Cagle World

Editor’s note: This column is written by Daryl Cagle, the owner of Cagle Cartoons

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, passed away recently at the age of 80. He was a newspaper columnist, among many other things, and he wrote columns for my syndicate, Cagle Cartoons, as a conservative in a group filled with liberal political cartoonists, like me.

Michael was one of the first columnists to join our little syndicate more than 20 years ago. At that time, he was doing a daily radio show on many hundreds of radio stations, competing head to head with Rush Limbaugh. He was an important part of our getting into newspapers in the beginning. Michael could have gone with any syndicate, but he chose to support our quirky startup, and his longtime support made a big difference for us.

Michael was a conservative Republican, but in the old style of his father, not the crazy MAGA Republicans we know now. He didn’t hesitate to criticize Trump. His columns were always popular. When Michael took a vacation, editors would freak out, calling us, asking what’s wrong and when Michael would be back.

Michael invited me to join him a few times while he did his radio show, live on hundreds of stations, which was great fun and not what I expected. He sat in a dull little room, at a dull little desk that looked nothing like a radio studio, all by himself. I asked him, “Don’t you have a producer? Isn’t there someone you work with who feeds you prompts and clever responses?” There wasn’t. Michael said he used to, but didn’t want to deal with it anymore.

I recall Michael going into a passionate radio rant about some conservative subject and suddenly he stopped, stood up and said, “You want a cup of coffee?” He had just gone to a commercial and had 60 seconds to get coffee. That’s what the radio show was like, we’re having a conversation, suddenly Michael turns his head, talking into the microphone, and then his head snaps back to me, carrying on our conversation, then back to the microphone for couple of minutes, then back to me as there was a traffic report, the news, or another commercial. Never a pause.

Going out to lunch with Michael was a similar experience. Michael always seemed to be surrounded by friends. He lived in the San Fernando Valley, as I do, and I recall going out to lunch with him at Hollywood restaurants where he’d see friends and celebrities pop up like the commercials on his radio show. He’d greet these old buddies, then turn his head back to me to carry on our conversation just as he would after a traffic report on the radio. One time it was to hug his buddy Pete Rose, the baseball player I’ve drawn and syndicated in many ugly editorial cartoons.

Mike lived in a different world as a charming conservative celebrity, among the cartoon characters we editorial cartoonists bash every day. He made time for everyone, he devoted himself to charities, and he was often asked to run for political office and never did, which probably contributed to making him more likable.

Michael leaves a hole in our little newspaper syndicate and I miss him.

–

Daryl Cagle is the publisher of Cagle.com and owner of Cagle Cartoons, Inc, a syndicate that distributes editorial cartoons and columns to over 500 newspapers. See Daryl’s blog at: DarylCagle.com and watch his video podcast about editorial cartoons at Caglecast.com.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, was an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation.

Editor’s note: This column is written by author and former columnist Bill Steigerwald

News of the death of my old friend Michael Reagan went viral this week – justifiably.

When it was announced on Jan. 4 Mike had died of cancer at the age 80, many of his fans, friends and former colleagues went to X and Facebook to offer their condolences and praise him.

Former Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson spoke for many who knew Mike when he called him “warm, engaging and ‘normal’ – “a man of simple and total decency.”

Many who posted on social media shared fond memories of working with Mike in talk radio or on Republican political campaigns.

My working relationship with Mike was much different. For the last 13 years, up until two weeks ago, he and I collaborated on this column. Every week.

On Thursday mornings – at 7:30 his time – Mike would call me in Pittsburgh from his home in Los Angeles. Usually, as we talked, he’d be banging around in his kitchen, merrily grinding the coffee he’d take to his wife Colleen each morning.

We’d talk for half an hour about the hot political issues, world events and Republican talking points of the day – ObamaCare, Trump, Biden, covid mandates, the Democrats’ destruction of California – and decide on a topic.

I’d record our conversation and we’d eventually produce a column that Cagle would send out to its hundreds of customers. By my rough count, we did this 650 times.

