Free Republic

mericans who have read our Constitution might recall the words saying that state governments may not “impair the obligation of contracts.” Yet they frequently rewrite or dissolve contracts when doing so is “good politics” – demanding that employers pay current workers more money or face punishment, for example. Once a star in the Constitution’s plan for liberty and limited state power, the Contract Clause is now almost completely forgotten. Vanderbilt Law School professor James W. Ely, Jr. tells that unhappy story in his book The Contract Clause: A Constitutional History. “Inserted into the Constitution without extensive debate,” Ely writes, “the...

Europe in 2017 is racked with uncertainty—the eurozone crises, the endless challenges of the European Union, national elections that resemble endless rounds of bullet-dodging. Yet even these events are insignificant compared with the deep tectonic shifts beneath the Continent’s politics, shifts that Europeans—and their allies—ignore at our peril. Throughout the migration crisis of recent years I traveled across the Continent, from the reception islands into which migrants arrive to the suburbs in which they end up and the chancelleries which encouraged them to come. For decades Europe had encouraged guest workers, and then their families, to come. As Germany’s Chancellor...

... There are nonetheless good reasons to raise questions about Mr. Mueller’s investigation, and those concerns are growing as we learn more about his close ties to Mr. Comey, some of his previous behavior, and the people he has hired for his special counsel staff. The country needs a fair investigation of the facts, not a vendetta to take down Mr. Trump or vindicate the tribe of career prosecutors and FBI agents to which Messrs. Mueller and Comey belong. Start with the fact that Mr. Comey told the Senate last week that he asked a buddy to leak his memo...

Want proof taxes can actually go down? In the last three years, nine states have eliminated or lowered their estate taxes, mostly by raising exemptions. And more reductions are coming. Minnesota lawmakers recently raised the state’s estate-tax exemption to $2.1 million retroactive to January, and the exemption will rise to $2.4 million next year. Maryland will raise its $3 million exemption to $4 million next year. New Jersey’s exemption, which used to rank last at $675,000 per person, rose to $2 million per person this year. Next year New Jersey is scheduled to eliminate its estate tax altogether, joining about...

Maybe Trump objected to the fraudulent notion, which Comey led the world to believe, that Trump was under investigation for collusion. On March 30, 2017, by his own account, then-FBI director James Comey told President Donald Trump that Trump himself was not under investigation — the third time he had given him that assurance. In fact, Comey told Trump that he had just assured members of Congress that Trump was not a suspect under investigation. Think about that. This was fully six weeks after the then-director’s Oval Office meeting with the president, during which Comey alleges that Trump told him,...

American college campuses are becoming more and more like the old communist states where people enjoyed freedom of speech—but only so long as they didn’t question some aspect of the official orthodoxy. Any such “deviationism” was apt to land them in severe trouble with the authorities, who encouraged loyal citizens to report it. (Alexander Solzhenitsyn recounted many cases of that in The Gulag Archipelago.) Duke University Divinity School professor Paul Griffiths is the latest faculty member to fall victim to the taboo against speaking out against “progressive” beliefs. His thoughtcrime: daring to say that a “racial equity” seminar would be...

One of the many holes in the “social contract” theory of government is that the power of the state is so often harnessed by interest groups to protect themselves against competition. Nobody ever agreed to that, but it happens all the time, inflicting losses on the consuming public. A recent instance of this is the aggressive lobbying campaign being waged by the American Optometric Association (AOA) against innovations that now make it possible for Americans to get accurate eye exams and lens prescriptions over the Internet. By using such innovations, millions of Americans who need vision correction could save substantial...

... Unelected bureaucrats not only write their own laws, they also interpret these laws and enforce them in their own courts with their own judges. All this is in blatant violation of the Constitution, says Mr. Hamburger, 60, a constitutional scholar and winner of the Manhattan Institute’s Hayek Prize last year for his scholarly 2014 book, “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?” (Spoiler alert: Yes.) “Essentially, much of the Bill of Rights has been gutted,” he says, sitting in his office at Columbia Law School. “The government can choose to proceed against you in a trial in court with constitutional processes, or...

Federal prosecutors have charged two U.S. citizens with providing material support to Hezbollah and helping the Iranian-backed Lebanese terror group prepare potential attacks in America and Panama. The charges, announced last Thursday after the men were arrested June 1, show that Iran’s terror proxies roam far beyond the Middle East. The FBI and New York Police Department carried out the investigation, which resulted in a raft of terror-related charges for naturalized citizens Ali Kourani of the Bronx and Samer el Debek of Dearborn, Mich. Prosecutors say Hezbollah recruited the men as “operatives,” provided them with “military-style training,” then gave them...

Donald Trump has ordered a “national security” review of steel imports with a goal of justifying a broad-based tariff. If his advisers look honestly at the evidence, they can’t possibly find enough to justify such a job-killing, economically harmful policy. ... The greatest harm from broad-based steel tariffs would be to the thousands of American businesses and workers that use steel. These would include the higher cost of American steel for construction (42% of steel shipments), automotive (27%) and machinery (9%). Public works and homes would cost more to build. Many U.S. companies that compete globally would risk losing business...

