Free Republic

Republican presidential hopefuls are united in blasting President Obama for his chaotic enforcement of marijuana laws, but the unity quickly breaks down when they are asked how they would handle things if they were in the White House. Some have sent mixed signals, saying state decisions should be respected while questioning how Mr. Obama has respected those decisions. Others have refused to say how they would wield the federal bureaucracy against marijuana. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is one of the few potential candidates to take a firm stance, saying he would insist on following federal statutes that outlaw the drug....

Sell Stocks, facebook and twitter your friends. Cancel vacations in these states and reschedule to Indiana, Arkansas or any of the other 30 States that aren't boycotting Indiana that have RFRA laws.

It’s been taking place for nearly as long as I’ve been alive and I’m having a hard time recalling a single conversation with anyone who was an enthusiastic fan. The subject is daylight saving time, which crops up twice every year in nearly the entire nation, and is then promptly forgotten again once everyone gets their internal clocks mostly readjusted. But perhaps this is finally coming to an end as ten states debate dropping the practice, picking a time and sticking to it. States across the country are taking a dim view toward daylight saving time. And some say...

A city will pay me to live there? How is that possible, you may ask. Well, it's true. There are cities in the US that will actually pay you to live there. Might they always be your first choice for where you would live? Maybe, and maybe not. But getting paid to move and live in a community, if even for a short while can be quite an adventure, save you a ton of money and might even surprise you with how much you enjoy living in that city. Find out now: How much house can I afford? Here are...

Just minutes ago. The Colorado State GOP has denied establishment Chairman Ryan Call his reelection. The liberty backed candidate Steve House has been elected as chairman. Ryan Call has been a monkey for Karl Rove and the RNC in the passed two elections. Ryan played backhanded tactics to deny the liberty vote at almost every stop he could. Earlier this month, he disqualified the election results of a specific county and decided to redo the county election himself. All so he could get a few more votes for his reelection. Steve House was backed by the liberty crowd. He is...

Instead of watching helplessly as our republic devolves into crown government, let’s distract ourselves with a counterfactual. What if senators were appointed by state legislatures for indefinite terms?The Senate was designed to preserve the federal nature of our system. Members of the House represent the people, but the Senators were to represent the states — really, state governments.Had this worked, the people would have benefited. (Sometimes, you win by grabbing all the power, but sometimes you win by ceding power to critical allies. The states were the people’s only allies in the War Against the Feds.) Unfortunately, senators came to...

A state-level bureaucrat is standing up to the the central government planners is a most unusual way. Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction, Diane Douglas, has informed all school districts in the Grand Canyon State that they have blanket authority to ignore all federal nutrition mandates regulating school fundraisers. "Forcing parents and other supporters of schools to only offer federally approved food and snacks at fundraisers is a perfect example of the overreach of government and intrusion into local control," Douglas said in a statement. "I have ordered effective immediately, that the ADE Health and Nutrition Services division grant exemptions for...

Year after year, Louisiana didn't have enough money to cover its expenses, yet Gov. Bobby Jindal refused to roll back income tax cuts or ever-increasing corporate tax breaks. Instead, he raided reserve funds and sold off state property. ...The governor has successfully trimmed some spending by cutting more than 30,000 full-time state employees. He's reduced the state's vehicle fleet, privatized much of the Medicaid program, turned over the state's charity hospitals to outside managers and looked for ways to make state government more efficient. That hasn't closed all the gaps, however, and Jindal's short-term solutions leave a string of debts...

An Indiana state senator wants to change the way US senators are elected. Until the 17th Amendment was ratified a century ago, senators weren't elected directly, but by state legislatures. Charlestown State Senator Jim Smith says the idea was to make senators responsive to their states‘ concerns. He argues the switch to direct election has contributed to a shift in the balance of power from the states to the federal government. Smith says it‘s separated senators from state concerns and made it harder to remove them. "As the needs of the state of Indiana change," says Smith,"then we would essentially...

We, as a country, love weird things. We celebrate it, wear T-shirts proclaiming our weirdness, and enshrine oddities that probably should have gone out with the trash a decade ago. And that’s okay. At Yahoo Travel, we went in search of weird, wonderful, and wacky museums that are worth going out of your way to see.

What should American conservatives to do when the leaders of their chosen party have become nearly indistinguishable from liberal Democrats? Vote? Write letters and emails? Make phone calls? Stay at home and refuse to participate? Withhold our financial support? We have tried all of those things – repeatedly, over the course of the past 100 years – but nothing seems to have worked. If anything, today’s GOP establishment leaders are more distant from, and more hostile to, conservatives than at any time since the Republican Party was founded.

In what has been described as a new front in the battle over same-sex marriage, legislators in several states under judicial orders to confer marital status on same-sex couples have introduced bills to forbid state or local officials from issuing marriage licenses to couples of the same gender. The bills would also strip the salaries of employees who issued the licenses, the New York Times reported Thursday.The bills have been introduced in the legislatures of Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas, with South Carolina also considering a bill that would allow officials to opt out of issuing such licenses if it...

President Obama believes more states are likely to legalize marijuana following efforts in Colorado and Washington state. "My suspicion is that you're going to see other states look at this," the president told YouTube blogger Hank Green. Obama said that the federal government was "not going to spend a lot of resources" enforcing federal marijuana laws in states that had decided to legalize the drug. He also noted that the Department of Justice was examining how to shift policies for nonviolent drug offenders. In an interview with The New Yorker last year, Obama appeared to tacitly endorse a Colorado referendum...

On January 30, the Southern District Court of Texas will decide whether 25 plaintiff states in Texas v. U.S. should be granted a preliminary injunction to stop the Obama administration’s latest, lawless executive amnesty. Establishing “legal standing” —essentially, a plaintiff’s right to sue — is highly problematic for petitioners aggrieved by the non-enforcement of our immigration laws, but the plaintiff states have skillfully laid out in their briefs a comprehensive case for why they should be granted standing. The states assert several economic interests harmed by the Deferred Action for Parental Accountability (DAPA) program. They cite, among other things, the...

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis called the states the “laboratories of democracy.” President Barack Obama ought to be glad that a handful of states are governed by Republicans doing lab work very different from his own. The economic gains registered in some of those states have played a significant part in pulling America out of its economic doldrums, allowing Obama, after six years in office, to give a State of the Union speech in which he could assert with some validity that the state of the union is “strong.” In his address on Tuesday night, the president “took credit,” as...

President Obama won't claim victory of the Islamic State. But in tonight's State of the Union he will say that he (or "American leadership") is "stopping" its "advance." "In Iraq and Syria, American leadership – including our military power – is stopping ISIL’s advance," Obama will say, according to excerpts released by the White House. "Instead of getting dragged into another ground war in the Middle East, we are leading a broad coalition, including Arab nations, to degrade and ultimately destroy this terrorist group. We’re also supporting a moderate opposition in Syria that can help us in this effort, and...

The 2014 midterm elections gave state Republicans their largest political majorities of the modern political era. In Governor races, the GOP picked up a net 2 states, against expectations of a 2-seat loss. The party also holds 68 of the nation’s 98 partisan legislative chambers, a grip on state government not seen since the 1920s. In only seven deeply blue states do Democrats control both the legislature and the Governor’s mansion. Republicans hold or share control in every other state. Conservatives rightfully worry that Republicans in Washington will pursue a modest agenda with their Congressional majorities, but the states provide...

By now, you’ve likely read plenty about how the Constitution has been twisted to give the federal government power far beyond anything the Founders ever planned. You already know the dangers of an unchecked President, of a Congress that passes bills without reading them, of agencies that do what they want, and judges who believe in precedent over original meaning. So I won’t waste your time sharing more of the same. Is the situation hopeless? Absolutely not. But in order to actually turn things around, a few sacred cows need to be dealt with. Here are TEN STEPS you should...

It is rare for conservatives to score a federal policy victory these days, especially with a Democrat in the White House, but as Michael Barone reminds us, just by playing defense conservatives have done exactly that on transportation. Unfortunately there are some in Congress who want to reverse these gains. The big win for conservatives on transportation comes from two sources. First, when the gas tax was last raised in 1993, it was not indexed for inflation, so the 18.4 cents a gallon collected today doesn't go as far today as it did more than two decades ago. Second, thanks...

One thing that makes the U.S. great: no two states are the same. That diversity leads to distinct strengths and weaknesses, but how can you know what makes North Dakota different from South Dakota, besides a made-up line separating them? Well, in the interest of showing that every state sucks in some way, we picked out one key area where each is most deficient. This is what every state is the worst at.