Free Republic

Acting as prosecutor, judge, and jury, the National Labor Relations Board is just the tip of the iceberg of government agencies wielding far too much power. “No jokes allowed. Ever.” Apparently, this is the new Twitter rule, as The Federalist national news publication faces a joint administrative and judicial broadside at the National Labor Relations Board. What the publication is going through constitutes just one of the many costly, silly, and arguably unconstitutional quasi-judicial proceedings underway throughout the federal bureaucracy.A recent case before the NLRB — in which the agency served as legislator, police, prosecutor, and judge — helps illustrate...

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin faces murder and manslaughter charges for kneeling on George Floyd's neck until he stopped breathing. But even if Chauvin is convicted, Floyd's family may not be able to pursue claims under a federal statute that authorizes lawsuits against government officials who violate people's constitutional rights. The uncertain prospects for the lawsuit Floyd's relatives plan to file underlines the unjust and irrational consequences of qualified immunity, a doctrine that shields police from liability for outrageous conduct when the rights they violated were not "clearly established" at the time. Congress should seize the opportunity created by...

We're seeing now what efforts against COVID-19 were supposed to produce: a flattening of the growth curve of new fatalities. The growth rate of fatalities is dropping. We entered the dark tunnel, and now we are on the way out. Rays of light are shining in. We will survive. But will we learn? It appears that the initial estimates of the scope of the threat were off by some orders of magnitude. But we started with zero knowledge. Mistakes are part of living. The problem is when we don't learn. The country already had huge, pressing problems before COVID-19. The...

Michael Bloomberg has been taking flak from progressives lately because of his longstanding, enthusiastic support for New York City's "stop, question, and frisk" program, a position he renounced just a week before he officially entered the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. The former mayor's support for stricter gun control laws, by contrast, is not very controversial among Democratic voters, although it reflects the same troubling readiness to sacrifice civil liberties on the altar of public safety. During Bloomberg's administration, the annual number of SQF encounters septupled, from fewer than 100,000 in 2002 to more than 685,000 in 2011. Nearly...

We are living in a time of increasing domestic tension. Some of it stems from the presidency of Donald Trump. Another part of it is various advocacy groups on both sides of the political spectrum demanding one cause or another. But nearly totally ignored is how growing government control over our lives, along with the betrayal of constitutional principles, contributes the most to domestic tension. Let's look at a few examples. Think about primary and secondary schooling. I think that every parent has the right to decide whether his child will recite a morning prayer in school. Similarly, every parent...

To those nattering nabobs of negativity who don’t trust government to do the right thing, or even to stop doing the wrong thing once discovered, I just want to say: “You’re right.” Again. Last April, a Washington Post exposé about a bizarrely tyrannical debt collection program caused the Social Security Administration (SAA) to publicly promise it would cease and desist from said program. The Social Security bureaucracy had been snatching the income tax refund checks of grown children whose parents, many decades ago, had allegedly been sent excess money intended for the care and feeding of these then-youngsters by this...

If the 1931 classic film Frankenstein were filmed in the United States today, the villagers storming the gates of the castle would not be carrying torches and pitchforks, but instead wearing HAZMAT suits, spraying cans of Lysol in the air, and demanding that the mayor do "whatever is necessary" to protect them against the possibility the creature might harm one of them. Of course, these marching villagers would be the few who actually dared venture outside their cottages with barred doors and shuttered windows. So here we are, not in 19th Century Transylvania, but 21st Century America. As of writing...

Well that’s great. The question is how useful will this audit actually be, and how truthful? In the 3 years since the birth of this site we have chronicled plenty of examples of waste in the military. It is PERVASIVE. The level of waste speaks frankly to a culture of accounting negligence at the Pentagon which is perhaps only rivaled by the chicanery at the Federal Reserve. Heads (and many many heads at all levels) should have rolled long ago. But, because a large portion of the American people have given the US military a pass on waste (Republicans) nothing...

It’s no wonder Americans don’t trust the government. Sandwiched between ideological zealots at the IRS and the EPA and massive corruption at the Veterans Administration, the public is being exposed to the consequences of bureaucracies running wild. President Obama is adding to the public’s discontent with the government. Obama’s high profile lies about his health-care plan and his insistence that there is “not even a smidgen of corruption” regarding the IRS targeting Tea Party groups are most certainly adding to the public’s distrust of government. According to a recent CNN poll, only 12 percent feel the government can be trusted...

As you can imagine, there’s a lot to choose from in the contest for the most spectacular waste of tax dollars. But the politicians in Oregon must really want the prize, because they managed to flush several hundred million dollars down a rat hole by putting together a state-run Obamacare website that has to be abandoned because it is so dysfunctional. And if the Oregon website is so bad that it’s switching to the much-derided Washington Obamacare website, it must be a disaster of unparalleled dimensions! Here are some excerpts from an AP report. After months of trying to get...