The last time was on Christmas Day, when we wrote about an encounter Mike’s wife Colleen had with a post office clerk who couldn’t read cursive.

Mike was the Hollywood-raised son of a historic conservative president and a super-loyal member of the Republican Party. I was a Ron Paul-libertarian from Pittsburgh. But we actually had a lot in common.

We were about the same age – he was always two years older. We both had adult kids and long-running marriages. I had even lived in Los Angeles in the 1980s, at one point just a few blocks from his home in Toluca Lake.

We both still played golf and followed sports, though based on his tweets he was a borderline fanatic when it came to college football. We both complained about the dishonesty and failures of the mainstream liberal media.

He and I got along so well, even the emergence of Donald Trump didn’t cause us problems.

Mike didn’t endorse him in the 2016 Republican primary. But when Trump became the presidential nominee, he did what his father would have done – he supported the GOP’s choice and campaigned for him enthusiastically.

Mike’s recurring message to President Trump – who once sent him a copy of a column he liked with a signed thank you note – was basically to keep doing what he was doing but please learn when to just shut up.

In our Thursday conversations, Mike was always as ready to laugh as rail about the latest dumb thing Biden or Trump did or said. Though he shared some of his increasingly serious medical problems with me, even then he stayed upbeat.

Those 650 op-ed columns we wrote are a blur to me now, but I know they were as lively and feisty as we could make them.

Some recent headlines give a sense of what they were about – “Australia’s fake gun control,” “Shutdown the shutdown hysteria,” “Charlie Kirk, RIP” and “Make peace like sausage – in private.”

For the last 13 years my Thursdays have been Michael Reagan days. It’s going to be hard to get used to not hearing his voice.

I’ve always told my liberal friends what a nice guy Mike was and that since 2013 I had spoken with him more than anyone else except my wife.

I only wish that I had gone through with my plan to fly to LA someday and meet my friend in person.

–

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, was an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. 

Bill Steigerwald is an author and former columnist who lives near Pittsburgh. 

Editor’s note: Michael Reagan is on vacation this week. He will be back with a new column on Friday, Jan 9.

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

Here’s a true Christmas story starring the U.S. Postal Service and Santa Claus.

Earlier this week, my wife Colleen went to our local post office in Los Angeles to mail a present to her relatives in Nebraska.

The address on the package was carefully written in Colleen’s beautiful handwriting, but after she gave it to the employee behind the counter, he looked up at her and said, “I can’t read that.”

“What?” Colleen said.

“I can’t read cursive,” the postal clerk said without shame. “You’ll have to print that address.”

Colleen ended up printing out the address so the post office worker could read it. Then he typed it into a computer, printed a label and slapped on the package.

The U.S. Postal Service is an infamously inefficient and expensive government monopoly that deserved to be privatized out of existence decades ago, so it’s really not shocking that it employs a clerk who can’t read cursive.

But it’s really not the clerk’s fault.. He’s most likely a victim of our public education industrial complex.

Forget cursive. Statistically, given the sad state of our government schools, he’s lucky he can read at all.

As is well known, and has been reported in the media for decades, more than half of all kids in public schools cannot read or do math at their grade level.

In 2024, only about 31 percent of 4th graders and 29 percent of 8th graders scored at or above “Proficient” in plain old reading.

To the poor mis-educated postal clerk, cursive – which virtually all of us, our parents and grandparents learned along with their ABCs and times-tables – might as well have been Greek.

My grandchild in fourth grade can read and write in cursive, but that’s because she goes to a Catholic private school where they never stopped teaching it.

In 2010, most California public schools dropped cursive after the state adopted the Common Core standards, which foolishly did not require it.

Cursive became an optional “learning goal” in some grades, but it basically disappeared or was haphazardly taught.

Somehow it miraculously became mandatory again in California for grades 1-6 starting on Jan. 1, 2024. But there’s a lost generation of kids out in the world who become helpless when confronted by even the most beautiful cursive writing.

Dropping cursive in California for 14 years and in many public schools elsewhere has caused a problem for the Post Office.

