Free Republic

President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency is accomplishing in weeks what conservatives have been talking about for decades. Already, DOGE has cut close to $1 billion in waste per day, dismantled the left-wing slush fund known formerly as USAID and is exposing the depths of the Deep State’s corruption — most recently the millions of taxpayer dollars that FEMA has been sending to hotels in New York City to house illegal immigrants. Elon Musk and his team of 20-something-year-old tech geniuses will continue to whip up public outrage over Washington’s monstrous misspending. But they can’t defeat the Washington Leviathan all...

Governors of deep blue states are scrambling and jockeying to craft their narrative to Donald Trump’s election-winning deportation message, with varying results. Thus far, California’s governor is attempting to become the anti-Trump opposition leader, as Massachusetts’s top executive is softening her state’s sanctuary status, and even Illinois’ leftist goveror is suddenly supporting the idea of deporting “criminals.” These Democrats are all pushing what former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich calls an “act of insurrection” against the legally elected president of the United States.

A leading drug policy advocacy group has published a draft executive order that it hopes will guide President Joe Biden or future administrations to promote equity in federal marijuana policy and steer the country away from the drug war. The suggested moves include mandating the attorney general to reinstate cannabis enforcement guidance that was rescinded under the Trump administration. The Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) released the multi-part proposed order on Monday, pitching multiple reforms that could be implemented with executive authority from the White House, rather than waiting for Congress to legislatively enact them. The intent is to significantly build...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in an interview with Punchbowl News compared President Biden’s proposed Supreme Court reforms to the Jan. 6, 2021 attacks on the U.S. Capitol. “That’s what some people were trying to do Jan. 6 — to break the system of handing an administration from one to the next,” McConnell said in the interview, referring to the proposed reforms. “We can have our arguments, but we ought to not try to break the rules.” The reforms that Biden has backed include 18-year term limits, which would allow a president to appoint a new justice every two...

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday said President Biden’s proposed term limits for Supreme Court justices are “unconstitutional” and will be “dead on arrival” in Congress. McConnell, one of the Supreme Court’s most ardent defenders in the Senate, said he was “surprised” that Biden, a former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, proposed authorizing presidents to appoint justices every two years and limiting them to 18 years in active service. “I couldn’t be more disappointed. This is a man who was chairman of the Judiciary Committee for a long time. He absolutely knows what he recommended is unconstitutional,...

Much “news” today consists of quick, divisive headlines with little regard for complexity or subtlety. A prominent example is the rapid firestorm that surrounded the conservative governments of Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia last year when some faculty loudly expressed their dissatisfaction with right-leaning higher-ed reforms. Having consulted an American Association of University Professors (AAUP) survey on the subject, media everywhere ran with the notion that red-state faculty would soon be fleeing, with many outlets printing articles claiming a “brain-drain” would soon occur. The AAUP survey in question, conducted last fall, attempted to understand whether and why faculty members...

Former President Obama touted several new Minnesota laws as a “giant leap forward” and a “reminder that elections have consequences” on Friday after the Democrat-controlled Legislature concluded a jam-packed session earlier this week. “Earlier this year, Democrats took control of the State Senate by one seat after winning a race by just 321 votes,” Obama tweeted. “It gave Democrats control of both chambers of the state legislature and the governor’s mansion.” “Since then, Minnesota has made progress on a whole host of issues — from protecting abortion rights and new gun safety measures to expanding access to the ballot and...

Violent riots and economically damaging activist actions broke out in France on Tuesday as the country saw one of its biggest mass mobilisations of protesters in years in response to President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to raise the pension age from 62 to 64 years old. Millions of people took part in protests across 200 towns and cities in France on Tuesday, with the organising CGT union claiming that up to 3.5 million people flooded out onto the streets, while the French Interior Ministry put the number at around 1.28 million. The protests and accompanying trade union strikes were the sixth...

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) sought to tamp down worries that a GOP majority would use raising the federal debt ceiling as leverage to secure reforms on entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare after a comment of his spurred Democratic attacks. “I never mentioned Social Security or Medicare. Actually, in the ‘Commitment to America,’ we say to strengthen Social Security and Medicare,” McCarthy said on CNBC Wednesday morning.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is using the January 6 protest to advance “systemic reforms” in Congress — namely, pursuing far-left voting legislation — deeming it necessary to “repair our democracy.” “Let me be clear: January 6th was a symptom of a broader illness, an effort to delegitimize our election process, and the Senate must advance systemic reforms to repair our democracy or else the events of that day will not be an aberration—they will be the new norm,” he declared on Monday:

A day after a career criminal was arrested in the fatal shooting of philanthropist Jacqueline Avant at the lavish Beverly Hills home she shared with her husband Clarence, a 90-year-old music producer inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year, her family issued a statement that read in part, “Now, let justice be served.” But in Los Angeles, where left-wing lawmakers and activists have pushed a litany of progressive reforms that help violent criminals spend less-time behind bars, justice is not only fleeting — it’s twisted, critics say.

