Goldwater Institute

Here's an incredibly important story for you to read and to share with others. It's about the Riley family of Arizona, a devastating disease, and how a bill just introduced in Congress could bring hope to so many.

That law is the Right to Try Individualized Treatment Act, which would give people suffering rare diseases the right to try experimental treatment tailored to the individual, such as gene therapy.

Thanks to gene therapy, little Keira Riley's life was saved--but her family had to travel to Italy to get the treatment for her rare disease. Federal law in America stood in the way.

Sadly, her sister, who also has the disease, was not so lucky.

You can read more about the Rileys and the law in the link below.

No parent should have to travel overseas to try to save their child's life, but that's just what happened to the Riley family.

Now they're fighting for a new law -- the Right to Try for Individualized Treatments -- so that every American has the right to access potentially lifesaving, gene-based therapies in the USA.

With the strong support for right-to-try at the state level, the Goldwater Institute is looking to expand nationwide with the introduction of the bill into both the House and the Senate in June.

“The law was created with the idea that [for individualized treatments] … you’re not going to be able to find the interest financially for taking something into trial,” said Naomi Lopez, a Senior Fellow at the Goldwater Institute who researches healthcare issues.

The new legislation could affect many more patients like the Riley sisters, who require care that is personalized to their DNA.

“There’s a much stronger growing demand, you know, with the influence of genetic testing, and gene editing, and gene therapies,” said Lopez.

Read more in National Review in the link below.

Juneteenth marks one of the great turning points in American history: the day when the promise of 1776 was carried more fully into the lives of those who had too long been denied it.

America was founded on a revolutionary principle: all people are created equal, endowed by their Creator with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That principle did not instantly erase the injustice of slavery. But it gave Americans the moral standard by which slavery could be condemned and a guide for future generations seeking to bring the nation’s laws and institutions into closer alignment with its founding ideals.

On June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, carrying the mandate of emancipation, and with it, the principles of the American Revolution. The Civil War had ended. The Confederacy had fallen. The Emancipation Proclamation had already declared enslaved people in the rebellious states free. But in Texas, that promise had not yet been made real for those still held in bo***ge.

Granger’s order marked the arrival of federal authority and a new birth of freedom. It also defined what that liberty meant. General Order No. 3 declared “an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property” between former masters and the formerly enslaved. Freedom was understood as self-ownership: a person’s right to his own life, his own labor, and the property earned through that labor.

That is why Juneteenth matters. It reminds us that liberty is more than an idea.

Read more in the link below.

Giving away tax dollars—or even promising to do so—to subsidize a private corporation’s bottom line is an abuse of power.

But that's what happened when city leaders in Columbia, Missouri, struck a deal with American Airlines to launch a new daily route to North Carolina, agreeing to put up $750,000 in taxpayer money to guarantee the corporate giant's monthly profits.

That's an unconstitutional giveaway of public dollars. Yesterday, the Goldwater Institute filed a lawsuit on behalf of Columbia taxpayers to protect them from the city's illegal deal.

Read about the case below.

Arizona made a promise to military families. We should keep it.

The Military Families College Savings & Scholarship Protection Act will let voters protect scholarship funds for the children of active-duty service members, veterans, and those killed in the line of duty.

Military families aren't a political piggy bank. A promise made should be a promise kept.

Thank you to Rep. Michael Way for sponsoring this important measure!

AZ Constitutional Amendment Will Block Attack on Military Families In a major victory for Arizonans, the state legislature has sent to the ballot the Goldwater Institute’s Military Family Protection..

Arizona lawmakers greenlit the strongest protections against race-based discrimination and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) of any state in the nation, sending a major new state constitutional amendment to the ballot in November. Thanks to Speaker Steve Montenegro for his leadership!

Arizona Legislature Approves Historic Constitutional Amendment to Stop DEI Arizona lawmakers just greenlit the strongest protections against race-based discrimination and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) of any state in..

Patients with rare and ultra-rare diseases are one step closer to accessing the personalized treatments that could save their lives.

Today, Rep. Diana Harshbarger and Sen. Ron Johnson introduced the Right to Try for Individualized Treatments Act, landmark legislation that would create a clear legal pathway for patients to access individualized gene and cell therapies without unnecessary bureaucratic barriers.

The original Right to Try, championed by the Goldwater Institute and enacted into federal law in 2018, empowered terminally ill patients to pursue promising investigational treatments. But medicine has evolved. Increasingly, groundbreaking therapies are being developed for a single patient based on that individual's unique genetic profile—yet outdated regulatory systems have struggled to keep pace.

This legislation modernizes the law for the era of personalized medicine, ensuring that patients and their doctors—not government bureaucrats—can make critical healthcare decisions when time is running out.

For families facing devastating rare diseases, this isn't a policy debate. It's a lifeline.

"No American should be forced to beg the government for permission to try to save their own life, and no bureaucrat should prevent a patient from accessing cutting-edge therapies." — Victor Riches, President & CEO, Goldwater Institute

The future of medicine is individualized. Our laws should be, too.

Congress Introduces Right to Try for Individualized Treatments Act to Expand Patients' Access to Gene Therapies Patients desperately waiting to access cutting-edge, life-saving treatments have new hope today with the introduction of the Right to Try..

Now is the time! Arizona can take the lead.

HCR2044 would enshrine the strongest state protections against DEI and race-based “affirmative action” of any state in the country.

We need House Speaker Steve Montenegro and Senate President Warren Petersen to move on HCR2044.

Arizona students, state employees, and state contractors shouldn’t have to suffer from the whiplash of Washington D.C., nor watch their state universities devolve further into hotbeds of DEI (or whatever surface-level rebrand it subsequently undergoes).

HCR2044 would turn this dynamic on its head, forcing our universities to stand against federal extortion and discriminatory DEI initiatives—now and always, regardless of the euphemisms used.

It’s no wonder that leading national conservative voices who’ve been in the trenches of higher education policy have echoed the call for Arizona lawmakers to pass HCR2044.

Labor unions are pushing for laws that would require a human driver in the cab of every self-driving truck, even if that driver has nothing to do.

They’re calling it a safety measure. But with the advent of self-driving trucks, whose core purpose is to improve safety, along with efficiency, the Goldwater Institute’s Brian Norman writes that we should embrace innovation, not turn away from it.

“These bills are not isolated safety measures but part of a coordinated campaign to slow a technology that threatens an entrenched labor model.”

Read more in the link below.

The City of Phoenix is at it again... and so are we.

Phoenix is trying to sell a parcel of downtown land to a private, out-of-state developer at a $3.3 million discount with no real public benefit in return.

That's Illegal, and Goldwater is suing the city to put a stop to it.

The Arizona Constitution requires government entities to receive a direct and proportionate return when they sell public assets. But Phoenix leaders are attempting to give Pennrose, LLC a massive discount on prime downtown real estate, agreeing to sell property worth at least $4.8 million for only about $1.5 million.

That’s not proportionate, and there are no other public benefits in the agreement to make up the difference.

Simply put, Arizona law does not give way just because city officials find a particular project desirable.

Public property belongs to the public. When government officials transfer millions of dollars in public value to a private developer, the Arizona Constitution requires a genuine public purpose and a proportionate exchange—not deep discounts justified by speculative or illusory benefits that taxpayers will never see.