Free Republic

Linette LopezAugust 20, 2014Muted headlines about bond swaps aren't doing justice to the announcement Argentina's president made last night. With her attempt to pass a law nullifying a U.S. Court's ruling that the country pay all its creditors, Argentina is effectively turning its back on the rules governing international finance. If Argentina's congress passes this law, the country could enter a place where rules no longer matter and negotiation with the hedge funds to which it owes over $1.3 billion in sovereign debt are all but impossible. What this law does is put debt that was once legally governed by...

Meet the Press featured a segment this Sunday that illustrates the planted liberal axioms that dominate our political culture. The topic was Congress’s failure to “get anything done” this term. NBC News’s chief White House correspondent, Chuck Todd, set the stage: New polling from NBC News, the Wall Street Journal, and Marist . . . shows that three out of four voters agree that Congress hasn’t done much this year . . . And guess what? The public’s right. Congress hasn’t been productive. In fact, this Congress . . . is on track to be the least productive in...

"Oversight Dems to America: “You Don’t Have the Right to Know” about White House Spending Taxpayer Dollars on Political Activity" Committee votes to reject White House claim that head of political office has absolute immunity from Congress Today, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee approved a resolution to reject White House assertions of “absolute immunity” for political affairs office head, David Simas, who has failed to appear before the Committee twice. This morning, the White House declined Chairman’s further accommodation to allow Mr. Simas to comply with his obligations under the subpoena. Yesterday, Chairman Issa offered White House Counsel Neil...

Ahh, government: In this week’s “Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t” file: A Southern California couple received a letter from Glendora city officials threatening to fine them $500 if they don’t get their sun-scorched brown lawn green again, reports AP. Which Laura Whitney and Michael Korte would gladly do, except for one thing: They could also be fined $500 if they water their lawn too much; they’re currently only watering twice a week. With more than 80% of California in an extreme drought, according to the Los Angeles Times, the state water board voted this week to...

On Tuesday, President Barack Obama laughed off an offer of a joint. A legal one, mind you, since this was Colorado. We’ve come a long way, baby, since five years ago when the exact same president was making cheap stoner jokes in response to serious questions about changing drug policy. These last few years have seen — and continue to see — an amazing pushback against the excesses of the drug war. Like the Berlin Wall, the war on drugs seemed like it would stand forever. The arguable “tear down this wall” moment for drug policy came in November, 2012,...

Why is it that democracies so often generate public policies that are wasteful and unjust? Why do such policies persist over long periods of time, even when they are known to be harmful? Assuming that you’ve pondered those questions, you’d probably also like to understand why, on rare occasions, bad policies do get repealed. If you have entertained those questions, or now see that they are worth entertaining, here is a book you’ll want to read. In Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers, economics professors Wayne Leighton (of Universidad Francisco Marroquin) and Edward Lopez (of Western Carolina University) take readers on...

Wikipedia has an article describing the six times Republican politicians suggested impeaching Barack Obama, the most serious of which was a hearing by the House Judiciary Committee “formally titled ‘The President’s Constitutional Duty to Faithfully Execute the Laws,’ that has been viewed as an attempt to begin justifying impeachment proceedings”. None of these have gone anywhere and there is clearly no present momentum behind the project, as suggested by the absence of a groundswell for a petition to impeach the president and a dearth of newspaper articles suggesting the same. The process itself, as described by Wikipedia, is surprisingly simple....

We might not have the ObamaCare mess if more people judged legislation by what it actually does instead of what its proponents hope it will accomplish. Think of verbs to truly understand what a bill does. There are specific verbs that describe the precise action of any bill. The Mackinac Center's short, plain-English bill descriptions (found on the VoteSpotter app and MichiganVotes.org) are built around those verbs. A great many descriptions include words like "prohibit," "mandate," "impose," "tax," "require," "restrict," "penalize" and "subsidize." If those verbs sound negative, it's not because we have a bias against the bills. It's because...

In January, I wrote a column called "The United Whims of America," which argued that the trend of politicians ignoring laws with which they disagree was a dangerous development. The central point, more true every day, is we are no longer a nation of laws, but a nation of whims – a people whose laws are in a constant state of flux depending upon who holds various offices. The consequences of this shift from laws to whims, if not reined in, will fundamentally transform the country in ways we cannot predict or allow. The problem of Congress passing and presidents...

Earlier this week, Sen. Jeff Sessions said that the president was deliberately dismantling our law enforcement system. Megyn Kelly of Fox News asked Rep. Gowdy about that. Rep. Trey Gowdy, a former prosecutor, agrees with Sen. Sessions that the president is systematically dismantling the nation’s laws, but he believes it is to win elections not to pursue an agenda. They [the administration] do however fundamentally view their role differently, he added. Attorney General Eric Holder recently claimed that illegal immigration is a civil right, if that is so, Gowdy says, that is like saying you and I have the right...

