I Believe

• Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God

  The Chicken TaxScene. It’s 1962. American farmers have cracked the code.We can raise chickens cheap. Like, really cheap. Industrial-scale factory farms, efficient as hell. We start shipping frozen chickens to Europe by the boatload. German housewives love it. French families love it. Half the price of local chicken. Maybe even tastier!European chicken farmers do not love it. They’re getting destroyed. So, France and West Germany do what countries do when their people scream loud enough. They slap tariffs on American chicken. Problem solved. Lyndon B. Johnson is President. He’s not amused. You slap our chickens? We slap back!In 1963, LBJ announced retaliatory tariffs. 25 percent on potato starch, dextrin, brandy. And … 25 percent on light trucks?The first three make sense. Targeted. Tit for tat. But light trucks? That was aimed at one company: Volkswagen. Their vans and little pickups were selling like crazy in the States. Detroit hated it. Johnson just gave them what they wanted: A 25 percent wall against the competition.Here’s the thing about the Chicken War. It ended fast. Europe backed down on chicken tariffs. Trade negotiations happened. The fight over poultry faded into the history books.But the truck tariff? That one never came down. Sixty-two years later, it’s still the law of the land.First, let’s clear something up. A tariff isn’t some clever penalty on foreign companies. It’s a tax on us. American importers pay it. Then they pass it along to businesses. Then businesses pass it along to you. At the dealership. At the grocery store. That’s what tariffs are. A tax on Americans buying foreign goods.That 25 percent wall around light trucks was supposed to be temporary leverage, but it stuck. It became a hidden tax we’ve been paying for six decades.And with foreign competition locked out, American trucks transformed. They got bigger. Heavier. More luxurious. Way more expensive. The Ford F-150 became the profit machine that drives Detroit. Not because it had to compete on price, but because it didn’t. Roll back the tape for context. An early 1980s F-150 had a base MSRP under six thousand dollars, roughly nineteen to twenty-four thousand in today’s money, depending on the exact model year and adjustment method. Even after inflation, trucks have leapt to a very different price tier. Now, seventy grand for a well-equipped pickup.Why would Ford lower prices when the moat was there? Why would GM? They wouldn’t. That’s not how business works.What started as a spat over frozen chicken became the permanent business model for America’s most popular vehicle.Harvard PhD Economist Milton Friedman would have loved the Chicken Tax story. The social responsibility of a business isn’t charity. It isn’t fairness. It isn’t “doing good.” It’s one thing: increase profits. That’s it. Maximize shareholder value. The sacred duty of a business is to make money.From that view, what Ford and GM did wasn’t shady. It wasn’t corruption. It was textbook. If consumers will pay $70,000 for a truck that costs half that to build, your duty is to keep charging $70,000. Dropping the price voluntarily isn’t noble. It’s malpractice. You’re throwing away profit that shareholders hired you to capture. It might even be wrong for a business to reduce prices. Voluntarily reducing prices reduces profits. And their duty is to maximize profits. Now, you can overturn a tariff in court. You can roll back a policy. You can refund the tax.But you can’t un-ring the bell. You can’t un-teach the consumer what they’re willing to pay. You can’t force a company to charge less when charging more is their duty.The Supreme Court might rule the tariffs unconstitutional. They probably should. The president doesn’t have the authority to enact sweeping tariffs. It’s about whether one man can impose the largest tax hike on the American people since 1993 without Congress. But even if the Court strikes them down, even if importers get refunds, your grocery bill isn’t going back to 2024 prices. Your furniture costs aren’t dropping. The new floor is set.That’s the lesson from the Chicken Tax. Tariffs might be temporary. But once prices go up, they don’t come down. The damage is permanent. It begs the question: What’s the purpose of these taxes?Why Congress, and Not KingsWhy do we tax ourselves at all?For most of human history, we didn’t. Early humans lived in bands of fifty, maybe a hundred. Small enough that everyone knew everyone. Cooperation was personal. You helped me hunt, I shared the meat. You watched my kids, I watched yours. No roads. No armies. No infrastructure. No need for taxes, because everything was face-to-face.Then came agriculture. Cities. Suddenly, humans lived with thousands of strangers. Tens of thousands. Millions. Our brains didn’t evolve for that. We evolved to cooperate with people we know. People we see. People in our tribe.How do you get a million strangers to cooperate? To build roads none of us would build alone? To fund armies that protect people we will never meet? To create systems like courts, schools, and infrastructure that benefit everyone but cost everyone? We told stories. Stories big enough that strangers could believe them together. Nations. Laws. Religions. The story of money we all believe is that a one-hundred-dollar bill is worth more than the cotton paper it’s printed on, that invisible numbers on a piece of plastic are worth anything at all. Taxation is one of those stories. The story says we’re not just strangers, we’re a people. Americans. Because we’re a people, we pool resources. We choose to tax ourselves, to build what none of us could build alone. Interstates, the power grid, the military, the internet.And tariffs? They’re not some foreign penalty. They’re taxes on us. American importers pay them. Then businesses pass them down. And right now, Americans are paying hundreds of billions through these tariffs. By the time the Supreme Court rules, the total bill could top a trillion dollars.When one person can tax us without consent, we no longer believe the story. We’re not citizens anymore. We’re subjects.The American Founders knew this. They’d lived it. James Madison, the architect of the Constitution, said, “Give all power to the many, they will oppress the few. Give all power to the few, they will oppress the many.”The British Crown taxed the colonies. The colonies had no representatives in Parliament. No voice. No vote. Just the bill. Taxation without representation.So when the Founders wrote the Constitution, they made a choice. A radical choice for 1787. They gave the taxing power to the American people’s representatives: Congress. Not the President. Article I, Section 8 declares Congress has the power “to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises.”That’s the philosophy of taxation in a republic. We don’t tax because a king demands it. We tax because we agree, through representation, to build something together.The Founders believed in something higher than the Crown. They believed in natural law. Rights granted by God, not kings. Life. Liberty. Property.Benjamin Franklin proposed a motto for the Great Seal of the United States: “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”That wasn’t a flourish. It was philosophy. If rights come from God or nature, no human has the authority to strip them away. So when a king taxes without consent, it isn’t just unfair, it’s illegitimate. Resisting isn’t rebellion. It’s duty.So, our choice. Citizen or subject. Representation or tyranny. Republic or monarchy.America owes allegiance to no king.Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.But the Matter Isn’t Settled…Of course, Congress has delegated some authority to the President over trade. In 1977, they passed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act for times of genuine crises. Freeze terrorist assets. Sanction rogue nations. That kind of thing.But hundreds of billions in new taxes on American importers, passed straight to American families because of trade deficits? Is that a threat to national security?The courts didn’t buy it. Not one. The Court of International Trade ruled the move illegal. Another federal court agreed. Then the Court of Appeals, three judges, unanimous, said the same thing. All concluded the law was written for emergencies, not long-standing trade policy. Letting the President tax unilaterally would rewrite the Constitution.Congress gave itself authority to tax in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution for a reason. If Congress wanted to give the President authority to impose hundreds of billions in new taxes, they have to say so explicitly. The Emergency Powers Act doesn’t do that. It authorizes responses to specific emergencies. Not permanent, sweeping taxation of the entire economy. Letting presidents declare trade deficits “emergencies” and impose massive tariffs would essentially rewrite the Constitution. It would transfer the taxing power from Congress to the executive branch. We don’t amend the Constitution through executive order and creative reading of a 1977 statute.So the tariffs are illegal. Case closed, right?Hold your horses, cowboy!The administration appealed. The appeals court paused its own ruling. Meaning the tariffs remain in effect while the case goes up to the Supreme Court. The government keeps collecting the tax. You keep paying it. Even though three separate courts have ruled it’s unconstitutional.The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. Oral arguments are scheduled for November 5, 2025. We’ll have a decision probably by year’s end. Maybe early 2026.In the meantime, the government keeps collecting. Importers keep paying. And we keep paying. By the time the Court rules, the total tab could top a trillion dollars.If the Court strikes them down, the companies that paid the tariffs will get refunds. Ford. Walmart. Target. Amazon. Every business that imported goods and paid the tax. They’ll get their money back. But the consumer? We already paid. And even if the Supreme Court strikes down the tariffs, our prices aren’t coming down. Businesses have a solemn duty to make profits. Once they’ve established that consumers will pay $70,000 for a truck, why would you drop it to $60,000 just because your costs went down? You’d be leaving money on the table. Shirking your duty to shareholders.The market has already adjusted. The new price floor is set. Consumers have demonstrated they’ll pay it. So prices stay high.The Supreme Court can rule on constitutionality, but it can’t undo the price increases. It can’t force companies to lower prices. It can’t give us back the purchasing power we’ve already lost.Is It a Win or a Loss for America?The Court will decide whether the President had the authority to impose these tariffs. The answer, based on every lower court ruling, is probably no.If the Supreme Court strikes down the tariffs, it will reaffirm a principle that’s stood for 237 years. Congress controls taxation. The President isn’t a king. We govern ourselves through our representatives, not by executive decree.That’s a win for the Republic. But it’s a hollow victory for our bank accounts.Even if the Court rules correctly and the system works exactly as Madison designed it, our grocery bills stay high. The damage is done.The constitutional principle survives. Our purchasing power doesn’t.And here’s the thing: Tariffs don’t even solve the problem they claim to address.China controls about 90% of the world’s rare earth element processing. These elements are critical minerals used in everything from F-35 fighter jets to smartphones. Last week, China expanded restrictions on rare earth exports, and the administration threatened 100% tariffs in response.But raising taxes on Americans doesn’t get us rare earth elements. It just makes Americans poorer while China still controls the supply.Want to solve the rare earth problem? Build partnerships with Denmark and Greenland, which hold substantial untapped reserves of rare earths and other critical minerals. Work with our NATO ally to develop Greenland’s mining capacity. Invest in domestic processing facilities. Create real alternatives to Chinese supply chains.That takes diplomacy. Investment. Strategic partnerships. Long-term thinking.Tariffs? That’s just taxing ourselves and calling it foreign policy.So is it a win, or a loss, for America?Jefferson already answered that question.Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.Not rebellion with rifles. Rebellion with accountability. Rebellion by demanding our representatives actually represent us. We fire the ones who let presidents tax us without a vote. We pick someone else, even if they are from the same party. We insist that we tax ourselves only by agreement of the people. Consent of the governed. Taxing power stays exactly where the Constitution put it: with Congress. With us.The system Madison and others put in place is resilient. But only if we defend it.America owes allegiance to no king.Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.Music from #Uppbeathttps://uppbeat.io/t/monument-music/betrayalLicense code: NGQCJSWK1IRUMRBE Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

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  18:51
• Do We Trust Every Future President?

