Free Republic

Harvard Law School was embarrassed recently when one of its graduates, the putative President of the United States, demonstrated that he was unaware that the supreme Court has constitutional authority to declare an act of Congress unconstitutional. And after reading a recent paper by Harvard law professor Einer Elhauge, one wonders whether the academic standards (or is it the moral standards?) of that once great school have collapsed. Professor Elhauge says in “If Health Insurance Mandates Are Unconstitutional, Why Did the Founding Fathers Back Them?” (The New Republic, April 13, 2012), that Congress may force us to buy health insurance...

The Affordable Care Act is looking less and less affordable. Start with the IRS’s new estimate for what the cheapest family plan will cost by 2016: $20,000 a year to cover two adults and three kids. And that will only cover 60 percent of medical bills, so add hefty out-of-pocket costs, too. The next surprise is for parents who thought their kids would be covered by an employer. Sloppy wording in the law left that unclear until last week, when the IRS ruled that kids won’t be covered. Starting in 2014, the law will require employers with 50 or more...

Jan. 1, 2014, will find the fat lady singing for my husband and me. That is when smokers will have to "cough up" extra money for their health insurance because of a provision of the Affordable Health Act. I am 60, which means that I will pay $5,000 extra. My husband at 54 will pay more than $4,000 extra each year. Mind you that this is on top of the insurance payments we already make.

The White House on Sunday stepped up pressure on Republicans to adopt a short-term budget patch that would cancel the $85 billion in spending “sequesters” due on March 1, saying that government spending is still needed to prop up a stubbornly sluggish economy. Late last week, White House officials laid out a list of potential cuts they would have to make if the sequesters aren’t averted, saying they’d be forced to kick children out of the Head Start education program and cut federal loans to small businesses. The officials even warned that more American workers could die as a result...

While Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman has been arguing that now is not the time for us to be worrying about the federal government’s debt, he does admit that a long term solution is necessary. “In the short run we can always inflate the currency as a means of defaulting on federal obligations,” Krugman said. “But in the long term there are significant demographic problems that require a real solution.” One of the significant demographic problems cited by Krugman was the aging population. “As people get older they tend to need more medical services,” Krugman recounted. “With our advanced...

Many of us have questioned what caused Roberts to switch his vote on ObamaCare at the last minute, as reported by CBS, and doing so, so late that the Conservative Justices were forced to rewrite their majority opinion to be minority dissent. These facts may answer that question. In 2000 Justice Roberts and his wife Jane adopted two children. Initially it was apparent that the adoptions were "from a Latin American country", but over time it has become apparent that the adopted children were not Latin American, but were Irish. Why this matters will become evident. In 2005 the NY...

Many of us have questioned what causedRoberts to switch his vote on ObamaCare at the last minute, as repo..., and doing so, so late that the Conservative Justices were forced to rewrite their majority opinion to be minority dissent. These facts may answer that question.

February 9, 2013 Ambush at Hilton Hollow Russ Vaughn Wow! The commander-in-chief of the most powerful military force the world has ever seen walked right into an ambush with no cover, no concealment, and no security at the National Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton. Forced to sit at the dais and suck it up while a renowned pediatric neurosurgeon from Johns Hopkins Medical School, Dr. Benjamin Carson, debunked the concept of Obamacare as well as pointing out the president's seeming indifference to the national debt, Obama did his best to smile but he simply could not suppress that droned-out...

Actually, we already saw it last quarter and there’ll be no escaping it this year. To the shock of many, U.S. GDP shrank in the fourth quarter of 2012 by 0.1%. Immediately, however, economists and commentators flooded the media with reassuring explanations. Super Storm Sandy reduced economic activity in the areas it ravaged; worries about the fiscal cliff and sequestration dampened business spending and government defense spending; businesses let inventory levels dwindle. Even the Federal Reserve commented that the GDP drop was the result of “weather-related disruptions and other transitory factors.” All this is true, to some extent. But none...

The costs of Obamacare are not just hitting businesses this year--they are also hitting the government, and public employees as well. Virginia, for example, is about to limit part-time employees to 29 hours per week in order to avoid triggering Obamacare’s requirement that employers provide health insurance to those working 30 hours per week or more. The state cannot afford the $110 million annual cost of insurance. Elsewhere, public institutions are taking similar steps to limit part-time work. In Ohio, Youngstown State University recently announced a 29-hour-per-week part-time limit, and placed employees on notice that they would be fired if...

