Free Republic

A federal appeals court Friday lifted a lower court’s order that blocked President Donald Trump from moving forward with efforts to dismantle the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP). The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that Trump is likely to suffer “irreparable” harm if barred from fully exercising his executive authority over the Institute’s board. The court concluded that the Institute holds “substantial executive power,” meaning its board members are not protected from at-will removal by the president. “As a general rule, the President may remove executive officers at will,” the three-judge panel wrote. They added that...

Attorney Alan Dershowitz said Monday that many of the injunctions blocking actions by President Donald Trump, ranging from his executive orders to his efforts to address wasteful and fraudulent spending, will be thrown out on appeal. The Trump administration is appealing injunctions imposed by federal judges that targeted the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order ending birthright citizenship, among others. Dershowitz said during “The Dershow” that the cases will eventually be resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court. “Nobody ever said that our system of checks and balances would make it easy to govern or would...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge found Monday that the Trump administration hasn’t fully followed his order to unfreeze federal spending and told the White House to release all the money. U.S. District Court Judge John McConnell ruled that ongoing struggles to get federal money for things like early childhood education, pollution reduction and HIV prevention research violated his Jan. 31 order. He ordered the Trump administration to “immediately take every step necessary” to follow his temporary restraining over halting its plans for a sweeping freeze of federal funding....... The Justice Department argued, however, his ruling applied to a sweeping...

In a national panic, Americans permitted executives to take power—to declare states of emergency and to implement lockdowns—and now those executives won’t give that power back. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia often noted that the primary safeguard of our constitutional liberties is the structure of our government. Every banana republic has a bill of rights, he once said, but the strength of the American system is the separation of powers. At the federal level, there are three separate, co-equal branches of government that must operate together for our representative republic to function properly, and this balance of power is mirrored...

Imposing tariffs on Mexico would also have done nothing to stop the flow of immigrants. At least not directly. However, the threat did bring President Adrés Manuel López Obrador to the table. And Mexico will be providing assistance to the US in order to stem the imposition of tariffs.

Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer is calling on President Obama to permanently ban offshore drilling in the Atlantic and Arctic using his executive authority. From Politico: NextGen and White House officials have discussed the possibility of Obama using his executive powers under a section of the law governing offshore drilling that allows him to “withdraw from disposition” any section of the Outer Continental Shelf that has not already been leased for oil or gas drilling… Steyer’s group says more permanent protections are available using section 12(a) of the OCS Lands Act. Similar to the Antiquities Act, which presidents can use to...

President Obama is weighing a big-time executive action on immigration that has both Democrats and Republicans anxious. He's also pursuing a major international climate-change agreement without ratification by Congress. And it's not yet clear whether the White House will seek congressional authorization for military action in Syria that appears increasingly likely. Yes, we are finally entering into what could be a very big debate about executive authority -- and with the 2014 election just weeks away. ThIS (sic) debate was supposed to happen when House Republicans sued Obama over his having delayed a portion of Obamacare unilaterally. But if he...

He is regularly briefed on scientific reports on the issue, including a national climate assessment that he will help showcase Tuesday. He is using his executive authority to cut greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and other sources, and is moving ahead with stricter fuel-efficiency standards for the heaviest trucks. “He’s spending money, in my view, in the wrong place,” Duncan said in an interview. “He needs to be focused on the economy, and the balance has gotten out of hand.”

"(A)s a matter of constitutional law, the OLC (Office of Legal Counsel) memoranda’s most sweeping, categorical, and controversial conclusion – that at all events no statute or treaty may limit thePresident’s sole constitutional powers as military” Commander in Chief” to direct and conduct the use of U.S. force – is in my opinion unquestionably correct. The Office of Legal Counsel has long and consistently defended the view, both in Republican and in Democratic administrations,that the President’s constitutional powers under Article II of the constitution, as chief executive and as Commander in Chief of the nation’s military, afford the President substantial...