  The Six-Hour Bomb: When Alexander Hamilton Almost Killed the ConstitutionJune 18, 1787. Philadelphia. The temperature in the Pennsylvania State House had already hit 85 degrees. Fifty-five men in wool coats and powdered wigs sat trapped in a room with the windows nailed shut and doors guarded for secrecy. The delegates chose privacy over performance so they could speak freely. They had been arguing openly for three weeks about how to build a government. Nothing was working.Alexander Hamilton finally stood. Brilliant, abrasive, born a b*****d in the Caribbean. He’d watched the Continental Congress dither while soldiers froze at Valley Forge. He’d seen New York burn while thirteen states bickered over tax policy.He had been quiet, boxed in by his own New York colleagues. Then he said the hard part out loud. “I have well considered the subject,” he began, “and am convinced that no amendment of the confederation can answer the purpose of a good government, so long as state sovereignties do in any shape exist.”In short, there could be no fix to the Articles of Confederation, the governing document that existed before the Constitution. Maybe it was the heat. Or frustration from the gridlock. But Hamilton was done with democracy’s inefficiency. State sovereignty would always gridlock national purpose. He rejected the proposals on the table from Virginia and New Jersey and aimed higher.He spoke for six hours. All day. The room heard a full design for a national government.What Hamilton wanted: A president elected for life. Absolute veto over all state laws. Power to appoint every governor of every state. Senators serving for life. A government that Madison judged to be suspiciously like the monarchy we had just defeated in a prolonged war.Madison noted, “Give all power to the many, they will oppress the few. Give all power to the few, they will oppress the many.” In the end, America would owe allegiance to no king.Hamilton’s model pushed far past what most men in the room would accept. Delegates from Connecticut started whispering to each other. The Virginians exchanged glances. By hour three, some walked out. By hour five, even his allies from New York looked uncomfortable. Benjamin Franklin, 81 years old and sitting near the back, closed his eyes, unclear whether from boredom or horror.No one took it up for a vote. The plan was never seriously considered. His audacity branded him a monarchist to some. The day after, the Convention went back to the real fight over representation. But something had shifted. The center of gravity slid toward Madison’s national vision because Hamilton had stretched the frame.What happened next tells you how the room felt. Hamilton left Philadelphia on June 29. He drifted in and out. He returned briefly in mid-August and early September. Fleeting presence meant little influence.In the end, Hamilton signed anyway. He was the only New Yorker who did. On signing day, he told the other delegates: sign it, even if it’s not perfect. The country needs this.Then he went home and did something remarkable.New York wouldn’t ratify the Constitution. The state legislature hated it. Too much federal power, they said. Too much risk of tyranny. So Hamilton spent seven months writing essays in New York newspapers under the pen name “Publius.” He wrote fifty-one of them. Madison and John Jay wrote the rest.These became The Federalist Papers. The most important commentary on the Constitution ever written.Hamilton’s task was to convince New Yorkers that a strong executive wasn’t a king. That energy in government didn’t mean tyranny. That the Constitution he’d argued against in private was actually the best hope for the republic.He lost the room in Philadelphia. But he won the argument in the newspapers. New York ratified. Barely. By three votes.Hamilton defended a Constitution that rejected his vision because he understood something crucial: a flawed republic beats no republic at all.Read Madison’s notes closely, and you see he understood the logic of the six-hour speech, even though he disagreed. Hamilton believed human passion would wreck any loose confederacy. He feared both gridlocked democracy and entrenched kings. His cure was durability: long terms, firm vetoes, national supremacy over state mischief. He said the British constitution best united strength with security. Now, the decisive matter. America’s founders did not fear a British king. They feared an American one. They feared what would happen when blind ambition gathered enough levers to bend the entire machine. They wrote a Constitution that mixes energy with friction so no single person or group could run away with the Republic. The secrecy and sealed windows were tools to make that compromise possible, not symbols of elitism.Hamilton lost the day, but not the argument. His extreme plan made the moderate path possible. But ideas never really die. His left a permanent temptation on the table: trade our Republic’s checks and balances for speed, trade gridlock for efficiency, trade debate for decisiveness. The room said ‘no’ in 1787. That decision created the Republic of the United States of America.Hamilton lost, but his argument never died. It waits for every moment when efficiency and allegiance sound better than divided power. That moment is now.The Shutdown’s Shadow. When the President’s Memo Becomes a WeaponOctober 1, 2025. Midnight. The lights went out across Washington. The federal government shut down for the first time in six years. Congress couldn’t pass a budget, and now 2.1 million civilian employees brace for days without pay. National parks lock their gates. Passport offices close. Air traffic controllers work without paychecks. Food stamp checks bounce in rural counties.This is the machinery of America, seized. Gridlock isn’t the problem. We have no king. But this shutdown isn’t like others. Back in Washington, Russell Vought, Project 2025 author and now head of the Office of Management and Budget, directed federal agencies to prepare “reduction in force” notices. To fire employees whose programs don’t match “the President’s priorities.”Not illegal programs. Not wasteful ones. Programs the president doesn’t like.It begs the question: Does the power of the purse still reside in Congress, or has it quietly migrated to the White House?Hamilton wanted the president to veto laws. The room in 1787 said no. This week, we’re watching what happens when Congress gives up.The shutdown impacts real people, but the crux of the matter is not the impacted programs. It’s not whether the EPA should exist or the CDC deserves its budget. It’s not even whether these firings save money or waste it.The crux is Hamilton and Madison.Hamilton wanted a king, or close enough. A president who could veto laws or Congressional policies they found distasteful. Not just unconstitutional laws. Not just illegal spending. Policies the executive simply disagreed with.Madison said no. He built a system where Congressional power over spending was sacred. Where the president couldn’t just refuse to execute laws because he thought they were bad policy. Where gridlock wasn’t a bug. It was the entire point.The question in 1787: What happens when the legislature passes something the executive hates? Does the executive get to ignore it? Does one person’s judgment override the people’s representatives?The Convention answered: No. The president executes the laws. Congress controls the purse. If you don’t like what Congress funds, you veto the bill before it becomes law. Once it’s law, you follow it.But what we’re watching now is Hamilton’s vision, 238 years late. A shutdown that becomes a veto. An executive using Congressional paralysis as permission to act. Not just managing the crisis. Reshaping government during it.This isn’t about President Trump. It’s about whether America still believes what Madison wrote in 1787: that ambition must check ambition. That we must divide power to limit power. That even good policy imposed by one person is tyranny.Hamilton lost that argument. But his idea never died. It keeps popping up, waiting for the right moment.Nixon’s Impoundment Crisis: When a President Tried to Be His Own CongressRichard Nixon looked at the federal budget in 1972 and saw waste. Not illegal spending, just programs he thought were stupid. He blamed the Democratic-led party for excess spending. Water treatment plants in Democratic districts. Rural development funds. Clean water grants.Congress had passed these appropriations. Nixon had even signed some of the bills. But he decided: I’m just not going to spend this money.He called it “impoundment.” What it meant: The president can refuse to spend money Congress allocated if he thinks it’s a bad idea.By 1973, Nixon had impounded over eighteen billion dollars, about twenty percent of controllable federal spending. Clean Water Act funds. Highway construction. Housing assistance. Food stamps.When Congress asked why, his answer was simple: These programs are wasteful. I’m protecting the economy.Nixon’s position was that the president has inherent constitutional authority to refuse to spend money he deems unnecessary, regardless of what Congress wants.Congress sued. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled against Nixon in Train v. City of New York. The law said money “shall be allotted,” not “may be” or “at the president’s discretion.” Shall meant shall.The courts said clearly: The president cannot refuse to spend appropriated funds based on policy disagreement.Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. The law was simple: The president cannot permanently cancel spending that Congress appropriated. To rescind funds, the president had to ask Congress. Both chambers must approve within forty-five days. If they didn’t, the money must be spent.The president can temporarily delay spending, but must notify Congress. Congress can force immediate release anytime.The law was bipartisan. Senate Republicans joined Democrats. Because they understood: If a Republican can do this, so can the next Democrat. This guts Congress’s power permanently.America need not fear a British king. We should fear an American one. The power of the purse is the power of the people. If we surrender it to the executive, we surrender the Republic itself.Nixon resigned in August 1974. Every president since has operated under the Impoundment Control Act. They’ve all chafed against it. But they generally followed the process: propose rescissions, let Congress vote, spend the money if Congress says.Until now. We’ve seen this before. Canceling foreign aid, withholding domestic spending, using shutdown authority to cut programs. It’s Nixon’s playbook.The argument is similar. These programs are wasteful. The president has inherent authority to manage the executive branch. The Impoundment Control Act itself might be unconstitutional.The question is the same question from 1787:Does the president execute the laws Congress passes, or does the president decide which laws are worth executing?Hamilton said the executive should have that discretion. Madison said no, that’s monarchy. Nixon tried to claim it. Congress and the courts said no.Now we’re asking again.Congress Built This TrapHere’s the uncomfortable truth: Congress created this problem.Not President Trump. Not Russell Vought. Congress did this by refusing to do their job.The Constitution gives Congress one primary measure against executive overreach: the power of the purse. Article I, Section 9. Every dollar spent must be “in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” Congress decides what gets