Free Republic

As I explained in my 2014 book Faithless Execution, the president takes two legally untenable positions on illegal immigration: (a) That the doctrine of prosecutorial discretion empowers him to choose which laws he will enforce, and (b) That if he chooses not to enforce laws in an area, like immigration, where the courts say federal law preempts state law, then state enforcement of congressional law is preempted by this executive branch non-enforcement policy. Obama’s first position is perverse. A president’s chief constitutional duty is to see that the laws are faithfully executed. “Prosecutorial discretion” is just a resource-allocation doctrine specific...

According to Romney in 2012: Donald Trump has shown an extraordinary ability to understand how our economy works and create jobs for the American people. He’s done it here in Nevada. He’s done it across the country. He understands that our economy is facing threats from abroad. He is one of the few people who stood up and said, “You know what? China has been cheating. They’ve taken jobs from Americans. They haven’t played fair. We have to have a president who will stand up to cheaters. We believe in free trade and free enterprise, but we don’t believe in...

Senator Ted Cruz is wise to laugh off Donald Trump's intimation that his constitutional qualifications to serve as president may be debatable. The suggestion is sufficiently frivolous that even Trump, who is apt to utter most anything that pops into his head, stops short of claiming that Cruz is not a "natural born citizen," the Constitution's requirement. Trump is merely saying that because Cruz was born in Canada (of an American citizen mother and a Cuban father who had been a long-time legal resident of the United States), some political opponents might file lawsuits that could spur years of litigation...

HOUSTON, Texas - Today, columnist and national security expert Andrew C. McCarthy endorsed Ted Cruz for President, saying Cruz "understands that the most immediate enemy the United States confronts on the world stage is Islamic supremacism." McCarthy, a former assistant U.S. attorney who led the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, said only one candidate "can be depended on to face down Washington" and "[t]hat candidate is Senator Ted Cruz.""Reinvigorating American principles will require taming Washington. It calls for restoring the Constitution as a vital limit on government, not a relic…or an obstacle," McCarthy wrote in a recent...

Andrew McCarthy’s column on Syrian refugees and the broader topic of asylum is the read of the day. With his characteristic knowledge and incisiveness, the former prosecutor of the Blind Sheikh for the first World Trade Center bombing gets to the heart of the issue. Few excerpts will convey the importance of this work, which should be read in its whole. The American people are far ahead of their elites in seeing the problem, even though our media, like the French and other Euromeadia, generally ignores the problematic aspects of not just Islamic culture but of the scriptural religion itself....

A national-security investigation may "not [be] conducted solely upon the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution." That clause, and others similar to it, are found throughout the Patriot Act and other provisions of federal law. They protect Americans from being subjected to surveillance based on nothing except their religious beliefs. There's an obvious reason for that at least, I thought it was obvious until Donald Trump reportedly embraced the idea of forcing Muslims to register in a database. I say "reportedly" because it is not clear to me, after hearing a recording of Trump's hectic...

"The Muslim Brotherhood youth in Egypt reject any form of violence." So said Rachid Ghannouchi, who - you'll no doubt be stunned to hear - heads up the Muslim Brotherhood's Tunisian branch, Ennahda. Naturally, Ghannouchi gave his Egyptian confederates a clean bill of health while speaking as an invited guest of the U.S. Institute for Peace in Washington. He is a master of the Brotherhood game, consulted by the State Department and a bipartisan Beltway clerisy ever on the hunt for that elusive "moderate Islamist." He is an Islamic supremacist who knows he can worm his way into Washington's heart...

In Senator Ted Cruz’s excellent Senate floor speech against President Obama’s catastrophic Iran deal, he urged Republican leadership – Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) and House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) – to reject the claim that Congress must vote on the deal in the next few days. He is absolutely right. By the unambiguous terms of the Corker law, the period for congressional review of the Iran deal has never begun because Obama has failed to provide the entirety of it.

In my weekend column I offered a concrete plan to undermine President Obama’s atrocious Iran deal. It is an easy one, because all that the Republican-controlled Congress has to do, if it really wants to derail this thing, is follow the law that they wrote and Obama signed, the Corker law — the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015, sometimes also known as “Corker-Cardin,” after Senate sponsors Bob Corker (R., Tenn.) and Ben Cardin (D., Md.). Sadly, in another iteration of the anger that is the wind beneath Donald Trump’s wings, many readers insist that GOP leadership has no...

Did you notice that there was not an iota of speculation about how the four Progressive justices would vote? There was never a shadow of a doubt. In the plethora of opinions generated by these three cases, there is not a single one authored by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, or Sonia Sotomayor. There was no need. They are the Left’s voting bloc. There was a better chance that the sun would not rise this morning than that any of them would wander off the reservation.

