Free Republic

Liberals won't like it. If Ted Cruz is elected president, he has big plans for the Supreme Court -- namely, picking extremely conservative candidates to fill any vacancies among the nine justices. In an interview with Bloomberg, the Senator and former solicitor general from Texas said that Republicans are generally bad at picking nominees for the high court, and that he'd be different. "Unlike many of the other candidates, I will be willing to spend the capital to ensure that every Supreme Court nominee that I put on the court is a principled judicial conservative," Cruz said. As solicitor general,...

AIKEN, S.C. — Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is "disgraceful" and a "disappointment" to conservatives, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said Saturday, while praising Associate Justice Clarence Thomas as his favorite member of the high court. "Justice Roberts really let us down. What he did with Obamacare was disgraceful, and I think he did that because he wanted to be popular inside the Beltway," Trump told about 4,000 supporters.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is "disgraceful" and a "disappointment" to conservatives, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said Saturday, while praising Associate Justice Clarence Thomas is his favorite member of the high court. "Justice Roberts really let us down. What he did with Obamacare was disgraceful, and I think he did that because he wanted to be popular inside the Beltway," Trump told about 4,000 supporters. The celebrity billionaire was referring to the chief justice twice voting to uphold key provisions of President Barack Obama's 2010 health care law and to the expressway around the District of Columbia, an...

SNIP “It is true that after George W. Bush nominated John Roberts, I supported his confirmation. That was a mistake and I regret that,” he said. But he insisted that he’d fought behind the scenes for a more reliable — and proven — conservative jurist, appellate judge Mike Luddig, for whom he had worked.

"As an individual, John Roberts is undoubtedly a principled conservative, as is the president who appointed him. He clerked for Chief Justice Rehnquist, worked in the Reagan White House, and served as the principal deputy solicitor general in President George H.W. Bush's Justice Department. As a jurist, Judge Roberts' approach will be that of his entire career: carefully, faithfully applying the Constitution and legal precedent. He is a mainstream judge, respected across the ideological spectrum. Thus, he's earned praise from liberal icons such as Harvard Law Professor Larry Tribe, and Chicago Law Professor Cass Sunstein, as well as from Clinton...

Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump said Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has "turned out to be a nightmare for conservatives," and put some of the blame for Roberts' presence on the Court on 2016 rival Sen. Ted Cruz. "Cruz fought like hell to get Justice Roberts in there. Justice Roberts turned out to be an absolute disaster, he turned out to be an absolute disaster because he gave us Obamacare." Trump told ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos on “This Week” Sunday. Trump repeatedly went after Cruz, who served as a law clerk for Supreme Court Chief Justice William...

For Republican presidential contenders challenged by the media, the go-to answer has become a claim of victimhood: You are biased against us. As Marco Rubio put it at the CNBC debate last month, "The Democrats have the ultimate super PAC. It’s called the mainstream media." Are media outlets really biased against Republican candidates? One of the most careful studies, by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro of the University of Chicago, doesn’t find much evidence of that. Its central conclusion is that readers...

Prepare to be “nudged” by Obama's new “behavioral science” squads — for your own good, of course. Under the guise of better “serving” the American people through government, Obama signed an executive order this week calling for federal agencies and departments to deploy emerging “behavioral science” techniques against the public.Among other goals, the expansion of federal mind manipulation is supposed to help more Americans access government welfare programs, take their “recommended” vaccines, supply more information about themselves to the federal government, and accelerate the transition toward what Obama called “a low-carbon economy.” The controversial decree, signed on September 15, explicitly...

Progressivism will finally succeed in installing global socialism under the umbrella of U.N.'s Agenda 2030, dressed as Sustainable Development and Equality After forty years of socialist indoctrination in schools and LGBT activism, the progressive agenda is finally bearing fruit. Gloating that the Women of the Left and GLAAD were victorious over our country, a recent Rush Limbaugh caller said that our country is in such a mess right now, that Christians won’t even help their own when religious rights are trampled. The warping and destruction of our children’s minds in schools is so complete, they now think the way feminist...

When Americans think about the Confederacy, they often think about Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 classic, Gone With the Wind. Inspired by recent debates over the Confederate flag, I decided to give the book a try. I confess that I did not have high hopes. I expected to be appalled by its politics and racism, and to be bored by the melodrama. (Scarlett O’Hara, Rhett Butler, and Ashley Wilkes? Really?) About twenty pages, I thought, would be enough. I could not have been more wrong. The book is enthralling, and it casts a spell. Does it make a plausible argument for continuing...

