Free Republic

As she woos her party’s wealthy donors, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is promoting a policy that sets her apart from her closest competitors for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination: A willingness to stake out positions on the politically fraught issue of overhauling the nation’s entitlement programs.In a recent Haley endorsement, Emily Seidel – a top official in the influential political network associated with billionaire Charles Koch – praised the former UN ambassador’s “courage” for advocating changes to “an entitlement system that makes promises it can’t keep.”

House Judiciary Committee Republicans are pressing ahead with sweeping reforms to the government’s FISA surveillance powers that among other things would would prohibit the FBI from searching through Americans’ phone records without a court-approved warrant. The effort is on track to be wrapped up by the end of the year when several Patriot Act powers expire. Republicans and Democrats are coming together on this matter in rare bipartisan cooperation, lawmakers told Just the News. “We've got, I think, strong agreement amongst members of the Intel Committee and members of the Judiciary Committee. And frankly some Democrats as well, that there...

President Joe Biden has reportedly asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop pushing through a “divisive” judicial overhaul bill amid protests. This is the same Biden, incidentally, who crammed through a massive, highly “divisive,” generational spending bill with zero votes from the opposition; the same guy who regularly rules by unconstitutional executive diktats; and the same guy who has done more to delegitimize the Supreme Court than any president in modern history. In any event, the president is concerned. As is The New York Times, which reports, “The Israeli Parliament passed a deeply contentious law limiting the Supreme Court’s...

More than 100 Democrats are calling on Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to schedule votes on gun violence prevention legislation, the latest push by members of the minority party to spark action on gun reform. In a letter to McCarthy on Thursday, the Democrats — all members of the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force — asked that McCarthy bring firearm-related measures to the floor “as soon as possible.” The lawmakers also laid out a “new standing request” that if leadership is ever forced to change the vote schedule or cancel votes altogether — which happened last week — that they would...

Despite being denigrated as a fascist and far-right, Giorgia Meloni is reliably the most popular EU leader in the polls. So why is this? In this video, we break down this polling and explain why she's in such a politically interesting position in Italy.00:00 Introduction00:45 The Polling02:34 Italian Politics & Technocrats04:14 Why is Meloni so Popular?How Meloni Became the Most Popular EU Leader | 10:56TLDR News EU | 689K subscribers | 103,511 views | July 31, 2023

President Joe Biden has reportedly asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop pushing through a “divisive” judicial overhaul bill amid protests. This is the same Biden, incidentally, who crammed through a massive, highly “divisive,” generational spending bill with zero votes from the opposition; the same guy who regularly rules by unconstitutional executive diktats; and the same guy who has done more to delegitimize the Supreme Court than any president in modern history. In any event, the president is concerned. As is The New York Times, which reports, “The Israeli Parliament passed a deeply contentious law limiting the Supreme Court’s...

rotests against the judicial reform measures being proposed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government took on religious overtones as protesters targeted MK (Likud) Ariel Kallner’s home in Haifa on Thursday night, plastering the neighborhood with posters proclaiming, “Here lives a messianic [believer].” Kallner filed a complaint about the matter with the police. He responded to the protesters: “The anarchist cowards came in the dead of night and vandalized the residential building where I live and the bus stop across the street.” Kallner told Hebrew-language Maariv news, “Do you really think they will succeed in breaking me? A complaint will...

Of all the declared Republican presidential candidates, none has taken a tougher stance on the Federal Reserve than Governor Ron DeSantis. He’s criticized monetary policymakers for permitting rampant inflation. He’s defended the rights of crypto enthusiasts to own and transact digital assets free from heavy-handed regulators at the Fed and elsewhere. And he’s come down hard against a central bank digital currency (CBDC), which poses great threats to financial privacy and freedom. Except for inflation, these might seem like esoteric policy concerns of little interest to average voters. But the issue profiles are waxing. Americans are increasingly aware just how...

President Joe Biden will veto the Republicans’ flagship border reform bill because it reduces the federal government’s ability to extract economic migrants from poor countries, according to a White House statement. The pending GOP border-protection bill is a “huge deal,” said Rosemary Jenks, a government relations director at NumbersUSA. “This is a [GOP] blueprint for 2025” if a Republican is elected to the White House, she added.

Brenton Smith ([email protected]) is a policy advisor with The Heartland Institute.Social Security reform has been largely dormant for 40 years as politicians from both parties have talked diligently about the program’s long-term outlook while assiduously avoiding taking any action to deal with it.The sad truth is the longer we wait, the harder it gets. Given the passage of time, a person turning 76 years old today expects, on average, to outlive the system’s ability to pay scheduled benefits. It only gets harder from here. That statistic should draw the attention of our elected officials, but it has done little...

