Free Republic

Israel's highest court has struck down a controversial judicial overhaul law enacted last year by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that would have limited the justices' power...The court struck down a law...that would have taken away the court's powers to abrogate government decisions it deems to be "unreasonable in the extreme."

Justice Samuel Alito said Congress has “no authority” to regulate the Supreme Court in an interview with the Wall Street Journal’s opinion section published Friday, pushing back against Democrats’ attempt to mandate stronger ethics rules. Alito, one of the high court’s leading conservatives, is just one of multiple justices who have come under recent scrutiny for ethics controversies that have fueled the renewed push. “I know this is a controversial view, but I’m willing to say it,” Alito told the Journal. “No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period.” Although the Constitution...

For several years now, the news from Israel has included reports on judicial battles between the Knesset and Israel’s supreme court. The supreme court strikes down laws passed by the Knesset, supports an explosion of harassment cases against the legislature and the Prime Minister himself… and generally acts as a partisan political body would. So, after much debate and considerable public outcry, the Knesset finally passed a set of judicial reforms on July 24, 2023, to curtail some of the powers of the supreme court. It is difficult for us in the United States to appropriately judge this action, until...

The U. S. Supreme Court issued two 6-3 decisions as it completed its last term, causing Democrats to renew their call for expanding the number of justices by four. Under President Biden, this would undoubtedly result in more liberal justices to uphold the agenda of the Democrat Party. The left’s court packing scheme, if successful, will weaken the constitutional system of checks and balances that preserves the American republic and protects against tyranny. The Founding Fathers were wary of a powerful central government that would oppress and restrict the liberties of individuals. Their experience under Britain's tyranny made them determined...

Acting as prosecutor, judge, and jury, the National Labor Relations Board is just the tip of the iceberg of government agencies wielding far too much power. “No jokes allowed. Ever.” Apparently, this is the new Twitter rule, as The Federalist national news publication faces a joint administrative and judicial broadside at the National Labor Relations Board. What the publication is going through constitutes just one of the many costly, silly, and arguably unconstitutional quasi-judicial proceedings underway throughout the federal bureaucracy.A recent case before the NLRB — in which the agency served as legislator, police, prosecutor, and judge — helps illustrate...

Restrictions on police power are, of course, imperfect, but they are much more developed and effective than those left-wing rioters and militants impose on themselves. The left doesn’t want to abolish the police; they want to be the police. At heart, the radicals rioting and fighting with the police are cops — every last man, woman, and alternatively gendered individual of them. The disorder they create is meant to clear the way to establish a new order, in which they will be the enforcers. They don’t want to be left alone to do their thing. They want to force the...

Talk to any D.C. denizen about the actual close-up view of the federal government they get, and inevitably something like the following question will come up: “Surely, people in politics know the system is broken? Why isn’t anyone doing anything to fix the numerous manifest failures of governance/policy/spending, etc?”  And inevitably, if your interlocutor is honest, they’ll be forced to give something like the following answer: “Yes, things are broken, but they’re not broken enough for anyone in D.C. to care, yet. Too much money is riding on all sides of every policy question for truth to prevail until it...

Today, I have signed into law H.R. 1158, the “Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2020” (the “Act”), which authorizes appropriations to fund the operation of certain agencies in the Federal Government through September 30, 2020. Certain provisions of the Act (such as Division A, section 8070) purport to restrict the President’s constitutional authority as Commander in Chief to control the personnel and materiel that the President believes to be necessary or advisable for the successful conduct of military missions. Others provisions (such as Division A, sections 8075, 8078, 8110, 9013, and 9016) purport to require advance notice to the Congress before the...

In the shallow world of modernity, we throw around a word like “democracy” as a stand-in for “things that I like.” Many in popular culture and elite institutions promote democracy as a cure for all that ails us—an unquestioned and unqualified blessing. Still others turn on a dime and hope for its demise as soon as it produces outcomes they don’t like. While democracy often plays a good and necessary role in a self-governing society, we have lost the healthy skepticism of its worst excesses that the Founding Fathers understood when they established the governing institutions of the United States....

George Conway, a conservative attorney whose wife is Donald Trump's senior White House counselor, has formed an organization whose goal is to push back against the president. Charter members of the group, called Checks and Balances, include former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, former acting Attorney General Stuart Gerson, former Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty and former Deputy White House Counsel Phillip Brady. Missing from its mission statement is any mention of Conway's wife, who helmed Trump's White House quest and became the first woman to successfully bring a presidential campaign across a November finish line. 'We believe in the...