Cass Sunstein, the former Obama administration “regulatory czar,” has warned the campus crusade against “microaggressions” could potentially be enforced by a “new cadre of thought police.” […] Sunstein chastises the University of California at Berkeley for its “willingness to consider disciplining people for making one of a large number of statements, many or all of which most Americans would consider harmless or even correct.” He also mentions another university, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, has taken a stand against microaggressions by publishing a list of “examples of racial microaggressions.” …

There’s a reason you don’t see many Adam Smith ties in the faculty lounge. “Adam Smith believed there are few things that the government should do,” James Otteson of Wake Forest said at the Philadelphia Society’s annual meeting in Philadelphia last month. Otteson is the Executive Director of the BB&T Center for the Study of Capitalism and Teaching Professor of Political Economy at Wake Forest. He is the author of Adam Smith’s Marketplace of Life. Nevertheless, Smith, the Scottish philosopher has inspired American scholars and sages for centuries. Thomas Jefferson recommended The Wealth of Nations as a worthy title for...

Much has been written about Obama’s controversial appointments, not only to the federal bench, but to key cabinet positions, as well as to the unaccountable (and probably unconstitutional) “Czar” positions. Much of the criticism has dwelled on the Obama administration’s lack of vetting when filling these rolls—but that’s not the issue. To the contrary, the Obama team did investigate thoroughly and they choose precisely. When an administration repeatedly nominates hard-left individuals, it’s not a vetting error—it’s a pattern. We should not allow the media to portray these appointments as a series of errors; but rather, we need to realize that...

Are Americans worried about climate change? Do they want their government to regulate greenhouse gases? A recent survey - from Stanford University, The New York Times and Resources for the Future - found that strong majorities say "yes" to both questions. But there's a big catch, which isn't getting the attention it deserves: A strong majority also say that they oppose increasing taxes on either gasoline or electricity in order to reduce climate change. That's important, because any serious effort to lower emissions is going to raise prices. At the same time, a majority said they would oppose the Kyoto...

On Jan. 22, Jason Hammond accepted a noncooperating plea deal from prosecutors in Cook County, Illinois: He will serve 41 months for his role in an organized assault on a casual dining establishment in the Chicago suburb of Tinley Park. On May 19, 2012, Hammond and 17 others stormed the Ashford House restaurant with bats and hammers, interrupting lunch and leaving 10 people injured. But instead of years in jail, America should perhaps consider sending Hammond a thank-you card. He is not to be confused with his twin brother, Jeremy Hammond, who is serving a 10-year sentence in federal prison...

Cass Sunstein, Obama’s former regulatory “czar” and one of the smartest and most devious thinkers on the left, has a highly revealing Bloomberg column out this week reporting on the results of a study of the way China has attempted indoctrination in its school system. This column and the underlying study (it’s an NBER paper, behind a paywall unless you have academic access) are useful as background reading for everyone who is rightly concerned about how Common Core standards will likely become the means of nationalizing a liberal school curriculum. (What? You mean you aren’t reassured by the promises from...

Hey, Obama Lovers, now that our Ambassador is dead, our Benghazi consulate is a smoldering ruin, and its top secret documents have been snatched by Al Qaeda, do you still think your hero's Libyan war is a smashing success? Because I sure do. Not from America's point of view, of course; it's a nightmare for our national security. But from the perspective of Obama's biggest donor, the convicted felon and renowned Israel-hater George Soros, the Libyan War is a triumph. Why? Because Obama waged it illegally and without the consent of Congress. And he did it in the name of...

In a recent Politico Magazine article titled, “Let’s Talk About Death Panels,” Harold Pollack urges reviving one of the most notorious proposals that did not make it into the Obama Health Car Law – “advance planning consultations.”During the debate over Obamacare’s enactment, there was considerable controversy over a provision in an early version under which health care providers would have been paid by Medicare to discuss with their patients whether they would want life-saving medical treatment.After former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin dubbed the planning sessions “death panels,” the provision was dropped from the law ultimately enacted.As Pollack...

If you have been following Glenn since his days at Fox News, you may remember the expose he did on Obama ‘regulatory czar’ Cass Sunstein and his nudge theory. One of Sunstein’s more disturbing ideas involved government operatives infiltrating online communities in order to disseminate false information. As Glenn describes it, the goal was to “pose, infiltrate, and discredit.” Anyone who actually took Sunstein’s words at face value were mocked and labeled conspiracy theorists. But, as it turns out, it was all true. “The English version of the NSA is the GCHQ… The English NSA has now revealed that that’s...

One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents. Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in...