ObamaCare: Faced with a string of court losses to those defending the First Amendment and religious liberty, HHS reworded its contraceptive mandate. But those who were fooled once won’t be fooled again. While liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, on these pages, and others have declared the new Health and Human Services regulations forcing religious institutions to violate their consciences as some sort of victory for the Catholic Church, any more such victories will surely mean the end of religious liberty in this country. Certainly the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops does not accept what HHS calls an "accommodation" as...

<p>There were a lot of taxes in The Affordable Care Act that Nancy Pelosi famously said "we have to pass the bill so that we can find out what's in it." The American Enterprise Institute has tracked some of the taxes enacted on the medical and pharmaceutical industries, and they are expected to raise billions — in the short term. However, those costs still have to be paid, and consumers are expected to shoulder many of them in 2016.</p>

"Whether this weekend finds you blowing two feet of snow off the driveway or counting the hours until "Downton Abbey," make time to watch the video of Dr. Ben Carson speaking to the White House prayer breakfast this week. Seated in view to his right are Senator Jeff Sessions and President Obama. One doesn't look happy. You know something's coming when Dr. Carson says, "It's not my intention to offend anyone. But it's hard not to. The PC police are out in force everywhere."

What to do if the nation fails to fall in line behind new gun grabbing legislation and doesn’t want to put limits on ammo capacity? How about if they rebel against the idea of taxing the heck out of ammo? What if it just seems like there simply isn’t a majority on board with new gun control legislation? Well, if you follow the Obamacare model, you could always consider making extra insurance on weapons technology mandatory. If you can’t force people to do what you want, force them to buy insurance: That seems to be the strategy of the liberal...

President Obama warned in his weekly address that the sequester would deal a "huge blow to middle-class families and our economy as a whole" and urged Congress to strike a compromise deal to avert the $85 billion in automatic cuts. "There’s certainly no reason that middle-class families and small businesses should suffer just because Washington couldn’t come together and eliminate a few special-interest tax loopholes, or government programs that just don’t work," Obama said. "At a time when economists and business leaders from across the spectrum have said that our economy is poised for progress, we shouldn’t allow self-inflicted wounds...

The Obama administration has made it abundantly clear that it would really just be oh so very helpful if all of the states would voluntarily comply with their proffered Medicaid expansion deal; ObamaCare really needs everybody to cooperate in order to work properly, so it’s really most unfortunate for them that the Supreme Court ruled last June that states were within their rights to decline the expansions without the threat of the total loss of federal Medicaid funding being held over their heads.It was something of a boon to the Obama administration when Republican governors John Kasich in Ohio and...

Thank you so much. Mr. President, Mr. Vice President, Mrs. Obama, distinguished guests – which included everybody. Thank you so much for this wonderful honor to be at this stage again. I was here 16 years ago, and the fact that they invited me back means that I didn’t offend too many people, so that was great. [LAUGHTER] I want to start by reading four texts which will put into I want to start by reading four texts which will put into context what I’m going to say. Proverbs 11:9 With his mouth the Godless destroys his neighbor, but through...

In May, 2009, Republican senators took the unusual step of inviting a pollster to speak to them at their weekly lunch. The pollster told them, in effect, that, if they opposed health care reform, the party would suffer large losses in 2010. The same bogus polls are being used to push Republicans into destroying the largest remaining component of their “ground game” — the Second Amendment community. If they resist, as we, with some difficulty, forced them to do on ObamaCare, they will take the Senate in 2014. Guns are the new ObamaCare. In many senses. First of all, you...

ObamaCare’s benevolent promise to help control and curtail healthcare-related costs is already going magnificently bust; why not just extend the consequences of heightened compliance costs and pricey taxes to an entirely other but equally indispensable economic sector while they’re at it, right? As the Federal Drug Administration so munificently explains, part of ObamaCare’s overall purpose is to help provide Americans with all of the tools they need to lead healthier lives (with a universal healthcare system that requires society to absorb the costs of individuals’ daily health-related decisions, what choice do they have but to butt into those decisions?) —...

(CNSNews.com) - Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, issued a statement on Thursday signaling to the Obama Administration that the bishops will not make a separate deal to exempt Catholic institutions from an Obamacare mandate that requires health-care plans to cover sterilizations, contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs that leaves lay Catholic business owners and individual employees still subject to the mandate. “In obedience to our Judeo-Christian heritage, we have consistently taught our people to live their lives during the week to reflect the same beliefs that they proclaim on the Sabbath,” said Cardinal...