Its modern mail-sorting machines have trouble reading hand‑addressed mail, so letters or packages with cursive addresses often get rejected and have to be processed by a human. It’s a small percentage of the billions of pieces of mail that are handled each day, but it amounts to millions of pieces.

Because the Post Office has so many cursively challenged younger workers, it has to have a special training center in Salt Lake City where they are given a crash course in reading cursive.

My wife’s experience with the clerk may explain why some of our hand-addressed letters and birthday cards in past years never got to Nebraska or other places.

It might also explain why some of the Christmas presents we sent or were expecting to arrive never showed up.

We used to blame those little seasonal tragedies on poor Santa Claus. But it turns out the root cause of the problem is the failure of our schools.

We should never have suspected Santa. Even little kids know he has the best parcel delivery system in the world – a privately owned one that’s a thousand times better than our government mail service.

Plus, Santa and his elves are old school. They can read cursive.

–

Copyright 2025 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

What a terrible bloody week it was.

From Rhode Island to Australia, innocent unarmed people were killed in cold blood by evil men with guns.

On Saturday at Brown University in Providence, a man with a common 9-mm handgun walked into a study session and shot two students to death and wounded nine others.

The shooter – who knew he was in a “safe” no-gun zone – fired more than 40 rounds and fled.

On Sunday, on the other side of the world, a father-son terrorist team killed 15 men, women and children and wounded 40 others who were attending a Jewish Hanukkah ceremony at Bondi Beach.

As a harrowing 10-minute citizen’s video showed, before Sydney’s police arrived the shooters were able to stand in full view and empty their handguns and rifles without fear.

The brutal attack on Australia’s Jewish community was the country’s first mass shooting since 1996, when its strict National Firearms Agreement was enacted in response to the massacre of 35 people in Tasmania with a semi-automatic weapon.

The gun-controllers of America, as usual, quickly weaponized Bondi Beach for their own propaganda purposes.

Comparing the rarity of mass shootings in Australia to our much higher (and often exaggerated) number, our gun-hating community in Congress and the media went nuts.

They immediately started screaming for us to become “a civilized nation” and join Australia’s supposedly superior war on guns.

They idolize Australia’s NFA as the magic answer to our much higher murder rate, but as Biondi Beach showed us, the NFA is not so hot.

It did ban semi-automatic rifles and shotguns. And it did set up a mandatory buyback program for those kinds of guns in the late 1990s that collected and destroyed nearly 700,000 weapons – one-fifth to one-third of the total national stock at the time.

But taken as a whole, the NFA is a typically faulty government fiasco. It’s basically a bureaucratic and political mess filled with loopholes and exemptions for farmers, target shooters, animal handlers, collectors – and potential terrorists.

The two shooters at Bondi Beach – one of which reportedly had known connections to an ISIS group – were armed with half a dozen deadly weapons, all of which they were licensed to own.

As they proved, coming up with a good reason to get a license to own guns in Australia is very easy and the enforcement of gun laws is very sloppy.

Today there are actually 800,000 more licensed gun owners (now 4 million) in Australia than there were in 1996, when the NFA was born.

A third of its legal guns are in cities. In Sydney more than 70 people own more than 100 guns and one person owns nearly 400.

Australians, despite their rowdy stereotype, aren’t as murderous as we are and never have been. There are about 28 million of them compared to our 340 million or so, and their murder rate is about a fifth of ours.

There are fewer than 300 homicides per year in Australia compared to our 18,000. Gun deaths – 17 percent of total homicides — lately have been falling each year in Australia – as they have been in the USA. But the Number One murder weapon of choice Down Under is still a knife.

Whenever there is a mass shooting, our never-ending national gun-control argument erupts across the USA and in the media.

But it’s an argument the anti-gun nuts can never win. Strict gun control, especially Australia’s kind, will never work for us.

Mainly, it’s because there are far too many guns floating around the U.S. to control – 400 million to 500 million.

