Free Republic

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - California, Oregon, Washington and other states involved in a western states pact to coordinate coronavirus response have asked the federal government for a combined $1 trillion in aid, California Governor Gavin Newsom said on Monday.

After a month of sheltering in place, hundreds of millions of Americans will soon emerge from the new “normal.” Georgia, Colorado, and Alaska (among other states) are giving their residents some freedom to return to their old lives, with many “non-essential” businesses resuming operations. Plenty of public health advocates are concerned and have raised legitimate questions about the timing of such policies. But, done right, a cautious re-opening of America can lay the groundwork for renewed prosperity and lead to better health outcomes than continued, blanket stay-at-home orders. And a robust system of American federalism allows states to emulate best...

If there is one benefit from the pandemic, it is that the establishment news media — which is overwhelmingly liberal and loathes President Trump and his 60 million voters — has finally done something counterintuitive. They consulted an old document long forgotten: the Constitution... now embrace federalism. Members of the Washington Democratic Media Complex have insisted that Trump was a dictator. Yet when the coronavirus hit, weren’t these TV show ponies whimpering that he wasn’t enough of a dictator? Trump rolled clips of cable news pundits dismissing the threat early on. Some networks cut away with great shrieking and pearl...

On April 11, The Washington Post ran an article about plans being made to reopen the economy. The article complains that state governors (rather than the White House) are leading the planning, which has resulted in a “mind-boggling level of disorganization,” according to a Centers for Disease Control director. The incessant bleating of prominent health leaders over the lack of federal control in this crisis only underscores how little they understand or respect this country’s Constitution and the freedoms it seeks to protect. Although the White House certainly has emergency authority to mandate all number of efforts to respond to...

Subtitle: The Insidious 17th Amendment. The 17th Amendment did to federalism what the 13th Amendment did to slavery. Both are long-gone vestiges of our framing era. Tenth Amendment? States’ rights? Poof, and not only long-gone but neither slavery nor federalism can possibly return without repeal of their respective amendments. Conservatives would do well to consider the 13th – 15th Amendments. Beginning with freeing slaves, then prohibiting state violations of privileges or immunities, securing due process, equal protection and entitling blacks to vote, the post-civil war amendments fundamentally altered society and the federal/state government relationship. Unlike the pre-civil war Constitution, the...

Any New Yorkers in there? Rhode Island plans to send the National Guard out to knock door-to-door in an attempt to hunt down anyone who has arrived in the tiny state from New York City during the coronavirus pandemic. State police, meanwhile, have begun pulling over cars with New York state plates. Gov. Gina Raimondo said anyone traveling there from New York will be ordered to undergo a 14-day quarantine and could face fines or even jail time if they’re found to not comply. “Right now we have a pinpointed risk,” Raimondo said at a news conference Friday. “That risk...

Molly Jong-Fast @MollyJongFast So the states are basically governing themselves because our president doesn’t know how to president at all?

A key House committee approved a bill to make the nation's capital the 51st state, sending it to the House floor for full approval. This is the first time since 1993 that a bill to make Washington, D.C., a state has been considered and approved in a committee. The House Oversight Committee passed the bill over the objections of the Republican minority, which introduced amendments to impose restrictions on abortion and gun control on the proposed state. The bill has 220 co-sponsors, giving it the momentum to pass the majority-Democratic House. "For such a historic achievement for the District of...

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Friday to take up an issue that could change a key element of the system America uses to elect its president, with a decision likely in the spring just as the campaign heats up. The answer to the question could be a decisive one: Are the electors who cast the actual Electoral College ballots for president and vice president required to follow the results of the popular vote in their states? Or are they free to vote as they wish? A decision that they are free agents could give a single elector, or a...

President Trump issued a warning to California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday, threatening federal intervention if Newsom is unable to solve his state's homeless crisis. "Governor Gavin N has done a really bad job on taking care of the homeless population in California. If he can’t fix the problem, the Federal Govt. will get involved!" Trump tweeted. The Golden State has led the nation in the number of homeless people with an estimated total of over 129,972 in January 2018, according to a Department of Housing and Urban Development [HUD] report. Just over 68 percent of the homeless population in...

There's an interesting headline out there today, which can serve as a good educational moment. Due to the ravages of the fires out in California, the White House is threatening to cut off federal funding. Now first off, The notion of this phrase "federal funding" (the article also uses the phrase "state funding") is offensive because it's dishonest. It's welfare, that's what it is. I'm not interested in P.C. comfort terms. As I wrote in May of 2017, when the progressives were starting off building their nanny-state empire, they had a very specific list of welfare queens - 48 of...