funded. The president executes those decisions.For decades, Congress has punted. They pass continuing resolutions instead of budgets. They kick hard choices down the road. They let government lurch from crisis to crisis because making actual spending decisions requires something they can’t muster: consensus.And when Congress won’t decide, someone else will.When the legislature abdicates, the executive fills the space. Not because presidents are tyrants. Because someone has to keep the lights on.Obama used executive orders when Congress wouldn’t act on immigration. Bush claimed war powers when Congress wouldn’t debate authorization. Every modern president pushes boundaries because Congress left the boundaries undefended.Both sides have constitutional arguments.Advocates for presidential power claim the Unitary Executive position. Article II vests “the executive Power” in the President. Executing laws includes discretion over how and when to spend. The president has inherent authority to decline spending he deems wasteful.Advocates for congressional power claim the Congressional Supremacy position. Article I gives Congress the power of the purse. Appropriations are laws. The president’s duty is to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” The Framers rejected a presidential line-item veto by design.Both can cite Founders. Both can find judges who agree. This debate only happens because Congress stopped defending its own power.The Framers created friction deliberately. Madison designed it that way. Ambition to check ambition. The government grinds to a halt when consensus breaks down because gridlock is the price of divided power.Here’s the originalist paradox: If this executive power existed all along, why didn’t presidents use it for 184 years?From Washington to Nixon, presidents generally spent what Congress appropriated. Not because they lacked ambition. But because they understood the constitutional bargain.When Nixon broke that norm, both parties slapped him down. Republicans joined Democrats on the Impoundment Control Act because they understood: If Nixon can do this, so can the next Democrat.That’s the test. Not “Do I trust this president?” but “Do I trust every future president?” We can’t complain about executive overreach if Congress won’t exercise legislative power.Do We Trust Every Future President?Hamilton wanted a king. The room said no. They built a system where Congress could check the executive through the power of the purse.But that check only works if Congress pulls the lever.Madison’s design assumed ambition would check ambition. That Congress would jealously guard its powers.He didn’t account for a Congress that would rather avoid hard votes than defend its constitutional role.What’s happening now looks like Hamilton’s vision. But Madison’s system didn’t fail. Congress is failing Madison’s system.The Founders gave us the tools. Congress just refuses to use them.So, again. Do we trust every future president?May God bless the United States of America. Music from #Uppbeathttps://uppbeat.io/t/peter-cavallo/spinning-aroundLicense code: KE8Y1OQ8TZ4BNQXU Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

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• Why Do We Still Need Temporary Workers After 35 Years?

  October 17, 1933. New York HarborAlbert Einstein stepped off a passenger ship at the Port of New York, carrying two suitcases and a violin case. He and his wife, Elsa, had fled Nazi Germany. His books were being burned. There was a bounty on his head: one million dollars. He had to flee. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, offered him refuge. American universities, including Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, kept Jewish faculty to a minimum under quotas that lingered into the late 1940s. In 1933, Germany barred universities from employing Jewish instructors. But Einstein’s unparalleled scientific reputation made him an exception. By 1940, he became a US citizen. A hunted mind found safety and gave its work to the country that offered it. His was the story of America’s ability to attract extraordinary talent in times of global crisis, benefiting both the individual and the country.Then, a great war… (artillery shells in the distance)Twelve years later, in September 1945, Wernher von Braun arrived at Fort Strong, Boston Harbor, under very different circumstances. He was a prisoner under military control, not a welcome guest.Von Braun had been a key figure in Germany’s rocket program. He surrendered to the US Army in the Alps and denied Nazi allegiance. Through Operation Paperclip, the Army shifted his custody into contract work. In total, we brought over more than sixteen hundred German scientists in similar fashion. America faced a critical shortage of expertise in rocketry, and the Germans were good at rockets. Operation Paperclip prioritized strategic advantage in a rapidly escalating Cold War. We acquired technical skills to compete with the Soviet Union. Yes, Von Braun’s past and role in Germany’s rocket program were controversial. But his expertise helped lay the foundation for America’s space program, including the Apollo missions. Von Braun would lead teams that researched space programs and weapons technology. He later became the director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Our stories highlight two faces of America’s approach to global talent. Einstein’s arrival was a humanitarian and intellectual triumph. We welcomed a persecuted genius. He enriched our scientific landscape.Operation Paperclip, by contrast, was a shortcut. We imported expertise rather than developing it. We chose to prioritize providing for the national defence over the longer work of creating homegrown American rocket scientists.It would not be the last time we brought in talent rather than build it here at home.November 29, 1990. The White HouseIt was the day after Thanksgiving. President George HW Bush was about to sign what seemed like routine paperwork. The Immigration Act of 1990 sailed through Congress with bipartisan support. Democrats held strong majorities in both the House and Senate, but Republicans voted for it too. Senator Ted Kennedy shepherded it. Bush praised it as expanding basic entry rights beyond numbers.Buried in technical language was a new tool. An H-1B visa for temporary workers in specialty occupations. A cap of 65,000. It felt generous for the handful of firms that might need niche skills. The press barely noticed the H-1B provision. Nobody understood we had just created a constitutional time bomb. By 1998, the dot-com boom raged. Tech companies begged for more skilled workers in STEM fields. For the first time, we reached the 65,000 visa cap. Instead of asking why American universities weren’t producing the workers American companies desperately needed, Congress simply raised the cap.Then, we raised the cap again to 115,000. Today, the nominal cap is 65,000 plus 20,000 for US advanced degrees, with exemptions and extensions that let total approvals exceed the cap. It’s the same pattern each time: Companies complain about shortages, and Congress increases the supply of foreign workers. Nobody asked the hard question: Why can’t we train Americans to do these jobs?Thirty-five years later, that same temporary program turned constitutional failure just got a $100,000 price tag. But the underlying problem, the broken infrastructure we need to develop human capability, remains untouched.If this is a temporary measure we’ve already had for 35 years, let’s ask some easy questions. What conditions must we achieve to reach readiness? How will we know we achieved those conditions? How long is too long to keep the program? How much preference is too much? If the goal is a tech-ready American workforce, who decides when we should kill the program?What Ted Kennedy and George Bush created in 1990 wasn’t an immigration program. It was an admission of constitutional failure. A Band-Aid slapped over a bleeding cut. Our inability to fulfill two of our founding promises: to promote the general welfare and establish justice.Our constitutional goals often compete. We sometimes ignore one to prioritize another. But not in this case. In this case, we flat-out ignore two of them at the same time.Call infrastructure what it is: the general welfare. If we expand H-1B, we admit we failed to build the system that produces capability. Justice is the fierce guardian of opportunity. We withhold that protection when we keep Americans born in even our poorest areas from the system.We’re still overlooking our constitutional requirements today. September 25, 2025. Capitol HillSenators Chuck Grassley and Dick Durbin, Republican and Democrat, sent identical letters to America’s biggest companies. Amazon. Apple. Microsoft. Google. JPMorgan Chase. The question was simple: Why are you hiring foreign workers while laying off tens of thousands of Americans?The numbers told the story Congress refused to see for thirty-five years. Amazon alone got approval for more than 14,000 new H-1B hires in fiscal 2025, the most of any company, even as it announced layoffs affecting tens of thousands of American jobs. Microsoft, Meta, Google followed the same pattern: hire foreign, fire domestic.The senators wrote to CEO Andy Jassy…“With all of the homegrown American talent relegated to the sidelines, we find it hard to believe that Amazon cannot find qualified American tech workers to fill these positions.”The median H-1B salary hit $120,000 in 2024, nearly double what the average American worker earns. These aren’t low-skill jobs being outsourced. They are exactly the high-paying careers we promise American students they can achieve through education and training.But here’s the constitutional violation hiding in plain sight: We built a system where companies find it easier to import talent than develop it. Amazon can process 14,000 foreign visa applications, but claims it can’t find qualified Americans. We’ve abandoned the infrastructure that should create American capability and the general welfare in favor of global recruitment.But there’s another question we have to ask. Is there justice for small businesses?These big tech companies can absorb the new $100,000 fee and keep hiring foreign workers. Amazon processed 14,000 H-1B applications. What’s another $1.4 billion to them? Microsoft, Google, and Meta can simply pay the tax and move on.But the startup in your town? The small software company trying to compete with Amazon? The local engineering firm bidding against Deloitte? They can’t afford a $100,000 visa fee. Because we haven’t built our necessary tech infrastructure, they get priced out of skilled talent entirely.When we create a two-tiered system where only the biggest corporations can access global talent, we’re rigging the game against small business owners. The fee doesn’t solve America’s skills shortage. It hands Amazon an even bigger competitive advantage.The Constitution promises to establish justice, not auction it off to the highest bidder. We didn’t fix the pipeline. We priced out the people who could.Eighty years of shortcuts have brought us here. But the Constitution offers a different path.In Case We’re not Picking Up on the Pattern…In 1945, we imported German rocket scientists instead of training Americans. In the late 1990s, we imported H-1B tech workers instead of training Americans. In 2025, we raised H-1B fees instead of training Americans. Rather than decisive efforts to fix our deficiency, we bring in skilled immigrant workers from nations that do a better job of achieving