Few Americans would ever turn their weapons in voluntarily and there’s no way even the most oppressive government, not even old East Germany, could find and confiscate them all.

Ironically, it turns out that the tragedy at Bondi Beach has hurt the gun controllers’ hopeless cause. It has exposed to the whole world that Australia’s tough gun control laws don’t work so well after all in the real world – and they’re something America should never want to copy.

–

Copyright 2025 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.
–

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

President Trump kicked off his “Affordability Tour” this week in Pennsylvania.

The liberal media immediately blamed him for not already making prices fall after 10 months, but that’s OK.

He’s doing exactly what he should do if Republicans hold any hope to avert a dangerous loss in the 2026 midterms. He’s somehow got to turn next year into a repeat of his victorious 2024 election campaign.

He needs to sell millions of independent and moderate Democrat voters on the idea that he and his policies will “Make America Affordable Again.”

Trump debuted his affordability sales pitch this week to a friendly crowd, blaming our higher prices on its real cause – the inflation spike of 22 percent that the Biden regime and radical left Democrats gave us.

The president boasted that his drill-baby-drill energy policies had brought gasoline prices down “nicely,” as he said, and he sold his audience on the sweet benefits of his “Big Beautiful Bill” that Congress passed in July.

It was “the largest tax cuts in American history: That’s no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security….”

But, as our salesman in chief cautioned everyone, all those BBB benefits won’t kick in until after Jan. 1.

The president and his team know if Republicans are to keep control of the House and Senate, Trump needs to make every local race about him and his policies.

He’s doing his No. 1 job – cheerleading, boasting and reminding voters across the U.S. of his accomplishments so far. But he’s like a general without an army.

Where are his Republican foot soldiers? They should be lined up right behind him, publicly praising his agenda and throwing political spears at the hearts of their Democrat enemies and the media.

But most Republicans in Congress have been AWOL, or they’re sitting back and praying that Trump will be able to pull off the same miracle in 2026 he did in 2024.

It’s crucial that Republicans in Congress quickly pass legislation that will continue to dismantle or reverse Biden’s wasteful spending programs and his horrible immigration, energy and tax policies.

Yes, it was great that Republicans passed the Big Beautiful Bill last July. But most voters don’t realize yet that they aren’t going to feel its benefits until much later in 2026 – and the midterms are coming in November.

If Republicans want to keep the House from falling back into the hands of the Impeachment Party, they’ve got to go into a hurry-up offense and pass some major legislation. They also have to kill the filibuster before the Dems get a chance to do it.

For now fixing health care is the most important – and toughest – job.

But there’s also lots more work to be done cutting spending, waste and corruption and enforcing immigration policy – plus taking on dozens of smaller things the chickens in Congress have been afraid to touch for decades.

If at least 218 Republicans in the House don’t step up and defeat their opponents this fall, Trump will experience the political disaster my father did in 1982.

The things my father did to eventually end inflation and turn the U.S. economy around mostly were passed by Congress in 1981. But his policies didn’t take effect until the end of 1982 – when it was too late to help the GOP in the midterm elections.

Think of it.

My father passed the largest tax break in American history in his first year as president, yet Republicans still suffered a crushing defeat and lost the House in the 1982 midterms.

It’s liable to be the same sad outcome for Trump in 2026. Even if his best troops in Congress join his army and fight, fight, fight to pass the best legislation in record time, it’s a long shot that the GOP can defy history and hold the House in the fall.

Today’s voters are unlikely to see, feel or experience the benefits of Trump’s policies until after the midterms – and for the salesman in chief there will be no reelection in 2028.

–

Copyright 2025 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.
–

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

The old legacy media has not just become irrelevant, it doesn’t inform us anymore. It disinforms.

Two fresh examples of the mainstream media’s permanent get-Trump bias came this week, courtesy of the New York Times and the Washington Post.

On Nov. 25 the Times ran a story with the headline “Shorter days, signs of fatigue: Trump faces realities of aging in office.”

Their latest cheap shot was an attempt to show Trump, 79, was being physically worn down by the job of being president.