There is an exceptional amount of lying in Washington these days, and our media and politicians are entranced by it. Lies must achieve extraordinary bulk and quality to impress the sport’s most ardent practitioners: Only a particularly nasty outbreak of mendacity could draw Washington’s attention to a subject it knows with such intimacy and depth. Most Americans are unsurprised. Long ago, they learned lies are the oxygen of the political world. They know the phrase “political deception” is a redundancy, like “false pretense,” “free gift,” or “foreign imports.” Most electoral lies, they’ve found, are dandruff on the body politic, pedestrian...

Trump got you down? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez giving you the willies? Try federalism — now with 70 percent less authoritarianism. To the uninitiated, conservatives sometimes sound — to put it plainly — bonkers. Your lefty friends are going on and on about free health care and making Jeff Bezos pay off their student loans, and conservatives are talking about . . . the 17th Amendment. Conservatives do hate the 17th Amendment. That’s the one that instituted the direct election of senators, which basically turned the upper house into a puffed-up House of Representatives with a bit less accountability. Conservatives of a...

A full-blown war is raging against the Electoral College. But as activist groups become more desperate to overturn our way of electing presidents before voters go the polls in November 2020, their arguments become more absurd and hyperbolic. CNN recently ran a preposterous segment suggesting that James Madison called the Electoral College “evil,” a shameful distortion and an absurdity given that the man known as the Father of the Constitution had a direct hand in creating the institution. Others have made more serious but ultimately absurd indictments of the Electoral College. Among the biggest stretches made by critics of the...

President Donald Trump called for a bipartisan effort to pass an infrastructure bill in his latest State of the Union speech. Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao echoed the same sentiments shortly after the speech. Yet both failed to provide a few details as to what ought to be included in such a bill, and leaving the details to Congress is problematic. So far, most congressional discussions on any infrastructure bill have focused on ways to fund more federal spending. Letting Washington simply throw more dollars at roads and bridges, however, is a bad idea. Whatever we spend, politicians should take...

WASHINGTON — A divided Supreme Court stopped Louisiana from enforcing new regulations on abortion clinics in a test of the conservative court’s views on abortion rights. The justices said by a 5-4 vote late Thursday that they will not allow the state to put into effect a law that requires abortion providers to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals.

The Senate is expected to vote Tuesday on an amendment that would federally legalize marijuana by allowing states to regulate their own medical and recreational pot markets. But even one senator can block a vote on the amendment, which would address a longstanding conflict between federal and state law. Sen. Cory Gardner, D-Colo., is seeking to attach the measure to the First Step Act, a bundle of prison, prisoner re-entry, and sentencing reforms that senators voted 81-12 to advance Monday.

The Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service of the University of Virginia analyzed Census Bureau population projections to estimate each state’s likely population in 2040, including the expected breakdown of the population by age and gender ... we see that, in fact, the [US] population will be heavily centered in a few states. Eight states will have just under half of the total population of the country, 49.5 percent, according to the Weldon Cooper Center’s estimate. The next eight most populous states will account for an additional fifth of the population, up to 69.2 percent — meaning that the 16...

Senator Warren, a Democrat of Massachusetts, is in the headlines for joining with Senator Cory Gardner, a Republican who represents Colorado, to introduce the Strengthening the Tenth Amendment Through Entrusting States Act. That legislation would, as Warren put it in a tweet, “let states, territories, & tribes decide for themselves how best to regulate marijuana — without federal interference.” Justice Thomas is Warren’s natural ally on the issue. He wrote an emphatic dissent in the 2005 Supreme Court case Gonzalez v. Raich. Alberto Gonzalez was President George W. Bush’s attorney general, and Angel Raich is an Oakland, Calif., woman who...

When Angela Merkel visited her party’s parliamentary group in mid-April, she didn’t talk about how she wants to change the pension system. Tolls on German highways were also not on her list, nor were all the problems with diesel emissions in the country. She didn’t even complain about the Christian Social Union (CSU), the outspoken Bavarian sister party to her Christian Democrats. Instead, she wanted to talk about the Peace of Augsburg, signed in 1555. […] […] If you look at the world through her lens, the riders of the apocalypse are already appearing on the horizon. […] In her...