MSNBC is not known for its showcasing conservative voices. When conservatives are invited, they are ruthlessly grilled and struggle to get a word in edgewise. With this in mind, it was surprising to see Andrew McCarthy of National Review on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Even more surprising was his comments on Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s email scandal. Willie Geist got to the heart of the discussion by asking McCarthy what his stake was in Clinton email controversy, “Is this about security? Is it about accountability and transparency?” In response McCarthy affirmed, “I'm a national security guy. I’ve been worried about Benghazi...

The Republican party’s conservative base has a major problem. In assessing the 2014 midterm elections, a tidal wave in which the base propelled the GOP to substantial majorities in both houses of Congress, conservatives are in full agreement with President Obama and completely at odds with Republican leadership. The president boldly declared that, while he was not on the ballot, his policies were. He could not have been more right. GOP leadership boldly declares that the election was a case of voters trusting Republicans with an opportunity to “prove we can govern” — to demonstrate that GOP lawmakers can work...

A heavyweight lineup of former national security officials banded together late Tuesday to accuse Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) president Grover Norquist and high-ranking GOP political operative Suhail Khan of connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. The officials authored a 45-page dossier on the issue to Cleta Mitchell, the top lawyer for the American Conservatives’ Union who in 2011 cleared Norquist of the allegations initially brought by former high-ranking Reagan official Frank Gaffney. The signatories include numerous powerful and respected former officials, including former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former CIA Director James Woolsey, former Florida Rep. Allen West, retired Army Lt....

What was Obama doing while terrorists attacked Americans in Benghazi? You couldn’t help but feel for Robert Lovell. The retired brigadier general is haunted by the failure of AFRICOM, the U.S. military’s Africa Command, to respond when Americans were under siege in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. His congressional testimony this week was somber — no faux “What difference, at this point, does it make?” indignation, no “Dude, this was two years ago” juvenilia for him. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and the State Department’s Sean Smith were killed in the early stage of the jihadist attack. By then, the actions that...

In Kosovo and Honduras, Obama-ite foreign policy gave Putin effective precedent.‘Your independence is irreversible, absolutely irreversible.” So declared Vice President Joe Biden, thrilling a parliamentary assembly in Pristina, Kosovo. These were still the early months of the Obama administration, and the vice president was touring the Balkans to take a victory lap in the breakaway Serbian territory whose independence he’d done so much to champion as an influential senator. As Vladimir Putin tucks away Crimea, just as he clawed South Ossetia and Abkhazia back from Georgia five years ago, Kosovo is worth remembering. So is President Obama’s staunch support of...

Top American lawyer and author Andrew McCarthy, who prosecuted the World Trade Center bombers after the 1993 attacks, accused Barack Obama of serial fraud tonight on The Kelly Files. Andrew told Megyn Kelly: “If ever there has been a fraud on the entire American people it’s this one. And, I would say, Megyn, this business about, “you want your plan, you keep your plan,” is just the beginning of it… We’re talking about serial fraud on multiple levels and multiple level misrepresentations… This is an ‘in your face’ almost a crude fraud… The remedy the Framers gave us for reigning...

‘If you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan. Period.” How serious was this lie, repeated by Barack Obama with such beguiling regularity? Well, how would the Justice Department be dealing with it if it had been uttered by, say, the president of an insurance company rather than the president of the United States? Fraud is a serious federal felony, usually punishable by up to 20 years’ imprisonment — with every repetition of a fraudulent communication chargeable as a separate crime. In computing sentences, federal sentencing guidelines factor in such considerations as the dollar...

In the Syrian rubble of Barack Obama’s foreign policy lies a moment of opportunity for conservatives. It is a moment for building a muscular foreign policy based on a recognition of good and evil; on an unapologetic conviction that the United States stands firmly on the right side of that ledger because it stands for the liberty and equal dignity of every human being; and, therefore, on an unwavering commitment to have our interventions guided solely by American national interests. It is a Ronald Reagan moment. Now, all we need is a Ronald Reagan. For now, we have only pretenders,...

Have you noticed who exactly the opposing camps are in Syria’s civil war — the aspect that the side chomping at the bit for American military intervention would prefer not to discuss? In one corner, we have Bashar Assad. Unlike President Obama and his minions, who spent their first couple of years empowering Assad — Obama reopening diplomatic ties, Hillary pronouncing him a valiant “reformer,” Pelosi huddling with him, Kerry wining and dining him — many of us alleged “isolationists” on the right were never under any illusions about him. Assad is an anti-U.S. thug, the junior partner of Iran,...

Andrew McCarthy told Mark Levin that ‘Allahu Ackbar’ doesn’t even mean ‘Thank God’ at all. Rather it’s a war cry that means ‘god is greater’ and Muslims believe that when they go into battle they will win because their ‘god’ is greater, thus they keep chanting it. And it comes from Muhammad who first used it when he waged war against Khaybar where he brutally eradicated the Jews from Arabia. So yeah McCarthy said McCain did more for non-intervention into Syria with that idiotic remark than the actual non-interventionists.