The power to make laws should rest with the people and their elected representatives—not government bureaucrats who impose costly rules and regulations on businesses and strangle the economy. To rein in runaway rulemaking, South Dakota has passed an important new law—modeled after a Goldwater Institute-backed reform—that puts powerful checks and balances on the administrative state.
The reform signed by Gov. Larry Rhoden is modeled after the Regulations In Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act. It requires any proposed regulation with compliance or implementation costs of over $3 million across two years to receive additional scrutiny and approval from the legislature. The law will restore democratic accountability and transparency to the rulemaking process and cut back on the red tape that increases costs on businesses and, ultimately, consumers.
The Goldwater Institute remains committed to empowering free people, not the government. South Dakota’s new law falls squarely within the broader suite of reforms that Goldwater is fighting to pass across the country to beat back the bureaucracy.
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For most of the law students, the Federalist Society’s symposium in Phoenix was an opportunity to contemplate legal doctrines and case law. But for Diego Morris, an Arizona State University law student, it was something far more personal—an opportunity to tell his story of defeating an aggressive bone cancer and to explain the urgency behind passing the Goldwater Institute’s Right to Try for Individualized Treatments.
Diego opened the panel “Mandates, Medicine, & Liberty” by explaining how as an 11-year-old baseball player he was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a rare cancer that sent him and his family in a race against time. The promising immunotherapy Diego desperately needed—the one that would ultimately save his life—had been tested in the United States but hadn’t been approved by the FDA. “My time was short,” Diego said, explaining how he and his family were forced to move to London to get the live-saving treatment.
Diego has become one of the most powerful advocates for the Right to Try for Individualized Treatments, which allows patients to access experimental medicine designed just for them based on their genetics. As Goldwater Executive Vice President Christina Sandefur explained, “True respect for liberty means empowering individuals to make their own medical decisions, even when—and especially when—those choices involve great risk.”
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The online reading list for a foundational Arizona honors college course highlights classics by Plato, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare. But the actual syllabus—the one that’s not readily available to the public—is quite different: it’s loaded with books about “patriarchy” and “militantly oppressive” discrimination in Israel, according to a new Washington Free Beacon story about the Goldwater Institute’s latest report on extremist faculty.
The Free Beacon is one of several outlets to report on Goldwater’s Desert Brain Drain: Arizona’s Honors Colleges Hijacked by Activist Faculty to Force DEI on Students. The report exposes how Arizona’s best and brightest students are forced into honors courses steeped in ideologically extreme and academically unserious content. One seminar session at Arizona State University’s Barrett Honors College, for example, “is almost entirely composed of left-wing ideological readings,” the Free Beacon reported. Meanwhile, at the University of Arizona, honors students grapple with unserious questions like whether food can be “colonized and decolonized.”
Arizona lawmakers should take action to end automatic state funding for activist research and bring greater oversight to public universities. In the meantime, the Goldwater Institute will continue to expose radical faculty in Arizona and beyond who turn public schools into taxpayer-funded vehicles for DEI, leftwing groupthink, and ideological pet projects.
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