Free Republic

We are all guilty of providing a wide leeway to a politician that we favor. If the politician is someone we support, we restrain ourselves when something becomes public that would have us in a tizzy if done by someone with whom we dislike politically. That is referred to as “cutting someone some slack.” But there is a limit for everyone like there was for Anthony Weiner or Larry Craig. When will the grownups in the Democratic Party say enough is enough with Barack Obama? We know that he is your guy. We also know that after 2010 there are...

One question congressional and presidential candidates should be asked is how we should go about restoring the rule of law to our federal government. Not even during the world wars of the last century was the executive branch as brazen in assuming sweeping and unlegislated powers, changing laws without the consent of the legislative branch and ignoring laws it didn’t like. Lawsuits are certainly one possible avenue to take, but a slow one–which is what the White House is counting on. It will do what it wants, and by the time an unfavorable decision is handed down, it will have...

I have watched and followed politics for several years, through more than a few presidents. Heretofore, I have not seen a President who is so willing to bypass Congress and act on his own, as is President Obama. From the time he took the oath of office, he has interjected himself into arenas where he has no business. In the prelude to the State of the Union show yesterday, it was announced he would be signing an Executive Order to force any business who does federal contract work to pay their employees $10.10 per hour, at the minimum. This is...

President Obama will announce tonight that he is signing an Executive Order mandating a new $10.10 minimum wage for all future federal contract workers. But it is not at all clear that he has the legal authority to do so. "My understanding is that they are using the president's authority under the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949," George Washington Law School's Associate Dean for Government Procurement Law Studies Dan Gordon told Townhall. "And that calls for measures which ensure 'economy and efficiency' of the procurement process. And I am not sure whether this blanket increase in the...

President Obama’s use of executive action to get around congressional gridlock is unparalleled in modern times, some scholars say. But to liberal activists, he’s not going far enough. "You have a power to stop deportation for all undocumented immigrants in this country!" the young South Korean man yelled at President Obama during a speech on immigration reform last November in San Francisco. Waving away security guards, Mr. Obama turned and addressed Mr. Hong, himself undocumented. "Actually, I don't," the president said. "And that's why we're here." "We've got this Constitution, we've got this whole thing about separation of powers," Obama...

A district court judge ruled that President Obama can’t lawfully keep hidden a foreign aid order he tried to shield via a claim of executive privilege, characterizing the move as a “cavalier” dodge of the Freedom of Information Act. The Justice Department had argued that a foreign-aid directive that Mr. Obama signed in 2010 should remain secret, because it was part of the Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development and fell under the umbrella of executive privilege — despite its unclassified status, Politico reported. But U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle ruled in favor of plaintiffs — the Center for...

Yesterday, Judge Brian Cogan of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, not only struck down Obamacare's contraception mandate as applied to religious non-profit organizations, but also sent a strong signal that federal courts were losing patience with President Obama's many stitches of executive power. Previous courts had ruled against President Obama's contraception mandate as applied to for-profit entities (see Sebelius v Hobby Lobby), but this was the first court to hold that participating in Obama's scheme to provide free birth control is a substantial burden on the free practice of religion (specifically the Catholic...

Subtitle: The solution to a dysfunctional Congress is not for Obama to govern the country all by himself. In the face of congressional gridlock, President Obama has started taking more and more matters into his own hands. In recent months, he has announced new gun control measures, put in place limited immigration reform and made fixes to the Affordable Care Act — all without Congress. Many liberals who once worried about presidential overreach have applauded his robust use of presidential power. Yet the president's increasing unilateralism shouldn't be cause for celebration. Bypassing Congress means bypassing democratic checks. It also means...

"............“.............A four-decade-long war on the press’s legitimacy had begun. The idea that it was a biased liberal press that made the molehill of Watergate into a mountain of Constitutional crisis took root. A month later, an article in the New York Times quoted a letter to the editor written by one Lerline Westmoreland published in a Southern newspaper, the Memphis Commercial Appeal: “It seems to me that the greatest threat to this country is not so much a dictatorial Supreme Court or an imperfect President, it is a vicious, slanted news media on the minds of the masses of Americans...

The Healthcare Act just forced upon Americans was pushed through with deceit by telling ignorant Americans they would receive healthcare at reasonable premiums. It turns out (as usual) that it was all a lie. What the Healthcare Act is, in fact, is a way to more thoroughly tax citizens without provoking a revolution. Millions of younger Americans never carried insurance because with good health they didn't need to. Now, the government is going to force EVERY adult to have healthcare. Many companies have dropped healthcare or have cut hours to 29 per week to not have to incur the costs...

