Trump refuses a clean extension — there is a risk that the three countries will eventually reach an agreement with provisions that further integrate the United States into a North American regional body, hastening the erosion of national sovereignty.

Ultimately, the United States must terminate — not renegotiate — the USMCA. Urge your U.S. representative and senators to enact legislation completely withdrawing the United States from this dangerous agreement. — Peter Rykowski

How Illegal Immigration Drove Housing Costs Through the Roof

The unprecedented surge in illegal aliens between 2021 and 2024 drove up home prices by roughly 30 percent and rents by approximately 20 percent in the average American metropolitan area. This is according to a Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas working paper published in March.

The Impacts of Unauthorized Immigration on U.S. Labor and Housing Markets: New Evidence from Administrative Microdata (Working Paper 2607) is the first study to use data on individual foreign nationals rather than relying on estimates. The authors constructed precise measures of net illegal entry by foreigners at both national and local levels, then analyzed the effects across local housing markets.

Unauthorized migrant worker flows raised local house prices and rents without expanding housing supply — a classic low-supply/high-demand shock. Millions of additional people needed housing, no new housing was available, and prices rose accordingly. The burden fell on existing residents, especially low-income American workers and legal immigrants already struggling with housing affordability. The paper also found that unauthorized foreign-worker flows reduced labor income per capita among the existing workforce.

During Joe Biden’s administration, the United States experienced what the paper terms an “unprecedented boom” in unauthorized immigration. The Department of Homeland Security reported nationwide total encounters exceeding two million annually during that period. The trend peaked in January 2024 and then fell steeply, turning negative by early 2025 (meaning more people left than entered).

Though that new trend continues, home prices nationally remain near all-time highs. Rental costs have consumed an increasing share of household income across virtually every income bracket. First-time homebuyers have been effectively priced out of markets their parents entered with relative ease.

What the paper documents is a massive involuntary transfer of wealth from American workers, renters, and aspiring homeowners to landlords, developers, and the employers of low-wage labor. No legislation authorized it. No Congress voted for it. It was the predictable economic consequence of a deliberate policy of non-enforcement at the border, and its costs were borne entirely by ordinary Americans who had no say in the matter.

Yet as foreign incursions into the United States have abated under continued border enforcement, the demand pressure on housing markets should begin to ease. Zillow has already reported national mortgage costs at their best level since August 2022.

Secure borders are more than a national security imperative; they are an economic policy. The costs and benefits are distributed in ways that elites, insulated by wealth, have been content to ignore. The Dallas Fed, to its credit, has now documented those costs with the rigor that the subject deserves. — Rebecca Terrell

The U.S. Dollar’s Eroding Purchasing Power

The U.S. dollar has lost nearly 30 percent of its purchasing power since 2020, a stark illustration of inflation’s impact on American households. According to analyses citing data from the Consumer Price Index (CPI), what cost $100 in early 2020 would cost roughly $130 for the same goods and services by mid-2026.

The CPI is a statistical tool compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). It tracks changes in the price of a basket of consumer goods and services. It shows a cumulative price increase of 29 percent over the past six years, equating to an average annual inflation rate of roughly 4.3 percent.

Factors driving the erosion include massive fiscal and monetary responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, such as trillions of dollars in government stimulus and Federal Reserve bond buying. This boosted demand, while supply chains faltered.

Some argue that the CPI understates inflation by underweighting essentials such as housing, groceries, and fuel for many families. Reporting for The New American in 2008, analyst Dr. John Fisher explained that “changes to the CPI … have increasingly distorted official statistics” to create a false sense of economic stability. This distortion is destructive because “the Treasury and the Federal Reserve use the CPI as one of the measures for establishing U.S. monetary policy.”

The first major adjustment to how the CPI is calculated occurred under President Richard Nixon, with introduction of the “core” CPI, which intentionally omits essential items such as food and energy, though they are essential and their cost increases are often most acute. Commentators described it at the time as calculation of “inflation after inflation has been excluded.”

