Free Republic

Washington Governor Bob Ferguson signed a bill Wednesday that set limits on rent increases—one of the first in the country. Rent stabilization bill, HB 1217, caps rent increases at 7% plus inflation, or 10%—whichever is lower. Washington now joins Oregon and California in drafting legislation that curbs climbing rent prices. “There is no single policy that will fix our housing crisis, but we need this comprehensive approach,” Sen. Emily Alvarado said at the bill signing.

Washington — The Trump administration on Monday urged a federal district court to dismiss a lawsuit challenging the Food and Drug Administration's actions expanding access to the widely used abortion pill mifepristone. Justice Department lawyers wrote in a filing with the U.S. district court in Amarillo, Texas, that the three states pursuing the lawsuit — Missouri, Idaho and Kansas — should not be able to do so in that court. The administration is pursuing a request initially made by the Biden administration last year in the closely watched challenge to mifepristone, a drug used to terminate an early pregnancy, that...

On Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Lauren King issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration's executive order banning funding for hospitals that provide gender-affirming treatments to transgender youth. The order applies to the states of Washington, Oregon, Minnesota and Colorado. Newsweek contacted the White House press office for comment on Saturday via email outside of regular office hours. Why It Matters Since returning to the White House on January 20, President Donald Trump has signed a slew of executive orders impacting on transgender rights, which his supporters claim muddy the biological difference between males and females and are a...

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments in a Texas case that could have major ramifications across the country—including, perhaps, the end of anonymity online.A Texas law requiring people to provide proof of age before viewing online porn comes before the U.S. Supreme Court today. With similar laws already at play in 18 states besides Texas, and other states considering such measures, it's fair to say that the future of online porn in this country depends on what the justices decide in this case. The Texas law (House Bill 1181) is being challenged by multiple plaintiffs, including the Free Speech...

Time to Revisit the Anti-Federalists We live in a time where the federal government’s reach seems to extend into every aspect of our lives. From the broad interpretation of the Commerce Clause to the extensive surveillance programs justified by national security, the concerns raised by the Anti-Federalists over 200 years ago appear more relevant than ever. Maybe it’s time we revisit what they had to say. What Were They Worried About? The Anti-Federalists were a group of early American thinkers and politicians who opposed the ratification of the Constitution as it was originally proposed. They worried that a strong central...

The Supreme Court case Idaho v. United States is less about abortion and more about federal control over state and individual rights. Thwarted by the U.S. Supreme Court [SCOTUS] in its effort to make abortion as easy to get as possible, the left is now hoping it can get the court to restore some of the power Democrats lost in the Idaho v. United States case. The case considers whether federal law can supersede state law. In this case, whether the federal government can require states that participate in Medicare to perform abortions in violation of a state law. “The...

The former vice president condemned Trump’s positioning on abortion in an op-ed (for the National Review), even as he didn’t mention his one-time boss by name. "We must work to advance the sanctity of life at every level, state and federal," Pence said. | Morry Gash/AP By KIERRA FRAZIER 06/24/2024 04:13 PM EDT Former Vice President Mike Pence revived his call for a nationwide abortion ban on Monday — the two-year anniversary of the landmark Dobbs decision — taking an implicit shot at former President Donald Trump in the process. In an op-ed in the conservative magazine National Review, Pence...

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued an executive order on Thursday directing state schools to defy the Biden administration’s expansion of Title IX protections to include students identifying as transgender. The Republican governor’s order, signed on Thursday, asserts the state’s commitment to preserving the traditional understanding of sex as an “immutable characteristic of the human body” firmly “rooted in biology and the created order.” “The government should celebrate, not erase, sex differences by providing proper protections for them,” the order reads. It also states that the Biden administration “has rejected reality and chosen to appease their left-wing base over students’...

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration will take a historic step toward easing federal restrictions on cannabis, with plans to announce an interim rule soon reclassifying the drug for the first time since the Controlled Substances Act was enacted more than 50 years ago, four sources with knowledge of the decision said. The Drug Enforcement Administration is expected to approve an opinion by the Department of Health and Human Services that marijuana should be reclassified from the strictest Schedule I to the less stringent Schedule III. It would be the first time that the U.S. government has acknowledged its potential medical...

If Lincoln was going to be elected in 1860, he wasn’t going to succeed calling for the abolition of slavery. Trump has decided that pushing federal abortion elimination is a losing proposition in 2024. Like it or not, Trump is right about the politics of the issue. A majority opposes ending abortion. He’s right to assert that the U.S. Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade and returning abortion to the states is where this historic issue needs to be. But let’s stress, for the time being.Abortion is modern America’s slavery issue. Slavery wasn’t settled at ballot boxes. The Compromise...

