Free Republic

This story was published at 4:33 p.m. and has been updated with a response from Rep. Cummings.House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., has accused the panel's top Democrat of prompting the Internal Revenue Service in 2012 to target a conservative organization applying for non-profit status. Issa said records obtained last week from the IRS show communications from the office of ranking member Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., about True the Vote, a Texas-based, non-profit conservative group that aims to prevent voter fraud.The communications at one point involved Lois Lerner, the ex-IRS official whom Issa's panel is poised...

Rep. Aaron Schock (R., Ill.) told Fox News host Gretchen Carlson there is “clear evidence” embattled former IRS official Lois Lerner broke the law Wednesday on Fox News. The House Ways and Means Committee released a report today revealing evidence highly incriminating to Lerner, and will refer her to the Justice Department for prosecution. Among the more startling allegations, Schock revealed the committee found evidence she deliberately attempted to obstruct Crossroads GPS’s 501 (c)(4) approval for purely political reasons. “We have in writing her own e-mails after meeting with liberal-leaning groups like Democracy 21 and others where they specifically say,...

Speaker Boehner Comments on the Criminal Referral For Lois Lerner Posted by Speaker Boehner's Press Office April 9, 2014 Press Release WASHINGTON, DC - House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) issued the following statement after the House Ways & Means Committee sent a criminal referral letter to the U.S. Attorney General outlining probable criminal actions taken by Lois Lerner during her tenure at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS):“The Ways & Means Committee, led by Chairman Camp, has conducted a serious and thorough investigation of the IRS, uncovering abuses and criminal acts that should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the...

The ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee actively conspired to inappropriately target and silence tea party-affiliated groups, says Catherine Engelbrecht, president of True the Vote. House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa released emails this week that suggest Rep. Elijah Cummings, Maryland Democrat, prompted the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the conservative organization as it was applying for nonprofit status, according to The Washington Examiner. Engelbrecht told John Bachman and J.D. Hayward of "America's Forum" on Newsmax TV that these emails will undermine claims by Cummings and the IRS that no conservative groups were targeted for political reasons. "I'm thrilled to...

A top building trades union is launching a midterm-election assault on House Democrats who oppose construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. A letter distributed Friday by the Laborers' International Union of North America (LIUNA) to the districts of 27 House Democrats calls for union members to make sure their representative "feels the power and the fury of LIUNA this November." Their crime: signing a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry last month urging him to reject Keystone, which would carry oil sands from Canada to Gulf Coast refineries.

You know, when we raise an issue, we’re too emotional,” Mikulski added. “Well, I am emotional.” “It brings tears to my eyes,” she exclaimed, “to know how women every, single day are working so hard and are getting paid less. It makes me emotional to hear that.” “I get angry, I get outraged, I get volcanic,” Mikulski asserted.

Chris Brown, left, mother of Christopher Brown for whom the new law is named, is with supporter, Tessa Hill-Aston, president of the Baltimore NAACP. Christopher's Law was passed by the Maryland General Assembly and is awaiting the governor's signature. The legislation requires police officers to be trained in CPR, cultural sensitivity, the proper use of force, and interacting with the physically and mentally disabled. "This is an umbrella of protection," said Chris Brown, 40, for whose son the bill (HB0294/ SB0542) was named. "This bill will ensure that police officers are trained in life-saving techniques. They already know how to...

The Maryland Catholic Conference counts the boost in minimum wage and full funding of two programs benefiting nonpublic schools among its successes as the General Assembly adjourned April 7. Legislators passed a bill April 7 raising the state’s minimum hourly wage from $7.25 to $10.10 incrementally by 2018. The final bill does not require, as earlier drafts did, that the wage be indexed to inflation. It also extended by one year the original proposal’s timeline for the full wage increase to take effect. The MCC, which advocates for public policy on behalf of the state’s Catholic bishops, supported a general...

Attorney General Eric Holder testified on Friday that the Justice Department (DOJ) never intended to stop the Louisiana school voucher program, despite his agency’s lawsuit that requested a permanent injunction against school choice scholarships.Under questioning before a House appropriations subcommittee, Rep. Andy Harris (R., Md.) got into a heated exchange after asking Holder if the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division was responsible for the lawsuit “against” the state’s scholarship program, which allows students to flee failing schools.“You buy into a premise that’s not correct,” Holder said. “That was not the division that was doing anything of that nature in Louisiana.”“We were...

March 31, 2014 A House could fall on LernerGlenn Farber Look out for that House! For all we know, Lois Lerner could be roused out of bed one morning this week or next by a congressional complaint charging her with contempt for having refused repeatedly to testify at two House hearings regarding the IRS targeting of certain nonprofit advocacy groups for extra scrutiny based on their names and policy positions. Lerner, who headed the IRS division that reviews tax-exemption applications, has repeatedly invoked her Fifth Amendment right instead of testifying about the agency, and she, her former lawyers, and her...

