I am still on the road, still fighting bad actors, and still spending my days buried in real cases, real families, and real constitutional problems. Today’s show was shorter, but the subjects were heavy.

We walked through three big questions:

Who really controls your children when medicine, courts, and child protective systems collide.

What the new parental rights amendment in Texas really does, and why it may be far more dangerous than advertised.

Why the recent elections should be a very loud alarm for anyone who cares about liberty going into the midterms, including President Trump.

Let me unpack all of that in a way you can share with friends, legislators, and school boards.

Under United States law, the Supreme Court has long recognized that parents have a fundamental liberty interest in the care, custody, and control of their children. Cases like Troxel v. Granville explicitly describe parental authority over upbringing as one of the oldest liberty interests protected by the Due Process Clause.

At the same time, states are allowed, and in some cases required, to protect children from abuse and neglect, including medical neglect. Ethical and legal commentary has consistently framed state intervention as justified when a child faces serious risk of harm and parents refuse necessary treatment.

Here is where the problem begins in the real world.

On paper, the idea is simple: if a parent is truly neglecting a child, the state can step in temporarily to prevent serious harm. In practice, however, child protective systems often operate with broad discretion, financial incentives tied to keeping children in custody, and a very low bar for what some professionals call “medical neglect.” Scholars and advocates have documented how families struggle to challenge removals, face qualified immunity barriers, and rarely find counsel who understands how to fight agencies that overreach.

That means a scenario like this is not hypothetical:

A child receives aggressive, expensive treatment that is not working.

A parent decides to stop a failing protocol and try an alternative approach.

The original physician, frustrated to lose control and revenue, reports the parent for “medical neglect.”

Child Protective Services arrives, files for an emergency order, and a judge hears only the agency and the physician in an ex parte hearing, without the parent present.

The child is removed, placed under state custody, and subjected to the very treatment the parent believed was harming the child, while the parent rushes to find an attorney in 24 to 48 hours.

That is what I call medical kidnapping. The legal tool was originally intended to rescue children from genuine abuse. It is now often used as leverage in disputes between families and powerful medical or pharmaceutical interests.

Now place that background next to what just happened in Texas.

Texas voters have approved a constitutional amendment, often referred to as Proposition 15, that adds explicit “parental rights” to the state constitution. According to the official summary, it affirms that parents have the right to exercise care, custody, and control of their children, and that they bear the responsibility “to nurture and protect” them.

On the surface, that sounds like exactly what many of us have been demanding. The problem is in the details that do not appear in the amendment. The phrase “nurture and protect” is not defined in the text. That means courts, agencies, and school systems will be left to interpret what those words require.

Commentators across the spectrum have already noted that vague duties like “nurture” and “protect” can be used in two very different ways. They can be cited to shield parents from unnecessary interference, or they can be invoked by the state to claim that a parent who refuses a contested medical treatment, questions school curricula, or chooses a different educational path is failing to “nurture and protect.”

Public health and legal scholarship has shown how parental rights, public health mandates, and child welfare frequently collide in exactly these gray zones: vaccines, “standard of care” treatments, gender-related care, and schooling decisions.

So in Texas, you now have:

A constitutional statement that parents must “nurture and protect” their children.

Existing doctrines that allow the state to remove children for “medical neglect.”

A child welfare system that already struggles with oversight and accountability.

Put those together and it is easy to see why I am deeply concerned that this amendment could be used, not to protect parents, but to justify more interventions when parents dissent from dominant medical or educational views.

If a court decides that “protect” includes every vaccine on the official schedule, or every new technology labeled “standard of care,” then refusing a specific intervention may be framed as a constitutional failure of your parental duty. That is exactly the opening that clever attorneys and bureaucrats look for.

The core question of this episode is simple but uncomfortable:

If the state can redefine “neglect” based on whichever treatments or ideologies are popular with its experts at any given moment, and if new constitutional language can be interpreted to give the state broad power to judge whether you are “nurturing and protecting” your child, then who effectively owns your children in practice?

The Supreme Court has said that parents have a fundamental liberty interest in raising their children.

The gap between those two realities is where medical kidnapping and bureaucratic overreach occur. That is the gap we must close.

The second part of the show looked at the recent election results. The short version is that the political movement often grouped under the “MAGA” banner did not have a good night. There were losses in key states and cities, some of them by wide margins.

While pundits are already trying to spin this as normal fluctuation in “blue” states, the reality is more serious. When your base is demoralized, does not believe its priorities are being addressed, and feels that entrenched insiders are still calling the shots, turnout suffers.

Many conservative voters see:

Continuing funding for foreign conflicts while the United States borrows and inflates.

Little progress on removing or even honestly auditing controversial medical products that were rushed to market during the pandemic.

Persistent influence of corporate and pharmaceutical interests in both parties.

Whether one agrees with every detail of that critique or not, there is no serious doubt that disillusionment among core voters leads to weaker performance in midterms. Political scientists have repeatedly observed that base motivation is central to midterm outcomes in both parties.

My argument in this episode was that if national leaders do not act on the issues their own voters care about, and rely instead on messaging and branding, they should not be surprised when those voters stay home.

Finally, we turned to tariffs and presidential emergency powers.

Under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), passed in 1977, the president is permitted to regulate certain aspects of international commerce after declaring a national emergency tied to foreign threats.

In 2025, President Trump used IEEPA to justify broad tariffs on imports from many countries, arguing that trade practices and issues like drug trafficking created an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to national security and economic stability.

Lower courts have since ruled that IEEPA does not authorize such sweeping tariffs, holding that the power to “regulate” imports under that statute does not include imposing essentially open-ended taxes on nearly all trading partners.

The case is now before the Supreme Court, and early reporting on oral arguments suggests that several justices are skeptical of such an expansive reading of emergency authority.

This raises an important constitutional point that goes beyond tariffs. For years, executive branches from both parties have relied on emergency powers in health, trade, and security to take actions that would never survive a normal legislative process. When those powers are used to impose lockdowns, mandates, or surveillance, many of the same voices now opposing tariffs on separation-of-powers grounds were silent or supportive.

My position is consistent. If Congress wants to maintain control over trade and emergency responses, it should stop delegating broad, vague powers to the executive and then complaining when a president uses them.

This episode brought several threads together.

The legal framework around parental rights is already fragile. The Texas amendment uses noble language that can be interpreted very differently once it reaches courtrooms and agencies.

The child welfare and medical systems have real incentives and very broad discretion, and those systems too often treat principled parental disagreement as “neglect,” especially where profitable treatments are involved.

The recent elections show that rhetoric without action is not enough. If leaders ignore the issues that matter most to their own voters, the midterms will reflect that.

The tariff fight is one more example of a larger struggle over emergency powers, constitutional limits, and whether Congress will reclaim its responsibilities.

Who really owns your children, who controls your economy, and who is accountable when rights are quietly redefined are not abstract questions. They are being answered right now in legislatures, courts, and agencies around the country.

My goal is to keep you informed, engaged, and prepared to push back wherever those answers threaten your family and your freedom.

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