The Times’ “proof” he was becoming Joe Biden 2.0 was he had considerably shortened his daily work schedule.

But the Times had their sloppy little hoax quickly exposed when the White House released Trump’s private Oval Office logs from Nov. 12 to Nov. 25.

Unlike the public schedule the Times based its bogus story on, the White House logs showed Trump had been working up to 12 hours a day and 50-hour weeks (not counting weekends).

As for the Washington Post, it recently produced a biased and lazy piece of journalism so bad it was debunked by the New York Times.

The liberal media, which hates Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as much as it hates Trump, jumped on the Post’s claim – from an anonymous source – that Hegseth had basically committed a war crime.

The charge was he issued a verbal order to kill the two surviving crew members of a Sept. 2 U.S. air strike on a speed boat suspected of carrying cocaine for Venezuelan drug smugglers.

After the high-speed boat was partially destroyed by fighter jets on their first strike, two surviving members of the crew who were clinging to parts of the boat were killed by a second air strike.

In what is commonly known in the military as a “double tap,” the follow-up strike was not specifically designed to kill the survivors.

It was designed to sink the rest of the boat so its cargo of drugs couldn’t be salvaged and so it wouldn’t be a threat to other ships.

The New York Times thoroughly debunked the phony “kill them all” quote the Post attributed to Hegseth and the Post’s equally slimy attempt to mischaracterize the purpose of the second air strike.

On Thursday, Admiral Frank Bradley told lawmakers in private that the second strike was his call, that it was militarily justified and lawful, and that Hegseth didn’t know until afterwards there were two survivors clinging to the wreckage.

Attacking Venezuelan speed boats that are presumed to be carrying drugs with deadly force has become a hot legal issue in Washington. So far, at least 83 people have been killed by U.S. planes.

The White House has defended the air strikes on smugglers as necessary to defeat the Venezuelan drug cartels in what it calls “an armed conflict” that threatens America.

Legal experts and human rights groups disagree. They call the air strikes “illegal extrajudicial killings” and argue that it is not justified to use the military to kill drug smugglers without due process.

Democrats, of course, don’t care about legal niceties or dead smugglers. They see the air strikes as their latest excuse to get Hegseth sacked or as another political weapon to use against Trump.

As for the dishonest and dying liberal media, it will show the horrible videos of speed boats being blown to smithereens over and over and travel 2,000 miles to interview the weeping wives of dead Venezuelan smugglers.

But there’s one thing I know the liberal media will never do when they cover Trump’s deadly war on drug cartels.

It will never interview the loved ones of the 80,000 Americans who were killed last year by drugs and ask if they approve of what Trump and Hegseth are doing.

–

Copyright 2025 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

The Democrats already have played every dirty political trick they can think of to bring down Donald Trump.

They tried to delegitimize his 2016 victory by claiming he won because of Russian interference in the election.

They ruined most of his first term by inventing the Russia hoax and pushing it as being true for several years.

They conspired with big tech to get Trump banned from Twitter and Facebook.

They impeached him twice on bogus charges.

Once it was for pressuring Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to investigate what Joe Biden’s crooked boy Hunter was doing in Ukraine. Once it was in 2021 for allegedly inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

We won’t even try to list all the indictments and civil cases Democrat prosecutors in New York and Georgia brought against Trump that made headlines every day but went nowhere.

By weaponizing the Justice Department, Democrats spent four years trying to put Trump in jail or keep him from running again in 2024.

The mainstream liberal media was not just AWOL as usual.

They were so busy working for the Democrats they spent almost zero time covering the obvious decline of Joe Biden or finding out who was really in control of the White House and its autopen.

The sad thing is, nothing has changed with the Democrats or the liberal media.

Now the Democrats are desperately begging for the FBI or anyone with a badge to please, please, please find a smoking-gun email from the Jeffrey Epstein files that ties the dead creep closely to Donald Trump.

They’re praying for an email that says something like, “Hey Jeff. Are we going to party with those cute 13-year-olds again this weekend?”

