Free Republic

A new letter from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) admits that illegal aliens were being allowed to board planes using Notice to Appear forms they received after entering the U.S. illegally. The revelation directly contradicts a TSA statement last month denying such allegations to various media outlets, including Breitbart News. In July Breitbart Texas... broke the news that the TSA was letting illegal aliens board planes using Notice to Appear forms; subsequently, a TSA spokesperson publicly attacked Darby on Twitter, insisting that his report was "completely wrong." The newly-surfaced TSA letter was penned on August 7, according to the Gateway...

What can President Barack Obama actually do without Congress to change U.S. immigration policies? A lot, it turns out. There are some limits under federal law, and anything the White House ultimately decides to do may be challenged in court as unconstitutional. But leading legal experts say the White House almost certainly could delay indefinitely efforts to deport millions of immigrants already in the U.S. illegally, and it could give them official work permits that would allow them to legally find jobs, obtain driver's licenses and pay income taxes. Here is what Obama could not do without approval from Congress:...

Unaccompanied illegal immigrant children with communicable diseases have given or exposed federal agents to lice, scabies, tuberculosis and chicken pox, according to a report issued Thursday by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General. In two cases, the children of a border patrol agent got chicken pox contracted from their parents’ exposure to unaccompanied children with chicken pox, according to the report on conditions of detention centers and border facilities. The report, the first in a series, is based on 87 unannounced visits to 63 detention centers being used to house unaccompanied alien children (UAC) in Texas, Arizona...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Even as they grapple with an immigration crisis at the border, White House officials are making plans to act before November's mid-term elections to grant work permits to potentially millions of immigrants who are in this country illegally, allowing them to stay in the United States without threat of deportation, according to advocates and lawmakers in touch with the administration. Such a large-scale move on immigration could scramble election-year politics and lead some conservative Republicans to push for impeachment proceedings against President Barack Obama, a prospect White House officials have openly discussed. Yet there's little sign that...

Bergdahl furor gives new mo to Andrew McCarthy’s book. “Be careful how you make those statements, gentleman.” Barack Hussein Obama had been president of the United States for all of two months. He was lecturing the titans of American finance who were struggling to explain to him, a man with no meaningful business experience, how high salaries are necessary if American companies are to compete for talent in a global market. “The public isn’t buying that,” scoffed the president. He wasn’t talking about the public, though. “My administration,” he warned, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” The...

It would seem President Obama is losing patience with those who excercise their free speech rights to express concerns about his (bogus) Climate Change agenda. As a matter of fact, according to an interview published in The New York Times, President Obama would love to “Go Off” on Climate Deniers in Congress: Do you ever want to just go off on the climate deniers in Congress? “Yeah, absolutely,” the president said with a laugh. “Look, it’s frustrating when the science is in front of us. … We can argue about how. But let’s not argue about what’s going on. The...

The White House spent $2,952,278 in flight expenses this year for two trips President Barack Obama took on which he spent a large chunk of his time playing golf. Obama billed both trips as official business, but he spent more time golfing than he did participating in government meetings, government oversight organization Judicial Watch reports. The conservative organization obtained the cost of Obama’s Air Force 1 trips through Freedom of Information Act requests. The cost per flying hour of the president’s plane is $210,877, the Department of the Air Force told Judicial Watch. …

April 30, 2014, 02:39 pm Carney: Email was not about Benghazi By Justin Sink Press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday that a newly-revealed email showing a White House official preparing then-U.S. ambassador Susan Rice for television interviews was not explicitly in reference to the terror attack in Benghazi. "The email and the talking points were not about Benghazi," Carney said. "They were about the general situation in the Muslim world." A set of documents obtained by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act request included an email from deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes to...

Constitutional law experts... warning... of an “imperial presidency.” The hearing, “Enforcing the President’s Constitutional Duty to Faithfully Execute the Laws,” focused on the multiple areas President Barack Obama has bypassed Congress, ranging from healthcare and immigration to marriage and welfare rules. Jonathan Turley, Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, testified that the expansion of executive power is happening so fast that America is at a “constitutional tipping point.” “My view [is] that the president, has in fact, exceeded his authority in a way that is creating a destabilizing influence in a three branch system,” he said....

Not satisfied with President Obama for appointing record numbers of gay, female and minority judges, liberal groups and labor unions are now pressuring the president to nominate more jurists who have backgrounds working for unions and public-interest organizations. The Alliance for Justice, a coalition of more than 100 liberal groups, is lobbying the White House to “broaden the bench” with more judicial nominees who represent what it calls “professional diversity” — judges who are more likely to be aligned with the coalition’s liberal agenda. “We face a federal bench that has a striking lack of diversity,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts...

