Free Republic

REDMOND, Ore. — B.J. Soper took aim with his AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and fired a dozen shots at a human silhouette target. Soper’s wife and their 16-year-old daughter practiced drawing pistols. Then Soper helped his 4-year-old daughter, in pink sneakers and a ponytail, work on her marksmanship with a .22-caliber rifle. Deep in the heart of a vast U.S. military training ground, surrounded by spent shotgun shells and juniper trees blasted to shreds, the Central Oregon Constitutional Guard was conducting its weekly firearms training. “The intent is to be able to work together and defend ourselves if we need to,”...

"I don't accept the law of gravity." "Then I encourage you to jump, sir.” Over the course of a weekend lunch with my wife, we pondered the goodness of craft beer, and soon wandered into the necessity of North Carolina’s bathroom law. We shook our heads at the idiocracy of Loretta Lynch’s opposition, and her disregard of Natural Law. I was warming up to say something about Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery of God’s differential calculus when my wife came up with the advice above for Natural Law deniers. Bring up Natural Law to friends, its importance to free government, and...

A visitor to America, say a modern Alexis de Tocqueville, might conclude that the American form of government is despotic. Considering we have presidential elections every four years, our imaginary visitor could further refine his observations and determine America 2016 to be an elective despotism. And why not? Obama’s speeches ooze with “I” and “me.” His cabinet secretaries and party have demonstrated loyalty to his person and not the Constitution. Notwithstanding his oath of office, which is a solemn promise to see that the laws be faithfully executed, he pledged to fundamentally transform America. These are mutually exclusive, and we...

At least two historic American statesmen attempted to insert the guarantee of internal police power to the states in both the Constitution and Articles of Confederation. Connecticut delegate Roger Sherman to the Federal Convention tried several times to prevent federal interference with any state’s “Internal Police.” On his final attempt, the motion failed bigtime by an 8-3 vote. What is Internal Police, why was its retention by the states not made explicit at the convention, and what effect could such a clause have had on American governance two hundred years later? Under Internal Police, a government has the power to...

While political parties ideally represent the common interests of their members, a contradiction has developed within the GOP over the past twenty years. Leadership and rank-and-file members work toward irreconcilable ends: the retention of power, wealth and status at any cost on the one hand, and change that restores economic prosperity and social cohesion on the other. For years, GOP leadership worked handily with democrat leaders Obama, Pelosi, Reid. Behind closed doors, this common senior leadership develops many thousand page omnibus spending bills. In turn, these assaults on the traditional appropriations process are presented to a membership that is cajoled...

Overregulation: Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s CEO Andy Puzder has people all in a huff over his idea to automate restaurants. But why be upset with Puzder? This is an inevitable consequence of massive minimum wage hikes by the government. “With government driving up the cost of labor, it’s driving down the number of jobs,” said Puzder. “You’re going to see automation not just in airports and grocery stores, but in restaurants.” He’s right. That’s why whenever the minimum wage rises above the market-set prevailing wage, jobs are destroyed. Who would pay someone $15 an hour to do a job that’s...

The following article has been taken from the May 12th issue of the Los Angeles Times. Although "The Coach's Team" rarely posts anything but original pieces by its own staff, I believe this information is important enough to be re-posted in its entirety for our readers. Please take note of the emphasized phrase below which makes it clear that, although the Obama Regime via the Department of Health and Human Services is in clear violation of the Constitution, the judge's ruling which correctly declares this to be the case "stands a good chance of being overturned on appeal." The reason?...

If memory serves, I recall an entertaining essay or chapter from perhaps a Stephen Hawking book from a couple of decades ago. Being designed for the mathematically challenged, it sought to introduce his thoughts on the nature of the universe without intimidating the reader. The essay involved a thought experiment where people lived in two dimensions. A people with no height navigated in an X-Y coordinate system-on-a-sheet-of-paper sort of world. It was all they knew. Hawking wondered of the people’s reaction if a third dimension, the Z, was introduced. In any event, he was certain that a surprised people would...

DESIGNATED SURVIVOR. From writer-producer David Guggenheim, who wrote two 2012 movies: “Safe House” (53% positive on Rotten Tomatoes) and “Stolen” (16%). When the President, Vice President, Speaker of the House, Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of Defense, Attorney General and almost all the other top-ranking cabinet officials die at the same time, Kiefer Sutherland finds himself running the United States.

Federal Judge Rosemary Collyer's ruling that the Obama Administration has been illegally subsidizing health insurance companies failed to faze the President or his minions. Presidential Press Secretary Josh Earnest mocked "the impotence of the President's political opponents. These court cases are an act of desperation. The GOP has lost this battle in the public arena. Voters reelected President Obama. That gives him all the mandate he needs to govern this country. Complaining that Congress never appropriated the money for the subsidies seeks to elevate a constitutional technicality above the will of voters." The "constitutional technicality" that Judge Collyer found persuasive...

