☕️☘️ GATEKEEPERS ☙ Tuesday, March 17, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS ☘️🦠

Federal judge tries to crush ACIP vaccine committee; communist Cuba crumbles under economic pressure; SAVE Act debate to begin in the Senate; Trump creates Fraud Task Force; and more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Happy St. Patrick’s Day, Irish folks and friends. The Childers clan is now installed in Western North Carolina, where we are both supporting the post-hurricane economy and admiring how much rebuilding they’ve done. In today’s roundup: rogue federal judge blocks ACIP vaccine committee from meeting, tosses all Kennedy’s picks as ‘unqualified;’ Cuba crumbles under communist mismanagement, can’t make it 3 months without outside oil; Trump TAWing; Senate SAVE Act debate to start today with hybrid talking filibuster and the show is hitting the road right as everything else is popping; and Trump signs Executive Order creating a Fraud Task Force and puts JD Vance in charge (and Marco Rubio breathed a nervous sigh of relief).

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Here we go again! Yesterday, A federal judge issued an injunction blocking the HHS vaccine committee from even meeting. The entire corporate media experienced a euphoric newsgasm, and blanketed the headlines with delirious stories about the ACIP committee. The Guardian’s headline trumpeted, “Federal judge blocks RFK Jr’s overhaul of vaccine recommendations.” None of the stories describe Judge Murphy’s eye-bleeding recent history. But never fear— I will!

Judge Brian E. Murphy, a Biden appointee to the deep-blue District of Massachusetts, is on some kind of wild tear. He has been reversed three times in the last 12 months on Trump cases— twice by the Supreme Court, and once by the First District Circuit Court of Appeal. He hasn’t won a single case. It would not be unfair to call him rabid.

Hours after the Supreme Court reversed him the first time (on an unrelated immigration case), Judge Murphy stubbornly issued a new order declaring that the Supremes’ order didn’t apply to his decisions and requiring the government to comply with his version.

This prompted frustrated Administration attorneys to ask the Supreme Court for emergency assistance, which it immediately provided, in the form of another order reversing Murphy again, and saying emphatically: oh, yes, our order DOES overrule you. Even liberal SCOTUS Justice Elena Kagan —who had disagreed with the original decision overruling Murphy— roasted him. She wrote that she did “not see how a district court can compel compliance with an order that this Court has stayed.”

Just two weeks ago, on March 5th, Murphy was reversed again, this time by his immediate bosses, the First Circuit. Judge Murphy last month declared the Administration’s efforts to deport illegal aliens to “third countries” (nations other than their country-of-origin) was unlawful and blocked its enforcement. But the First Circuit immediately stayed his order, saying they would soon issue a full ruling reversing him.

In short, Judge Murphy is 0-3 on Trump decisions.

That’s the judge who is trying to shelve the ACIP on a glacier in Greenland somewhere. He’s not really a judge so much as a human speed bump.

Judge Murphy’s 45-page opinion halting the ACIP meeting and overturning all its decisions was a love letter to technocratic credentialism. To give you an idea, it literally started —its first sentence— with a Carl Sagan quote praising the importance of science. Murphy’s opinion later cited a New York Times headline as proof of discrediting Dr. Robert Malone for “spreading misinformation.”

Murphy walked through each of Kennedy’s ACIP appointees, member by member, naming and shaming each one, and declared that 9 of the 15 were unqualified. But just look at who he’s dismissing as unqualified and why:

• Dr. Pollak: a transplant surgeon, with 120+ peer-reviewed publications, and who was the principal investigator on NIH transplant grants. Note that transplant biology is immunology. Dr. Pollack has spent his entire career studying the immune system. Judge Murphy’s verdict: he’s not a vaccine expert.

• Dr. Stein: an epidemiologist, Case Western Reserve graduate, 115 peer-reviewed publications on tuberculosis and infectious disease. Murphy’s verdict: not a vaccine expert. Because tuberculosis and infectious disease background don’t count, not unless you studied the right infectious diseases.

• Dr. Malone: credited with foundational mRNA vaccine technology research, not to mention he’s been writing about vaccines for the last six years almost every day. Murphy’s verdict: his mRNA work was 30 years ago, his role is “disputed,” and the judge cited a New York Times hit piece calling him a “misinformation star.” In other words, a federal judge used a far-left newspaper hit-piece to impugn a scientist’s academic credentials. In a legal opinion. Unironically.

• Dr. Griffin: he was the Surgeon General of Louisiana. Murphy: Not qualified.

• Dr. Milhoan (the ACIP Chair): a pediatric cardiologist, Air Force flight surgeon, and a Ph.D. in myocardial inflammation. Murphy: Not qualified! Apparently, studying how hearts get inflamed after vaccination doesn’t count as relevant vaccine expertise.