America’s hyper-politicization continues to grow apace. We now find public officials who regard themselves as “progressive” attacking citizens who don’t happen to agree with every aspect of their agenda (i.e., state regulation of just about everything). A revealing case like that has just surfaced in Michigan. Steve Tennes owns a farm (called The Country Mill) in the small town of Charlotte in south-central Michigan. He grows a variety of fruit and for years has been trucking some of it to sell in the public Farmers Market in East Lansing, about twenty miles away. The buying and selling of produce used...

... Mr. Trump’s more consequential eruption was against Mr. Trump’s Justice Department. He was evidently responding to a segment on MSNBC’s “ Morning Joe ” about his executive order temporarily suspending immigration entry from six countries with a history of terrorism. “People, the lawyers and the courts can call it whatever they want,” Mr. Trump wrote. “I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!” Mr. Trump added that “The Justice Dept. should have stayed with the original Travel Ban, not the watered down, politically correct version they submitted to S.C.” These comments are reckless...

Since the federal government heavily subsidizes most of our colleges and universities through grants and loans, is it too much to expect that the officials who run them would take steps to protect the First Amendment rights of students and faculty members? Some of them make little or no effort at doing so, as exemplified by the recent absurdity at Evergreen State College in Washington, where the administration smiled benignly on the raucous student protesters who disrupted a biology professor’s class because they had declared that white people were to remain off campus on their proclaimed “Day of Absence.” (If...

PARIS — Show Court 1, one of the biggest stadiums at the Australian Open, was rechristened Margaret Court Arena in 2003 to honor the player who dominated women’s tennis in the 1960s and still holds the record for the most Grand Slam titles. It is unclear what the stadium will be called when the tournament begins in Melbourne next January. Court, 74, now a pastor in Perth, has reignited debate about her legacy and how the sport should celebrate her by making a series of inflammatory comments recently about gays and same-sex marriage. Her beliefs are not new — her...

In the fall of 2014, Marquette University political science professor John McAdams did something that thousands of academics do every day – he wrote a blog post expressing his opinion about something. That post, however, wound up getting him kicked off campus, suspended from teaching, and ultimately terminated from his job. A court has now ruled his termination is perfectly legal, despite the fact that he holds tenure. This case, which would have strained the imagination of Franz Kafka, badly undermines one of the remaining defenses against leftist inquisitions against faculty members who dare to question any aspect of “progressivism”...

MANCHESTER, England — A 22-year-old British man whose parents had emigrated from Libya was identified by the police on Tuesday as the bomber who carried out Britain’s deadliest terrorist attack since 2005, an explosion that killed 22 people and injured 59 others at Manchester Arena. The man, Salman Abedi, lived in a house just 3.5 miles from the arena, where he detonated a homemade bomb in a public concourse around 10:30 p.m. on Monday as a concert by the American pop star Ariana Grande was ending and as crowds of teenagers had begun to leave, many for an adjacent train...

WASHINGTON — An estimated 629,000 visitors to the United States — just over 1 percent of all travelers — remained in the county at the end of last year after overstaying their visas as students, workers or tourists, according to a report released on Monday by the Department of Homeland Security. Although the figure represents a tiny portion of the estimated 50 million visitors to the country, Homeland Security officials say the failure of some people to leave when their visas lapse presents a national security risk. Two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, Satam al-Suqami and Nawaq Alhazmi, had overstayed...

Since American citizens have the right to keep and bear arms (not just law enforcement officials, as gun control advocates maintain), it would seem to follow that they’re entitled to use their weapons when they are threatened. More than a century ago, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that in Beard v. United States, where the first Justice Harlan wrote that the defendant, who had been convicted of manslaughter for killing a man in a violent dispute, was not obliged to retreat, not to consider whether he could safely retreat, but was entitled to stand his ground, and meet any attack...

The United States got along nicely for its first 176 years without federal meddling in higher education. In 1965, however, Congress passed and President Johnson signed the Higher Education Act into law, putting the federal camel’s nose well inside the college tent. That intrusion has had decidedly malign effects. College costs have risen far faster than ever before, while academic standards have generally declined to the point where people often now say, “College is the new high school.” Millions of Americans are deeply in debt for college degrees that often betoken little or no gain in useful knowledge. The Higher...

Thursday night, White House communications officials were eager to spotlight these comments from legislators, admitting or confirming, that they had, so far, seen no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Sam Stein, Huffington Post: “But just to be clear, there has been no actual evidence yet.” REP. MAXINE WATERS (D-CA): “No, it has not been.” Keep in mind, this is “Mad Maxine” Waters, who begins that interview by contending, “Lock her up, lock her up, all of that, I think that was developed strategically with people from the Kremlin, with Putin.” Right, right, there’s no way the...