The next series of changes came in the 1980s, and they collectively produced a reported inflation rate roughly six to eight percentage points lower than the previous methodology would show. This is according to economist John Williams, who describes the adjustments at ShadowStats.com.

The substitution effect assumes consumers swap expensive goods for cheaper alternatives when prices rise, effectively penalizing households for being priced out of their preferred purchases. Hedonic adjustments, which discount price increases by attributing them to quality improvements in products such as electronics and automobiles, further suppress the reported number. Owners’ Equivalent Rent replaced actual home purchase prices with a hypothetical estimate of what homeowners would charge themselves to rent their own homes, a figure that consistently understates real housing costs. The cumulative effect of these adjustments, Williams argues, means that the dollar’s purchasing power loss since 2020 is closer to 50 percent when measured against the consistent pre-manipulation methodology. This is precisely why consumer sentiment surveys have persistently shown Americans feeling far worse about the economy than the official statistics suggest they should.

Even by the current CPI’s rosier numbers, the situation is gloomy. A family needing $50,000 annually in 2020 for the same lifestyle would require about $65,000 today. This environment has fueled interest in alternatives such as Bitcoin, gold, or real assets as inflation hedges.

Long-term, the dollar has lost more than 96 percent of its value since the Federal Reserve’s creation in 1913, highlighting fiat currency’s structural vulnerability. — Rebecca Terrell

In First Setback to Homeschooling in Decades, Connecticut Declares War

Connecticut officials just adopted the first major new restriction on homeschooling in America in decades, forcing parents to seek permission from “child welfare” authorities while imposing a slew of new regulations on families who exit government schools. Advocates for home education blasted the move. And they vowed to fight on. The legislation, known as House Bill 5468 and signed into law as Public Act 26-37 or “An Act Concerning the Provision of Parent-Managed Learning,” treats all homeschool families as guilty until proven innocent, critics said. Before starting to homeschool, parents must report to the government and receive approval from the Department of Children and Families (DCF) to proceed.

The unprecedented measure also purports to force parents to provide government-approved “education.” Language ordering homeschoolers to have “equivalent instruction” to the government’s was removed. But the final bill signed into law by Governor Ned Lamont last month still decrees that parents must follow the studies taught in government schools.

The bill was so controversial that all Republicans and even some Democrats voted against it. But even with no GOP support, the legislation was approved by the House in a 96 to 53 vote and 22 to 14 by the Senate. Thousands of concerned citizens spoke out and testified against the bill, while just a handful expressed support.

“The state has a responsibility to protect children,” argued State Senate Pro Tem Martin Looney, a Democrat, before voting to support the controversial bill. “In other words, it’s not only the parents who have a responsibility for those children.” He did not mention the epidemic of sexual abuse, drugs, crime, illiteracy, and suicide in public schools.

But Republicans pointed out that the state’s child-welfare bureaucracy was in shambles. “That agency is a train wreck,” explained Senator Eric Berthel, a Republican from Watertown. “It’s off the rails. It needs to go through substantial reform and be fixed before they should be allowed to interact with another family and another child.”

“The bill subjects every homeschooling family to a background check just to exercise a basic parental right,” fumed Berthel, one of many Republican lawmakers who spoke out against what they described as government overreach and an assault on parental rights. “It creates a system where an allegation can carry the same weight as a conviction.”

“In today’s economy, many families have multiple generations living in the same household,” he continued. “Under this bill, if anyone in that household is on a registry, the request is denied. That’s not targeted policy. That’s a blanket restriction that punishes entire families.”

Critics at the state and national level also slammed the measure. “They are taking something away from the homeschoolers that they have always had in Connecticut,” argued Family Institute of Connecticut Executive Director Peter Wolfgang, a homeschooling father of seven. “We have always had strong freedom to homeschool here.”

He also blasted the state’s effort to scapegoat home-educating families for failures of DCF, noting that the children who died were already known to the agency. “They were DCF’s responsibility, and DCF dropped the ball,” he said. “So what does our state government do? The opposite of what makes sense.”