Beginning with “We the People,” the Constitution is a compact, an agreement among equals, the people of the American civil society. The events of 1787-1788 could have been scripted straight out of John Locke’s Second Treatise. A preexisting civil society came to the conclusion that its current form of government was inadequate to secure its unalienable rights, which, as per the Declaration (also a Lockean document), is the broad purpose of government. Through state sponsored conventions, special delegations of the sovereign people debated the pro/con of establishing a new government. Just as Locke described the steps that men, emerging from...

Our Declaration of Independence was not only illegal, it was an act of treason. Like today, most men in 1787 worldwide equated that which is legal with justice. Who could argue against the idea that justice is joined with statutory law? Equate the legal with the just, and the law can be whatever presidents for life, oligarchs, or a majority say it is. Mankind can be fragmented into a welter of nations, each with its own morality. Might makes right. Justice is rendered relative among the nations of the world. Since there is no single standard of justice, all standards...

For several decades, conservatives have lamented the growth of the administrative state, aka the fourth branch of government. Created by congress, directed by the president, and armed with semi-despotic powers, these administrative agencies, by the number of regulations they issue, are the real lawmakers in the once American republic. On paper, the fourth branch is accountable to the reps of the people, the House and Senate of the United States. Liberals love the fourth branch, for while these agencies are legally subject to congressional oversight, they are extensions of the will of the president and are, as a practical matter,...

In this letter dated July 22nd 1721, Cato explained that the world is regularly lead into mistakes by people who profit from them. If the people were properly apprised of the truth, no one would live in slavery. There are lessons here for early 21st century America. In most nations there is neither the light of truth nor liberty. Where they exist, they are inseparable. Destroy one and the other follows. In these nations we find tyranny and deception, ignorance and slavery joined together, such that “Wherever truth is dangerous, liberty is precarious.” Among sciences, Cato regards political science as...

As colonists, we were proud to be English subjects, the freest people in the world. Our revolution was against Crown corruption of a wonderful system that was seeping from England into her North American colonies which threatened our rights as Englishmen. As American patriots shake their heads in disbelief at the possible return of a thoroughly corrupt, felonious, treasonous Hillary Clinton to the White House, I recently happened upon a 1787 piece which extolled the anti-corruption features of the Constitution. Just four days after the close of the Federal Convention, and over a month before Alexander Hamilton published the first...

As touched upon in Part I, and against the backdrop of an orchestrated South Sea Bubble, subsequent economic crash, and unpunished stock-jobbers, Cato interwove Lockean concepts regarding the laws of nature, civil society, and high crimes which were found some fifty and sixty years later in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. What follows are illustrative of the thought train of two foundational truths, from Locke to Cato to our Declaration of Independence, which culminated in the free government design of our Constitution. The Purpose of Government. John Locke: Civil Society comes into being when every individual has resigned up...

A government designed to secure our unalienable rights has become something of a black-hole that devours liberty. In the sum total of our three national branches, fewer than 1,500 (One president, 435 congressmen, 100 senators, and about 875 Article III judges) men and women push around over 320 million citizens without restraint or fear for their personal safety. What is to be done? If we weigh the potential benefit, meaning the restoration of our republic, against the remote disadvantages of an amendments convention, there is little reason to avoid one. Some prominent conservatives have expressed concern over the possibility of...

Thomas Jefferson famously adapted key passages of John Locke’s Second Treatise in his draft Declaration of Independence. An 18th century gentleman could hardly regard himself as learned without the ability to quote a few Lockean passages from memory. Yet, what of the average colonial? Books were expensive imports. How were the yeomanry educated well enough in Lockean concepts to readily understand and accept this radical document, the Declaration of Independence? Through newspapers. Like modern Americans, our colonial forebears were also political junkies. Freewheeling editorials, letters to the editor that criticized parliamentary and colonial governments were standing features of public life....

Free Government is that happy condition wherein government respects and protects the unalienable, Natural Rights of the nation, and makes no law without its consent. Under this simple guidance, government is twice limited: by its end, which any of us would have a right to pursue were there no government at all, and by its means, which require our consent. Yes, the presidential campaign season is entertaining. But if the practical extent of our God-given freedom depends on the election of either Bernie, The Beast or Donald Trump, it follows that actual free government is as real and enduring as...

It Is A Mixture Of Stealth And Kinetic JihadBy Col. Tom Snodgrass (Ret.), Right Side News Islam Is Pursuing A Clash Of Civilizations, The West, Not So Much In 1993 Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington first introduced the concept of ‘The Clash of Civilizations,’ which pointed out that Islam in is conflict with all other politico-ethic-geocultural-economic-religious societal groupings (Western, Slavic-Orthodox, Hindu, etc.). In response U.S. and international academic elites dismissed Huntington’s thesis on the basis that ‘civilizations’ certainly warred in the past, but modern sovereign nationhood and economics had rendered civilizational warfare archaic. Once the Western intellectual judgment ruled out civilizational...