our goals than we have.Each time, we chose the shortcut over the constitutional path. Each time, we treated symptoms instead of causes. Each time, we failed to ask the fundamental question: What would it take to make these visas unnecessary?The answer isn’t complicated. It’s just hard. Lucky for us, America is a great nation with tremendous resources. If we’re serious about reducing H-1B dependency, not just making it more expensive, we need to address the infrastructure failure that created the problem. Three specific steps would transform our approach from Band-Aid to cure:First: Measure H-1B applications per capita.Stop tracking how much money we spend on training programs and start measuring whether they work. H-1B applications are a direct measure of American workforce readiness. When applications drop, we’re succeeding. When they rise, we’re failing. Make this the primary metric for evaluating our education and training infrastructure.Second: Require H-1B companies to participate in local training.Any company filing H-1B applications must demonstrate active participation in developing American talent. Partner with community colleges. Host career days. Present real-world challenges to students. No participation, no visa applications. This aligns private profit with public need. Exactly what the Constitution requires.Third: Eliminate student loan interest for low-income students.The government isn’t a for-profit institution. The nation benefits when its citizens improve their capabilities. Charging interest on federal student loans for low-income students creates a barrier to the technical education we need. Genius hides in poverty. Remove that barrier.These aren’t radical proposals. They’re constitutional obligations we’ve ignored for thirty-five years while wondering why we still need temporary foreign workers to fill permanent American needs.The question isn’t whether we can afford to invest in American capability. The question is whether we can afford not to.So…Why Do We Still Need Temporary Workers After 35 Years?Einstein’s arrival was a triumph, for him and for America. Von Braun’s expertise launched our space program. Both stories show immigration enriching our nation. But neither shows us building the infrastructure that creates American capability.The H-1B program continues this pattern. It fills immediate needs but doesn’t address the underlying question: Why can’t we systematically develop the talent we keep importing?It doesn’t promote the general welfare, because we’re not building American capability. Nor does it establish justice, because it ignores homegrown American tech workers and prices small businesses out of competition. Let’s come back to our questions. Again, H-1Bs are a temporary measure we’ve already had for 35 years. What conditions must we achieve to reach national tech readiness? How will we know we achieved those conditions? How long is too long to keep the program? How much preference to corporations is too much? If the goal is a tech-ready American workforce, who decides when we should kill the program?These aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re real questions that demand specific answers from policymakers. They’re the questions Congress should have been asking since 1998. They expose that we’ve never planned to end H-1B dependency.So, instead of building infrastructure that lets every American kid lead the world in tech innovation, we’re still asking the same question we’ve avoided for thirty-five years…Why do we still need temporary workers after all these years?The constitutional violation is the infrastructure neglect, not the immigration. Immigration works when America offers opportunity. We should build the infrastructure that offers that opportunity to Americans, too.May God bless the United States of America.Music from #Uppbeathttps://uppbeat.io/t/oliver-massa/opulenceLicense code: IWQO24UR7GWNHDOR Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

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• Does the Civil Rights Act Violate the Constitution?

  On September 10th, a gunman killed Charlie Kirk in Utah. The event reminds us that no one should die over speech, and that we must wrestle with big questions calmly. You don’t have to love him or hate him. At times, his message resonated with many across America. At times, it divided us. If we say we disagree with his points, we should be able to make the case. If we can’t, his spears carry weight.One of his sharpest questions was this: Does the Civil Rights Act of 1964 violate the Constitution?Let’s sit with that for a moment. If your first thought is, “That law ended Jim Crow. How could it be wrong?” you’re not alone. We wrote the law to strike down a national disgrace. To end segregation. To stop the humiliation of being turned away from a lunch counter, of being told you couldn’t buy a home in a certain neighborhood, of being trapped in second-class status.We intended the Civil Rights Act to end those humiliations. To tear down the walls of segregation. To give every American a fair shot.In that moment, justice demanded action.But justice isn’t just a word. It’s a goal that shapes real lives. It’s the chance for a kid who grows up in a leaky trailer or in project housing to work, to save, and to buy a house in a neighborhood where their children have a good school and a fair shot. From a word on a page to life on the ground. According to the Constitution’s chief authors, justice may be the most important of the six national goals that bind our Republic. But justice isn’t a handout program. Justice is the chance to earn your place. It’s not a promise of results. Because the goals in our preamble, meaning union, liberty, welfare, defence, order, and justice, sometimes compete or clash, we must hold them in balance.In the end, our goal isn’t to win an argument. It’s to get better, together, at pursuing the ideals that bind us.So here’s the question: in the balance between Union, Liberty, and Justice, does the Civil Rights Act of 1964 violate the Constitution?Act One. A Plate of SegregationIn the mid-1960s, Maurice Bessinger’s Piggie Park barbecue ran popular drive-ins and a sit-down sandwich shop around Columbia, South Carolina. The chain routinely denied Black customers full and equal service. Those who were served had to take food at kitchen windows and were not allowed to eat on the premises. After Congress approved the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title II barred restaurants and other public accommodations from excluding people by race. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it on July 2, 1964, in a nationally televised ceremony attended by lawmakers and civil-rights leaders, among them Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.Had equality arrived?Not everywhere. Piggie Park didn’t change. On July 3, Anne Newman, a mother and minister’s wife, wanted a sandwich. Instead, she got a full plate of rejection. She and her friends went to Piggie Park for lunch. The waitress came out, saw she and her friends were Black, and turned back inside without taking the order. They went back a month later and were again refused service. The moment sparked a fight for justice. Newman, Sharon Neal, and John Mungin filed a class action suit seeking an injunction to stop the discrimination at the restaurants. This wasn’t a casual “we can agree to disagree” dispute. Bessinger stocked his restaurants with booklets defending racial separation. You could pick up this reading with your barbecue. It drew on the Genesis 11 story of the Tower of Babel to argue that God scattered the nations and meant them to remain separate. Integration, he preached, defied divine order. Some pamphlets even claimed biblical warrant for slavery.At first, the courts split. They wrestled with how far the law reached. The district court agreed that there had been discrimination. They also ruled that drive-ins, where most food was takeout, didn’t have to follow the law. The Fourth Circuit disagreed, saying all Piggie Park locations were public accommodations. Newman v. Piggie Park went to the Supreme Court in 1968. The high court sided with Newman and made it plain: religion is no excuse for segregation in a public restaurant. The justices called Piggie Park’s claim “patently frivolous.”Piggie Park wasn’t about handouts or special favors. It was about human dignity. The right to walk into a public restaurant and be served like anyone else. Believe what you want. But if you open your doors to the public, you serve the public.So…did the Civil Rights Act of 1964 violate the Constitution in Columbia, South Carolina? Did the decision rob Maurice Bessinger of his religious liberty? He was still free to believe, worship, preach, and pass out booklets. What he couldn’t do after choosing to run a public restaurant was use those beliefs to keep people out.And he didn’t stop speaking his mind. Before he died, he deeded a tiny patch of ground under the flagpole to the Sons of Confederate Veterans for five dollars so that future owners couldn’t take the Confederate flag down.But the issue isn’t cut and dry. The stories don’t stop in South Carolina.Act Two. A Seat With ConditionsIn the late 1960s, the University of California, Davis School of Medicine faced a stark reality: its classes had almost no Black, Latino, or Native American students. Justice is the opportunity to earn a place, but what does opportunity mean when the doorway to a profession has been locked for decades? UC Davis tried a fix: Out of 100 seats each year, they reserved 16 for “disadvantaged” applicants. UC Davis judged those applications by a separate committee, with different standards, and the underrepresented minority applicants competed only for those 16 seats.Enter Allan Bakke. A Marine Corps veteran and engineer in his early 30s, Bakke had set his sights on medicine. He’d spent years preparing, earning strong grades and MCAT scores. He applied to UC Davis in 1973 and 1974, along with a dozen other medical schools, and he was rejected by all of them. Later, he discovered that some minority applicants admitted through the special program had lower scores. He believed the school had shut him out because he was white. In reality, records later showed that competition was stiff; as many as 67 applicants had higher scores than his. Nonetheless, Bakke sued. He argued that a publicly-funded state school couldn’t deny him a seat and still honor the commitment to prohibit race discrimination in federally funded programs. Regents of the University of California v. Bakke reached the Supreme Court in 1978. The ruling was messy. Quotas, like the 16 reserved seats, were unconstitutional. They could not exclude Bakke based on race. The court ordered him admitted. But the Court, led by Justice Lewis Powell, also said diversity in education is a compelling goal. Race could be one factor in a holistic review, as long as every applicant competes in the same pool, with no guaranteed quotas.So…Did the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act violate the Constitution? Did it violate Bakke’s right to justice?UC Davis had its opinion of justice. It argued that set-aside wasn’t favoritism. It was a correction for a pipeline bent by decades of exclusion. A diverse medical class would better serve California’s diverse communities.If you were Bakke, would you see justice denied? If you were a minority applicant, would you see the set-aside necessary to level a field tilted by history? The Court decided justice meant the opportunity to compete equally, but not a scripted