He also blasted the state’s assumption that children were safer in a government school than with their own families. “What this law says is that the state government believes that children are safer in a public school … than they are with their own family,” he said. “It’s substituting the government for the family, and it’s saying that children belong to the state instead of to their own family.”

Ultimately, politicians “want to put all homeschoolers under the thumb now of DCF, the same group that failed to protect these children that were already their responsibility,” Wolfgang continued. Indeed, he noted that lawmakers and supporters of the bill consistently referred to the children as “‘our kids’, as if the kids belong to the state.”

Wolfgang and others also suggested the real goal was to target people of faith — especially those who do not want LGBT “pride” propaganda, transgenderism confusion, or pornography in books. The goal, he said, is to get everyone to conform to the “new state religion” and the “totalitarian wokeness.”

The Home School Legal Defense Association, which rallied families in the state and beyond, vowed to continue the fight against Connecticut’s new restrictions. Attorney Kevin Boden, HSLDA director of legal and legislative advocacy, sent an email to families warning about the significance of the danger — and noting that this assault could spread.

“This profound shift transforms Connecticut from a state where parents had significant freedom to the only state that imposes mandatory background checks on fit parents before they can teach their own children in their own home,” he said. “By requiring every parent to be pre-screened before they can begin homeschooling, it ceases to acknowledge parents as trusted actors and instead casts them as risks to be managed.”

The above is part of an article by Alex Newman. To see the entire article at TheNewAmerican.com, click here.

Will German and Japanese Rearmament Bolster the Greater Israel Project?

Eighty years after their defeat in World War II, Germany and Japan are accelerating military buildups and defense cooperation. A June 14 New York Times article highlights how Berlin and Tokyo, once made reliant on the United States for security, are now investing heavily in their armed forces.

The shift marks a dramatic departure from their imposed postwar pacifism. After 1945, both nations were forced to adopt constitutions and policies that severely constrained their militaries. Germany’s “culture of restraint” and Japan’s Article 9 “peace clause” reflected a strategic dependence on American protection through NATO and bilateral treaties.

However, beneath the surface of what looks like rising autonomy lies a calculated U.S. effort to offload military burdens while maintaining influence. With U.S. troop withdrawals from Germany underway and questions about long-term commitments in Asia, Washington is encouraging its allies to take more aggressive postures — Germany confronting Russia in Europe, and Japan adopting a harder line against China in the Indo-Pacific.

Germany’s Zeitenwende has translated into massive defense spending increases, positioning it as Europe’s leading military power. This includes substantial aid to Ukraine and plans for a stronger conventional force, aligning with U.S. goals of containing Russia without committing more American forces. Berlin’s moves support NATO efforts that ultimately serve Washington’s interests in weakening a key BRICS member.

Similarly, Japan is boosting its defense budget to record levels. Facing China’s assertiveness, Tokyo’s self-defensive actions advance the U.S. containment strategy in the region.

So despite rhetoric of multipolarity, Germany and Japan remain heavily integrated into U.S.-led security frameworks. Their rearmament, while addressing genuine threats, functions as burden sharing that allows the United States to pivot resources while directing outcomes against BRICS cohesion. In fact, the United States may be signaling its decision to break with NATO to help advance the Greater Israel Project in the Middle East. According to critics such as former National Counterterrorism Director Joe Kent, Israel wants NATO dissolved so that it can agitate for the United States to attack Turkey (a NATO ally) with the goal that Israel ascends as the regional hegemon.

According to Kent, “Unfortunately leaving NATO won’t be to avoid foreign entanglements, we’ll be leaving NATO so we can side with Israel when Turkey & Israel eventually clash in Syria. This is after we helped topple the secular Syrian gov & installed a former AQ/ISIS leader as president. Time to stop playing arsonist & fireman in the Middle East, it’s just not worth it.” — Rebecca Terrell

DOJ Announces $6.5 Billion Healthcare-fraud Crackdown

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that it had charged hundreds of people in connection to Medicare and Medicaid fraud totaling more than $6.5 billion.