Former President Donald Trump on Monday announced his position on whether abortion should be banned, following months of not taking a stance on the combustible and crucial issue in his 2024 rematch with President Biden. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee took to his social media platform on Sunday night to say that he would issue a statement on "abortion and abortion rights." In video posted Monday morning, Trump explicitly affirmed his support for in vitro fertilization (IVF) and he emphasized his support for states determining their own laws for abortion so long as there are exceptions for rape, incest and...

The Biden administration has continued the modern Democrat tradition of perverse federal land use policy. It comes as a surprise to most Americans that the federal government owns nearly one-third of the nation’s land mass, in excess of 640 million acres. (It also owns 1.7 billion acres of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), but that is another story.) Most know of the National Park Service in the Department of the Interior and its 80 million acres of parks, preserves, reserves, monuments, memorials, historic sites, battlefields, and recreation areas, in every state. Many Americans may be familiar with the 141 national...

Former president Donald Trump, the front-runner in the GOP presidential primary, said a state abortion law signed by his top challenger, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), which bans the procedure after six weeks, is “terrible.” In April, DeSantis signed the controversial law, which will go into effect if the Florida Supreme Court upholds the state’s 15-week ban on abortion that he signed into law last spring. At a hearing this month, the Florida justices appeared open to upholding the limiting ban. Trump, in an interview that aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” criticized DeSantis for being “willing to sign...

Trump said members of his own party "speak very inarticulately about this subject. "I watch some of them without the exceptions, et cetera, et cetera," he said, referring to conservatives who don't support abortion exceptions in cases including abortion and rape. "I said, 'Other than certain parts of the country, you can’t — you’re not going to win on this issue. But you will win on this issue when you come up with the right number of weeks." "Because Democrats don’t want to be radical on the issue, most of them, some do," he continued. "They don’t want to be...

The White House is promoting President Joe Biden’s mass marijuana pardon and scheduling review directive as part of a “Fight for Our Freedom” campaign meant to “mobilize young people” as next year’s election approaches. A factsheet about the campaign that the administration published on Thursday contains a section dedicated to the president’s cannabis reform actions from late last year titled, “Addressing a Failed Approach to Marijuana.” “The criminalization of marijuana possession has upended too many lives—for conduct that is now legal in many states,” it says. “While white, Black and brown people use marijuana at similar rates, Black and brown...

Trump [has] refused to endorse a federal ban on abortion, allowing some top rivals to get to the right of him on an issue that animates many conservative activists. ... That tension underscores the new reality the GOP finds itself in more than a year into the post-Roe era. While top Republicans were long able to simply declare themselves opposed to abortion, they must now contend with more complicated questions — including when access should be banned and whether uniform standards might apply across the U.S., even in states where support for abortion rights runs deep. “There’s a wide variety...

America’s Founders fought a bloody revolution in order to escape the “absolute despotism” to which they had been reduced under the hereditary monarchy of the British government, a system that Thomas Paine said “laid the world in blood and ashes.” After that revolution was won, the Founders’ singular focus was to create a republic that would safeguard individual freedom and state sovereignty by vesting only limited, specifically enumerated powers in a federal government. The Constitution’s first ten amendments (the Bill of Rights), Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, as well as the Ninth and Tenth Amendments establish clear limitations...

(Mar. 18, 2023) — The Constitution requires the president to be a “natural born citizen”. However, the term is not defined in the Constitution. Neither has a law or court ruling been made more exactly delineating the constraints of the term. The purpose of this post is not to re-hash the arguments about what “natural born citizen” means, but to outline a process that generates a legal standard for how it is enforced. The States are key to this process. This proposal is to have one or more states enforce via legislation the implementation of the requirement in their state,...

The Fourteenth Amendment protects the rights of “any person” to due process when a state deprives him or her of life, liberty, or property, and to the “equal protection of the laws.” By overruling Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court eliminated Roe’s deeply flawed holding that “the word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.” Since a sound case can be made that interpreting “person” to include all human beings is consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment’s original public meaning, Congress should do so for purposes of its power to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment. KEY TAKEAWAYS...

State legislatures are often overlooked in the heat of campaign season, yet the laws crafted there have as much impact, if not more, on the average person’s everyday life as the ones passed by Congress. But for many Americans, ignoring elections for state legislatures is no longer an option. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade this summer has them focused on state capitols, where abortion laws are now being decided. State legislatures also have a significant role in certifying the results of an election in most states. Certifying election results has been largely devoid of drama in...