Free Republic

U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, Judge Andrew Hanen’s ruling against the Obama Administration’s unilateral rewriting of the nation’s immigration laws has Democrats incensed. Hanen demolished the Administration’s contention that President Obama’s actions were within his “prosecutorial discretion.” “It is within the President’s discretion not to prosecute individuals who have broken our laws,” the Judge said. “It is not within his discretion to create new laws without Congressional legislation.” Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson vowed to press ahead regardless of the ruling. “The opinion of a single judge in Texas can’t overturn the decision of the President...

CARSON CITY, NEV. – A bill that would make it easier for immigrants with temporary legal status to get a Nevada teaching license has passed its first legislative hurdle. The bill could affect students who have work permits also known as DACA recipients or DREAMers. Existing law allows the state superintendent to give a teaching license to someone who is not a citizen but has a work permit only if there's a teacher shortage for a subject the person can teach. Otherwise, applicants must be a citizen or legal resident. The bill would allow those immigrants to get a teaching...

A college student in Oregon has been banned from anywhere on campus that a fellow student is, not because he has done anything wrong, but because he “resembles” the person who raped that student. That means if the student lives in a dorm and the student who was raped is there, he cannot sleep in his own dorm. If she has a class in a room near him, he is not allowed to go to class. Again, this is not because he did anything, but literally because he “looked like the person who had raped her.” The campus, which is...

Republican senators Mike Lee, Ben Sasse, and Rand Paul have all been high profile opponents of the Obama administrations current plan to regulate the internet -- in particular, Lee has called the regulation a government "takeover" of the internet and says it amounts to a "a massive tax increase on the middle class, being passed in the dead of night without the American public really being made aware of what is going on.” And when Lee says that the American public isn't aware of what's going on, that is in no way hyperbole. FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai has emerged as...

Muslim Leader Who Called Israel a ‘Suspect’ After 9/11 Meets with Biden at White House Critics call Salam Al-Marayati anti-Israel and soft on terrorism BY: Adam Kredo February 18, 2015 5:00 am A controversial U.S. Muslim leader who has been highly critical of Israel and said that the Jewish state should be on the “suspect list” in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks participated on Tuesday in a White House summit on Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) that featured Vice President Joe Biden. Salam Al-Marayati, founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), tweeted out a photo of himself at...

Concerned that “the low cost of Internet communications could adversely impact candidates who communicate by legitimate regulated paid media,” the Federal Elections Commission is considering regulations that would place a cap on blogs and tweets that conforms with campaign finance rules. Under the proposed scheme, the FEC would estimate the monetary value of every political comment made on these media. Once the accumulated value of comments reached the ceiling for contributions to a candidate or ballot measure, the blogger or tweeter would be ordered to stop making any additional comments prior to election day. Failure to do so would subject...

Ten Thousand Commandments is the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s annual survey of the federal regulatory state. Authored by CEI Vice President for Policy Clyde Wayne Crews, it shines a light on the large, growing, and hidden costs of America’s regulatory state. The scope of federal government spending and deficits is sobering, but federal regulations cost hundreds of billions – perhaps trillions – of dollars annually. Unfortunately, they get little attention in policy debates. Regulatory costs are difficult to quantify because, unlike taxes, they are unbudgeted and often indirect. Ten Thousand Commandments compiles scattered government and private data on the numbers and...

Gordon Van Gilder, a 72-year-old retired schoolteacher in New Jersey, faces a 10-year prison sentence for possessing an unloaded 18th-century flintlock pistol in his car. Mr. Van Gilder, a collector of 18th-century memorabilia, said he had the gun unloaded and wrapped in a cloth in the glove compartment of his vehicle when he was pulled over in November by a Cumberland County sheriff’s deputy for a minor traffic violation, according to a video posted last week by NRA News. After consenting to a search of his vehicle, Mr. Van Gilder said he alerted the deputy of the pistol in his...

Back up the shredders — the Tea Party could be coming. The city’s new municipal- ID program allows for personal info provided by applicants to be destroyed at the end of 2016, in case a conservative Republican wins the White House and demands the data, the law’s co-sponsor told The Post on Monday. City Councilman Carlos Menchaca (D-Brooklyn) said the measure was crafted so data submitted by those seeking the cards can be destroyed on Dec. 31, 2016. The cards are aimed at undocumented immigrants. “In case a Tea Party Republican comes into office and says, ‘We want all of...

WAUWATOSA, Wis. – Union protesters targeted Gov. Scott Walker’s private residence Monday with a protest over cuts in the Governor’s most recent budget proposal. Schools and Communities United, an amalgam of unions and left-wing activist groups, issued a press release Monday that reads: Schools and Communities United is organizing a Presidents’ Day action in opposition to Walker’s proposed budget cuts near Scott Walker’s house on Monday, February 16 at 4:30pm.