Murphy’s test for “vaccine expertise” —a test he never explicitly defined— could be boiled down to one question: Did they spend their entire career inside the vaccine establishment? If not: unqualified. That’s the same kind of credentialist gatekeeping shoved vaccine injury research to the margins for decades. The old ACIP —the one packed with Murphy-approved vaccine orthodoxy— was the same committee that, as yesterday’s post explained, buried all the post-vaccine injury data under a noisy chicken coop of buzzwords and bureaucratic confusion.

The old ACIP’s Judge-Murphy-Approved “expertise” didn’t protect the public. It protected the program. It protected the gravy train. It protected the bureaucracy.

The whole point of Kennedy’s reconstitution was to bring in outsiders who would approach vaccine policy without conflicts of interest within the captured health establishment— crossing domains to include immunologists, epidemiologists, clinical physicians, and even a cardiologist who studies myocarditis. Judge Murphy disagrees with that approach. He ruled that only the people who spent their careers promoting vaccines are qualified to evaluate them.

It wasn’t a legal standard. It was the guild, protecting its turf.

💉 Judge Murphy, stung by three consecutive rebukes in a row, tried to be careful this time. He devoted page after page to legal citations and what looks like careful legal analysis. His best point, perhaps his only good point, was that Kennedy appointed the new ACIP members too fast, in days instead of the two years that previous committees took.

But, without getting too deep into the weeds, Judge Murphy’s opinion relied almost entirely on classic judicial sleight-of-hand. For example, in a footnote(!), he conceded that his finding on the critical element of irreparable harm was a “close call.” (That was where he stretched too far, and where his decision is likely to get its neck chopped off.)

Another fine example from the opinion was Murphy’s silly strawman argument. He was so in love with a question that he’d come up with at the hearing, that he quoted himself in the transcript, a sort of judicial narcissism that sounds good when it’s being typed up but looks awful in the federal register. Murphy asked Trump’s lawyer, what if the CDC recommended that people go have ‘measles lunches’? Could the court lawfully stop it?

First of all, nobody recommended measles lunches. It’s not this case. Even as a bizarre hypothetical, it’s still not very smart. (But it does show how hysterical progressives have gotten about measles.) Trump’s lawyer courageously and correctly answered, “no,” the Court can’t overrule CDC recommendations it doesn’t like, not even measles for lunch. (Although that kind of judicial activism would have been very welcome during the pandemic, when it was nowhere to be seen— a point Murphy passed by going around 90 mph).

Murphy, swooning with self-appreciation over his too-clever, first-year-law-student hypothetical, then devoted four rambling paragraphs explaining his own theory that he could override any CDC guidance he found irrational. Which, again, was not this case. His analysis was legally useless and we’re all dumber for having read it.

What Kennedy actually did was restructure an advisory committee and adjust a vaccine schedule— using the exact same executive authority that every HHS Secretary has used since 1964. Judge Murphy constructed an absurd hypothetical to make a routine exercise of executive discretion seem unreasonable. Judges deploy this tactic when the actual facts don’t support the result they want.

I’m describing all these judicial defects to illustrate that the decision will almost certainly be overturned, and Judge Murphy knows it. Since ACIP meetings must be publicly noticed weeks in advance, they can’t just meet again as soon as Judge Murphy gets reversed. It’ll take another month. Murphy’s real goal, therefore, is to kick the ACIP can as far down the Trump 2.0 street as possible, to run out the clock before the ACIP can do too much “damage.”

“HHS looks forward to this judge’s decision being overturned,” HHS spox Andrew Nixon said, “just like his other attempts to keep the Trump administration from governing.”

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Communist Cuba turned a corner last night. It’s only taken seventy years. This morning, a grieving New York Times reported, “Cuba Ready to Accept Outside Investment, Top Official Says.” Outside investment is the Times’s euphemism for “capitalism,” which it can’t bring itself to say in a positive context.

“Cuba is arguably facing its most precarious moment since the Communist revolution,” the Times moaned weakly. Yesterday, the crumbling island nation announced a brand-new policy allowing Cuban ex-patriots in the U.S. to own property, businesses, and bank accounts in Cuba. They announced it right before the power flickered off the entire country.

In short, they published their new policy and then turned out the lights. It was the largest going-out-of-business sale in history.

No oil has been delivered to Cuba since January 9th, not since President Trump threatened tariffs on any country selling oil to Cuba. Venezuela —Cuba’s last lifeline— was neutralized when President Maduro was evacuated right after the New Year. Trump’s pressure campaign didn’t just squeeze Cuba— it created the conditions where the communist government had to invite capitalists back in through the front door.

“No oil has been delivered to the island,” President Díaz-Canel said in his announcement, “in the last three months.” It was an astonishing admission: Cuba’s communist leader publicly admitted his entire economic system depends on foreign oil charity. Ninety days of self-sufficiency was all the glorious communist revolution could manage. “The doors are open,” Cuba’s deputy prime minister added.

