WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Under the Radar: 04.18.25

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

This week on “Under the Radar,” hear about a Supreme Court case about minors seeking reproductive healthcare without parental consent, a bill hoping to prevent a single judge from stopping federal policies, an executive order aimed at decreasing prescription drug prices, and more. I’m your host, Luke Miller, and on this show we’ll cover the news you didn’t catch this week from the mainstream media. While they’re covering the President’s latest tweets, here you can hear about the new legislation, executive orders, and Supreme Court decisions that affect you. Welcome, to “Under the Radar.”

This is Under the Radar on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Now, here's your host, Luke Miller. This week on Under the Radar, hear about a Supreme Court case about minors seeking reproductive health care without parental consent, a bill hoping to prevent a single judge from stopping federal policies, an executive order aimed at decreasing prescription drug prices, and more. I'm your host, Luke Miller,

and on this show, we'll cover the news you didn't catch this week from the mainstream media. While they're covering the president's latest tweets, here you can hear about the new legislation, executive orders, and Supreme Court decisions that affect you. Welcome to Under the Radar. The first piece of news I have for you this week is a Supreme Court case called Montana v. Planned Parenthood of Montana. It's not actually a normal Supreme Court case.

It is a petition that has been filed with the Supreme Court by the state of Montana in an attempt to revive a parental consent law for minors who are seeking abortions. Montana is a very interesting state when it comes to these kind of laws, when this comes to reproductive health laws. In 2024, Montana passed an explicit constitutional right to an abortion through an amendment process. They have enshrined the right to abortion permanently within the state's constitution. However, this case is about whether that applies to people under the age of 18. In 2013, the Montana legislature passed a law requiring teenagers under 18 to get consent from a parent

or guardian when seeking an abortion. However, Planned Parenthood immediately went to the state courts and challenged the law. They got from a judge there, what's called a preliminary injunction, which basically means that you put the law on hold for a short amount of time until a higher court can make a decision about whether the law is constitutional or not. Now, Planned Parenthood has a pretty advanced legal team, it seems like, because a lot of the cases that I have been talking about have involved Planned Parenthood. There's a lot of Planned Parenthood cases that go up to district courts and to the Supreme Court. And Planned Parenthood has somehow managed to lock this law down in procedural struggles. For over 10 years now, the Montana law requiring teenagers under 18 to get consent

in order to get an abortion has been on hold. The preliminary injunction that's supposed to be temporary has lasted 12 years now. But recently, there's been a bit of a change. We see in 2022, The Supreme Court overturned the infamous Roe v. Wade decision in the Dobbs v. Jackson decision, which shifted the abortion rights debate back to the states. Pretty much immediately afterwards, Montana enshrined their right to abortion in their state constitution. However, the state of Montana is now arguing against Planned Parenthood of Montana that the Dobbs decision means that the states have a right to enforce the laws that are on the books about abortion. because this law is on the books. The law requiring consent for children under the age of 18 to get an abortion. It's pretty common sense to say that people who are not allowed to vote, who are not allowed to drink, who are not allowed to buy tobacco products,

shouldn't be able to make this kind of decision without the consent of their parents. There is an exception to this rule because there kind of needs to be for certain cases like parental abuse or the parents aren't particularly in the lives of the children, involved in the lives of the children. In that kind of case, there's a particular exception to this law called the Judicial Bypass Provision, which means that minors can ask a judge to greenlight an abortion without the parents' consent. But since 2013, this law has been on the books in Montana that if you are under the age of 18, you have to have parental consent to get an abortion. Of course, this law has not been enforced, even though it has been on the books for the last 12 years, because Planned Parenthood has been holding it up,

which seems pretty insane to me if you really think about it. Planned Parenthood is a private organization who has a direct conflict of interest about this law, and they, by themselves, are determining the laws of a state. They by themselves are holding up a law that was passed by the elected legislators of a state. Montana is one of the states where abortion is easier to get, and the legislature there still decided to pass this consent law. That is, the majority of people electing a majority of representatives who passed a piece of legislation. legislation, which is not particularly easy to do, particularly with abortion cases. When you're dealing with laws about abortion, it's very, very hard to pass legislation about it because it's such a polarizing issue. In the state of Montana, their legislature passed this law. A private

company who has a direct conflict of interest because they stand to make money on people getting abortions is holding up this law and has been doing so for 12 years. So the state of Montana in this Supreme Court petition is asking that the Supreme Court, go ahead and end the preliminary injunction, which is supposed to be temporary anyway, and has lasted well over a decade. The petition asks that the Supreme Court end the injunction and let the law be enforced, like the Dobbs decision meant that it was supposed to, because the Dobbs decision sent those abortion law decisions back to the states. The states are supposed to be able to enforce their own laws about it. A private company is holding that up. That's what this petition is about.

