Free Republic

‘It’s the law of the land.” This is rapidly becoming the preferred shorthand argument for why criticism of Obamacare is just so, so wrong. It also serves as the lead sentence of a larger claim that all attempts to overturn the Affordable Care Act are really symptoms of a kind of extremist right-wing lunacy. For instance, here’s Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who walked out of the painting American Gothic to deliver this homespun wisdom: “We’re not going to bow to tea-party anarchists who deny the mere fact that Obamacare is the law. We will not bow to tea-party anarchists...

Minutes after midnight on Wednesday, Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) rose to give his colleague Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) a breather from what was already a marathon speech warning of the “train wreck” that is resulting from the collision of the American economy with the oppression of ObamaCare. While the remarks delivered by both men were eloquent, engaging, and educational, Senator Lee’s impromptu descant on the unconstitutionality of the Supreme Court’s rewriting of the original healthcare legislation was particularly noteworthy. For nearly an hour and without a teleprompter, Senator Lee rightly accused the Supreme Court of having “rewritten” ObamaCare, converting it...

The United States, the world’s largest arms dealer, has joined more than 90 other nations in signing a treaty that regulates global arms trading, but there is strong resistance in the Senate, which must ratify it. Secretary of State John Kerry, who signed the Arms Trade Treaty on Wednesday, said it was a “significant step” in keeping the world safe and preventing terrorists and others from obtaining conventional weapons. … Addressing U.S. critics of the treaty, the former senator said fears that it would undermine Americans’ constitutional right to keep and bear arms are not grounded in reality. For one,...

As close observers of history and human nature, James Madison and the other Founders of the U.S. Constitution knew that the equal and unbiased application of the law to all people, especially elected officials, is essential to freedom and justice and one of the primary safeguards from authoritarianism and oppression by a ruling class. And so, referring to the members of Congress, James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 57: "[T]hey can make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as on the great mass of the society." Today, elected officials need...

The House Judiciary Committee on Thursday approved House Bill 4770, which among other things, attempts to define what a journalist is to restrict access to motor vehicle accident reports for a period of 30 days after the accident. The measure is part of three-bill package aimed at impeding so-called “ambulance chasing” law firms. Within the package, the legislation is apparently an attempt to deny "ambulance chasers” quick access to accident reports. However, in that effort the bill sets out to define what does and doesn’t qualify as a “news publication.” “Government cannot license who speaks,” said attorney and MLive columnist...

In the wake of the shooting at the Navy Yard, Obama spokesman Jay Carney said the president is implementing executive actions and reiterated his commitment to strengthening gun laws, including expanding background checks to sales online and at gun shows.

The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material. In addition, the court extended the length of time that the NSA is allowed to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five years to six years — and more under special circumstances, according to the documents, which include a recently released 2011 opinion by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, then...

Obama is the second fervently anti-American president we have seen. That was hard to accept for a long time, but after the overthrow of our longtime ally Mubarak in Egypt, after Obama's active support for the Islamofascist Muslim Brotherhood, after the Benghazi arms-smuggling operation to Al Qaida-allied rebels in Syria, and now, after Obama's selective outrage against Syrian poison gas attacks in a civil war where 130,000 Syrians have died -- after all those facts I don't think Obama is running a pro-American policy any more. After all, Obama is running the "apologize for white folks" administration. It's the "American...

Back on April 2, 2013 I posted a thread titled 'Listen Up: Here Is Proof Native-Born Citizens And Natural-Born Citizens Are Separate'. In that thread I provided a link to the U.S. Citizenship And Immigration Services website page that stated the following: The Immigration and Naturalization Service: “Interpretation 324.2 Reacquisition of citizenship lost by marriage.” Interpretation 324.2(a)(7): “(7) Restoration of citizenship is prospective . Restoration to citizenship under any one of the three statutes is not regarded as having erased the period of alienage that immediately preceded it. The words “shall be deemed to be a citizen of the United...

Regardless of what Barack Obama is saying he, and not the world or humanity, drew a red line in the sand regarding the use of chemical weapons in Syria. Now that either the Syrian government, or the al-Qaeda rebels we are about to support, used chemical weapons Barack Obama is seeking authorization from the Congress to conduct military operations in the war-torn country. The president is assuring the Congress, and the American people, that this will be a limited strike and will include no boots on the ground in Syria, however when John Kerry was pressed on this he hedged...