🚀 Cuba has remained a throbbing migraine for American presidents ever since Fidel Castro seized power in 1959— sixty-seven years ago and counting. Eisenhower broke off diplomatic relations. Kennedy got the Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis. Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter each inherited the same bearded problem ninety miles off the Florida coast. Carter invited the disastrous Mariel boatlift, when Castro emptied his jails and mental institutions directly into Miami. Say hello to my little friend.

Reagan powerlessly watched Cuba export the Marxist revolution all across Central America. Clinton got the rafters. Obama tried the charm offensive, reopening embassies and loosening travel restrictions, and got nothing in return except a mysterious sonic weapon attack on American diplomats in Havana. Trump 1.0 slammed the door shut again. Biden cautiously cracked it back open.

Through twelve presidencies, two Castros, and now their hand-picked successor Díaz-Canel, the Cuban regime has outlasted every American strategy thrown at it— isolation, invasion, assassination plots, embargo, engagement, and back to embargo again. The island’s communist government has survived longer than its own Soviet Union sponsor, which is like a tapeworm outliving its Siberian Husky host.

What twelve presidents couldn’t accomplish with assassination plots, a botched invasion, a half-century embargo, sonic weapons, and one very awkward Obama handshake, Trump may have cracked in ninety days with an oil embargo and a tariff threat. On January 29th, Trump signed an executive order declaring a national emergency on Cuba under IEEPA and threatening tariffs on any country that kept shipping oil to Havana. Mexico blinked within forty-eight hours.

The New York Times grudgingly called it America’s first effective blockade of Cuba since the Missile Crisis sixty-four years ago. The communist government that survived the Bay of Pigs, the Missile Crisis, the Soviet collapse, and the Special Period is now inviting Miami capitalists to come home and open up shop. It needed no aircraft carriers, no boots on the ground. No absurd CIA plots involving exploding cigars.

Just an old-fashioned economic squeeze that forced the regime to choose between reform and darkness— and for the first time in sixty-seven years, they chose reform. The Art of the Deal.

President Trump found the pressure spot and pushed on it, hard. It wasn’t luck. Without first creating his tariff dashboard, and without first taking out the Venezuelan president, an oil embargo would have been impossible. Cuba was a careful sequence, a plan, executed in precise order, like a lawyer building a case before a jury.

And yet still, somehow, the media keeps describing Trump as having no plans, as though he’s a geopolitical pinball, randomly pinging between one fortunate opportunity after another.

“I do believe I will be having the honor of taking Cuba,” President Trump said yesterday. “Whether I free it, take it, I think I can do anything I want with it,” he said. “They’re a very weakened nation right now.”

Cuba’s capitulation, coming in the first weeks of the Iran operation, is also not coincidental. The Cuban generals can see what’s happening in Iran. President Trump had already told reporters, “We’re talking to Cuba, but we’re going to do Iran before Cuba.” The Cubans aren’t waiting to find out what that means, which is probably exactly what Trump intended. And now he gets to add a new win to the TAW column, which is currency buying more time for Operation Epic Fury.

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The Senate Show starts today! The United States Senate will take up the SAVE America Act and will require Democrats to step up to the podium and debate rather than oil out behind the scenes with the silent filibuster.

Utah Senator Mike Lee dropped a terrific tweet yesterday announcing that Senate Majority Leader John Thune agreed to force Democrats into a talking filibuster over the SAVE America Act, the bill requiring documented proof of citizenship to register to vote and a photo ID to actually cast a ballot. The House already passed it in February. Now it finally arrives in the Senate, where Democrats had planned to quietly smother it with the silent filibuster— the procedural trick requiring sixty votes instead of fifty-one, but nobody ever has to stand up and explain why.

Not this time! Majority Leader Thune agreed to a “hybrid talking filibuster,” meaning Democrats who want to block the bill will have to physically stand on the Senate floor, live on C-SPAN, in front of everybody, and cogently make their case for why proving you’re an American citizen before voting in American elections is just too dangerous to ask.

Good luck with that. These days, asking Democrats to argue cogently about anything is like asking Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) to use English grammar, or asking AOC to add a row of single-digit numbers. Imagine the clips we’re going to get.

The SAVE Act isn’t complicated. To register to vote, you show a birth certificate, passport, naturalization certificate, or REAL ID. To vote, you show your photo ID. That’s it. It polls at around 80% approval, which in modern American politics is the rate usually reserved for puppies, firefighters, and Chick-fil-A.

Democrats know this, which is exactly why the silent filibuster was invented— to let senators kill popular legislation without leaving fingerprints. Senator Lee explained, “Democrats wish they could quickly vote against the SAVE America Act and avoid public scrutiny for their opposition to election security. We’re not letting them off that easy.”

