The public purse is not a private piggy bank for government leaders to dip into to reward their favorite businesses. That’s why the Goldwater Institute is now warning city officials in Columbia, Mo., that their promise to fork over taxpayer money to shore up American Airlines’ bottom line violates the state’s constitution.
To entice American to introduce daily, round-trip flights to Charlotte, N.C., Columbia leaders recently offered to provide the airline with up to $750,000 in taxpayer money if the new route isn’t profitable every month. The problem: that arrangement violates the Missouri Constitution’s Gift Clause, which prohibits cities from lending their credit or providing public money “to or in aid of any corporation.” In a letter this week, Goldwater urged Columbia’s leaders to take steps to ensure that only private money is used to pay any of the airline’s invoices under the agreement.
Taxpayers should never shoulder the risk for a multi-billion-dollar company’s for-profit business pursuits. The Goldwater Institute will continue to demand transparency to ensure that officials in Columbia and elsewhere abide by their state constitution.
Read more here.
Supporters of patients’ rights and government accountability in Oklahoma have new reasons to celebrate after Gov. Kevin Stitt signed two Goldwater Institute reforms into law.
In a win for rare-disease patients, Oklahoma is now the 18th state to approve Goldwater’s Right to Try for Individualized Treatments Act, a cutting-edge law that empowers patients to seek personalized treatments based on their own genetics. These treatments by definition cannot go through the Food and Drug Administration’s outdated regulatory process in a timely manner. States like Oklahoma are ensuring that patients aren’t denied access to potentially life-saving treatments due to bureaucratic red tape.
Oklahoma has also joined the growing list of states that have signed legislation modeled after the Goldwater Institute’s Safe Neighborhoods Act. The law allows property owners to seek compensation when local governments allow homelessness to grow unchecked and harm neighborhoods. The premise is simple: when government fails to perform its most basic duties, law-abiding citizens shouldn’t be left holding the bag.
The Goldwater Institute will continue fighting to pass Right to Try for Individualized Treatments and the Safe Neighborhoods Act across the nation.
Read more about Right to Try here.
Read more about the Safe Neighborhoods Act here.
How did America’s slaveholding Founders really feel about slavery? While some contend they were hypocrites, those Founders expressed more angst, guilt, and self-awareness about their position than most might expect. That’s the lesson from the Goldwater Institute’s Timothy Sandefur in a new article in Reason.
In the article, adapted from his new book, “Proclaiming Liberty: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence,” Sandefur explains that America’s Founders didn’t deny that it was self-contradictory for them to hold slaves while also proclaiming liberty to be every person’s birthright. Thomas Jefferson, for example, publicly opposed slavery throughout his life, pursued “freedom cases” in court, and unsuccessfully fought to embed a denunciation of slavery into the Declaration of Independence.
“What is actually remarkable about the patriots is the degree of candor with which they confessed that slavery clashed with their principles,” Sandefur writes. “No patriot of stature ever defended the practice. And no considerable political movement in the English-speaking world had ever before condemned slavery as candidly and as often as the patriots did.”
As we approach the nation’s 250th birthday this July, it’s important to remember that the patriots were not caricatures—they were living, breathing individuals with a great devotion to the new nation, despite their sometimes inconsistent positions on a great evil of their age.
Read more here.
