Free Republic

Having failed to convince the body of the people, the state legislature, to approve his plan to expand Medicaid in Ohio, Governor Kasich is considering a new course, one less representative and more, shall we say, authoritarian. In fact, those who enjoy a little irony, will find the name of his expedient slightly amusing: the Controlling Board. Although, it sounds a bit like the stuff of a cold-war thriller, the Controlling Board is actually a function of the state legislature and the Office of Management and Budget. It is described on OMB’s website as, “..a mechanism for handling certain limited...

After reading an article at the Onion, which I am not allowed to post on FR, I felt the need to change my position on the action in Syria... It is currently the third article on their front page: a "Poll" showing Americans are strongly in favor of sending CONGRESS to Syria and putting them on the ground. Very funny!! However, I would amend the action to include the Executive branch, all the czars, and the alphabet agencies. If they want to fight so badly, let them. There are very few I would actually keep here to monitor the progress...

Two weeks ago, the House Appropriations Committee stripped the scandal ridden Internal Revenue Service of nearly one quarter of its 2014 budget as punishment for its targeting of political groups and its costly boondoggles. Shockingly, Senate Democrats voted to increase the IRS’ budget.Last week, numerous Republicans in both chambers of Congress threatened to cut off all funding for the federal government as of Oct. 1, in response to President Obama’s unconstitutional stance that he can pick and choose which parts of ObamaCare he will implement.On July 3, the Obama administration disclosed that it would not implement ObamaCare’s employer mandate on...

I have always believed that regardless of the laws of a nation, the social fabric that binds it is woven of mutual trust between the people and their private and governmental institutions. Once that fabric is weakened, the dangers to an ordered society are extreme. This week, the holes in the U.S. social fabric are manifest, and they are caused by the administration's ever-expanding lawlessness.. The statements by the high-tech self-exile Snowden set off alarms even among those who are willing to repose their confidence in the general integrity of our intelligence services. In my case, not because I believe...

Americans voted twice for a big-government President, and now we’re beginning to experience the impact of big government. Are you shocked? It’s been four years of the President and Congress spending future generations into the oblivion of debt, the Executive Branch securing control over huge chunks of the private economy (two car companies, multiple banks and the health care industry are only part of it), and a dramatic expansion of both the defined role, and the powers of the IRS. At this point in the Obama presidency, we the people should not be surprised by a government that has purported...

When racial tensions flared in Sanford, a league of secretive peacemakers reached out to the city's spiritual and civic leaders to help cool heated emotions after 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in February. When civil-rights organizers wanted to demonstrate, these federal workers taught them how to peacefully manage crowds. They even arranged a police escort for college students to ensure safe passage for their 40-mile march from Daytona Beach to Sanford to demand justice. As national figures and sign-waving protesters grabbed the spotlight after Trayvon's death, federal workers from a little-known branch of the Department of Justice labored...

Promises upon promises abound in elections. Senator Obama proved himself a masterful coaxer in 2008, feasting on the pining of an electorate disillusioned with the American political system. He was the unifier, the inspirational personage representing the solution to a failed decade marked by a rowdy Texan in the White House who squandered America’s capital in foreign lands. The next four years, and surely the next eight, were to be ones marked by a robust economic recovery, a dramatic decline in poverty, and, of course, resurgence of confidence in America’s position in the world. None of these have materialized. In...

Jay Carney says President Obama was never against signing statements, just when President Bush "abused" them. Watch what then-Senator Obama said in 2008 while running for president and decide for yourself. "His concern was with what he saw as an abuse of the signing statement by the previous administration. So that the positions he took in signing statements on the budget bill entirely consistent with that position, you need to retain the right to, as president, to be able to issue those signing statements, but obviously they should not be abused," White House press secretary Jay Carney told the press...

The Rise of Unchecked Presidential Power By Robert Eugene Simmons Jr. In order to achieve a dictatorship in a country, you have to go one of two ways. Either you have to foment a violent revolution, using the power of the military to seize the government, or you have to be voted into the position and seize the power slowly. In the USA, it is all but impossible to achieve the takeover via violent overthrow, and the separation of powers makes it difficult to take over via slow seizure of power. However, the plans of the progressives have been working...

Democratic postmortems on Barack Obama’s disappointing first year in the Oval Office have emphasized, as the president himself did, difficulties inherited from “the last eight years.” Republicans, for their part, credit public opposition to Obama’s overreaching policies. But a full explanation goes much deeper. Obama is failing because he has turned the constitutional functions of the presidency upside down. The 2010 State of the Union address nicely summed up Obama’s topsy-turvy approach to the presidency. He pressed for a new jobs bill, more domestic spending, and health care nationalization. He attributed his political setbacks not to broad opposition to his...

