Year in Review: Your Kids, Your Rights

Whose kids are they?

The public education establishment treats your children like they belong to the government. They conceal important information about school operations, curricula, and even students themselves; they shoot down parents’ pleas for transparency; and they interfere when parents try educating their children on their own.

But children are not the government’s property. And with the Goldwater Institute spearheading the nationwide campaign to defend parental rights in 2024, the public school bureaucracy is losing its stranglehold over education. We’re defending parents’ rights in court, from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin to Massachusetts. We’re protecting school choice from the left’s attacks—while expanding it in state after state. We’re equipping parents with the tools they need to get answers.

We’re standing with parents every step of the way, and together, we’re going to win the fight for America’s future.

Read more here. 

“If It Wasn’t for Goldwater…”

What would you do if the government took your car and kept it for six long years without accusing you of any wrongdoing?

“I wouldn’t even know how to even begin,” Massachusetts grandmother Malinda Harris says in a new feature for the Springfield Republican newspaper. That exact scenario happened to Malinda under civil asset forfeiture, an unjust law that allows government to steal your stuff, even if you’re not accused of a crime—to the tune of billions of dollars a year around the nation. “If it wasn’t for the Goldwater Institute, I wouldn’t have gotten the car back,” adds Malinda, who has testified about her ordeal before the U.S. Congress.

Civil asset forfeiture is legalized government theft. It’s time to end this corrupt, unconstitutional practice.

Read more here.

Municipal Malfeasance

Local government lunacy was in full effect in the fourth quarter of 2024 in Arizona.

Does it seem coincidental that the Phoenix and Tempe governments are bringing back red-light cameras and their oft-unfair ticketing practices just as the rental tax is being abolished in Arizona? Rather than address issues like understaffed police departments, Phoenix and Tempe officials are focused on turning a profit off the backs of their hard-working citizens.

Or consider that Tucson’s “solution” to its crime problem is to…blame small businesses. Instead of cracking down on criminals, the city is limiting the hours of operation for hookah bars, which it blames for a recent wave of crime.

Local governments owe it to their citizens to protect, not violate, their rights in 2025.

Read more here.