Free Republic

President Trump is nominating federal judges, and Supreme Court Justices such as Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who claim to be committed to “originalism.” This approach to constitutional law requires that the Constitution be interpreted to mean today what the text was intended or understood to mean at the time it was written. But originalism conflicts sharply with American reality and American ideals. Years ago, Frank Sinatra sang a song about what America meant to him. The last line was “But especially the people, that’s America to me.” If that’s what America is, then originalism is unamerican. Because there is no place...

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union…” By Wallace S. Bruschweiler & William Palumbo Do you remember the big Constitutional convention about ten years ago, where it was decided that “We the People” would be substituted by “the media?” We don’t either. Did you know that the nation’s primary concern is that some people aren’t paying the IRS enough money in taxes? Until Tuesday evening, we did not know that either. In a country with our first amendment, which protects freedom of speech and freedom of the press – among other rights...

Recent First Amendment rulings by the Supreme Court could force courts and university administrators to take a closer look at controversial practices that have marginalized certain political views – often conservative ones – on campus. Free speech on campus has emerged as a hot debate in recent years, amid a rash of speakers being disinvited or violently protested. These issues are often handled in-house – but now, the courts could hold sway. “We should expect college campuses to truly be marketplaces of ideas where students learn to value free speech and open inquiry and take that lesson with them as...

Tuesday on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity,” conservative talker and legal expert Mark Levin criticized the plea deal Michael Cohen made with the prosecutor for the Southern District of New York regarding campaign finance law violations. Levin argued Cohen pled guilty to the charge despite them not being offenses and at the behest of the prosecutor who insisted they were offenses. snip The general counsel for the Clinton mob family, Lanny Davis, he had his client pleaded two counts of criminality that don’t exist. These campaign finance violations that is all over TV, they are saying implicates the president of the...

We must be very careful and only trust the trustworthy - we must trust the Constitution, the rule of law, and duly elected President Trump who stands for both Sir Alexander Fraser Tytler (1747-1813), a Scottish jurist and historian, provides an explanation for why great societies do not survive for more than 200 years: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public...

New Article: Is Kamala Harris Eligible to be President? Junior CA Senator May Run In 2020, by Sharon Rondeau, at The Post & Email (Aug. 19, 2018) — Given that California Sen. Kamala Harris’s Wikipedia biography states that she was born in Oakland, CA in 1964 to immigrant parents and speculation exists that she plans to run for president in 2020, Golden State citizen Gary Wilmott has been seeking information as to her citizenship status and whether or not she meets the constitutional requirement of “natural born Citizen.” The Wikipedia entry states that Harris’s mother, Dr. Shyamala G. Harris, was...

History is replete with good things to emulate and horrid things to avoid. The first thing to emulate in free government is to assume everyone in it is a rogue, a knave, and is willing to ruin the nation for personal gain. To ignore high criminals in government is to invite national ruin. Like constitutional patriots today frustrated with the lack of accountability of Deep State operatives from Obama on down through the DOJ and FBI for high crimes and felonies against the sovereign people, so too did Algernon Sidney (1622-1683) admonish a system in which the king’s magistrates often...

It’s Time: There hasn’t been one since the earliest days of our founding, but conservatives — increasingly alarmed by creeping socialism, Left-wing courts, and Democratic efforts to overturn the 2016 election are now turning their attention more avidly towards a “constitutional convention.” In the days of the Tea Party movement, a book called “The Liberty Amendments” by constitutional scholar, author, talk host and former Reagan Justice Department official Mark Levin sparked a modern-day convention movement that would operate much as the first “con-con” which took place from May 25 to September 17, 1787 in Philadelphia. “I think we’re three or...

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts, As many readers of this website have noticed, the United States has lost its character and become a dysfunctional society. In place of a largely homogeneous population once united in veneration of the Constitution, there exists today massive diversity which Identity Politics has used to disunite the population into separate interest groups. No clause or article of the Constitution, nor the Bill of Rights, is safe. The George W. Bush and Obama regimes destroyed two of the most important protections of civil liberty—habeas corpus and due process. Bush declared indefinite imprisonment on suspicion alone...

Consider a few facts: Donald Trump is in the White House, despite winning almost three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. The Senate, the country’s most powerful legislative chamber, grants the same representation to Wyoming’s 579,315 residents as it does to 39,536,653 Californians. Key voting rights are denied to citizens in the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and other United States territories. The American government is structured by an 18th-century text that is almost impossible to change. These ills didn’t come about by accident; the subversion of democracy was the explicit intent of the Constitution’s framers. For James Madison, writing...