We know it’s never going to happen. The Democrats sat on the Epstein files like mother hens for four years.

If there were any incriminating emails or photos or videos of Trump getting a Bill Clinton Special back massage from one of Epstein’s 15-year-olds, we’d have seen it on the nightly news the day Biden was inaugurated.

The whole Epstein thing has been a farce from Day 1. It’s all about partisan gotcha politics.

No one cares about the thousand young girls Epstein and his slimy girlfriend recruited and trafficked to hundreds of old and powerful politicians, billionaire businessmen, foreigners and God knows who else.

We’ll have to wait and see which party gets hurt the most by whatever dirt is vacuumed out of the Epstein files, but I’m betting on the Democrats.

They’re such losers. They’re on a 10-year losing streak. They’ve been after Trump since 2015 and all he does is win.

Their latest move is the video six Democrats in the House and Senate with military or intel experience put out this week encouraging our military personnel to “refuse illegal orders.”

They claim the Trump administration is “pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens” and “no one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.”

They didn’t name any specific illegal orders that Trump has issued, of course, because there are none. They just want to scare people.

As usual, the liberal media have not challenged the Democrats’ misleading and ominous message, which makes it sound like President Trump poses yet another existential threat to the Constitution, democracy, apple pie, etc. etc. etc.

The media haven’t pushed the six Democrats hard to name the illegal orders Trump supposedly has given.

And they haven’t pointed out that taking an oath to support and defend the Constitution — and obey the lawful orders of the president — is one of the first things enlistees in all our armed services do.

Trump blasted the dumb video on social media as “really bad, and dangerous to our country” and called the Democrats who “starred” in it “seditious traitors.”

But what they really are is a six-pack of losers.

–

Copyright 2025 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.
–

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

So big whoop.

The federal government shutdown that never should have happened is over.

One cheer for the Senate. It only took 44 days for Democrats to do what everyone knew last month they would have to do – cave.

Thank the Lord Senate Republicans didn’t surrender this time because of the liberal media that always blames them and cranks out stories about starving babies and other imaginary or exaggerated victims of a federal shutdown.

Government shutdowns always end eventually. And everyone who’s been hurt always gets compensated for their lost pay or SNAP credits.

But as we’ve said here often, shutdowns would never happen if Congress could get off its butt once in a while and pass its 12 annual appropriation bills when it’s supposed to – which is before the start of the next fiscal year on Oct. 1.

But as we were reminded by the few media people who made that point, the so-called leaders we send to work for us in Washington have passed their annual budgets on time only four times since 1977 and zero times since 1997.

This year was no different, except the shutdown lasted longer than any other in history.

Democrats pretended the big fight was over the extension of subsidies for Obamacare, which not a single Republican in Congress voted for in 2010 and a few sensible Democrats now admit is a mess that has further screwed up health care and driven insurance prices to the moon.

Democrats hoped the thought of losing Obamacare subsidies and the cut-off of SNAP benefits would provide the political pressure they needed to get their way.

But their Obamacare card didn’t work.

We all know what really ended the shutdown was the chaos at our airports when federal air traffic control workers were laid off or quit because of stress and financial hardship.

Anyone who’s flown on an airplane in the last decade knows how crowded, uncomfortable and unreliable air travel has become.

But the flight delays and massive cancellations that affected the plans of millions of travelers during the last few weeks were not new, just much worse than usual.

The end of the shutdown is not going to fix the carriers’ problems or make air travel great again – if it ever really was.

American Airlines won’t be buying up huge old 747 jumbo jets and reinstalling bars and pianos in coach like they did in the 1970s.

And the Federal Aviation Administration – aka the U.S. Post Office of the airways – will still control our air traffic with its antiquated methods, obsolete computers and high salaries.

The FAA – whose 45,000 workforce includes 35,000 controllers whose salaries average about $145,000 a year – is one of those bloated federal agencies that should no longer exist.

It should have been privatized and turned into a non-profit corporation decades ago – which is what 60 other countries, including Canada, the UK and Germany, have done to varying degrees.