Desmond Tutu is a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to end apartheid in South Africa, and has long been a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which uses nonviolent means to challenge the Israeli occupation of Palestine and is the initiative being attacked by these bills. Tutu notes that these legislative initiatives are aimed “at punishing and intimidating those who speak their conscience and challenge the human rights violations endured by the Palestinian people.”

Democratic lawmakers and campaign finance reform advocates quickly bashed Wednesday’s Supreme Court decision to strike down total limits on individual campaign contributions, warning of future corruption in elections. Meanwhile, Republicans largely cheered the ruling from the narrowly divided court, which found it unconstitutional to impose caps on the aggregate amounts that one person can donate to campaigns, parties and political action committees. Calling himself “all for freedom,” Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Wednesday commended the ruling, saying “donors ought to have the freedom to give what they want to give.” And Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who had filed...

Judges are stepping in where they have no jurisdiction, no constitutional backing, no understanding of the limits of the federal government in relation to the states, and almost no knowledge of American history. “A Carroll County [Maryland] commissioner said she was ‘willing to go to jail’ opening up a board meeting with a prayer despite a federal judge in Maryland ruling the board has to stop with opening meetings with prayers that reference Jesus Christ or any specific deity. “‘If we cease to believe that our rights come from God, we cease to be America,’ (video) ‘We’ve been told to...

With just days to go before open enrollment ends on March 31, Maryland officials are reportedly planning to abandon its glitch-ridden ObamaCare website and replace the health exchange with technology from Connecticut’s marketplace. The Washington Post reported late Friday that the board of the Maryland exchange will vote on changing the system that has cost at least $125.5 million at a meeting on Tuesday, the day after the end of the first enrollment period under ObamaCare. …

“Real Time” host Bill Maher caused some real confusion with his knee-jerk liberal guests Friday night when he offered them a “racist” quote from Paul Ryan that turned out to really be from Michelle Obama. And he did it to make a point. Maher was piling on the latest liberal meme of Paul Ryan as piñata for comments he made in mid-March about inner-city “men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.” Two of Maher’s guests, Center for American President Neera Tanden and comedian W. Kamau...

If you like your exchange … you can keep your exchange? And if you don‘t like your state ObamaCare exchange — because it hasn’t functioned properly in six months despite endless promises that Maryland would fix it — you don’t have to keep your exchange. The state will finally throw in the towel on its $125 million web portal, and will replace it with a copy of Connecticut’s: Maryland officials are set to replace the state’s online health-insurance exchange with technology from Connecticut’s insurance marketplace, according to two people familiar with the decision, an acknowledgment that a system that has...

Maryland to Drop Obamacare Exchange: 'Broken Beyond Repair' Cash wasted on this clunker. Geoffrey Norman March 29, 2014 10:45 AM The state of Maryland has encountered many setbacks in its attempt to get a health care website up and running smoothly. (Sound familiar?) And now, it has run up the white flag. As Mary Pat Flaherty and Jenna Johnson of the Washington Post report: … [Maryland] officials are set to replace the state’s online health-insurance exchange with technology from Connecticut’s insurance marketplace, according to two people familiar with the decision, an acknowledgment that a system that has cost at least...

President Obama’s populist economic pitch is fizzling. The White House hoped to hammer Republicans this year on an array of pocketbook issues centered on hiking the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, an effort meant to appeal to independents and rally Democrats to the polls. Three months in, Obama’s approval ratings are flailing in the low 40s, and Senate Democrats haven’t even been able to unify their 55 members on a minimum wage bill. That’s made it tougher to contrast the positions of Democrats with Republicans in an election year that is shaping up to be about the healthcare law...

Abortionist Mehrdad Aalai, a former associate of the notorious New Jersey abortionist Steven Chase Brigham, has surrendered his Maryland medical license and closed down his abortion clinic, Annapolis Road Gynecology. In a letter to a Maryland State Board of Physicians Disciplinary Review Panel dated March 12, 2014, Aalai states that he decided to voluntarily surrender his medical license and retire rather than face additional investigation and disciplinary action. closedsign5“I have decided to surrender my license to practice as a physician in the State of Maryland as I plan to retire from the practice of medicine because of my age and...

The Republican Party is currently trying to sort out an internal battle between its dwindling stock of moderates who are occasionally willing to work with Democrats, and its hard-right base, which views compromise with Democrats in general, and President Obama in particular, as heresy. But in a speech Monday, Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), the second-ranking Democrat in the House showed that there are significant fissures in the Democratic Party as well. Hoyer, though nominally Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s second-in-command, is starkly different from Pelosi and many others on the party’s left wing when it comes to economic and fiscal issues....