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The shooting could have been limited if someone else in the Aurora, Colo., movie theater had been carrying a gun, Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert said today. Gohmert reacted to the shooting, which left 12 dead, during an interview this morning on the radio program Ernest Istook Live! From The Heritage Foundation. "Well it does make me wonder, you know with all those people in the theater, was there nobody that was carrying that could've stopped this guy more quickly?" Gohmert said. "I mean in Tyler, Texas, we had-my hometown-we had a shooter come in over a domestic matter, and...

Two Democratic lawmakers in Annapolis want to spur a debate about the influence of money in politics and send a rebuke to tea party leaders by having the General Assembly ratify the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, which required that U.S. senators be elected directly by voters instead of by state legislatures. The amendment became the law of the land in 1913 after three-quarters of the states approved it. Maryland was not one of them. Attacking the amendment has become a cause among some conservatives who believe it transferred too much influence from the states to Washington. It is the...

The U.S. Constitution went into effect JUNE 21, 1788, when New Hampshire became the 9th state to ratify it. The 55 writers of the U.S. Constitution consisted of: 26 Episcopalian Christians, 11 Presbyterian Christians, 7 Congregationalist Christians, 2 Lutheran Christians, 2 Dutch Reformed Christians, 2 Methodist Christians, 2 Quaker Christians, 2 Roman Catholics Christians and 1 Deist Christian - Dr. Franklin, who called for prayer during the Constitutional Convention, June 28, 1787: "God Governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without...

The Obama administration is urging the Senate to ratify the US-Russia Strate gic Arms Reduction Treaty -- but it won't release the negotiating record for "New START" to senators who've asked for it. Denying the Senate's requests raises all sorts of suspicions about the treaty, which would reduce the US strategic nuclear arsenal by about 30 percent and cut our missile silos, bombers and submarines by nearly 20 percent. Is there is something in the blow-by-blow transcript of the talks with the Russians that the White House doesn't want senators to see? Some fear the administration did some winking and...

Few members of the Tea Party have endorsed Rand Paul’s misgivings about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but a surprising number are calling for the repeal of an older piece of transformative legislation: the 17th Amendment. If you don’t have the Constitution on your smartphone, that’s the one adopted in 1913 that provides for direct popular election of United States senators. Allowing Americans to choose their own senators seems so obvious that it is hard to remember that the nation’s founders didn’t really trust voters with the job. The people were given the right to elect House members. But...

It is an impressive testament to the abiding affection and political influence of former President Ronald Reagan that the fate of a controversial treaty now before the U.S. Senate may ultimately turn on a single question: What would Reagan do?As we had the privilege of working closely with President Reagan in connection with the foreign policy, national security and domestic implications of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (better known as the Law of the Sea Treaty or LOST), there is no question about how our 40th president felt about this accord. He so strongly opposed...

A national defense analyst says it's absolutely crazy that Pentagon officials will push the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to recommend the quick ratification of the U.N. Law of the Sea Treaty. Cliff Kincaid, president of America's Survival, has already expressed his concerns that the Chinese have been using their huge trade advantage with the U.S. to build up their navy, while the U.S. Navy plans to further reduce the number of ships in its fleet. (See earlier article) But Kincaid says instead of changing course and rebuilding to counter the Chinese threat, top Naval officials, including Chief of Naval Operations...

Lee Hamilton, the former Democratic Congressman from Indiana, reports in an August 27 column in the Indianapolis Star that the Senate will vote in September whether to join the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The treaty, the most comprehensive and potentially dangerous ever devised, would dramatically affect the ability of the U.S. to compete for oil and gas and precious minerals in the oceans of the world. The New York Times is the latest liberal paper to endorse the treaty, arguing in an August 25 editorial that "unless the United States joins up, it could very...

OTTAWA — It's a threat that has left-wing Canadian nationalists and right-wing U.S. congressmen in rare and dismayed agreement: a freeway, four football fields wide, stretching from Mexico to northern Manitoba. Groups on both sides of the political spectrum say the corridor - dubbed the NAFTA superhighway - is a primary goal of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) of North America established two years ago by the leaders of the United States, Canada and Mexico. At separate press conferences in Ottawa yesterday, the road was held out as an example of the potentially repugnant effects of the trilateral partnership....

"Because of the prohibition of the First Amendment against the enactment of any law "respecting an establishment of religion," which is made applicable to the States by the Fourteenth Amendment, state officials may not compose an official state prayer and require that it be recited in the public schools of the State at the beginning of each school day - even if the prayer is denominationally neutral and pupils who wish to do so may remain silent or be excused from the room while the prayer is being recited." --Justice Black(?), Engel v. Vitale, 1962 Contrast the 10th A. ignoring...

Dateline, 17 September, 2005, National Capitol It is self-evident that this new constitution is fatally flawed. It is unlikely to be ratified. And even if it is, it will fail in practice. Begin with ratification. One province is so opposed that it refused to take part in the drafting. The governors of two provinces refused to sign the document and are committed to its defeat. There is a hotbed of opposition in another province. One of the leaders there walked out of the drafting, and returned home to lead the effort to defeat the constitution, taking a majority of his...

The contentious debate over judicial confirmations is often portrayed as a referendum on the notion of a "living Constitution." Conservatives like U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia believe that judges should adhere to the original text of the Constitution as expressed in the meaning of the words and their understanding at the time the Constitution was ratified. Liberals respond that the Constitution must be adapted to reflect changes in society's values and attitudes. However, these viewpoints are not, in fact, mutually exclusive. In truth, no one seriously believes the Constitution is "dead." America's founding fathers provided a procedure for amending...

A U.N. treaty governing the oceans could clear the way for U.S. oil companies to tap deep oil and gas reserves offshore, which supporters say would bolster America's energy security. But that access might be blocked, because conservatives opposed to the multinational treaty are fighting hard to keep a strong Senate majority from ratifying the pact. When Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice called in January for prompt ratification of the treaty, she gave American oil companies their best hope yet to tap oil and gas reserves lying under thousands of feet of seawater. <snip>.......... In 2003, about 62 percent of...

Sorry for the vanity, but I've searched the internet and can't find an answer. Does anyone know if a State, meaning State legislatures, can repeal ratification of a US Constitutional Amendment? The Senate repeals ratification of treaties, I think. And if States can, what happens if more than 1/4 (13 States) repeal ratification of an Amendment? Could this be a backdoor approach to repeal of some Constitutional Amendments, namely the 16th (Income Tax) and 17th (Election of Senators)?? Just a thought...

So it is with the so-called Law of the Sea treaty negotiated by the late Elliott Richardson and others like him back in the ’70s, rejected by Ronald Reagan in the early years of his presidency and ignored by the Senate when Bill Clinton tried to revive it in the ’90s. But now, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has moved it out of the file of dead ideas to the front burner with a promise to Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) that the Bush administration wants it to be ratified as soon as possible. Thus, Bush is...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

It is full of grammatical errors, legal lapses and overloaded sentences designed to please too many critics. But the drafters of Afghanistan's proposed constitution -- completed last week and delivered to President Hamid Karzai for review -- say it comes close to achieving the impossible. In 182 brief articles and 39 pages, the draft -- a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post -- manages to balance the competing demands of a confused postwar society that is struggling to chart a course between Islamic and secular values, domestic tradition and international norms, immediate political needs and permanent legal...