outcome. There could be no reserved seats, no separate tracks. But a school could consider race as one thread in a larger fabric, if every candidate competed equally.Bakke went on to have a successful career as a doctor in Minnesota.But the issue still isn’t settled. Let’s move on to Louisiana.Act Three. From the Classroom to the Shop Floor In 1965, President Johnson signed Executive Order 11246. In it, Johnson outlined that if a business wanted to compete for federal contracts, it had to follow the rules. If you wanted to do business with the federal government, you had to take “affirmative action” to ensure equal opportunity. This meant companies had to create goals and timetables to hire underrepresented groups. The government insisted these were not quotas. They were temporary tools, intended to pry open doors rusted shut for generations.At the time, Kaiser Aluminum in Gramercy, Louisiana, filled skilled jobs almost entirely with white workers, and it intended to change. They made a goal that their workforce would represent the local labor force. The company and the union built a training pipeline and reserved half of the slots for Black workers to correct the imbalance. A white worker named Brian Weber was passed over for promotion in favor of workers with less seniority. He saw a new door being closed in the name of opening another, so he sued. The local court and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit agreed that Weber was a target of discrimination, but the matter was not settled. Kaiser appealed.In 1979, the Supreme Court decided United Steelworkers v. Weber. Kaiser Aluminum’s plan survived. The high court said a business could give preferential treatment to minority groups, as long as the company intended the effort to be a temporary fix to balance workforce diversity.In 1987, Johnson v. Transportation Agency approved a similar approach for gender. A business could choose to hire a woman in a male-dominated job if she and a man were comparably qualified for a promotion, if the plan was modest and temporary.The tension between the classroom and the shop floor became plain. The high court killed fixed quotas in college. But numbers could steer workplace decisions if businesses called them goals, kept them temporary, and technically kept the door to all applicants open. On the ground, these goals felt like quotas. If a business chose a woman or minority applicant for a job or a promotion, some believed they were a token hire, not the top choice. If even the rules were fair, the optics were not.Ricci v. DeStefano drew a bright line in 2009. New Haven, Connecticut, gave firefighters a vetted, job-related promotion exam. One of them, Frank Ricci, was dyslexic. He paid to have the textbooks read onto audiotape. He studied eight to thirteen hours a day. He earned his spot at the top of the list. In total, nineteen of the top candidates were eligible for immediate promotion. 17 were White, two Hispanic. No Black candidates scored well enough for promotion. Fearing a lawsuit, the city threw out the test results.Ricci sued. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court found that a city couldn’t discard a valid, job-related test because it didn’t like the racial outcome. Merit, tied to the job, had to matter. Fast-forward to January 21, 2025. President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14173, revoking President Johnson’s Executive Order 11246. The new executive order barred workforce balancing and preferential hiring. It outlined that federal agencies would enforce civil rights laws without identity-based preferences. Some call Trump’s executive order a return to racism. Others point out that official policy and case law framed federal goals as non-quota, remedial tools. Temporary in purpose and bounded by merit and non-discrimination.So…Did the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act violate the Constitution? Did it violate Brian Weber’s right to justice? What about the firefighters in Connecticut?Some would rightly point out that we have not achieved equal representation in the workforce. Others would ask: If the federal government intended numerical goals as temporary, who would decide to eliminate them, and when?Act Four. The Permanent QuestionBut hold on. The play on our stage so far today moves from clear, undeniable injustice to increasingly problematic bureaucratic overreach. One endpoint whispers this bureaucratic mission creep has become a cure worse than the disease. That government enforcement created to stop obvious discrimination became a mechanism for institutionalized reverse discrimination.Before we close the book on this constitutional drama, we need to wrestle with the hardest question of all: What if we didn’t open the door?Take Cheryl Hopwood, a white mother from San Antonio who sued the University of Texas Law School in 1992. Like Allan Bakke, she argued that racial preferences had cost her a seat. The Fifth Circuit agreed in Hopwood v. Texas and struck down the school’s affirmative action program. Texas celebrated a return to “pure merit.”But how did Texas measure merit? The LSAT is the test students take to get into law school. The scores correlate with first-year law school grades. But the scores also correlate with family wealth, parents’ education, and zip code quality. When Texas stopped considering race, Black and Latino enrollment plummeted. In 1996, exactly five Black students enrolled in a class of 500. Was that justice? Texas panicked. Rather than accept that merit-based admissions had produced an unwanted outcome, the university created a workaround. UT quietly began weighing “socioeconomic factors.” Were they first-generation college students? Did they come from underrepresented communities? Had they overcome economic hardship?Admissions officers still tracked racial numbers. They still worried when minority enrollment dropped. They just found new ways to achieve the same results without using the forbidden language of race.Was the new approach race-neutral? Or was it just more sophisticated racial engineering?The constitutional question gets thornier when we think more about what “temporary” means. In 1978, Justice Powell allowed race as one factor in holistic admissions. 25 years later, in 2003, Justice O’Connor warned we would be ready to stop considering race in no more than 25 more years. Here we are, on the cusp of the expiration of those 25 years. And we have many unanswered questions. What conditions must we achieve to reach equality? How will we know we achieved those conditions? How long is too long? How much preference is too much? If the goal is a level playing field, who decides when we’ve reached it?Act Five. Dignity and the DoorwaySo, where does this play in five acts leave us? The Civil Rights Act of 1964 opened doors that should never have been closed. For Anne Newman, it was the glass door of a sandwich shop in the South Carolina heat. For Allan Bakke and Cheryl Hopwood, the door to an admissions office. The law didn’t give them a sandwich or a degree. It gave them the dignity to participate. The right to compete. The right to be judged on their own terms.But what began as a tool to unlock a door became, for some, a bureaucratic machine rearranging the room. On the one hand, the foundation of the Civil Rights Act is that all people are equal in dignity and rights. If that is true, no disadvantaged group needs permanent quotas. Promoting a system of quotas only strips the dignity from minority groups. It ensures that every magnificently qualified woman or Black man is seen as promoted because of the need to fill a quota and not based on their merit.Think of a female pilot in the cockpit of a 747. She is there because of her immense skill, courage, and dedication. But a system of preferences allows a passenger to whisper, “She’s probably only there to fill a quota.” We can call that passenger a bigot. And he is. But the system feeds his bigotry. On the other hand, dignity cuts both ways. A female pilot hears whispers about quotas, whether affirmative action exists or not. But if she did receive preferential treatment because of her gender, the injustice becomes undeniable. The system validates the prejudice it claims to fight.We cannot reject our commitment to civil rights. We must always celebrate the moral courage of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He spent Easter Sunday, 1963, in a Birmingham, Alabama jail cell, after urging for equality and peaceful protest. He denounced us for being “more devoted to order than to justice … (preferring) a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”We passed the Civil Rights Act so people wouldn’t have to throw their dignity under the train to join public life. But we must also remember Dr. King’s central vision: a nation in which his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.Merit and character are not the enemies of equality; they are its ultimate destination.In the balance of our six national goals, justice is the bedrock. It is our most important national goal. But justice is not a guaranteed outcome. It is not a handout. It is the fierce, unwavering protection of opportunity. It’s the promise made to the boy I was, stacking hay in stuffy Missouri barn lofts: that a kid from a leaky trailer or project housing can, through grit and talent, earn a place at any table in the country.This leaves us with the sharpest question of all.Does the Civil Rights Act of 1964 violate the Constitution?May God bless the United States of America.Music from #Uppbeathttps://uppbeat.io/t/monument-music/betrayalLicense code: ENQWTJMW52NIKTAE Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

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• Should We Fund Education At All? With Shaka Mitchell

  Joel Douglas (00:03) My guest today is Shaka Mitchell, a senior fellow for the American Federation for Children, a Nashville-based attorney, a Belmont adjunct teaching constitutional law, and a leader dedicated to transforming education for underserved families. He’s a featured guest on TEDx Nashville and podcasts like The Learning Curve and Charterfolk. The charter schools Shaka has worked with drive real growth for Nashville’s underserved kids, often doubling district test scores in math and reading. While high-poverty public schools rank in Tennessee’s bottom 30%, Shaka’s schools rank in the top 20% to 25% serving the same communities. Shaka, thanks for being here. Your work with high-performing charters raises big questions about how we fund and deliver education. So, I feel like we have to ask a basic question to get started.Shaka Mitchell (00:49) Hey, thanks for having me.Joel Douglas (01:02) Should we fund education at all?Shaka Mitchell (01:05) Yeah, good question. Well, thanks for having me, Joel, and you’re starting out with a big swing right out of the gate. Should we fund education? I would say yes. I would say yes.And I want to also give the early disclaimer that I am not a big-government guy. I tend to be pretty skeptical of government. I used to work at one point at a constitutional law firm that came from a libertarian perspective. I really believe in individual liberty, individual rights, and also just an individual’s work ethic. So I am not a big-government guy. That being said, when we’re talking about education, it’s something that I think has a community impact. It’s also something that, from a rule of law perspective, is provided for by every state constitution in the country.Right? So all 50 states have a constitution that says something about