Free Republic

The conservative majority on the Supreme Court is potentially poised to take down one of the nation’s oldest and most restrictive gun-control laws this summer. New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen will be the court’s first major Second Amendment case in more than a decade and happens to be coming amid rising national gun violence and an uptick in gun sales in recent years. What the justices decide could unravel laws across the nation restricting who can carry guns in public. Here’s what’s happening. The case: Can New York place severe restrictions on who can carry a...

The Biden administration on Sunday froze Afghan government reserves held in U.S. bank accounts, blocking the Taliban from accessing billions of dollars held in U.S. institutions, according to two people familiar with the matter. The decision was made by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and officials in Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, the people said. The State Department was also involved in discussions this weekend, with officials in the White House monitoring the developments. An administration official said in a statement, “Any Central Bank assets the Afghan government have in the United States will not be made available to the...

By the middle of the week, as cities across Afghanistan were falling like dominoes to the Taliban and U.S. diplomats appeared increasingly at risk, President Biden’s plan for an orderly end to the United States’ longest war was quickly falling apart. On Wednesday evening, Biden convened his top advisers to assess the ominous turn of events. One by one, in the cramped Situation Room in the White House basement, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken outlined the administration’s options for ensuring the security of U.S. personnel. Biden asked them to return...

U.S. prosecutors this week put a price tag on damage to the U.S. Capitol from the Jan. 6 breach — $1.5 million so far — and for the first time are asking defendants to cover some of the bill in plea offers, prosecutors and defense lawyers said. The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington cited the damage estimate Wednesday in court and in plea papers filed in the case of Paul Hodgkins, 38. The Tampa crane operator pleaded guilty to one felony count of obstructing an official proceeding of Congress and faces sentencing July 19 in Washington. “Your client acknowledges that...

Reporters used to report the news. Reporters used to stand up for free speech. All that is gone in the Progressive Era of news as the likes of CNN’s Oliver Darcy use their reporting to censor the news and free speech by campaigning to get their competitors and ideological opponents deplatformed or driven off the air by advertiser boycotts. Now comes the Washington Post’s tech policy reporter Tony Romm who attempted to get the wildly popular border wall fundraiser taken down by GoFundMe

President Trump’s surprise decision to rapidly withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria is meeting with intense criticism by foreign policy experts, who denounce it as strategically stupid, reckless for national security and a blow to America’s global credibility. But inside Syria, the consequences are even more serious. For one example, 50,000 Syrian civilian refugees living under the direct protection of the U.S. military are suddenly fearing for their lives. For three years, civilians living in the Rukban refugee camp in the southeastern Syrian desert have survived because of the protection of U.S. forces encamped 10 miles away on a base...

Months after President Trump took office, Russia’s disinformation teams trained their sights on a new target: special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Having worked to help get Trump into the White House, they now worked to neutralize the biggest threat to his staying there.

On the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Germany last month, President Trump’s advisers discussed how to respond to a new revelation that Trump’s oldest son had met with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign — a disclosure the advisers knew carried political and potentially legal peril. The strategy, the advisers agreed, should be for Donald Trump Jr. to release a statement to get ahead of the story. They wanted to be truthful, so their account couldn’t be repudiated later if the full details emerged. But within hours, at the president’s direction, the plan changed. Flying home...

Donald Trump won tonight’s debate. He didn’t implode, he didn’t blither, he didn’t continually interrupt Hillary Clinton and he didn’t even sniff much. And, frankly, he had the best retorts and one-liners. Clinton was on her heels much of the night, and several times, she had to reset by resorting to tired, hollow platitudes — which only drove home the point that she lacks authenticity and appears to be a typical politician who is therefore dishonest. That said, Clinton was an able, informed politician, but Trump — for the first time — appeared to be a worthy opponent. The fact...

Driving the Republican jihad was a claim, first reported in October 2012 by Fox News, that CIA personnel had wanted to respond more quickly to the Benghazi attack but were ordered to “stand down,” perhaps by political higher-ups. Although this claim was promptly rebutted by CIA officials, it was repeated by Fox News at least 85 times, according to a review by the liberal advocacy group Media Matters. This barrage fueled Republican charges that the Democrats were engaging in a coverup. The Senate intelligence report addressed this inflammatory charge head-on. “The committee explored claims that there was a ‘stand down’...

WaPo site WhoRunsGov.com launched today as a moderated wiki, opening it for readers to contribute to the 700-plus in-depth profiles of Washington's most influential people in government. The site today is also debuting two reporting projects on health-care reform and government technology strategy that will be based on community content. WhoRunsGov.com, which was launched in beta form in January, currently includes profiles of Obama administration officials, members of Congress, Capitol Hill staffers, Pentagon officials and heads of think tanks and interest groups that play a critical role in shaping public policy. The moderated wiki platform allows users to both write...

This is why presidential elections matter even if and when you don't particularly like one candidate or the other. The re-election of George W. Bush in 2004 begat the nomination to the United States Supreme Court of Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. and Justice Alito's ascenion to the High Court last year begat today a landmark abortion ruling that anti-abortion advocates have pushed to get for years. You can spin this any other way you want but in the end it comes down to a simple matter of personnel. Justice Alito was willing and able to go in the law...

It has been said that opinions are like a certain anatomical feature (that good manners prevents naming) because everybody has one, and “they all stink” (except, of course, one’s own). The first half of that formulation is a quantitative measure – something that can be counted; whereas the latter half of the adage is a qualitative measure – a statement of value. Good debate should contain both elements, but good debate is increasingly hard to find these days. Mark Twain is reputed to have said that the world can be divided into two groups: those that divide the world into...