Penna Dexter
As evidenced by the crowd at last weeks’ March for Life on the National Mall in Washington DC, the pro-life movement is alive and well. In a post-Roe world, it’s still needed.
Vice President J.D. Vance joined the marchers, thanking them for showing up in such large numbers on “this especially frigid January.”  He made it clear he’s one of them, and  described their cause as “our movement.”
In a video message, President Trump pledged that in his second term, he will “protect the historic gains” made in his previous administration and will block the “push for a federal right to unlimited abortion on demand.”
Both the president and vice president made clear that targeting of “Americans of faith” and pro-lifers by the U.S. Justice Department will end.
President Trump told the marchers, “I am releasing the Christians and pro-life activists who were persecuted by the Biden regime for praying and living out their faith…”
Vice President Vance referred to failures by our nation to foster a culture of life, stating “our country has not stepped up in the way you have.”
Sadly, his statement aptly describes a recent action by the United States Senate.
Every January, before the March for Life, Congress considers an important piece of pro-life legislation. This year’s bill was the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, introduced by Senators James Lankford (R-OK) and Jim Banks (R-IN).
 On January 9th, the new Senate Majority Leader, John Thune, (R-SD) held a vote on it.
The bill does nothing to limit access to abortion. It simply requires that babies who are born alive—having survived an attempted abortion—will receive appropriate medical care. It’s a simple argument: Leaving this baby to die would be infanticide.
The motion for cloture failed 52-47, with every Democrat voting against moving the bill forward.
This extremism helped give us a Vice President who marched for life, carrying a sign that reads, “I Am the Pro-life Generation.”

Kerby Anderson
Here is a social statistic that should concern all Americans, and deserves attention from leaders in government, pastors in churches, and parents in the home. Young men are falling further behind. That is the title of a Wall Street Journal article by Rachel Wolfe.
“More women ages 25 to 34 have entered the workforce in recent years than ever. The share of young men in the labor market, meanwhile, hasn’t grown in a decade.” Place her statistics with another that I cited just a few months ago. America has 7 million young men (ages 25-54) who are not working and not looking for work.
One reason is attitude. Richard Reeves (president of American Institute for Boys and Men) explains, “The sense a lot of young men have is not being sure that they are needed or that they are going to be needed by their families, by their communities, by society.”
This leads to the phenomenon known as a failure to launch. “In Spanish, parents call it encaminado: making sure your children are on the path to an independent adulthood.” One in three young adults live with their parents. And young men are more likely to live with their parents than young women. Former Senator Ben Sasse wrote about this in his book, The Vanishing Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance.
Steven Malanga argues in his essay Unemployable that “a growing number of Americans aren’t simply out of a job. There are no longer fit for work.” Many young men do not have a good work ethic and haven’t been prepared by the schools for the labor market.
The crisis of young men in America deserves our attention. Government leaders and church leaders need to take note.

Kerby Anderson
Senator Rand Paul was on a TV interview with Larry Kudlow to talk about government spending. They began by acknowledging that we have a national debt of $36 trillion and a fiscal budget that needs to be brought under control.
Senator Paul believes the best benchmark is to only spend what comes into the federal treasury, but that hasn’t happened in decades. But he suggested that the first place to start would be to cut the hundreds of thousands of dollars allocated to study whether lonely rats use more cocaine than well-adjusted socialized rats. Or Senator Paul suggested we might cut the money allocated to study whether Japanese quail on cocaine are more sexually promiscuous. With a bit of sarcasm, he suggested there are a “few things we might be able to cut.”
Of course, these aren’t large cuts, which is why Larry Kudlow wanted to know if it were possible to save the money by not spending funds allocated but never used for COVID, or the Inflation Reduction Act, or even the CHIPS bill.
Senator Paul responded that there is a way to do this. It’s called recission. It was tried once in the Trump administration to send back $15 billion in unspent funds, but there were two Republicans who did not vote for it. He is convinced that perhaps now you could get 50 Republicans to vote for recission and cut $500 billion.
The other idea they discussed was impounding funds, but the Supreme Court ruled against President Nixon doing that. This current court might be willing to consider that process of impounding funds since it was done for more than a hundred years until the court ruled against Nixon in 1975.
There are ways to cut federal spending.