Reporting from Washington -- When President Obama says he has the best healthcare in the world, he isn't kidding. The White House medical unit, with a staff of four doctors plus nurses and physicians' assistants, is steps from his office. Treatment is free for Obama and his family (as well as for the vice president and his family). During the president's travels, a doctor and nurse ride in a limousine in his motorcade. An emergency medical technician comes too, with an ambulance. Air Force One is stocked with equipment for an on-board operating room. On overseas trips, two medical teams...

Covert board called crucial to presidents Report studies security role since Eisenhower by Bill Gertz Presidents need to rely on a little-known group of intelligence advisers that since the 1950s has helped guide policies and oversee the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy, according to a report by former intelligence officials. The book-length report to be released today is an exhaustive historical study of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), which was created during the Eisenhower administration and has been used by presidents in different capacities ever since. "In some instances, the Board has played a central role in advising the president...

What will Washington be like when the Barbarians leave town next year? Will this hapless burg feel the relief of an epic enema? Will this home of flagrant hypocrites and BS ejaculators, stuffed from snout to stern with an indigestible lumpen elite of corrupt souls, moral myopics, and wannabe-messiahs — will it actually change? We know what Washington has become since the Barbarians took over in 2000. Who back then, when Bush was campaigning as a "compassionate conservative," could have foreseen what his Cheney presidency would bring us? 1. The turning of our proud Army and CIA into low-life torturers....

Since September 11, 2001, the speaker of the House has been required for security purposes to take government planes for official business. The White House rightly called "silly" recent criticism of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's desire to have a plane that could fly to her San Francisco district nonstop, which would be larger than the plane her predecessor used. But this flap raises a more serious issue--that of presidential succession. Pelosi takes a military plane because the speaker of the House is second in line to succeed the president, behind only the vice president. That's what drove the Department of...

Washington -- Like chess players planning several moves ahead, some Democrats in Congress are looking toward what they see as the inevitable clash with President Bush over who has the power to end the Iraq war. Such a confrontation could provoke a constitutional crisis between two co-equal branches of government -- a Democratic-led Congress bolstered by polls showing the war is deeply unpopular and a Republican president who so far won't budge from his position that he is the decision-maker who will control policy for Iraq. "Since the president is adamant about pursuing his failed policies in Iraq, Congress has...

High school civics courses and even college-level political science classes on the separation of powers can sometimes differ radically from the actual practice. In a time when corruption runs rampant throughout Congress, and the legislative branch consistently succumbs to the executive branch’s agenda, change within the government is necessary, say Thomas Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, co-authors of The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track. Both Mann and Ornstein spoke about their book at the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday, July 12 as part of a panel discussion with former Speakers...

This thread invites all FReepers to engage in a Constitutional debate on this question: Is House Speaker Dennis Hastert correct or incorrect in his interpretation of the relevant Constitutional clauses as they pertain to the FBI raid of Rep. William Jefferson's offices in the Capitol?PREMISE: As conservatives, the one thing we should most try to conserve is the United States Constitution. In order to do so, we need to understand it. The raid on Rep. William Jefferson's Capitol office by the FBI is a very rare case, and it raises extremely important separation of powers questions. Please try to debate...

In the continuing saga of the surveillance "scandal," with some congressional Democrats denouncing President Bush as a lawbreaker and even suggesting that impeachment hearings may be in order, it is important to step back and put things in historical context. First of all, the Founding Fathers knew from experience that Congress could not keep secrets. In 1776, Benjamin Franklin and his four colleagues on the Committee of Secret Correspondence unanimously concluded that they could not tell the Continental Congress about covert assistance being provided by France to the American Revolution, because "we find by fatal experience that Congress consists of...

The shocking governmental homicide of Terri Schiavo has many dimensions, twists, and turns--all of which, upon analysis, converge on one inescapable reality: The life of Terri Schiavo is solely in the hands of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. While Terri lies dying by slow execution in a Pinellas Park hospice, Gov. Bush and others have looked mainly to the legislative process for relief--knowing full well that any special law intended to spare Terri's life will likely be overturned or disregarded by unsympathetic courts on the pretext of "separation of powers." Terri's protectors have also appealed repeatedly to the courts themselves to...

WASHINGTON — Bucking the trend to break down walls between law enforcement agencies, the U.S. Capitol Police (search) has asked to be able to decline information requests from the executive branch. The Capitol Police insist this power is important to protect sensitive information from Freedom of Information Act (search) requests. The executive branch is subject to FOIA requests, but the legislative branch, of which the Capitol Police is a part, is not.