Members of a Henderson family may proceed with their civil rights case against police officers who took over their homes without warrants in 2011, but a federal judge has thrown out the family’s unusual Third Amendment claim. Michael and Linda Mitchell and their adult son, Anthony, filed the lawsuit in 2013 against Henderson and North Las Vegas police. The case included a seldom-raised claim that police violated the Third Amendment, which places restrictions on the quartering of soldiers in private homes. “While we are sorry that we will not be able to have a jury decide whether the Mitchell family’s...

ATF Trying to Ban AR-15 Ammo Under Guise of "Law Enforcement Safety" Katie Pavlich | Feb 16, 2015 In its never ending goal to ban modern sporting rifles, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has proposed new regulations banning common AR-15 ammunition, arguing it's necessary to protect the safety of law enforcement officers. The NRA sounded the alarm late last week: You can read the bureaucratic language justifying the proposal here. The new proposal will allow Attorney General Eric Holder to determine if the ammunition in question qualifies under the broad definition of "sporting purposes." Current law gives ATF...

A state-level bureaucrat is standing up to the the central government planners is a most unusual way. Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction, Diane Douglas, has informed all school districts in the Grand Canyon State that they have blanket authority to ignore all federal nutrition mandates regulating school fundraisers. "Forcing parents and other supporters of schools to only offer federally approved food and snacks at fundraisers is a perfect example of the overreach of government and intrusion into local control," Douglas said in a statement. "I have ordered effective immediately, that the ADE Health and Nutrition Services division grant exemptions for...

José was looking for peace and quiet, in addition to work, when he decided to settle in the hinterlands of upstate New York 14 years ago. “A lot of farmland and trees,” he recalled, speaking in Spanish. “It reminded me of my village in Mexico.” But he quickly learned that being poor and undocumented and living far from the well-established immigrant networks found in the nation’s big cities made life especially difficult. Such challenges are a fact of life for the large and growing population of immigrants across the country who have bypassed traditional gateway cities like New York and...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog The “most transparent administration in history” says it won’t let the public see its 332 page net neutrality plan until after the FCC votes on its implementation The Obama administration has just said that it won’t let the public see its 332 page proposal for net neutrality until after the FCC votes on its implementation.Which reminds me of this Nancy Pelosi gem regarding Obamacare:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoE1R-xH5ToRepublican FCC Commissioner Ajit Paisaid has seen the proposal. Paisaid said Obama’s net neutrality plan was 332 pages long, and that:“It gives the FCC the power to micromanage virtually every aspect of how...

President George W. Bush was fond of saying that "9/11 changed everything." He used that one-liner often as a purported moral basis to justify the radical restructuring of federal law and the federal assault on personal liberties over which he presided. He cast aside his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution; he rejected his oath to enforce all federal laws faithfully; and he moved the government decidedly in the direction of secret laws, secret procedures and secret courts. During his presidency, Congress enacted the Patriot Act. This legislation permits federal agents to write their own search warrants when...

U.S. President Barack Obama singled out office supply giant Staples Inc as undercutting his healthcare reform law and said large corporations should not use the health insurance issue as an excuse for cutting wages, the news website BuzzFeed reported. "It's one thing when you've got a mom-and-pop store who can't afford to provide paid sick leave or health insurance or minimum wage to workers … but when I hear large corporations that make billions of dollars in profits trying to blame our interest in providing health insurance as an excuse for cutting back workers’ wages, shame on them,” Obama said...

(CNSNews.com) -- The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is holding a hearing today to receive public feedback on whether it should create new rules regulating political speech, including political speech on the Internet that one commissioner warned could affect blogs, YouTube videos and even websites like the Drudge Report. The hearing is a response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in McCutcheon v. FEC last year, which struck down the FEC’s previous cap on aggregate campaign contributions from a single donor in an election cycle. Before the decision, individuals were limited to a combined total of $46,200 in contributions to all...

If the roughly four to five million immigrants who could benefit from President Barack Obama’s executive order were to be deported, it would come with a price tag of about $25 billion. That was the estimate by Politico, which said it came up with the figure based on a variety of sources. Politico estimated that it costs roughly $7,200 to deport someone. The Department of Homeland Security told Politico that it costs closer to $8,661. Deportations have skyrocketed under Obama, reaching a record – more than 2 million since he became president. The president, however, has accused Congress of not...

The question of the so-called DREAMers – the millions of people who were brought into the United States as children and grew up undocumented even as they became as thoroughly Americanized as the nachos at a baseball game – will present politicians in the 2016 presidential elections with a starkly simple proposal: you’re either with them, or against them. Stand unequivocally with them – that is, agree that the only way to deal with their limbo is to grant them a legal status that will lead to citizenship and offer a similar path for family members and friends who don’t...