In a press release, the DOJ stated that its 2026 National Health Care Fraud Takedown “resulted in charges against 455 defendants, including 90 doctors and other licensed medical professionals, for their alleged participation in health care fraud and opioid abuse schemes involving over $6.5 billion in false claims and significant patient harm, including death.”

The DOJ also bragged that its enforcement “represents a new era in federal, state, and international cooperation to combat health care fraud: cases in 56 federal districts and 45 U.S. states and territories, with 50 state Medicaid Fraud Control Units participating, the most in Department history.”

At a press conference featuring multiple senior Trump administration officials, Assistant Attorney General Colin M. McDonald declared that “the Department of Justice is aggressively scaling our offensive against anyone using healthcare as a front to steal from the American people.”

Although the DOJ’s crackdown is welcome news, we must remember that Medicare and Medicaid are unconstitutional federal programs — having no authorization under Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution — and fraud involving those programs would not exist if Congress simply followed the Constitution.

By expanding the federal government far outside its constitutional bounds, Congress has expanded opportunities for fraud — in addition to these programs’ detrimental impacts on individual freedom, state sovereignty, and the national debt.

Instead of focusing on eliminating Medicare and Medicaid fraud, the Trump administration and Congress must put their energy toward eliminating these programs entirely. — Peter Rykowski

Local Police to Gain Access to Massive DHS Database Tool

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is moving to equip state and local law enforcement with powerful facial-recognition technology, threatening privacy, federal overreach, and the creation of a de facto national surveillance network.

A newly revealed DHS document outlines plans to provide local police departments with mobile apps that allow officers to scan faces and query databases containing more than 250 million government records. These include data about U.S. citizens as well as illegal aliens.

The technology builds on tools already in use by federal immigration agents, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Mobile Fortify app and Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) Mobile Identify app. Officers can point a smartphone camera at an individual and rapidly cross-reference the facial scan against vast repositories, including State Department visa records, Transportation Security Administration traveler data, DHS biometric systems, and other federal and state sources.

The ICE Task Force Module and similar apps are designed for 287(g) agreements, which deputize local officers for immigration-enforcement functions. This extends federal surveillance capabilities into everyday community policing. It potentially turns routine traffic stops into intrusion without warrants or probable cause for biometric searches.

The situation exemplifies the steady erosion of Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Facial recognition represents a powerful biometric identifier that, once normalized at the local level, could enable real-time tracking and database queries far beyond immigration enforcement. Those wary of big-government surveillance see it as another step toward a technocratic police state. Accuracy issues common to facial recognition add another layer of risk for misidentification.

Supporters argue it enhances removal of aliens, but despite the technological advances already in use, deportation numbers are nowhere near what was promised.

As DHS pushes forward, lawmakers are calling for limits and greater oversight, ignoring the fact that true security rests within constitutional boundaries, not so-called reform of an agency that monitors the citizens of this country. — Rebecca Terrell

Why Is Pope Leo Celebrating Commies & Revolutionaries? Hichborn Explains

Pope Leo has been working closely with a broad range of radical leftist organizations, including promoters of communist revolution, abortion, and LGBT, warned Lepanto Institute founder and chief Michael Hichborn in this interview on Conversations That Matter with The New American magazine’s Alex Newman.

Hichborn, a Catholic scholar on the front lines of defending traditional Catholic teaching, warned that the Vatican has been infiltrated by sinister forces. In a stunning new report, Hichborn’s organization documents how Pope Leo has continued the late Pope Francis’ partnerships with groups that are wildly at odds with the traditions and historic beliefs of the Vatican.

Watch and share the interview at TheNewAmerican.com. — The Editors

America’s Unelected, Unaccountable Federal Judiciary

A group of law students at Emory University recently petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to take up a case that exposes one of the most glaring contradictions in American law. Tens of thousands of people who work for the federal courts are not covered by landmark civil-rights protections, and they cannot turn to an independent agency for help if they experience harassment or discrimination on the job.

