Free Republic

Congress is not hiding their desire to eliminate guns from law abiding gun owners and they are doing it by submitting and passing bills into law that will shred the power of our Second Amendment. Our forefathers thought so highly of the right of citizens to own guns to protect themselves but ultimately to protect themselves from a government that had become too powerful, controlling and basically, out of control that they included protection of that right in our Bill of Rights. It is quite clear that the foresight these incredibly brilliant men had was prescient. It is also quite...

By this year’s standards, the process that led to Obamacare seems like a veritable exercise in transparency and open government.How quickly Democrats forget. A dozen years ago, President Barack Obama faced strong and justified criticism for backtracking on his promise, made numerous times during the 2008 presidential campaign, to televise health-care negotiations on C-SPAN:By this year’s standards, however, the process that led to Obamacare—the law that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, said we had to pass in order to find out what’s in it—seems like a veritable exercise in transparency and open government. It’s gotten so bad that press reports...

A tech and telecom staffer for Sen. Amy Klobuchar announced she is leaving her staff to join Apple, the news coming just hours after the Minnesota Democrat slammed Big Tech for having “literally hired so many people” in Washington, DC. April Jones, the deputy legislative director and counsel for Klobuchar on tech and telecom issues, will be joining Apple as a senior government affairs policy counsel, according to Politico. The announcement came Wednesday, one day after Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen spoke in front of the Senate Commerce Committee’s consumer protection subcommittee, blasting her former employer and calling for government regulators...

LET’S BUILD INFRASTRUCTURE is preparing to launch formally in Washington, D.C., next week with a six-figure advertising blitz focused on pressing lawmakers to use privatization, rather than taxation, to pay for the infrastructure proposals debated in Congress. The organization touts public-private partnerships and a process known as “asset recycling,” in which the government finances new construction and repairs by selling or leasing roads, bridges, water utilities, parking lots, and other infrastructure assets to private contractors instead of paying for them with public funding. The private operators in turn recoup costs by adding tolls or increasing user fees, such as water...

Several lobbying firms with connections to President Biden experienced a sharp increase in cash during the first six months of 2021, with some raking in four times as much revenue over the same time period in 2020. One firm cashing in on the Biden administration is headed by the brother of a senior White House official, and another bought a lobbying group owned by a top official from the presidential campaign. Two other firms are linked to lobbyists who worked under Biden when he served in previous offices. The influx of cash to these firms “illustrates the extent to which...

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

A venture capitalist and political fundraiser was sentenced today to 144 months in federal prison for falsifying records to conceal his work as a foreign agent while lobbying high-level U.S. government officials, evading the payment of millions of dollars in taxes, making illegal campaign contributions, and obstructing a federal investigation into the source of donations to a presidential inauguration committee.Imaad Shah Zuberi, 50, of Arcadia, California, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Virginia A. Phillips, who also ordered him to pay $15,705,080 in restitution and a criminal fine of $1.75 million.In November 2019, Zuberi pleaded guilty to a three-count information...

Over the past couple weeks, Texas Scorecard has examined some of Texas’ highest-paid lobbyists. By using data from Transparency USA, we’ve looked at their backgrounds, how much they are being paid to influence elected officials, and who their clients are. Here are the lobbyists we’ve profiled so far: • Daniel Hodge - Formerly Gov. Greg Abbott’s Chief of Staff, Hodge left to join the lobby in 2017....and quickly became the highest-paid lobbyist in the state, with a maximum reported income of $8,269,999. • Reed Clay - Another former staffer to Gov. Greg Abbott, Clay served as deputy Chief of Staff....

Newly filed lobbying records show Venezuela’s socialist government previously hired a longtime Democratic Party donor for $6 million at the same time it was lobbying to discourage the U.S. from imposing sanctions on the oil-rich nation. The documents, which were disclosed Thursday, show a U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela’s state oil giant PDVSA agreed to hire Marcia Wiss’ Washington law firm in March 2017. That’s the same month it signed a consulting deal for $50 million with scandal-tainted former Congressman David Rivera. Wiss, an international trade lawyer with a history of donations to the Democratic Party, including a $1,500 contribution to...

By the authority vested in me as President of the United States by the Constitution and laws of the United States of America, including section 301 of title 3, United States Code, and sections 3301 and 7301 of title 5, United States Code, it is hereby ordered as follows:Section 1. Revocation. Executive Order 13770 of January 28, 2017, “Ethics Commitments by Executive Branch Appointees,” is hereby revoked, effective at noon January 20, 2021. Employees and former employees subject to the commitments in Executive Order 13770 will not be subject to those commitments after noon January 20, 2021.Sec. 2. General Provisions....