Senator Lee even compared the coming floor fight to the two-month battle over the 1964 Civil Rights Act, noting that Trump asked for “an epic fight.” And why wouldn’t he? The political geometry is devastating. Democrats face two options, both difficult. Option one: filibuster, spending days or weeks on national television arguing that citizenship verification is racist, hurts married women, or otherwise threatens democracy— while 80% of the country watches and disagrees. Option two: let it pass, enraging the progressive base that views voter ID requirements the way vampires view crucifixes.

There’s no door number three. The silent filibuster was door number three— and Thune has apparently slammed it shut.

The timing is also noteworthy. The SAVE Act’s electrifying floor debate is expected to begin today— right in the middle of the Iran operation, right as Cuba is capitulating, and right when Trump’s approval numbers are at their highest. If you were designing the worst possible moment for Democrats to publicly oppose election security, you couldn’t do better than the week America is winning on every front.

Which crisis will the media focus on? And we still have over 7 months till the midterms.

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Yesterday, President Trump signed an executive order creating the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud — and then handed the controls to Vice President Vance. Reuters ran a story dripping with disdain, simply headlined, “Trump launches anti-fraud task force to be led by Vance.”

The new executive order directs a government-wide crackdown on fraud, waste, and abuse across every federal benefits program— housing, food, medical care, cash assistance, all of it. VP Vance chairs the new task force. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson serves as vice chair. And the senior adviser is Stephen Miller, which suggests the task force won’t be requesting information nicely.

The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office estimated that federal programs lose between $233 billion and $521 billion every single year to fraud. That’s not a typo. The low-end estimate is a quarter of a trillion dollars annually walking out the back door of the federal treasury. The high-end estimate is over half a trillion. Every single year, for decades.

Nobody did anything about it. It’s too hard!. Until now.

The order’s recitals described the scale of the problem. “Illegal aliens, criminals, foreign gangs, bureaucrats, State and local officials, non-governmental organizations, and ineligible providers exploit these programs with ease,” it noted. “This incentivizes public officials to maximize the flow of welfare to migrant communities, and makes public officials who do so more powerful.”

Then the order pulled the pin on a political grenade: “Many of these public officials willfully turn a blind eye to fraud, waste, and abuse within them — to ensure that welfare flows to these migrants, helping the public officials remain in power.”

I wonder which public official President Trump could have been talking about?

The executive order specifically names California, Illinois, New York, Maine, and Colorado as states having “insufficient safeguards and weak oversight” that increase the risk of large-scale fraud. Those are all deep blue states. They all expanded benefits programs as fast as possible after the pandemic, and treated accountability as a burdensome suggestion. In that sense, the task force isn’t as much of an audit as a political X-ray of progressive governance.

White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf said the task force could recoup “potentially billions, or tens of billions, or even hundreds of billions of dollars.” Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller went further, calling it “the first-ever effort in American history to reclaim the ultimately trillions of dollars that were stolen from taxpayers.” That’s Miller-grade rhetoric, but the GAO’s own numbers make it hard to argue he’s wrong about the scale.

The order also specifically directed AG Pam Bondi to encourage use of the task force’s secret weapon, which has been sitting in the United States Code since the Civil War: 31 U.S.C. § 3730, the False Claims Act’s qui tam provision. President Lincoln signed the original version after defense contractors started selling blind horses and defective rifles to the Union Army.

The modern version of the statute lets any private citizen who is aware of fraud against the federal government file a lawsuit, under seal, in federal court. If the government recovers any money, the whistleblower gets 15%-30% of the take. It’s the new fraud gold rush.

It’s a powerful incentive. If the GAO is right that $233 to $521 billion is walking out the door every year, and Vance’s task force starts mapping exactly where the exits are, and keeps publishing data, then every state employee, every contractor, every program administrator sitting on knowledge of fraud just got handed a lottery ticket with very favorable odds. The task force identifies the patterns and the qui tam whistleblowers do the excavation.

And the financial incentive —potentially millions per case— means the government doesn’t even have to find all the fraud itself. It just has to make it clear that it’s looking. Insiders will do the rest.

The smartest political move of all was putting Vance in the chair. This isn’t a ceremonial appointment; it’s a 2028 launchpad. If Vance spends the next two years as the face of recovering stolen taxpayer money from bloated state bureaucracies, he walks into a presidential campaign with the best résumé line in modern politics: “I found your money, and I got it back.” Every fraud case his task force uncovers is a campaign ad that writes itself.

Democrats are already calling it a politically motivated witch hunt, which is what fraudsters always say right before auditors find the receipts. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz called it “a campaign of retribution.”

It’s not retribution. It’s a Reckoning.™

Have a terrific Tuesday! C&C will be back tomorrow morning with more essential news and commentary from snowy Western North Carolina.

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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