Meanwhile, while we pray for Trump to make that major miracle occur, we’re back to being abused by our kick-the-funding-can-down-the-road Congress.

The continuing resolution that was in the bill that reopened the government gives back federal workers their jobs and pay, but it does nothing to permanently solve our recurring government shutdown crises.

It only extends current federal funding levels through the end of January 2026. Then the next government shutdown showdown between Republicans and Democrats will be featured on our TV screens every night.

We can cheer the end of this shutdown. But it’s not going to change how the government or the airlines work.

The same people are still serving in Congress. The same people are still running the airlines and airports.

It seems to me, all the shutdown did for 44 days was cover up their incompetence.

–

Copyright 2025 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

To nuke the filibuster or not to nuke the filibuster?

That’s the big question as we head into the sixth week of a record federal government shutdown.

We keep hearing that the filibuster is a powerful weapon in the U.S. Senate.

But the ordinary American doesn’t know what it is, where it came from, who’s in favor of it and what good or bad things it has been used for throughout history.

In corner-bar language, the filibuster is basically a Senate-made house rule that allows a single member to prolong a debate or prevent a full vote on a bill by talking about it forever unless 60 members vote to force him to sit down and shut up.

The filibuster slowly evolved, starting in 1805 or so, but its major debut was in 1837.

That was when a bunch of Whig senators who hated President Andrew Jackson blathered on for days to prevent the Senate from expunging an old censure of Jackson for refusing to turn documents over to Congress.

The Whigs won the day because they were still talking when the legislative session expired, so the Senate just packed up and went home.

Debate in the Senate was unlimited and unstoppable until 1917, when it invented its powerful cloture rule.

That’s the procedure that allows a majority to kill a filibuster and shut the minority up.

If 66 percent of the total members (since lowered to 60 actual senators) vote to overturn the filibuster, the bill or whatever it is that’s being held up can be put to a final vote.

All this inside-baseball parliamentary stuff is what they are referring to when they joke that making laws is like making sausage – too ugly to watch.

The filibuster was usually a minor tool used to slow legislation down until World War I.

Then some Republicans trying to keep us out of the war in Europe used it to delay and ultimately defeat the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles.

In 1948 some liberal Democrat senators used it to slow down or amend the anti-communist “witch hunts.”

And until 1965 racist Southern Democrats like Strom Thurmond and Robert Byrd infamously used long filibusters to repeatedly block Republican civil rights bills in the Senate.

In the last 50 years it has become a parliamentary super-weapon, but Democrats have changed some rules to make it easier to get their pet bills passed – rules they have lived to regret.

The biggest one was in 2013, when Harry Reid dreamed up what he thought then was a clever way to end the Republican filibuster that was holding up Obama’s federal judgeships.

What has become known as the “nuclear option,” it allowed the majority party in the Senate to end filibusters by the minority party. Instead of needing 60 votes to close debate, it could be done with a simple majority of 51.

We now know that the Republicans got the last – and most historic filibuster laugh.

By using the Democrats’ own nuclear weapon, Republicans stopped Democrats from filibustering Trump’s three conservative Supreme Court nominees, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, and got them confirmed.

Today during the government shutdown, Democrats are filibustering spending bills and driving Trump crazier than usual.

He wants Senate Republicans under John Thune to “nuke the filibuster” so he can get his MAGA agenda quickly through Congress while he has a slim majority.

He’s willing to risk Democrats retaking the White House and Congress in three years and Republicans having no filibuster power to stop the legislative reign of terror the left will inflict on the country.

President Trump’s MAGA faithful are cheering him on. Sen. Thune says he doesn’t have the votes he needs to nuke the filibuster.

Lots of Republicans are terrified of what the Dems will do if they take power – starting with packing the Supreme Court.

It could be that the filibuster has run its course and deserves to be nuked.

But whatever its future, its greatest lesson to politicians should be, “Be very careful what you wish for.”

–

Copyright 2025 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.