A government money grab that's been operating under the guise of public safety might soon be ended. Legislation to scrap Michigan's "driver responsibility fees" has overwhelming support in the Legislature. In 2003, state lawmakers passed a bill that assessed "driver responsibility fees" in an effort to bring in additional revenue. The move was thinly veiled as a measure to ensure drivers were operating vehicles safely. However, the fees often go beyond simply assigning stiffer penalties for unsafe driving practices. In many instances they pile on costs that individuals don't have the ability to pay. What's more, under certain circumstances they...

"....Hounding out people with different views is seen by the Left as a necessary means to achieve its supposedly noble goals — just like the Spanish Inquisitioners who claimed God was on their side as they went after religiously “incorrect” Jews, Muslims, and heretics. Unfortunately, the Obama administration has been part of the problem, not part of the solution. Its appointees used the once-impartial IRS against conservatives. They monitored Associated Press reporters. They denied that the NSA was eavesdropping on average citizens. They arbitrarily chose not to enforce laws they didn’t like. The president bragged of using “a pen and...

In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee Tuesday, Eric Holder offered an alarming new doctrine for the Republic: laws are only suggestions, and the real authority to enforce or not enforce them lies in the hands of the president and his cabinet officers. (snip) There is a vast amount of discretion that a president has — and more specifically that an attorney general has,” Holder responded. “But that discretion has to be used in an appropriate way so that your acting consistent with the aims of the statute but at the same time making sure that you are acting in

There’s been a lot of discussion among members of the Armed Intelligentsia lately about how Connecticut’s finest might proceed if they decide to confiscate unregistered guns from the state’s 100,000 or more newly-minted felons. The level of concern is evidenced by daily long comment threads, speculative posts by people who are not members of law enforcement, and even a couple of contributed opinions from the LEO community. The rational consensus seems to be that if the gun-grab order were given, cops would pinch a registration scofflaw at the grocery store, at work, on the road…anyplace other than his or her...

Last Sunday, The New York Times published a front-page article about the heartfelt need of California farmers for more illegal aliens. The first tip-off that heinous public policy ideas were coming was that the Times introduced farmer Chuck Herrin, owner of a farm-labor contracting company, as a "lifelong Republican." That's Times-speak for "liberal." Herrin admitted that he employs a lot of illegal aliens and bitterly complained that they lived in fear of "Border Patrol and deportations." (But, apparently, he doesn't live in fear of admitting he's violating our immigration laws.) Sorry that running a country inconveniences you, Chuck. He said...

Parent and child rights, abortion, and baby-selling are among issues coloring the debate among Maryland legislators over a gestational surrogacy bill passed by the Senate March 20 and awaiting action by the House Rules Committee. The Maryland Catholic Conference supports the Maryland Collaborative Reproduction Act (S.B. 208) as amended, in order to protect the parties involved – intended parents, surrogate mothers and the children surrogacy arrangements produce. As the public policy arm of the state’s Catholic bishops, the MCC does not support surrogacy, and in past years has simply opposed similar legislation. “We would prefer a ban,” said Andrea Garvey,...

In the months since Edward Snowden revealed the nature and extent of the spying that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been perpetrating upon Americans and foreigners, some of the NSA's most troublesome behavior has not been a part of the public debate. This behavior constitutes the government's assaults on the American legal system. Those assaults have been conducted thus far on two fronts, one of which is aimed at lawyers who represent foreign entities here in America, and the other is aimed at lawyers who represent criminal defendants against whom evidence has been obtained unlawfully and presented in court...

Mayor de Blasio’s SUV was caught on camera speeding through Queens and blowing through two stop signs Thursday — just two days after he announced a sweeping street-safety plan. The mayor — who was riding shotgun on the way back to City Hall from a pothole-filling photo op — was twice clocked going 15 mph over the speed limit by a WCBS/Channel 2 news crew. The two-car caravan also ran past two stop signs without even tapping the brakes and changed highway lanes without signaling, the CBS video shows. De Blasio’s wild ride came after his pledge to personally abide...

by Gina Cassini | Top Right News Today, an Arizona state senate committee approved a bill that would virtually nullify all federal gun acts, laws, orders, rules or regulations. The vote was 6-3.Along with twelve sponsors and co-sponsors, Arizona State Sen. Kelli Ward introduced the Second Amendment Preservation Act in the Grand Canyon State. SB1294 prohibits the state from enforcing “any federal act, law, order, rule or regulation that relates to a personal firearm, firearm accessory or ammunition within the limits of this state.” “We’ve sat back and allowed the federal government to trample the Constitution long enough,” Ward said. “We’re going...

In the wake of media reports that 40,000 new federal, state, and local laws will go into effect this year, there’s no better time for Americans to revisit the old maxim that “ignorance of the law is no excuse.” An unknown number of these new provisions are criminal laws that can deprive us of our liberty and brand us for life. No ordinary American can be expected to know every law, new and old, on the books, not even every criminal law. Anyone concerned about Americans’ being locked up for innocent behavior should resolve to help end overcriminalization. Overcriminalization strikes...