Free Republic

It’s hard to imagine a greater victory for the conservative legal movement than the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, which overturned D.C.’s ban on handguns. Not only did the Court definitively settle the long-contested question of whether the Second Amendment secures an individual right to keep and bear arms, but it did so using the language of “originalism”—the school of thought, long championed by conservatives, that says the Constitution should be read according to its original public meaning. It was therefore surprising when a leading conservative jurist, Judge J. Harvey Wilkinson III of the U.S....

Voter dissatisfaction with Republicans and Democrats is at historic levels, and the tea-party movement is hoping to play kingmaker in the November elections. The country’s current breed of discontent is ideal for the tea parties, because economic concerns are foremost, allowing the movement to sidestep the divisions between its libertarian and conservative wings. As the elections near, however, voters will want to know where the party stands not just on the economy but on social issues. A perfect illustration is drug policy, where conservatives advocate continued prohibition but libertarians argue for legalization. Which way should the tea party lean when...

A reader who asks his name not be used writes about the drug raid video from Columbia, Missouri: I am a US Army officer, currently serving in Afghanistan. My first thought on reading this story is this: Most American police SWAT teams probably have fewer restrictions on conducting forced entry raids than do US forces in Afghanistan. ... Generally, our troops, including the special ops guys, use what we call "cordon and knock": they set up a perimeter around the target location to keep people from moving in or out,and then announce their presence and give the target an opportunity...

I posted this first to the latest Glenn Beck thread. I think it embodies what Glenn is talking about in a concentrated summary and deserves notice, IMHO: A right-wing progressive can be defined as one who joins with the left in promoting the all-encompassing all-powerful Commerce Clause in order to push a social "conservative" or religious agenda, primarily today in the federal War on Drugs. (Right-wing Progressivism predates left-wing Progressivism in the alcohol temperance movement of the 1870s and also in the premature ending of Reconstruction and Plessy v. Ferguson institutional and statute-enforced segregation.) The right has been willing to...

If the idea is to create a drug-free America, then we can safely say that after hundreds of billions of dollars spent, millions of arrests, and decades of escalating police and military efforts, the war on drugs is a complete failure. The reason is clear if you think about it. The attempt to use government force and central planning -- violence and socialism, essentially -- to effectively mold society by preventing people on an individual basis from growing, producing, transferring, and ingesting drugs of their choice, is a ridiculous fantasy and always has been. There will forever be ways to...

Roger Roth, Wisconsin Assemblyman and Candidate for Congress, Wisconsin’s 8th District, had this observation about the U.S. Constitution: “The Constitution is a wonderful document. It’s a great piece of paper that’s got a lot of words on it. But you know, at the end of the day, it’s just a piece of paper that’s got a lot of words on it. And we need to elect representatives that believe in that.” “It’s not so much ... I asked a class of, of, uh, you know, I go around to my local schools and talk to fourth, fifth, sixth graders, and...

A former White House speechwriter, Mark Thiessen, has jumped to the defense of his former boss, writing for the Washington Post that George W. Bush “established a conservative record without parallel.” Even by the loose standards of Washington, that is a jaw-dropping assertion. I’ve been explaining for years that Bush was a big-government advocate, even writing a column back in 2007 for the Washington Examiner pointing out that Clinton had a much better economic record from a free-market perspective. I also groused to the Wall Street Journal the following year about Bush’s dismal performance. “Bush doesn’t have a conservative legacy”...