Fatal ecclesiastical teaching positions of the past need a continuous update in line with the times, comments Oliver Wintzek. Well-founded reforms would be all the more important and waiting must come to an end. Professsor Dr Oliver Wintzek is Professor of Dogmatics and Fundamental Theology at the Catholic University in Mainz. At the same time he works as a co-operator at the Jesuit Church in Mannheim within the Pastoral Care Unit of Pope John XXIII.

In his N.Y. Times op-ed (Feb. 28, 2023), columnist Paul Krugman admitted that Social Security is indeed not like a pension plan, but rather incorporates significant wealth transfers from higher- to lower-income participants.The thing about Social Security is that from the beginning it was designed to encourage misconceptions. It looks, on casual inspection, like a giant version of a private pension plan. You pay into such a plan during your working years, contributing to a pension fund, and when you retire you receive payments from that fund in proportion to the amount you put in. ...I'm pretty sure that it...

A new interactive website database is now available free to individual citizens and election reform groups across the country to help in the fight to get all states to obey a federal election law mandating regular voter roll maintenance. The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a national, non-profit, law firm dedicated to election integrity, announced the launch of the website on Feb. 27. The data provided on the website is designed to encourage some defiant state election officials to comply with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA). “We hope this interactive database will draw attention to the hundreds...

The last president to reform Social Security was Ronald Reagan. He formed the Greenspan Commission to formulate solutions to problems the program faced. Reagan then worked with speaker of the House Tip O'Neill to enact the solutions. Social Security as we know it would have ended decades ago had he not been successful.During the 2022 elections, Democrats claimed that Republicans would "end" Social Security and Medicare if elected. On January 26, President Biden proclaimed, "Here's the deal: they want to cut your Social Security and Medicare." At the State of the Union address, Biden doubled down, saying, "Republicans want Social...

A Republican lawmaker in North Dakota has proposed legislation codifying new responsibilities for tenured professors at two public colleges and making it easier for their presidents to fire them. “In response to the urgent need to accelerate workforce development, the state board of higher education shall implement a four-year pilot program,” House Majority Leader Rep. Mike Lefor proposed Jan. 18 in House Bill 1446. The new program would clarify faculty responsibilities and empower the president of the university could review and fire faculty if they failed to fulfill them. The reforms would be enacted no later than May 1 of...

BALTIMORE (AP) — Since the Baltimore Police Department started overhauling its practices through a series of court-ordered reforms in 2017, officers have become significantly less likely to use force against members of the public, such as brandishing a service weapon, deploying a stun gun or striking an uncooperative suspect into compliance. But the agency still needs to improve its ability to hold wayward officers accountable and address a dire staffing shortage, according to testimony Thursday in federal court in Baltimore. With a mix of praise and admonishment, the discussion focused on recent developments in a yearslong effort to enact sweeping...

Leading US attorney Prof. Alan Dershowitz told Galei Tzahal's Morning News Show with Efi Triger that the government's planned reforms to Israel judicial system will open the Jewish State to greater international criticism and make it more difficult for supporters like him to defend Israel. "I have no doubt that if the plan is implemented it will weaken the position of Israel and the position of the its Supreme Court in the world, I am certainly afraid that it will be much more difficult for people like me to defend Israel against its critics," Dershowitz said. .....

The power of the House of Representatives rests in the power of the purse and the Article I, Section 7 provision that "All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives." The budgeting process needs reform. Budgets should be crafted long in advance insomuch as possible. Haste does indeed make waste. Basic operating budgets by department that contain clearly needed constitutional funding acceptable by both the vast majority of Republicans and Democrats should be enacted into law several months in advance of the start of a fiscal year. The federal government should never face a widespread shutdown...

Socialist Left Police State S--t (if any one knows more polite legal terminology to adequately replace this expression, please tell me what it is) has ruined Australia's reputation as a free nation. If this tyranny becomes entrenched, Australia will grow weak and collapse, as threatens now in Jo Biden's America. (I know this phrase is offensive to many, but, legally or illegally, the guy does hold the White House as we speak.) The solution is truth. The solution is freedom. God bless beautiful Di, a former police woman in Australia's biggest state of New South Wales, who is now quite...

Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), two members of the Jan. 6 House panel, introduced a bill Monday to reform the Electoral College Act, offering a number of provisions to protect elections from interference by state and federal lawmakers. The Presidential Election Reform Act (PERA) would make clear that the role of the vice president in presiding over the counting of electoral votes is purely “ministerial.” It also takes aim at potential action from the lawmakers’ colleagues to object to states’ electoral slates, requiring that a third of the members from both chambers must object to the certification,...