education—that education is valued, that it is highly prized, and that the state is going to do something to fund some system of education for the public. Now, whether or not the government has to provide the actual services, I think we can differ about. That’s where I would say no. But in terms of funding, I would say yes because, listen, if we don’t do it, you can’t just fund your own children. I don’t believe that. I think that looking out for one another’s kids in that regard is a societal benefit.Joel Douglas (02:47) And really, that’s why I feel like we have to answer this question first. It’s what you just alluded to: you have to fund your kids and everybody else’s kids. If you look at it from a constitutional perspective, I would think about it as, well, we have six national goals, and if one of those is justice, one is liberty, and one is defense, then education fits into a lot of those buckets.If you think about it from a justice perspective, it kind of gets to an individual—like we need to fund education to help individuals who grew up in a less prosperous or less advantaged background succeed. If you think about it from a defense standpoint, you might think, like the school lunch program was started from a defense requirement standpoint. So if we think about education from a defense standpoint, then that’s kind of a collective; we need to have an infrastructure of training-ready Americans who can go and join the military and serve in defense industries to protect the people of the United States.But it’s both, right? You can’t just do it from a justice standpoint—that’s not the only reason you do it—but you also don’t only do it for the collective benefit. It goes back to exactly what you said about how we have to pay for each other’s kids, too, because some of them might join the military and also because constitutionally, we have a commitment to the justice of those kids that grow up in a less prosperous environment.Shaka Mitchell (04:25) Yeah, I think that’s right. And, you know, education is one of these things that, as opposed to, maybe other, say, commodities—things that we buy from the store. The education that I get for myself, yes, it’s important to me personally and individually, but if I’m better educated, that’s going to benefit the community that I’m a part of. It’s going to benefit the private company that I might work for or the nonprofit. It’s gonna benefit the military if I’m a part of the service, right? It’s gonna benefit my neighbors.So education is not one of these things that’s like going to the grocery store and you buy the kind of breakfast cereal that only you like. You’re the only one in your house that likes it and you say, “Forget about everybody else, I’m eating whatever, Fruity Pebbles. I don’t care if nobody else likes it.” No, education is not that kind of good. It’s the sort of thing that actually has so much benefit.And I mean, you highlight something really important, too, that I took a look at a little bit this summer and might just write about later. And that is that the armed forces right now are going through the lowest recruitment cycle in history, right? Our military is having such a hard time finding academically and physically ready young men and women, and that becomes a defense problem. So that speaks a little bit to this “education as a national defense” and national security issue as well. There’s a lot of overlap there.Joel Douglas (06:06) Absolutely, and I don’t want to take too much time on it, but just from a physical education standpoint, PE. When I was a kid, and I grew up in a small town in northern Missouri, the high school football coach was the PE teacher. He used it as the football training program so that we essentially had an extra hour to do stuff. So, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, we'd lift weights. Tuesday, Thursday, we played some sort of sport, so we were running, chasing each other, doing field hockey, or whatever that was.But my kids today, because I have two teenagers, they don’t do the same kind of stuff in PE. For half of the year, they sit in a health class. And rather than go run for 45 minutes and then have 45 minutes of health class—I don’t want to digress too much—but if they ran for an hour every day, would the military benefit from them being more fit and having a higher pool of candidates who could join after they graduate? Absolutely.Shaka Mitchell (07:14) Yeah. I’m a big believer in physical education and just the benefits of physical activity in general. I really think that it’s something that, frankly, kind of links together with education in this sort of virtuous cycle. Right? I mean, I think for a lot of kids, and even personally, when I feel better physically because I’ve exercised, I think I’m more mentally sharp and focused and ready for the workday. And I think that’s the same for elementary, middle, and high school kids, too.Joel Douglas (07:52) Yeah, that’s right. But I’ll get back on track. You said something about how the government doesn’t necessarily outline how to achieve education. So it says what to do. Well, it doesn’t even say that. It says the goals are justice, liberty, defense, and the other three. So you alluded to there being different ways to achieve those. And I know you work with a lot of those, and that’s the work that you do. So, can you talk about that?Shaka Mitchell (08:24) Yeah, so, you know, a lot of state constitutions—most state constitutions—are really broad, even vague, when they talk about education. They’ll say something like, "The state of [fill in the blank] will provide for an equitable education system." You go, okay, what does that mean exactly? Right? Does that mean we're talking about dollars? Equitable that way? Are we talking about kids who are gonna exit the system with the exact same amount of coursework? It’s so vague nobody really knows. It’s just kind of one of these adjectives that they threw in there, and it sounded good. And then you fast forward just a few years, and you don’t really know what it means.So one of the problems, of course, in any state is that on the one hand, it’s really efficient, or it seems like it’s going to be efficient, to have one system that you have in place for all the kids to participate in. That seems like it would work on paper; it seems efficient. But then what happens is, as soon as you meet more than one child, you realize that they are different, and you realize that the same system isn’t likely to work for a whole range of students. And that’s within one school, let alone a whole district, state, or country, right?I live in Nashville, Tennessee, and we’ve got about a hundred thousand school-aged kids. There’s no way one system with one school board of nine people is going to be able to figure out a system that works for every single child because they have different interests. Even in my own house—and I bet this is the same for you and your kids—same parents, but my kids are interested in different things. One is better at math. One is much more interested in the arts. One is much more interested in reading, nose in a book, right? They’re just interested in different things. They’re going to learn in different ways. And that’s in one family. You multiply that out across the whole city, and you've got to do something different. And so that’s really, I think, why I believe so much in school choice.The idea is that, yes, we’re going to fund education from a central pot. Because again, let’s collect the money that way, easy peasy. But let’s not assume that those nine people on the school board can come up with one system that works for everybody. Let’s let different models work. So if it’s a charter school that’s got a focus on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), cool. Do that. In my city, there’s another charter school that’s really focused on students for whom English is not their first language. Okay, great. Let’s do that because that was something that the district was really struggling with. Or maybe it’s a values-based decision that a family wants to make. You really want your kids to go to a faith-based school. Okay, cool. I think that that’s your right to do. So let’s figure out how to make it work for families and make it more of a partnership rather than this top-down, command-and-control model where you say, "Alright, here’s the one thing that we say you get to have, and if it doesn’t work, too bad. See you in 12 or 13 years." Like, that doesn’t work.Joel Douglas (12:07) Yeah, and I don’t know if you’ve read the book The End of Average, but it’s a great book. It breaks down that if we average all everybody’s traits, thinking that whatever we produce to make the average will work for most people...Shaka Mitchell (12:13) Yeah, yeah, I love it.Joel Douglas (12:28) ...what in fact happens is we average everybody, and it doesn’t fit anybody because nobody is average. And so if you make a pair of pants that fit the average person, then they fit no one. And so that goes to school performance also, because some kids may not necessarily be low performers, but they may need extra time. The book talks about how they may need extra time in a particular core group of academics. And then later, when other kids who performed higher in that block are ahead of them, they might be bogged down by something else that they need to slow down for. But this kid who took more time in block two, as an example, can now speed through block three, and then they’re caught up in block four as compared to the kids who sped through block two, took more time at block three, and now they’re all in the same place in block four.And I feel like that is a very tough governance problem to have because our public schools today are designed to make everybody fit through the funnel at the same time, and students just don’t do a great job doing that. How would a charter school, or—I’m getting into what you do specifically—but how could other schools kind of solve that problem?Shaka Mitchell (14:02) Yeah, I think it’s the right question in that we have to be thinking about how we make this work for the end user: the students. So part of that is making sure we’re framing the question in that way. What I see happen too often in school districts is that we say, "Hey, how do we make this easier on the adults?" rather than, "How do we make it work better for the kids?"Joel Douglas (14:30) Do you mean the parents or the teachers, or both?Shaka Mitchell (14:32) No, I think we often ask how do we make it easier—sometimes it’s not even for the teachers—it’s how do we make it easier for the central office administrators to track, or how do we make it easier for folks at a state department of education to check the boxes? And so I think a lot of teachers would tell you they spend too much time checking the boxes rather than doing the things that their training would indicate they are uniquely qualified to do. And those are the things that really motivate them, which is, "Okay, how am I going to unlock learning for these specific students?"That’s what we want teachers focused on, rather than checking the boxes to say, "Okay, well, did my kids have this much seat time this week or this year?" Right? I mean, that’s not—seat time doesn’t mean much. There’s a whole lot of ways to sit in a seat and not be productive.So I think some things that schools can do—district schools, public schools, private schools, charter, it doesn’t really matter—is to really be student-centric. And then I would also say to not be afraid of innovation. And that’s something that happens