Hiking electricity costs and killing jobs en masse, his Environmental Protection Agency will shutter existing coal-fired power plants and make new ones impossible. "Congress should move immediately to defund as much of this as possible," says Myron Ebell, director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Center for Energy and Environment. That's the last, best hope for stopping this monstrous plan.

Back in 2007, when he was running for president, Barack Obama criticized George W. Bush's expansive vision of executive power, saying, "I reject the view that the president may do whatever he deems necessary to protect national security." The day after taking office in 2009, Obama declared that "my administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government." Those two positions went together, because secrecy requires power and power thrives in secrecy, as Obama himself has been demonstrating for the last four years. Three recent cases illustrate how breaking his promise of "the most transparent administration in...

President Barack Obama narrowly defeated Gov. Mitt Romney in the popular vote 51 percent to 48 percent. In the all-important Electoral College, the difference was larger, with Obama winning 303 electoral votes and Romney 206. Let's not think so much about the election's outcome but instead ask: What's so good about democracy and majority rule? How many decisions in our day-to-day lives would we like to be made through majority rule or the democratic process? How about the decision to watch a football game or "Law and Order"? What about whether to purchase a Chevrolet Volt or a Toyota Prius?...

Cornered by reporters with video cameras, former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, a senior adviser to President Obama's reelection campaign, attempted to defend the kill list...The second notable statement concerns the killing of 16-year-old American citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki.. ADAMSON: ...It's an American citizen that is being targeted without due process, without trial. And, he's underage. He's a minor. GIBBS: I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children. I don't think becoming an al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about...

President Barack Obama is starting to channel his inner Cheney. For years, Obama talked about the limits on presidential power. Now, driven either by principle or political expediency, he's working to build and maintain a powerful presidency that pushes the edge of what it can do, while often telling Congress and the courts to mind their own business. In the last week alone, he refused a subpoena to share Justice Department emails with Congress, told courts he doesn't have to justify his claimed power to assassinate suspected terrorists, and decided to stop deporting certain illegal immigrants even though Congress has...

WASHINGTON — One Saturday last fall, President Obama interrupted a White House strategy meeting to raise an issue not on the agenda. He declared, aides recalled, that the administration needed to more aggressively use executive power to govern in the face of Congressional obstructionism. “We had been attempting to highlight the inability of Congress to do anything,” recalled William M. Daley, who was the White House chief of staff at the time. “The president expressed frustration, saying we have got to scour everything and push the envelope in finding things we can do on our own.” For Mr. Obama, that...

— One Saturday last fall, President Obama interrupted a White House strategy meeting to raise an issue not on the agenda. He declared, aides recalled, that the administration needed to more aggressively use executive power to govern in the face of Congressional obstructionism. -snip- But increasingly in recent months, the administration has been seeking ways to act without Congress. Branding its unilateral efforts “We Can’t Wait,” a slogan that aides said Mr. Obama coined at that strategy meeting, the White House has rolled out dozens of new policies — on creating jobs for veterans, preventing drug shortages, raising fuel economy...

One Saturday last fall, President Obama interrupted a White House strategy meeting to raise an issue not on the agenda. He declared, aides recalled, that the administration needed to more aggressively use executive power to govern in the face of Congressional obstructionism. snip Aides say many more such moves are coming. Not just a short-term shift in governing style and a re-election strategy, Mr. Obama’s increasingly assertive use of executive action could foreshadow pitched battles over the separation of powers in his second term, should he win and Republicans consolidate their power in Congress. snip The unilateralist strategy carries political...

One of the lies Ron Paul's more vocal supporters (his army of cyberstormtroopers) will tell you until they're blue in the face is that the Shame of Texas has a strict constructionist view of the Constitution. They'll hiss, scratch, and burn a cross on your blog for daring to point out the obvious. In other words, they're like Chairman Obama's Drones, big on fascisti passion, small on critical thinking. Let's take a stroll down Memory Hole Lane, shall we ? Here is the text of Ayatollah RuPaul's interview with Neil Cavuto of FOX News back in 2009: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NEIL CAVUTO,...

This administration is abusive enough when it acts outside its constitutional authority, but it is even more tyrannical when it affirmatively thwarts the express will of the Congress on matters within the legislative domain. When Congress denied Obama authority to transfer money to the International Monetary Fund, he did so anyway, issuing an executive order promising to give that body $140 billion for redistribution to Third World countries. Now he's made another mockery of bipartisanship and the Constitution in making six recess appointments, including two people so objectionable that a near supermajority of Democratic senators wouldn't confirm them: James Cole...