Free Republic

In 1985, Leo Alexander,one of the most important psychiatrists to grace America, died at age 79 of cancer. He was author of the Nuremberg Code and trial aide and medical consultant to the Nuremberg Tribunal that tried 23 Nazi physicians for war crimes including inhumane experiments and murders of prisoners and concentration camp detainees. His New York Times obituary elaborates: A medical investigator for Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson and an aide to the chief counsel at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, Dr. Alexander wrote the (Nuremberg) code after studying the actions of German SS troops and concentration camp...

When candidates run for public office — local, state, or federal — they campaign on some careful blend of their résumés, their personalities, and their political issues. Thus it has always been, and thus it will always be, in a republic. "Vote for me because I have the experience to do it well," or "Vote for me because I'm so much like you, I'll represent your interests," or "Vote for me because we agree on these twenty or thirty specific issues." But there is something going on that we don't usually expect, and while it's been in process for a...

What if I told you the Supreme Court often does too little, not too much? That accusation usually comes from liberals who see the judiciary as philosopher-kings enacting social justice over and against the will of a bigoted public. But a conservative case exists for making the same accusation, just on different grounds. For the Right, the court has abdicated too much of its power to the administrative state, letting its interpretations of law function over and above the justices’ constitutional power. That abdication may be ending. On Monday, the justices added to their docket Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo....

The Supreme Court on Monday announced it will hear a case that could significantly scale back federal agencies’ authority, with major implications for the future of environmental and other regulations. The justices next term will consider whether to overturn a decades-old precedent that grants agencies deference when Congress left ambiguity in a statute. Named for the court’s decision in Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the Chevron deference has become one of the most frequently cited precedents in administrative law since the decision was first handed down in 1984. It involves a two-step test: First, judges decide if Congress...

In November 2007, the original iPhone was barely four months old, Barack Obama was considered a long shot to win the Democratic nomination for president, and Steph Curry was a sophomore playing basketball for little-known Davidson College. That same month, the TransWest Express Transmission Project filed its first request with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), seeking permission to build a 732-mile electric transmission line to connect a wind farm in southern Wyoming with a power grid serving the rapidly growing area around Las Vegas. Last week, the BLM granted permission for the line to be built. We've blown through...

The Supreme Court on Friday dealt the administrative state another blow with a 9-0 decision holding that individuals and businesses harpooned by an independent agency don’t have to suffer a torturous government adjudication to challenge its constitutionality in federal court (Axon Enterprise v. FTC and SEC v. Cochran).

Now that the pandemic emergency is over, House Republicans want federal employees to come back to their offices. The Stopping Home Office Work Unproductive Problems Act or SHOW UP Act of 2023 introduced by Rep. James Comer (R-Ken) was passed by a vote of 221-206. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md) called the GOP "hypocritical. These are the guys who say they want to shrink the government by cutting unneeded bureaucracy. Now they want these supposedly unneeded employees to travel into the city to work? Won't this increased traffic congestion impede the private sector workers who actually produce products and services that...

Arizona’s water is running worryingly low. Amid the worst drought in more than a millennium, which has left communities across the state with barren wells, the state is depleting what remains of its precious groundwater. Much of it goes to private companies nearly free, including Saudi Arabia’s largest dairy company.Thanks to fresh scrutiny this year from state politicians, water activists and journalists, the Saudi agricultural giant Almarai has emerged as an unlikely antagonist in the water crisis. The company, through its subsidiary Fondomonte, has been buying and leasing land across western Arizona since 2014. This year The Arizona Republic published...

The lovely and prolific Taylor Swift announced a concert tour. So far, so good. Happens every day. Ticketmaster opened up the ticket sales process, and sold 2 million tickets while fielding 3.5 billion requests – yes, 3.5 billion – before server crashes and other problems caused them to suspend sales. Taylor Swift is furious. Millions of fans are frustrated. Live Nation the parent of Ticketmaster, is embarrassed. And politicians – ranging from communist US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to conservative US Senator Mike Lee – are all demanding hearings. It’s easy to kid about the disproportionate attention this is getting in...

Voters who think that putting Republicans in control of the House and Senate will make a big difference for the economy are in for a rude awakening. President Joe Biden has unleashed the regulatory Leviathan. Lawmakers will be hard-pressed to stop the damage. The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) just this morning released its hugely valuable report called “10,000 Commandments,” which is a compendium of the regulatory state. In it, CEI Vice President for Policy Clyde Wayne Crews lays out the terrible truth about Biden’s regulatory zeal. The first thing you have to understand about federal regulation is how massive it...