The US government's spying budget includes funds to invent new technologies "to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit Internet traffic," leaked documents show. Among the NSA's annual budget of $52.6 billion are requests to bankroll "groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities" that can beat cryptography and mine regular Internet traffic, new documents leaked by Edward Snowden to the Washington Post reveal. The document in question, the Fiscal Year 2013 Budget Justification -- referred to as the "Black Budget" -- states on page 4: "...we are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit Internet traffic." Because of its mention in the...

Reuters) - The Obama administration has delayed a step crucial to the launch of the new healthcare law, the signing of final agreements with insurance plans to be sold on federal health insurance exchanges starting October 1. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) notified insurance companies on Tuesday that it would not sign final agreements with the plans between September 5 and 9, as originally anticipated, but would wait until mid-September instead, according to insurance industry sources. Nevertheless, Joanne Peters, a spokeswoman for HHS, said the department remains "on track to open" the marketplaces on time on...

All of us in the conservative movement know that Obama should have been impeached long ago for his arrogance and trampling on our Constitution, but until now, we haven't had a broad enough consensus in the country to go forward. Now we do. The upcoming war on Syria is wildly unpopular, with less than 10% of Americans supporting it, and for the first time I can recall, even Democrats and Indies despise Obama as much as we do. While our neighborhood is solidly conservative, the US sites where our import-export business operates have lots of Democrats and liberals. For this...

The National Security Agency paid millions of dollars to cover the costs of major internet companies involved in the Prism surveillance program after a court ruled that some of the agency's activities were unconstitutional, according to top-secret material passed to the Guardian. The technology companies, which the NSA says includes Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook, incurred the costs to meet new certification demands in the wake of the ruling from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (Fisa) court. The October 2011 judgment, which was declassified on Wednesday by the Obama administration, found that the NSA's inability to separate purely domestic communications from...

What's the NSA to say when they illegally and unconstitutionally snarf up emails they have no business looking at? Ooops: For several years, the National Security Agency unlawfully gathered tens of thousands of e-mails and other electronic communications between Americans as part of a now-revised collection method, according to a 2011 secret court opinion. The redacted 85-page opinion, which was declassified by U.S. intelligence officials on Wednesday, states that, based on NSA estimates, the spy agency may have been collecting as many as 56,000 "wholly domestic" communications each year. "For the first time, the government has now advised the court...

Just when you think the progressive liberal power grab can't get more blatant, another ugly example rears its head. It appears that under the umbrella of Obamacare, the government will now send agents into your very home to inspect it and you. Yes, you now have someone else to worry about other than the IRS. David Catron reports in The American Spectator that the federal government will "authorize state agencies throughout the nation to send government inspectors to your house if a 'home visit' is deemed appropriate pursuant to HHS guidelines ostensibly meant to 'create social and physical environments that...

Janet Napolitano’s TSA agents won’t keep their blue, latex-covered paws to themselves. The TSA is now expanding its grope to rodeos, sports stadiums, music festivals and train stations. The TSA’s signature move is like the signature move of a guy who “accidently” brushes his hand against a woman’s buttocks or chest—a woman he’s not dating; married to; or, even a friend to. Except the TSA pulls the creeper move on men and women alike, plus grandmothers and toddlers. Between 2010 and 2012, TSA misconduct increased by 26 percent, according to a report released this summer from the Government Accountability Office....

President Obama has only occasionally used his bully pulpit to confront racial inequality in America, even if race inherently has been a backdrop of his tenure as the first black president. He has, however, made fighting economic inequality a central goal of his presidency, delivering forceful speeches and advocating policies aimed at shrinking the income gap and increasing social mobility. When he speaks later this month on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Obama will be at the confluence of efforts to reduce racial and economic divisions. As the president addresses a crowd from...

The Obama administration announced last month via blog post that the president was unilaterally suspending ObamaCare's employer mandate—notwithstanding the clear command of the law. President Obama's comments about it on Aug. 9—claiming that "the normal thing [he] would prefer to do" is seek a "change to the law"—then added insult to constitutional injury. It also offers a sharp contrast with a different president who also suspended the law. As for Republican congressmen who had the temerity to question his authority, Mr. Obama said only: "I'm not concerned about their opinions—very few of them, by the way, are lawyers, much less...

As a reaction to the crack epidemic of the 1980s, many federal drug laws carry strict mandatory sentences. This has stirred unease in Congress and sparked a bipartisan effort to revise and relax some of the more draconian laws. Traditionally — meaning before Barack Obama — that’s how laws were changed: We have a problem, we hold hearings, we find some new arrangement ratified by Congress and signed by the president. That was then. On Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder, a liberal in a hurry, ordered all U.S. attorneys to simply stop charging nonviolent, non-gang-related drug defendants with crimes that,...