in a lot of districts. They say, "Why are you doing it this way?" And the answer is, "Well, we’re doing it this way either to check the box for compliance reasons, or we’re doing it this way because we haven’t looked up and looked around to see what else is even working." And that’s a really unfortunate dynamic if it exists, right? We want to have a place where our schools are innovative and are taking best practices from other industries even and saying, "Alright, what can we do? What’s working at a school across the state? Can it work over here?" rather than just doing things the same old way. Unfortunately, I think that our incentive system is not set up well to foster innovation; it sort of does the opposite. It encourages schools to sometimes just keep doing the same old, same old, and that doesn’t benefit students.Joel Douglas (16:55) There are at least three challenges, though. I’m sure there’s way more than just three. But what about rural schools that don’t have enough kids? So if you in Nashville can break up a school for this and a school for that, a rural area just can’t do that. They don’t have enough. If you only have, like my school growing up had 27 kids in my class, how do you break them up? And then another challenge is if you take the money from these five kids away from the school and give it to this other school, then what happens to that first school? I think that that’s probably a challenge. And I’ve got my third one already, but I’ll turn it back to you.Shaka Mitchell (17:37) Yeah. Well, thinking about the rural school question. Here in Tennessee, we have a lot of rural schools also. I mean, obviously, not Nashville; anybody who’s been to Nashville recently knows that Nashville is not rural. Nashville is a little bananas, quite the opposite lately. But you don’t have to go far to find rural schools. And so I think things have shifted a whole lot since you and I were in school. There are a lot of things that did not exist when we were in school. Among them is the ability to take classes online and virtually, right? And connect with faculty members on the other side of the world or connect with students on the other side of the world.Just a couple of quick examples of this. I received this demo from a company that’s doing work out of Florida. Florida, you know, really leads the country, I would say, in innovative new school models. And Florida actually has a lot of rural schools, too. You don’t really think of it that way because they have some big cities, but there’s not a whole lot between Tampa Bay and Tallahassee. You’ve got a lot of rural areas. So this company has pioneered some virtual education, and it’s with these big VR goggles, right? And so I sat in a coffee shop in Nashville with the VR headset, and I did a lesson on the Constitutional Convention. I was walking around, you know, in this virtual world. I’m walking around Philadelphia, and the professor was there with me. I don’t even know what state he was broadcasting from. His avatar was there with me. We’re looking at things. I’m asking questions. I could turn pages in a book. I mean, it’s just pretty wild. Now maybe that’s not for everybody, but that sort of thing didn’t even exist 10 years ago in a way that was so tactile and constructive. So I think there are just more options in rural schools now.The other thing is to think about the school building and that time when kids are coming together. It’s like, well, what’s the value of that grouping? Meaning maybe we still want kids to come together for certain subjects or for certain lessons or certain group dynamics, right? People often talk about socialization and whatnot. But even in the homeschool communities now around the country, they have ways of getting together so that their kids have time with one another. And so I can envision things in rural communities where you say, "Okay, we’re going to still be learning in a similar environment, but it’s going to look much more like a one-room schoolhouse, for instance." And you’ve got kids who are working on different content simultaneously, right? It doesn’t all have to be the same one lesson for all the kids in the classroom. It should be differentiated. Because like you said, just because you’re a student who’s doing well in reading doesn’t mean that you’re doing just as well in math. You might be ahead or behind or whatever. And so that’s where you can shift the lessons and really make the lessons match the kids. And you’re seeing a lot of parents are able to piece that together through these choice programs. And again, in Florida, it’s happening. It’s happening in states like Arizona, Indiana—increasingly around the country.Joel Douglas (21:32) And even here in Wyoming. So my daughter, who is a sophomore this year, is able to take Japanese classes through the University of Wyoming as a part of her high school curriculum. And she can do that at her high school; like she has a free period, and during that free period, she enrolls in a Japanese class that’s taught at the University of Wyoming.Shaka Mitchell (21:42) Wow. Wow.Joel Douglas (21:57) And so she also gets college credit for doing that, which saves her money in the long run because she’s not at the university paying tuition rates; it’s included in the cost of the high school. So I could definitely see that that distributed training environment would be—sorry, I have a lot of military instructor background, so I say "training," but let’s just assume I said "education."Shaka Mitchell (22:09) Right, that’s amazing.Joel Douglas (22:25) That distributed education environment would really suit a lot of kids well, especially those who were interested in computers or a very unique subset of material that not everyone in their small school would be interested in taking.Shaka Mitchell (22:44) Yeah, for sure. I mean, AP classes are the best example of this because, you know, unless you’re at a big school—and in particular, a big school in a place that’s more densely populated, maybe an urban area or a suburb that’s close to an urban area—it’s hard to have a lot of AP classes, right? Because you don’t know from year to year if you're going to have enough students who even want to take, say, AP Physics or something like that. I think that’s a place where rural schools have traditionally struggled a little bit to have all those different course offerings, even though the kids might have the aptitude to do it.So yeah, the virtual space, that’s super cool. To be able to save money and get college credit—even if you didn’t get credit by eventually scoring a four or five or whatever you need to on the AP test, that exposure already is going to be super helpful. You’re still going to get the high school credit you need, and you might just find out, "Hey, I thought that I was really interested in business, and then I took a college-level business course, and it turns out I’m not actually that interested in it," or vice versa. And I think that exposure is really, really good for kids.You asked a question about money shifting around, too, and that’s one where I think we’re just seeing different dynamics around the country than what we grew up with. We’re just seeing the dollars start to follow the students. And that, I think, is the model that we want to get to. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to have all those resources, all that capital tied up in a building. And often that’s where it gets tied up. I mean, I heard a stat out of the state of Texas where the debt load that districts are carrying because of football stadium construction costs is just astronomical, right? Why do we have so much money tied up in that? And I get it. I mean, folks would laugh if I said that I played high school football, but I did for a very brief period of time. I get it. It’s fun. I like going to games, watching games, whatever. But we don’t need all of our education dollars tied up in the buildings and the stadiums. The whole point is to make sure that when the Friday night lights go off, these kids are prepared to do something as adults. So let’s work on that.Joel Douglas (25:30) And that may not be a battle that we can win, as far as not having football, but...Shaka Mitchell (25:36) That’s right. Yeah, I’m not trying to turn Texas away from football anytime soon. I’m not gonna die on that hill.Joel Douglas (25:43) But there’s also a compliance piece, too. So if we say, "Okay, kids only need to study from home so they can do all their curriculum at home, and then they come to a centralized location to do interaction or whatever," there’s just an inkling in the background of, if they commingle, are they gonna meet all the same public health requirements and the same nutrition requirements as the core group of kids who are in the mix? And that’s very challenging because there are a lot of people, for instance, with vaccines, who feel right now that they want to have a choice in whether or not their kid gets a measles vaccine. But then they also want their kid to be able to play football. And so then if they’re on the football team, do they need to have a measles vaccine? That’s a challenge that legislators are fighting right now.Shaka Mitchell (26:39) Yeah, for sure. It’s challenging. We don’t wade into those sorts of public health areas, but it’s definitely a challenge. I mean, I think one of the things it highlights, frankly, is that for better and for worse, schools have truly become a hub for lots of other things that are not related to education. Right? So you’ve got schools that are used as public health centers, you’ve got schools that are used for giving out food resources... and I get it, because if this is the place in your community where you’re most likely to see kids or families, I get why you would want to take advantage of that time. But to the extent that we put all that responsibility on school leaders and teachers, I don’t think it’s been really constructive. Let them focus on what they can do, and their locus of control needs to be education. And if that means we’ve got to come up with other ways and other places to do, say, a food pantry, you know, maybe so be it. But I would prefer letting the educators focus on that one thing.Joel Douglas (28:03) Sure. Yeah, and I know you don't. Because you work with so many underserved communities, I know that you readily acknowledge that for some of those kids, that’s the only meal they’re gonna get that day. And so that is an important thing, and I know that you believe that.Shaka Mitchell (28:15) Right, right.Joel Douglas (28:21) You’re talking about a different subset than here in Wyoming or in Missouri where I grew up. We didn’t necessarily see that at the school level, but I certainly believe that in other places, that’s a different thing. So what do you say when a legislator talks to you about, "We don’t want you to take money away from the public schools"? How do you answer that?Shaka Mitchell (28:49) Yeah, it’s a good question. You know, assuming that it’s asked honestly, right? Then I think that it’s helpful to try to get folks to think about what it is that they actually want the money spent on. And so oftentimes, what people say is, "Well, we don’t want to take money from our public schools." But if what they really mean is, "Let’s make sure students in public schools have the same amount of resources," then I’m like, "Okay, yeah, I get that."Because here’s the deal: your daughter, the one that we were talking about earlier, the sophomore—let’s just say hypothetically that she moved from a public school to a different school environment, to