To hell with a million man march. We need a TEN MILLION man march!! Fill the mall and every street in DC!! Time to raise the pucker factor in DC until no one in congress can even raise up from his chair. When the people fear their government there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, we have Liberty!! Tea Party leaders, right-wing groups, 2nd amendment groups, pro-life religious leaders, Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, Levin: Gentlemen start your engines!! It's time to unite and turnout freedom loving Americans of every political stripe to run the statist bums out and restore...

The current Washington shutdown standoff reveals an illuminating clash of worldviews.Risibly, the aha moment for me came Wednesday while dozing off to a Tonight Show conversation between Jay Leno and his “guest,” Newt Gingrich. Leno challenged the former Republican Speaker of the House with, “Here’s the part I don’t understand with the Affordable Care Act; Why should Obama negotiate? First it came out, it passed both houses.The Supreme Court said, ‘Yes, this is legitimate.’… It’s already a law.If you don’t like it, you wait four years, you vote the guy out.” Jay Leno’s statement exhibits the statist worldview of defending...

President Barack Obama said today in a speech delivered in the White House Rose Garden that he is asking Congress to vote to authorize him to use military force in Syria—while insisting he does not need congressional authorization to order the U.S. military to commit acts of war in that Middle Eastern country. “I have long believed that our power is rooted not just in our military might, but in our example as a government of the people, by the people and for the people,” Obama said at one point in the speech. “That’s why I have made a second...

n a rebuke to the Obama administration, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been violating federal law by delaying a decision on a proposed nuclear waste dump in Nevada. By a 2-1 vote, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ordered the commission to complete the licensing process and approve or reject the Energy Department's application for a never-completed waste storage site at Nevada's Yucca Mountain. In a sharply worded opinion, the court said the nuclear agency was "simply flouting the law" when it allowed the Obama administration to continue plans...

A third federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that President Obama violated the Constitution last year when he made recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, adding more weight to the case as it goes before the Supreme Court in the justices’ next session. The Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 decision, said that the president can only make recess appointments after Congress has adjourned “sine die,” which in modern times has meant when it breaks at the end of each year.

Politico’s Glenn Thrush reports that after President Obama won re-election, he tried to find out ways of pushing his second term agenda without the Republican-led Congress. “Guys, I don’t want politics to be a limit of what you recommend to me,” Obama told senior aides David Plouffe, Lew, Dan Pfeiffer and Pete Rouse a couple of weeks after his reelection, according to a White House aide with direct knowledge of the meeting. “Let’s come up with an agenda, then let’s figure it out from there as best we can,” he said, prodding them to adopt a more muscular approach to...

In a sharp escalation of the U.S. role in Syria's bloody civil war, the White House announced late Thursday that it will provide military aid to rebels fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad after confirming that his government used chemical weapons on the opposition. Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes told reporters on a conference call that President Barack Obama had heard pleas from Syria's rebel Supreme Military Council (SMC) for more help. "Our aim is to be responsive," Rhodes said, underlining that the new assistance would have "direct military purposes."

Sen. Ted Cruz says Barack Obama is acting like an “imperial president” and must think he can do “nothing wrong,” given his adversarial push to have Congress accept Chuck Hagel as his new defense secretary and extend the nation’s debt limit without a fight. … Cruz, however, indicated he was more concerned about Obama’s determined effort to avoid a fight with Congress on the debt limit, which could mean a move to invoke the 14th Amendment’s provision on the public debt and simply tell the Treasury to ignore the debt ceiling. …

Back in the spring of 2011, House Republicans had refused to raise the nation’s debt ceiling unless the president first conceded to massive spending cuts—a gratuitous game of chicken that put the global economy at risk and defied decades of bipartisan Washington tradition. At the time, many Democrats, including Bill Clinton, were urging Obama to go it alone. I’d raise the debt ceiling on my own, “without hesitation,” Clinton told a reporter. “[I’d] force the courts to stop me.” But the White House insisted that unilateral action was “not an option.” Instead, Obama spent 44 days trying to forge a...

"I think that I've learned some lessons over the last four years and the most important lesson I've learned is that you can't change Washington from the inside." -- President Obama in an interview with Spanish-language broadcaster Univision. The Obama campaign is pushing back hard against the president's gaffe in his Univision interview of saying that Washington cannot be changed from within. It was an unfortunate thing for an incumbent to say, especially when the nation is so unhappy with the way Washington operates. The federal government has gotten more dysfunctional in the era of Obama, despite his promises to...