It'll be interesting to see what the Supreme Court decides about the petition. Generally, petitions are reviewed much more quickly than cases are because you don't have to hear quite as lengthy arguments about it. So be looking in the upcoming days for what the Supreme Court has to say about this parental consent issue. The next piece of news I have for you this week is a bill that has recently passed the House of Representatives and is being brought up in the Senate. As of this past week, House Bill 1526, the Nora Act, the N-O-R-R-A Act, which stands for the No-R-R-R-R-A Act of 2025. The purpose of the bill is to limit the authority of single judges, particularly district court judges, to provide injunctive relief. And just to explain a little bit of the background on this, I can think off the top of my head of at least five instances since the Trump administration has taken office of a district court blocking a particular

action that the Trump administration is trying to do. Most of the time, that is executive orders. So the Trump administration trying to cut USAID funding, international development funding. A single district court judge blocked that. A single district court judge blocked another instance where the Trump administration was trying to lay off some federal workers. A single district court judge in this week's headlines was able to make a ruling about what the Trump administration could not do about deportations. So there have been a lot of instances recently where individual district court justices are stopping the entire action of the federal government around a particular issue. This bill, which was introduced by Representative Daryl Issa of California, who's a Republican, the bill is meant to be a countermeasure to those instances where it seems like one person is disrupting the balance of power between the judicial branch and the executive branch. And there's a legitimate concern to be had there, right?

So if the court system is supposed to check the power of the executive branch, that's its right under the Constitution. That's what the Supreme Court is there to do. That's what district courts are there to do. However, the district courts are not letting these cases get up to the Supreme Court for the most part because of a little loophole that they're using called injunctive relief. Injunctive relief is essentially a legal solution to, quote unquote, irreparable harm. In a lot of these cases, monetary damages are not. necessarily at stake, or they're not necessarily sufficient, let's say. So I'll take the example of USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development. The Biden administration had entered into contract

with USAID to give them a certain amount of money to spend on foreign aid and development. The Trump administration basically said we're not going to enforce those contracts because we didn't make those contracts. And USAID sought injunctive relief. And what that means is USAID said, says if the court just makes them give us money, that's not enough. There's been irreparable harm done to us because whatever it might be, they might have had to lay people off because they didn't get the money. They might have been set back months at a time in the work that they're trying to do. Whatever it might be that's a non-monetary and irreparable harm that just giving them money can't fix. That's what you seek injunctive relief for. So the lawyers for these different

agencies that have been suing the Trump administration are seeking injunctive relief. And that it stops at injunctive relief. So when the district court judge grants injunctive relief, it means that generally the case is not going to go any higher than that. And that's what the bill is trying to stop. The bill is trying to say, we can't have a situation where one judge just gets to decide what the administration has to do, which contracts it has to enforce, whatever the ruling might be. And it can't be taken to any higher court because there are higher courts than the district courts, particularly the Supreme Court. That's the ultimate authority in the judicial branch, and it's not made up of one person. That's the big deal here, is that the

Supreme Court is made of nine people, not one person, and that means that you're not going to receive very many rogue decisions from the Supreme Court, which is the language that the bill uses. So the bill says that we don't want any rogue rulings from an individual district court judge that throws off the balance of power between the judicial and the executive branch, which seems to make sense. The solution provided by the bill is that a case has to, to be brought by two or more states in different circuit courts challenging an action by the executive branch. In that scenario, the case will be referred to a three-judge panel that's selected at random. That three-judge panel may issue an injunction that would otherwise be prohibited and is

supposed to, quote, consider the interest of justice, the risk of irreparable harm to non-parties, and the preservation of the constitutional separation of powers in determining whether to issue such an order. So the bill is not saying that courts can no longer issue injunctive relief as a legal remedy to a particular problem. What the bill is saying is that one judge should not be able to issue injunctive relief because that means that one person who might be biased or have conflicts of interest in a particular way shouldn't be able to make these very political decisions by themselves. And the groups and states that decide to sue the federal government for these kind of things take advantage of that, right? So I mean, if you're suing the Trump administration,