A proposed change to federal disability assistance would result in millions of more case reviews, likely cutting off many disabled recipients, if the changes are enacted. The federal government is accepting public comments on the proposal until the end of January. Under the proposal, millions more reviews would be conducted and hundreds of thousands of people would have reviews more frequently. “We think the real intent of this is just to be a backdoor cut to the program,” said Jen Burdick, a supervising attorney with Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, who assists people applying for disability benefits. Anyone applying for...

**SNIP** Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s proposed “geriatric parole” program - which would entitle some state prisoners 55 or older who have served at least half their sentence to parole hearings - is one such concern to O’Neill, though proponents say it’s humane and could save the state money on medical care. “Most people in New York City and across the nation are really good people,” said O’Neill. “But there’s a certain percentage of the population that just can’t abide by society’s rules, and they do very bad things and they need to stay in prison.” **SNIP** O’Neill said Sunday he doesn’t...

Few Democrats and Republicans had any issues with the National Emergencies Act, passed in 1976 to give presidents the authority to declare emergencies in times of crisis. But since the president is now Donald Trump and the crisis is unchecked illegal immigration, suddenly members of his own party, as well as a growing number of Democrats, have lots of problems with the law — and they want to change it. Seems like the Koch Brothers still wield much power. The Hill reports that Republican leaders are currently crafting legislation that would curb the president’s powers during future national emergency declarations.

As a former federal prosecutor, I am clear-eyed about crime. Unlike some reformers, I don’t think our justice system is fundamentally broken, unjust, or corrupt. I have nothing but respect for law-enforcement officials, who put themselves in danger every single day in order to protect the public. I know from experience that dangerous criminals exist — individuals who are incapable of or uninterested in rehabilitation and change. We should throw the book at those people. But my time as a prosecutor also tells me that not every criminal is dangerous or incapable of living a productive life. My faith as...

Among the many sensible proposals President Donald Trump called for during his first State of the Union address, one certainly deserves more attention than it has received. Tuesday, before a joint session of Congress, Trump said: All Americans deserve accountability and respect—and that is what we are giving them. So tonight, I call on the Congress to empower every Cabinet secretary with the authority to reward good workers—and to remove federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people. . . snip

President Trump is the first political entity in our lifetime that not only comprehends the faces of the false arguments (the fallacies of false choice), but more importantly sees the administrative architects behind the Potemkin villages represented by those faces. When it comes to domestic economic policies, the architects are the BIG CLUB. So, what is “The Big Club“? ..What “Deep State” is to intelligence, military intervention and foreign policy – The “BIG CLUB” is to matters of domestic economics… Politicians do not write laws. Paul Ryan, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer do not sit in their offices writing out...

Americans support Donald Trump’s Jan. 25 comprehensive immigration reform by three to one, according to a new poll by Rasmussen Reports. Sixty-one percent of Americans agree with the immigration priorities described in Trump’s Jan. 25 Executive Order, which seeks to exclude migrants who oppose Americans’ values. Only 19 percent of Americans — and only 28 percent of Democrats — disapprove of Trump’s decision to align immigration policy with Americans’ civic and cultural values. Here’s the critical passage from Trump’s reform: In order to protect Americans, the United States must ensure that those admitted to this country do not bear hostile...

Aw right! we The People overcame vote fraud and got Trump into the Presidency. Now, we need to start sending in suggestions for his administration. I want to start the process with what I consider the most vital issue for America's future: how to make the election process honest and reflective of the TRUE will of we the sovereign people. And no, this does not and will not endorse tossing out the most brilliant aspect from our founding fathers and mothers, the electoral college. Yes, I'm actually asking fellow Freepers to weigh in on ways to fix the corrupted voting...

Hillary Clinton will roll out her proposed changes to President Obama's Affordable Care Act on Tuesday, focusing lowering the cost of prescription drugs. While the Democratic front-runner has long been a supporter of Obamacare, dating back to the 1990s, she has had her own, somewhat differing views on healthcare reform. Her plan, which she will introduce at a community forum in Iowa on Tuesday, will showcase some of those differences. In the run-up to Clinton's healthcare event, her campaign has complained that "price gouging … in the specialty drug market is outrageous" and said that would soon lay out a...