a private school. Well, she would no longer be a cost to that original school. So why in the world would we continue to send 100 percent of the funds to that original school? Wouldn’t we want her to be funded wherever she goes?And by the way, here’s the thing: people make it sound controversial when you’re talking about a charter school or a private choice program, but this is exactly what happens anytime someone moves from one county to another county, right? And we don’t stop people from doing that. We don’t say, "Hey, you live in Davidson County, and it’s not fair that if you move to Williamson County, you’re taking money from the public schools." Well, it is true in some sense, but you’re taking the student, too, right? And so I try to get legislators to think about how this kind of already happens in the natural context of people moving around, and we want families to be able to do what’s best for them. So that to me is a higher priority than just sustaining this particular building or that particular building. I want families to thrive, irrespective of what type of school they attend.Joel Douglas (31:13) Sure, love it. Also, I love the distributed education environment thought. I wrote a piece once about how I feel that, in general, high school kids are not well prepared to move into the working world directly. They have a hard time getting their first job, and then they have a hard time building expertise in whatever they want to do as they grow up.But if we took kids who were seniors—so say the kids that were on the university track just keep doing their thing, and then kids who were gonna go into a tech field or were hoping for tech certifications—they take their senior year of high school or the first year after high school and do distributed training. And we have businesses that sponsor real-world problems that they’re having. So then during the class, the kids are actually thinking, "Oh, this is a problem that this business is having; this is how I would approach it." Then I think that that would be really valuable real-world expertise that those kids could get. I would love to see that integrated into high school or early post-high school curriculum, but I also understand that that breaks the education mold, and that’s a challenge.Shaka Mitchell (32:37) Well, you know, it breaks the mold, but it’s not without some precedent. There are many European countries, actually, that have a system of high school internships where the curriculum is basically created by industry and by business leaders. So you’ve got the business leaders who are themselves saying, "We anticipate these needs or those needs..."(Sound of strong wind in the background)Sorry, is there—do you hear that?Joel Douglas (33:20) I was gonna say something. I believe that is the Wyoming wind making its presence felt. Yeah, that’s just our wind in the background. Wyoming is known for our wind, and there it is.Shaka Mitchell (33:27) No kidding. Okay. Well, I apologize for breaking up our talk. That’s amazing. Okay, well, good, I’m glad it’s that and I’m glad your house is still standing, because that sounds intense.Anyway, so, yeah, there’s this European model where you’ve got industry and business leaders who might say, "Okay, hey, here’s the training that we think is gonna be really important in the heavy mechanical engineering industry," right? So, big engines, big motors, and things like that, maybe for ships or something. And they say, "Here are the things that we think are going to be really valuable skills and knowledge for the next five years." And they actually work with schools to create that curriculum on a year-by-year basis. And there are some European countries where something like 80% to 90% of high school kids have basically an externship that year where they’re getting some hands-on training. These are kids where some of them are gonna go into the trades, and some of them are gonna go on to do more education.So I love the idea, not just for one sector of kids, because the reality is, most of us don’t know what we’re gonna do when we’re 16. And maybe we will go to college, maybe we won’t, maybe we’ll go later in life. I mean, I have a lot of formal education, and you know how I spend a lot of time on the weekends? Fixing things around my house. Right? And so it’s not like these things are mutually exclusive. If I have no idea how electricity works, I could get really hurt when I’m trying to, you know, a couple of weeks ago, when I had to fix our washing machine or install a new garbage disposal or whatever. So I think those technical skills really can benefit anybody.Joel Douglas (35:37) Absolutely, and that idea really comes from the Air Force Weapons School. The Weapons School is the Air Force’s version of Top Gun. It’s structured differently, and I won’t go into it... but there are blocks. And in that block, you might have two or three days’ worth of education. You’re in class from 7:00 in the morning till 5:00 or 6:00 in the evening, and then you study that evening. You take a test in the morning the next day, then you start academics again at 7:00. You go through two or three days of that, and then on, say, day four, the instructors give you a problem set of, “Hey, this is a real-world scenario, and you have until tomorrow night to come up with a presentation which you will teach back to the instructors outlining your approach to solve this real-world problem.” And what you learn is, on day four, you feel ready to go, and you’ve gotten good test scores the first three days because you take a test every day. You get the problem set, and you learn you didn’t retain what you thought you did.Shaka Mitchell (36:47) Right.Joel Douglas (36:50) And then you have to teach it to yourself again so you can teach the instructors at the end of the next day. It’s a fantastic education model, and I would love to see it—well, it was a very beneficial education model for me, and I’m sure it would benefit other kids. It’s a tall order to ask a high school kid to do that kind of stuff.Shaka Mitchell (37:16) Maybe it is, but I’ll tell you, I had a conversation with a researcher at Johns Hopkins University, and she does a lot of work on what she calls "education pluralism." She’s done a whole lot of work researching different school models around the world, really. And then also school culture within a school building—meaning, like, how rigorous is it? You know, what are the expectations? And she would say that we are grossly under-challenging our kids in school. And that resonates with me.I mean, you think about how many kids are so-called "behavioral challenges," but actually the challenge is often academic, right? Kids who talk a bunch in class—it’s often because they’re not engaged for one reason or another. Maybe they’re not engaged because they don’t understand the content. Maybe they’re not engaged because they do understand it, and it’s really boring, and they would rather be doing something else. They’re not dumb, and they realize, “What am I doing here?” Right? And so in both cases, unfortunately, we end up doing the wrong thing, and we sort of say, “Alright, you’re out of here, go to the principal’s office,” or whatever, rather than saying, "Are we actually matching the challenge to the child’s aptitude and their capabilities as we see them right now?" And so I think we could do a better job. So it sounds like a tall order, what you have in mind, but I would be willing to say, hey, let’s not play slow-pitch all the time. Let’s throw a little bit harder and see if our kids can make contact.Joel Douglas (39:14) Yeah. I want to give you a chance to talk about whatever you want to talk about for however long you would do that for. So you could pitch charter schools, you could pitch the work that you do.Shaka Mitchell (39:26) Yeah, thanks, Joel. Well, one of the things that I’ll mention—I think it’s a really exciting time in education policy in terms of what we’re seeing around the states and even at the federal level. And I think it couldn’t come at a better time. So just yesterday, some new data was released from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It’s called the NAEP.Joel Douglas (39:56) Yeah, I saw the performance report.Shaka Mitchell (39:56) Yeah, and what was released were some 12th-grade math and reading scores and an eighth-grade science score. This is often called "the nation’s report card." So this isn’t some ticky-tack little assessment. This is for kids in every state in the country—kids in private schools, public schools, charter schools take it. But the public schools' scores were released, and in math and reading—in reading, for instance, the scores were some of the lowest in history. In math, they were the lowest point since 2005. And remember, these are the kids whose eighth-grade year was when COVID hit. So it’s been super disruptive for them. And I think in some ways, these scores just confirmed what a lot of parents saw during that time, which is, "Hey, this system just isn’t really serving our children as well as it could be." Again, not all schools, but system-wide, we had some major problems.What that looks like, for instance, is that only 35 percent of 12th-graders were proficient in reading. Thirty-five percent. In math, on the opposite end of the spectrum, 45 percent were below basic. So it goes below basic, basic, proficient, and then there's advanced. But 45 percent below basic in math. So who’s gonna be surprised if we have a rising and continuing national debt problem in the future? Who’s gonna be surprised if personal finance is just a mess for this cohort of kids? If you can’t do basic math, it’s gonna be a problem. It’s gonna manifest itself as a major problem when you do hit the working world and you’re not quite sure, like, what do these things like interest rates mean? Whether it’s on a credit card or for a home that you’re trying to purchase or a car or whatever.So those do concern me. That being said, on the encouraging side of the ledger is what’s happening in many states with these programs that allow parents to get public dollars for their choice in education. I think now we’ve got 18 states that have what we call a universal choice program. And we also have now, I believe, 48 states that have charter schools. And so those are public schools that are independently run and operated so that a school leader and its school board can make personnel decisions, they can make curriculum decisions.And really, I encourage families to not feel like you have to be satisfied anymore if your child is in a school that’s not working well for them. In most states now—not all, but in most states—you have some options, and that number is increasing on an annual basis. You know, if you’re in a position where your child comes home and he or she is really discouraged, really disappointed in what’s happening, don’t take it for granted that this is your only option. You may have some other options out there. I definitely encourage folks to, you know, check out our website or do some other research online and see what options are available in your state because you might be able to get some scholarships to attend the school of your choice.Joel Douglas (43:54) Awesome. Hey, Shaka, I really appreciate you being on the show today.Shaka Mitchell (43:59) Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation.Joel Douglas (44:03) Thank you.Music from #Uppbeat https://uppbeat.io/t/dada/stormy-sea License code: ML5WFF9OHYGLPAUV Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

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