There is a threat implicit in this because Muhammad taught that after the invitation to Islam comes the invitation to dhimmitude, and then warfare. There is a threat implicit in this because Muhammad taught that after the invitation to Islam comes the invitation to dhimmitude, and then warfare. A hadith depicts Muhammad saying: “Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war…When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these you also accept it and withhold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them...

(Reuters) - About 100 protesters, many wearing T-shirts emblazoned with “NRA = Not Real Activists,” marched through the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Dallas in May to slam the powerful gun lobby as too conciliatory on gun rights and rally for their candidate for the board. Adam Kraut, a gun rights lawyer, fell about 4,000 votes short of the 71,000 needed for election, but earned 5,000 more than the previous year, a sign of the growth of the Second Amendment purists within the NRA known to many as “gundamentalists.” With opinion polls showing U.S. public support for more gun...

Civics 101: Americans who are at least 40 years old remember their basic American civics and government classes which taught how our government functions, how Congress works, what a republic is versus a pure democracy, and, of course, the Constitution. Instruction was particularly focused on the Bill of Rights — the first 10 amendments to the Constitution as basic building blocks of a free and thriving society written by our founders and ratified by the first 13 states. Learning how government functions and learning about our core constitutional rights is fundamental to the preservation of our country.

The XXII Amendment to the Constitution says, in part, "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once." Notice what this Amendment prohibits: "No person shall be elected to the office of the President". It says it twice.Notice also what the Amendment does not say: "Any person having served blah, blah, blah shall...

South Africa will push ahead with plans to amend the constitution to allow land expropriation without compensation, its president says. In a recorded address, President Cyril Ramaphosa said the ruling ANC will "finalise a proposed amendment" allowing the move. He said the reform was "of critical importance" to the economy. Recent months have seen growing anger about the slow pace of land reform in South Africa. The country's white minority is believed to have a disproportionate hold over land, with a few thousand white commercial farmers possessing the most fertile lands. However, critics fear expropriation could lead to land grabs,...

When Alexander Hamilton penned the 85th Federalist, Concluding Remarks, in August 1788, eleven states had ratified the Constitution. While there was no practical need to continue his exhaustive writing pace, Hamilton nonetheless summarized in this last Federalist the expected benefits of Constitutional government. Most importantly, the Constitution corrected the major defects of the Articles of Confederation and would restore unity to a rapidly dissolving Union. Having witnessed the threat of individual states allying with European monarchies such as Spain or re-allying with Great Britain, our Framers wisely determined that only a collection of republics were suitable members under the new...

Everything that I need to know about Democracy, I learned in High School. It’s true. By the time I started work at 14, I had a very good understanding about how democracy worked. Now, this wasn’t by sitting down in Civics Class. It wasn’t by listening to a teacher instruct us. It wasn’t by reading a book on politics. No. It was by my experiences on Student Council. You know, it is absolutely amazing to me that I received such a profound understanding at such an early age. Even my father, a staunch liberal democrat, couldn’t grasp his arms around...

I want to urge legislative consideration to the amending of our current civil rights legislation to include non discrimination against one's political opinion. I began this analyses after Black supporters of our elected president wearing MAGA hats were put out by a low life Uber driver in New York City , but of far greater concern are alt-leftists companies like Facebook and Twitter purging conservative posters in the stream of public accommodation and commerce. ( today causing a 25% collapse of Facebook Stock value.) We learned from the Supreme Court case Marsh vs. Alabama ( URL above) the following analyses...

New York, Connecticut, Maryland, and New Jersey are suing the federal government claiming that "the tax cut legislation unconstitutionally punishes states who choose to impose high tax rates. By limiting the amount of state and local taxes that can be deducted from income that is taxed at the federal level the legislation impedes our ability to shift some of the tax burden onto other states as has been the custom since federal income tax was implemented in 1916." While there is nothing in the original Constitution or in any of the Amendments suggesting that federal taxes must allow deductions for...

I expected the reaction to a recent op-ed I published calling for the end of birthright citizenship to be cantankerous. I even expected it to be hysterical—from the Left. I did not expect self-described “conservatives” to be just as hysterical as the Left, and to use precisely the same terms. “Nativist.” “Xenophobe.” “Bigot.” “Racist.” “White nationalist.” “White supremacist.” One point I’ve been making for a while is that one faction of “conservatism”—let’s call it the anti-Trump wing, although the phenomenon long predates Trump—sounds and acts with every passing year more like a “conservative” subdivision of the Left. Like the Left,...