MORE ON: JOE BIDEN Ice queen: Progressives slam Pelosi's flashy freezer stunt Pope Francis congratulates Joe Biden on election victory Dead people voted in 2020 election, Tucker Carlson says Progressives are betting on Biden leaning into their agenda At least 40 people working for President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team are or were registered lobbyists, a new analysis found. The report, published Wednesday by the Wall Street Journal, was done by searching the congressional lobbying databases for the over 500 appointees to the Biden transition team. In late September, as a Biden transition team was beginning to come together, the Democrat...

U.S. multinationals function as unregistered lobbyists for foreign governments. If a foreign government wants to lobby the U.S. government, they and their lobbyists need to register with the Department of Justice, through the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA. Week Thirty-Eight of the Trump White House In Review Watch Full Screen Alternatively, the foreign government could ask one of their American counterparts to do their bidding for them. The Chinese government opted for the latter approach, law enforcement sources tell the Wall Street Journal. Reportedly casino magnate Steve Wynn, who has business ties in the Chinese region of Macau, wrote...

<p>TikTok has come under fire for being owned by the Chinese Communist Party. In fact, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo just last week talked about banning TikTok and other CCP-owned social media platforms out of national security concerns. Because of that, the social media company is beefing up its lobbying efforts in the United States.</p>

Congressional leaders are likely to put a very ugly deal in front of the American people, and if it passes, America may be unrecognizable after this pandemic. But there is a way to stop it, if people on the populist left and people on the populist right work together. Here’s the situation. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and the Trump administration are negotiating a bailout package to address the coronavirus crisis. There’s been a lot of chatter about the need to support workers as the economy goes into a freeze.... But in the United States,...

It happens every odd-numbered year, legislators descend on Austin. We all come fresh from winning our respective elections. We are elected by our constituents - voters - and we come to town with their issues and concerns in mind. This last legislative session, the Texas Legislature was ready to move on property tax reform. We were going to take action after hearing for years from Texans that, “Property taxes are too high. Property taxes are pricing out Texans of the homes they bought.” Senate Bill 2, which the legislature passed, requires many local taxing units - cities and counties -...

LECANTO — When Florida lawmakers signed off this year on a bill creating more than 300 miles of toll roads, they did so with scant evidence the project was needed. More than five months later, after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it into law and the project has been vetted in two rounds of public hearings, local officials are growing frustrated by the persistent lack of details about what would be the largest expansion of Florida’s toll system in decades. “We’re beating a dead horse right now before it’s even born,” said Dixie County Commissioner Mark Hatch, who sits on a...

Facebook (FB.O) Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg met with a half-dozen U.S. senators on Wednesday for dinner as the company seeks to boost its reputation in Washington. The social media giant has been under fire on a number of fronts for more than a year and faces antitrust investigations by the Federal Trade Commission and a number of state attorneys general as well as numerous legislative proposals that seek to restrict how it operates.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex, seemed as surprised as everyone else when he admitted he agreed with a proposal put forward by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ✔ @AOC If you are a member of Congress + leave, you shouldn’t be allowed to turn right around&leverage your service for a lobbyist check. I don’t think it should be legal at ALL to become a corporate lobbyist if you’ve served in Congress. At minimum there should be a long wait period. Ted Cruz ✔ @tedcruz Here’s something I don’t say often: on this point, I AGREE with @AOC Indeed, I have...

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) appeared on Fox News’ “Hannity” this week to discuss the origins of the Steele dossier. He said it should really be called the “Simpson” dossier. Although Christopher Steele likely contributed “stories” to the dossier, and his years of experience in British intelligence lent credence to the document, Nunes believes that Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson may actually have written the majority of it. In his book “Spygate,” journalist Dan Bongino makes the same case. He points out the striking similarities between articles Simpson and his wife, Mary Jacoby wrote for the Wall Street Journal in 2007...

Have you ever noticed what Paul Manafort’s major crime was? After two years of investigation, after the predawn raid in which his wife was held at gunpoint, after months of solitary confinement that have left him a shell of his former self, have you noticed what drew the militant attention of the Obama Justice Department, the FBI, and, ultimately, a special counsel who made him the centerpiece of Russia-gate? According to the indictment Robert Mueller filed against him, Manafort was an unregistered “agent of the Government of Ukraine.” He also functioned as an agent of Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s president from...