You're going to have a lot more success with a district court judge in California or Washington, D.C., which tends to be very liberal in its district court judges, states like Texas are going to be more likely to uphold an action by the Trump administration. So when there's one judge making a decision, it's much easier to do what they call forum shopping, which means choosing a location where a judge is going to be favorable to what you want. That's what the bill is trying to address. So the bill is being introduced to the Senate this week in hopes of balance. out some of these decisions that justices are making to hold up actions of the Trump administration and restore some semblance of balance of power between the executive branch and the judicial branch of the federal government. You're listening to Under the Radar with Luke Miller on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. The next piece of news I have for you this week is an executive order entitled,

lowering drug prices by once again putting Americans first. It was signed by the president on April 15th. You notice that the words once again are in the title because a lot of it is reinstating some things that the first Trump administration implemented in an attempt to lower prescription drug prices. Like most of the executive orders from this administration, there's some good stuff about it and there's some bad stuff about it. Starting with the negatives about this executive order, you know, most of the time when politicians talk about lowering health care prices or lowering drug prices or whatever that might be, I'm always skeptical about it because usually behind that promise is just saying we're going to just

force the price to be lower and that never works you have to create economic conditions to lower prices and there are some good things that do that about this executive order however particularly within the public health care programs like medicare and medicaid some parts of this executive order do just say we're going to figure out a way to lower the price to force the price down for example there's a whole section of the executive order that sets up some future grant money to be given to different health centers to provide insulin and epinephrine or epipens essentially for free. And the people that this program is going to be available for are people who have no health care insurance, who have a high unmet deductible, or who have a high

cost sharing requirement for either insulin or epinephrine. The reason that this is a little bit of a problem is because it incentivizes people to not have health care insurance. Because when you say if you don't have health care insurance, we're going to essentially give you public health care insurance by making sure you get lower prices by federal grant money. That's incentivizing people to not get their own private health care, which is going to put more people on to the public health care, which is already one of the biggest costs that the federal government incurs every year. It's also just not economically sustainable. At any kind of public health care program, it kind of insists upon itself. It's always a cycle to get more and more people into the program.

because federal money speaks a lot bigger than corporate money most times. So that's one thing that's a negative about this executive order is that there's several sections of this that are basically providing federal grant money for people who either are already on public insurance or have no insurance at all, health care wise, which is just an incentive for more people to feed into that public health care system. And don't get me wrong, insulin and epinephrine are very expensive and those are life-saving drugs. They're very necessary for a lot of people. The problem is that they're priced so highly, even though they're so vital for people's health, because the government's created a monopoly

around them. When there's only one or two kinds of insulin that you can get, then the companies who make it can charge exorbitantly high prices because you have nowhere else to go and your demand for it isn't going to go down anytime soon. So that's the issue that leads to this problem that requires the government to give out federal grant money for this. However, that also brings brings me to the good part of this executive order, which is that there are many parts of the executive order that are aimed at accelerating competition for these high-cost prescription drugs. The executive order says one of their goals is to, quote, accelerate approval of generics, biosimilars, combination products, and second-in-class brand name medications,

and improve the process through which prescription drugs can be reclassified as over-the-counter medications, including recommendations to optimally identify prescription drugs that can be safely provided to patients over the counter. The whole goal of that is to make their more options for these high cost drugs because when there's more options, there's more competition between the different companies that make them, which means that the price has to come down. That's the real issue. That's how you really bring down the cost of prescription drugs. You've got to lower the barriers to entry for companies to be selling these drugs to some extent. Obviously, you still have to test them and make sure they pass all the safety regulations and all that kind of stuff. But the goal of this executive order is to

make it easier for companies to get those kind of drugs safely onto the market to create competition and bring down prices. Along that same line, another part of the executive order is increasing the amount of prescription drugs that we import from other countries, which might be difficult given the tariff situation that's going on right now. But that is a goal of the executive order is to increase the amount of imports that we bring in of prescription drugs, which would also do the same thing. It would increase competition within the market for prescription drugs, ultimately bringing down the price, which is a real way to address the issue. It's not just the typical politician answer of, we're going to make the big bad drug company bring their prices down. The real answer to