The pandemic divided Americans into two classes: those who could work from home and those who could not. Federal government employees were members of the privileged class. And they don’t want that to change. During the pandemic, over 90% of the EPA, USAID, the Department of Education and, ironically, the Department of Labor, were 'working' online. The utility of federal agencies could roughly be measured by whether their employees were mostly showing up to work, the Department of Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs, or were permanently out to lunch like the Department of Housing and Urban Development which did...

Believe it or not, overturning Roe v. Wade may not be the Supreme Court’s most dramatic decision this year. Instead, its ruling on West Virginia v. the Environmental Protection Agency could prove far more consequential. It could literally upend how our government works. West Virginia vs. the EPA asks whether important policies that impact the lives of all Americans should be made by unelected D.C. bureaucrats or by Congress. This SCOTUS could well decide that ruling by executive agency fiat is no longer acceptable. The case involves the Clean Power Plan, which was adopted under President Barack Obama to fight...

The Astonishing Implications of Schedule F Two weeks before the 2020 general election, on October 21, 2020, Donald Trump issued an executive order (E.O. 13957) on “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service.” It sounds boring. Actually, it would have fundamentally changed, in the best possible way, the entire functioning of the administrative bureaucracy that rules this country in a way that bypasses both the legislative and judicial process, and has ruined the checks and balances inherent in the US Constitution. The administrative state for the better part of a century, and really dating back to the Pendleton Act of...

The Origin and Operation of the US Administrative StateOn July 2, 1881, only four months into the first term of President James A. Garfield, an angry attorney from Illinois named Charles J. Guiteau shot Garfield in the torso at a Baltimore, Maryland, train station. Guiteau had a motive. He was furious because he believed, due to his work for the campaign, that Garfield would give him a job in the new administration. But none was forthcoming. It was revenge. Garfield died of the wounds months later. It was a shocking thing. Congress immediately got to work figuring out how to...

As more facts about the law-enforcement response at the Robb Elementary School massacre become available, confidence in relying on police to save lives is being eroded. It seems that the pattern in police responses to school shootings that is frequently exhibited is reluctance to risk getting shot. A Texas Department of Public Safety spokesman argued that “harsh as it may seem to the parents of children being killed by gunmen invading their schools, a rational risk/reward assessment must take precedence over an emotional expectation from untrained civilians. Despite more than a dozen desperate 911 calls coming from students trapped inside...

The D.C. bureaucracy and specifically the intelligence agencies have long become powers unto themselves, and a threat to our democracy.The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s long history of abusing its power is once again prominent amid the continued expose by Special Counsel John Durham. His prosecution is demonstrating the FBI’s use of its power to deploy federal intelligence assets against political opponents of Democrats. The FBI routinely intervenes in politics, such as when the FBI assisted the Hillary Clinton campaign in painting former President Donald Trump as a Russian intelligence asset, as Durham’s investigation is emphasizing with more evidence. By getting...

A PR nightmare for a beleaguered administration has finally led to a possible remedy for the baby formula quandary.You got the sense of just how disorganized the Biden administration is when one of their prominent mouthpieces on the most current crisis was — Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg?! I don’t know too many people who saw the former mayor with such limited transport experience he could not fix potholes, as the logical choice to weigh in on Enfamil rationing. Maybe he was regarded as an expert because he launched his new career with a two-month paternity leave.Adding to the incompetence was...

Last December, Joe Biden warned of a winter of doom, a plague of Biblical proportions and just as Moses hoisted a brass serpent mounted to a pole, Biden declared that we must look to “the science” and to the great Fauci—the ubiquitous state demanded obedience to the COVID gods. Biden, and statists like him always demand a religious fealty to bureaucracy. COVID and every other crisis are just goads designed to prod us into a cold, seamless line. “We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated,” Biden gravely warned America on Thursday, December 16,...

Data-driven weather forecasts help leaders know when to deploy resources to respond to hurricanes and individuals decide whether they need to bring an umbrella with them when they go out. Similarly, the CDC's new disease forecasting center aims to guide decisions about broad public health needs like developing vaccines or deploying antivirals, and helping individuals decide whether it's safe for them to go to the movie theater George and a small team of colleagues are faced with tackling a "critical need" to improve the government's "ability to forecast and model emerging health threats." "In short, we need to use data...

Back in the day, just about everything that used a battery had a hatch or a hutch that you could open to pull it out and replace it if need be. Whether it was a radio, a cordless phone, or a cellphone, it was a cinch to swap out a battery. These days, many devices hide their batteries, deep beneath tamper-proof stickers and warnings that state there are “no user serviceable components inside.” The EU wants to change all that, though, and has voted to mandate that everything from cellphones to e-bikes must have easily replaceable batteries, with the legislation...