The institution that enforces civil-rights law against every employer in America exempts itself from those same laws. Federal court employees who experience workplace discrimination cannot file a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. They cannot sue in federal court under Title VII. They are subject to an internal system in which, as the Emory students noted, judges oversee complaints against people they know and work with every day. This is precisely the opposite of the neutral, independent process the law demands for everyone else.

For instance, liberal firebrand Ruth Bader Ginsburg, while imposing diversity quotas on others, famously declined to live up to her own ideals. In her 13 years as a D.C. Circuit judge, Ginsburg never hired a single black person as a law clerk, a secretary, or an intern, though her staff was composed of 57 positions. This came to light at her Supreme Court confirmation hearing. Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) questioned Ginsburg, who replied by saying, “I am going to try harder, and if you confirm me for this job, my attractiveness to Black candidates is going to improve.”

Under pressure as a Supreme Court Justice, she hired exactly one African-American during her 27-year tenure on the nation’s highest bench: Paul J. Watford, who clerked for her in the 1998-99 term.

Thomas Jefferson warned with prophetic precision about exactly the dangers of a court that imposes standards on others while exempting itself. In an 1820 letter to William Jarvis, Jefferson wrote:

You seem to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps…. Their power [is] the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots.

Jefferson was responding directly to the power grab that had already occurred, executed by his political rival Chief Justice John Marshall. In Marbury v. Madison (1803), Marshall declared that the Supreme Court possessed the authority to strike down acts of Congress as unconstitutional. Actually, no such power appears anywhere in the Constitution. Article III defines the judicial power but says nothing about courts invalidating legislation. The power of judicial review appeared in no other national judiciary in world history at the time, nor in the British common-law system upon which America’s judiciary was based. Marshall invented it in a case strategically engineered to establish the principle while appearing to rule against his own party’s interest.

Alexander Hamilton argued in The Federalist, No. 78 that courts would be the “least dangerous branch” because they controlled “neither sword nor purse.” Hamilton did not anticipate a court that would seize the power to nullify the sword and purse of the other two branches entirely, making itself, in Jefferson’s terms, a “despotism of an oligarchy.”

For two centuries, that oligarchy has expanded its reach with remarkable consistency. When Congress began pushing for a binding Supreme Court ethics code following revelations about certain undisclosed gifts and travel accepted by judges on the bench, Chief Justice John Roberts refused to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee and instead submitted a written statement accompanied by a voluntary “Code of Conduct” adopted by the Court in November 2023.

Conservatives and liberals alike noted that the code was light on actual ethics and heavy on assertions of judicial independence — for example, “A justice should uphold the integrity and independence of the judiciary.” The code contains no enforcement mechanism, no independent investigator, no penalty for violations, and no external oversight. In other words, the Court will police itself.

This is what the Emory students are now challenging for lower-court employees. Roberts dressed up institutional self-protection as ethical leadership, but he defended the Court’s most cherished attribute: freedom from accountability to the American people.

On the other hand, Congress possesses constitutional tools it has almost entirely abandoned. Article III gives Congress the power to define and limit the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. Congress could strip the Court of jurisdiction over entire categories of cases. It could expand the Court. It could impeach Supreme Court justices — a power used precisely once in American history, unsuccessfully, against Justice Samuel Chase in 1804.

That it does none of these things reflects not constitutional limitation but political cowardice — a legislature that has grown comfortable outsourcing the hardest questions to nine unelected lawyers, while using the excuse that “the courts decided it, not us.”

The Emory law students, whatever their intentions, have stumbled onto the oldest and deepest contradiction in American constitutional life. The institution that stands in judgment over every other American institution — that tells Congress what it can legislate, tells the president what he can execute, tells states what they can do — answers, in the end, to no one.

Jefferson called it oligarchy. He was right then. He remains right now. — Rebecca Terrell