this problem is you have to increase competition and you have to do it safely. That's the line that you have to walk. So that's the good part of what this executive order is trying to do. The next piece of news I have for you this week is another executive order that caught my eye entitled Unleashing American Commercial Fishing in the Pacific. This executive order is a little bit different than most in the sense that it's an actual proclamation, which is different than a presidential policy prescription for what the executive branches are supposed to do. This is just a presidential proclamation of this is how something is now. And this one basically is to state that the Marine National Monument is not to exist anymore. If you've never heard of the Marine National

Monument, you should look it up. It's very interesting. It's very beautiful. It was an ocean area that has been designated by a presidential proclamation in the past to be managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in order to conserve different fish species and ocean animal species, coral, and different things like that. It's about 400,000 square miles of ocean, and the executive order slash proclamation opens all of that water up to commercial fishing, which seems kind of pointless to me. I love fishing, but I don't understand why this particular area of the ocean needed to be fished, other than just it's a statement that we're not standing for this kind of environmental conservation because it is part of a movement

that President Trump doesn't agree with. I don't particularly understand it. There's so many more areas of ocean to be able to fish. This one was being used as a marine conservatory. I don't understand why this needed to be done. And to be clear, the waters are still to be held in federal control. What this proclamation changes is that now all of that water is open to commercial fishing, which is going to open up commercial fishing to a lot of different kinds of exotic fish that are going to attract a lot of tourists and a lot of attention. And that might be the purpose of this. But the reason that these waters haven't been able to be fished in the past is because a lot of those fish species are endangered or at least in need of some level of conservatory protection. So if we open that up to commercial fishing, it seems as though it.

it's going to dwindle some of those populations. So again, I don't really see the purpose of this executive order. In my most charitable view of the president, it's that he's prioritizing economic concerns over environmental concerns. And in a little bit less charitable view, it's just that he's rigidly opposed with anything to do with the environmental movement because he associates it with people on the left. The last piece of news I have for you this week is another executive order signed by the president

on April 16th entitled, Ensuring Commercial, cost-effective solutions in federal contracts. This is an executive order stating that it is the policy of the Trump administration that federal agencies are supposed to buy commercially available products and services instead of those that are non-commercial or those that are created specifically for government agencies. The point of this policy would be that federal agencies aren't supposed to work privately with companies to create things to be given to the government at a discounted rate or for free and in exchange the government might look more favorably upon the particular company in subsidy or in taxes or whatever it might be. You look to avoid a little bit of that conflict of interest when you

avoid non-commercial sales. Another part of that is that the government is contributing to the private economy when you do that, when you actually buy commercially available products. So just to create an example, let's just say the Department of Health and Human Services needed to buy medical equipment. Well, this executive order means that they would have to purchase it commercially from private companies and pay full price for it, which is a stimulant to the economy because the government is a big spender, particularly federal agencies. They are big spenders. And so if they spend that money commercially, then that money's going to go back into the economy.

The other side of that is that if the HSS was trying to get medical equipment and purchased it noncommercially, then the hospital service or whoever provided it to HHS might be looked upon differently by the time federal grant decisions come around again. So it's just to avoid conflicts of interest there. And it's to facilitate a positive use of taxpayer dollars to contribute back into the economy because the government is going to spend a lot of money either way. So you might as well send that money back into the economy at full price, contribute to private companies, help private companies to create a better product, just use the government like a business essentially. A lot of what President Trump does is to use the federal government like a business. This is just

just another way of doing that, and it keeps the federal agencies a little bit more accountable to taxpayers. So to summarize this week, we had three executive orders, one aimed at lowering prescription drug prices, one opening the National Marine Monument to commercial fishing, and one requiring federal agencies to buy products like any other business would. We had a bill that hopes to eliminate rogue district court decisions, and we had a Supreme Court petition to allow Montana to determine its reproductive health laws instead of planned parenthood. Tune in next week for more. Well, that's all I have for you today on Under the Radar. I'm your host, Luke Miller,

and I want to thank you for listening and encourage you to tune back in next time for more coverage of the news that fell under the radar. You're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM. Thanks for listening to Under the Radar with Luke Miller, here on Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM.