Free Republic

In small-town community centers, schools, churches and a vast city convention center, immigrant advocates are spreading the word about President Barack Obama's plan to give millions of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally a temporary reprieve. In Los Angeles, advocates are hosting an information session for as many as 10,000 people at the city's convention center Sunday. "After this big forum, we're going to have daily orientations. That is what we have to do in order to deal with the demand," said Angelica Salas.

The Senate voted to pass its annual National Defense Authorization Act on Friday , sending Montana’s first wilderness additions in 33 years to President Barack Obama’s desk. The National Defense Authorization Act authorizes $585 billion in Pentagon discretionary spending and $63.7 billion in overseas contingency operations.It also includes a package of 70 public land management bills; the biggest collection since the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009. They create about 250,000 acres of new wilderness designations and protection of other lands from energy development. Other measures open thousands of acres to logging in Alaska and swaps federal lands for...

Things are pretty volatile in the Chaos Caucus. Every since Republicans took over the Assembly, things have been anything but smooth. That shouldn’t be much of a surprise. After all, even the GOP itself didn’t expect to be in charge of the lower house, and the last time the party was in charge, Ronald Reagan was in the White House and the pinnacle of technology was the Apple IIe desktop computer. You already know about the disastrous election of Ira Hansen, R-Sparks, as speaker. He was undone by ugly sentiments penned in a Sparks newspaper over a long career as...

In a rare alliance, President Barack Obama and Speaker John Boehner scrambled Thursday to salvage a a $1.1 trillion must-pass spending bill amid a Republican revolt over immigration and a Democratic revolt over provisions that would deregulate Wall Street and increase the amount that individual donors can contribute to national political party committees. With its fate in doubt, President Obama took to the phones to personally lobby Democratic members on Thursday to vote for the legislation, a development White House spokesman Josh Earnest confirmed to MSNBC’s Alex Wagner. Republican leaders scrambled to convince enough conservative dissenters to change their votes...

A Republican has joined Democrats in criticizing the inclusion of a partial repeal of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law in legislation funding the government. Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) signed on to a letter with Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) that calls on congressional leaders to scrap portions of the $1.1 trillion "cromnibus" that relax restrictions on banks trading financial derivatives. The pair argued in the letter that there is "broad bipartisan support" for removing that particular language. Brown and Vitter, who have worked together in the past on bills to limit big banks, argued that the language was unfairly jammed into...

Over the last several months, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush has been giving speeches, campaigning for candidates, appearing at public forums, and meeting with wealthy donors, which has led many people to believe that he may soon enter the race to become the next Republican presidential nominee. On Dec. 1, Bush told a gathering of business leaders at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington that he would make a decision about his political future “in short order.” But Bush’s recent business ventures reveal that he shares a number of liabilities with the last nominee, Mitt Romney, whose career in private equity...

The federal government's funding authorization expires tonight at midnight, and the Republican plan to renew it bodes poorly for the GOP's leadership of Congress next year. ... Congress shouldn't let the government shut down, but Republicans should neither acquiesce to president Obama's unprecedented executive power grab, nor give up control over the budget for well into the 114th Congress. ... Republicans take control of both chambers in January, so they have no good reason to make a deal with the Senate Democratic leadership that sets spending levels until next October. ... There are, as speaker Boehner has pointed out, some...

Sens Jeff Sessions (R-AL) said, “So I have a message today to every leader in Congress, to every official in the White House, and to President Obama: we are going to fight this illegal amnesty and we are not going to stop. We are going to carry out the mission the voters sent us here to do. We are not going to give in. We are not going to yield. We are going to stand strong for the American people.”

The Los Angeles Unified School District is declaring itself a safe haven for unauthorized immigrant students and their families who may qualify for relief under President Barack Obama's executive order. At a press conference Tuesday, district officials and union leaders pledged to work together to help students who qualify access the records they need to file their applications.

The only person left who can stop the 1,603-page, $1.1 trillion Speaker John Boehner omnibus spending bill from getting to the floor for a vote is House Rules Committee chairman Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX). If Sessions doesn't kill the bill in the Rules Committee on Wednesday, the bill just may pass the House of Representatives. For Sessions to do that, however, he’d need to very publicly and aggressively cross Boehner and House Appropriations Committee chairman Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY)—something that would be largely unorthodox and very difficult to do, politically. Don’t expect Sessions to kill it, though: He’s a Boehner...

“No nation ever continued happy, whose chief magistrate was its absolute master; and no nation miserable, whose supreme power was properly checked and divided.” These words were written by Thomas Gordon in 1722. Perhaps he picked them up from John Locke’s 1689 Two Treatises of Government. In any event, our framing generation certainly understood what to do with power in a republic, for their design “properly checked and divided” powers. They first divided it vertically between member republics and the government created by those republics. Second, authority was carefully parceled out horizontally among three branches. This past month, depending on...

A border immigrant rights group is set to launch efforts Wednesday to create a municipal ID for residents who don't have access to current forms of state identification. The standardized ID would not only afford the homeless, indigent and disabled access to essential city services, the El Paso-based Border Network for Human Rights argues, but would help undocumented immigrants prove they qualify for relief from deportation under the president's recently announced executive action. Without some form of ID, “these people may end up being deported even though they qualify for executive action," said Fernando Garcia, executive director of the BNHR....

President Barack Obama was bullish on Tuesday about the future of his deportation relief programs, urging undocumented immigrants to apply despite threats from Republicans that the policies will be dismantled. Obama said future presidents could, of course, try to end the programs. But stripping protections and deporting those who applied is "not politically likely," he said at a town hall meeting at the Casa Azafrán community center in Nashville, Tennessee. "Any future administration that tried to punish people for doing the right thing, I think would not have the support of the American people," the president said.

<p>Starting Jan. 1, unauthorized immigrants can get California driver’s licenses, but before they can register their vehicles they’ll need one more, pricier item -- auto insurance.</p> <p>Another state law is aimed at fixing that. Also starting Jan. 1, unauthorized immigrants for the first time are eligible to buy insurance through California Low Cost Auto Insurance.</p>

(CNSNews.com) – On Nov. 20, the same day President Barack Obama announced executive action to shield millions of illegal aliens from deportation, Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Jeh Johnson issued an agency-wide memorandum explaining new guidelines for enforcing the nation’s immigration laws -- or not enforcing them based on a wide range of “circumstances.” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson spoke about the U.S. government response to the growing number of youth crossing the border illegally on June 12, 2014 in Washington, D.C. (CNSNews.com/Penny Starr) Those guidelines are receiving minimal media attention but, coupled with the president's executive action mean...

New York lawyer Brett Stark, who has worked with dozens of unaccompanied Central American children who crossed into the United States in the past year, says getting the courts to grant these kids asylum is extremely difficult. So he often turns to a special advocate — a doctor. Such medical-legal partnerships have cropped up in New York and California, where thousands of unaccompanied minors have settled with their families or friends who were already in the U.S. For cases involving emotional trauma, the bulk of the evidence may come from a psychologist. The lawyer can try to describe the trauma,...

Harvard University law professor Laurence Tribe, a mentor to President Barack Obama, said the administration's carbon rule for power plants is "a remarkable example of executive overreach" that raises "serious constitutional questions." Tribe, who submitted joint comments to the Environmental Protection Agency with coal producer Peabody Energy Corp., said the agency should withdraw its plan to cut emissions from power plants because it reverses decades of federal support for coal. "The Proposed Rule lacks any legal basis and should be withdrawn," Tribe and Peabody wrote in their filing, which law firms for the company said was submitted to EPA on...

The further into the frightening future we travel, the more we will need to understand what has gone wrong with our national thinking, and more importantly, how we are going to correct it. We have spent the last 6 years listening to our dear leader chastise us about equality, about paying our “fair share,” about redistributing wealth. His ideas are essentially and hopelessly false and infantile. Either we rid ourselves of such rubbish, or life in America will continue to go bad. The idea of fairness is one of the earliest moral ideas that children grasp. If little Steven sees...

The U.S. National Security Agency should have an unlimited ability to collect digital information in the name of protecting the country against terrorism and other threats, an influential federal judge said during a debate on privacy. "I think privacy is actually overvalued," Judge Richard Posner, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, said during a conference about privacy and cybercrime in Washington, D.C., Thursday. "Much of what passes for the name of privacy is really just trying to conceal the disreputable parts of your conduct," Posner added. "Privacy is mainly about trying to improve your social and...

Washington (CNN) -- President Barack Obama said Wednesday that he and outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder are "not going to let up" in the effort to solve the problem of racial tensions that exists between law enforcement officers and minorities in communities nationwide. Obama's remarks came soon after a grand jury decided not to indict a white police officer in the July chokehold death of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man.