A spokesman says former U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge is in critical condition after undergoing an emergency heart procedure at a hospital in Austin, Texas. Ridge spokesman Steve Aaron says the 72-year-old Ridge, Pennsylvania's Republican governor from 1995 to 2001, was attending the Republican Governors Association conference when he called for help at his hotel about 7 a.m.

Keith Weissman and Steven Rosen Are PhDs and Middle East Experts Who Did Some Lobbying. They Thought They Were Doing What Washington Insiders Always Do. Thomas O’Donnell didn’t reveal his job when he phoned Keith Weissman in 2004 and got the policy analyst’s wife. He says he didn’t want to scare her. When Weissman returned the call and found out O’Donnell was an FBI agent, his first reaction was to attempt a joke: “What did I do?” “I’m sure you didn’t do anything,” O’Donnell told him. He wanted to meet that day, for five or ten minutes, and get Weissman’s...

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia reaffirmed his commitment to defending the Constitution while speaking to the Federalist Society in his home state of New Jersey on Friday. Scalia, the preeminent conservative firebrand of the court, told the audience it is the structure of the government under the Constitution and not the liberties guaranteed under the Bill of Rights that makes us free. As reported by The Daily Signal: “Every tin horn dictator in the world today, every president for life, has a Bill of Rights,” said Scalia, author of the 2012 book Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts. “That’s...

“The same courts that have unilaterally granted foreign nationals a religious liberty right to immigrate are now preventing American Christians from praying.” “Ten Commandments” Judge Roy Moore, who is running against RINO Mitch McConnell stooge Luther Strange to fill the vacant Alabama Senate seat created when Jeff Sessions became attorney general, blasted the “do-nothing Congress” this week following the horrific 9th Circuit (Circus) ruling that made public prayer on a football field illegal, a clear violation of religious liberty and the First Amendment. Several years ago, now fired former Bremerton High School (in Washington state) football coach Joe Kennedy would...

Last month, as President Trump made broad claims about his power to pardon, I noted that he “may find out that something can be both legal and, simultaneously, an impeachable offense.” Last night, as the president issued a pardon to former Maricopa County, Ariz., sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of criminal contempt of court, some commentators argued that this was exactly the case. Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman, for example, wrote after Trump’s belligerent Phoenix rally speech that such a pardon would represent an “assault on the federal judiciary, the Constitution and the rule of law itself” for which...

At a dinner with the nation's governors, President Barack Obama says he's not naive in believing politics can be a noble endeavor. [...] Obama recounted how President Lyndon B. Johnson told a gathering of governors three days after John F. Kennedy's death that a government of checks and balances will only work when people are willing to work together for the common good. ...

For your Friday evening viewing pleasure, the third major speech he’s delivered in the last few months demanding more leadership from his colleagues. The first, in early November, was a general indictment of Senate dysfunction. The second, which came just last week, was a plea for clarity in the war on radical Islam, especially from Obama. This one is a hard knock on both parties for cowering as the executive branch gobbles up more and more of Congress’s prerogatives. And the hook, as any media-savvy pol nowadays would insist on, is Trump. That comes right at the beginning (transcript here);...

"Decisions of the Supreme Court that go beyond power delegated to the judicial branch or are contrary to the Constitution are null and void. To protect our constitutional republic, citizens, states, and the other branches of the federal government must resist any such decision." The Supreme Court looms large in American politics. In fact, many accept the claim—made by the Court and others—that the Supreme Court gets the final say as to what counts as law under our system of government. Judicial review is now bound together with the doctrine of judicial supremacy, crafted by Chief Justice Roger Taney in...

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Saturday it “boggles the mind” that the White House has not yet released the text of trade deal it’s pushing, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). “It kind of boggles the mind,” Paul said in an interview with Breitbart News. “Who’s in charge of the administration that decides to keep a trade treaty secret? To keep it classified makes no sense at all.” Paul said the administration should immediately release the text of the trade deal so members of the Senate can decide how to vote later on. The Senate recently voted to fast-track the...

President “I am not a dictator” Obama, the same man who once bemoaned that the U.S. Constitution is deeply flawed and America’s Founding Fathers had “an enormous blind spot” when they wrote it, is again complaining that our Constitutional Republic does not satisfy his dictatorial aspirations. Apparently, the inconvenience of having each state represented equally in the Senate is inconveniencing his ability to shove his leftist personal agenda down the throat of Congress and the American people. As the Washington Times reports: At a Democratic fundraiser in Chicago Thursday night, Mr. Obama told a small group of wealthy supporters that...