Free Republic

The State Department is hosting a two-day conference on the world's oceans, beginning today, and it's expected to produce a raft of announcements and initiatives, including new marine protected areas -- one off the coast of New England -- as well as a ban on single-use plastic bags. Ahead of the conference, press reports said President Obama on Thursday will establish the first national marine monument in the Atlantic Ocean to permanently protect nearly 5,000 square miles of underwater canyons and mountains off the coast of New England. The White House said the designation will lead to a ban on...

President Obama signed a bill into law Wednesday that places stronger regulations on chemicals present in nearly every product Americans use, including detergents, clothing, paint thinners, cleansers and automobiles. The Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act passed by Congress early this month in a rare bipartisan vote. It updates the Toxic Substances Control Act, which had not been reauthorized since the Ford administration in the mid-1970s. The new law gives the Environmental Protection Agency more oversight and stronger tools to monitor chemicals that in some cases could cause cancer and other health problems in adults and...

In the latest rebuke of the Obama administration’s expansive view of executive power, a federal judge has struck down the Interior Department’s effort to regulate fracking for oil and natural gas. Judge Scott Skavdahl of the District Court of Wyoming already had put a hold on the regulations last year, and in a decision released late Tuesday, he ruled that Congress did not give Interior the power to regulate hydraulic fracturing, indeed it had expressly withheld that power with some narrow exceptions.

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) unveiled what he called the Republicans“ “policy agenda” for 2017 on Wednesday, including a plan to regain the legislative power granted to Congress in Article One of the U.S. Constitution. “Article One,” Ryan said at a pen and pad briefing with reporters at the Capitol, “this is something that our members are very animated about because this has gotten out of control. This is about the separation of powers, about the Constitution, and wresting control away from decades of executive overreach and giving it back to Congress,” he said. Ryan noted that President Barack Obama...

It’s a lie often repeated that Obama was a Constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago law school. In fact, he was just a lecturer there for a short time who never much impressed his colleagues. Watching this administration in action one wonders what, if anything, he understands about the Constitution at all. His is an administration based on flouting it. It’s true that the judicial process moves slowly and such conduct can continue for a while until halted, but repeatedly the courts are catching up. In fact, the Supreme Court has ruled unanimously against the administration 20 times....

When Wyoming rancher Andy Johnson decided to create a stock pond for horses and cattle on his 8-acre property, he did what any conscientious landowner would do. He got permits from both the state and local government before moving any dirt. What he didn’t count on was a power-mad Environmental Protection Agency.

The Navajo residents of Page, Ariz., have gotten to the point where they openly worry their modest rush hour may end altogether. The rush hour consists of only a few hundred cars carrying 520 people out to the Navajo Generating Station (NGS), heading down a windy road to the coal-fired power plant, which is dramatically positioned on a ridge a mile from the shores of Lake Powell, the second largest man-made reservoir in the United States. The Navajo coal plant’s lease is set to expire in 2019, pending complex negotiations aimed at extending operations until 2044. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)...

Forty-three Republican senators on Monday joined the legal challenge to President Barack Obama’s actions on immigration, arguing that the president overstepped his constitutional authority in unilaterally expanding programs for immigrants. The White House has countered that Obama had no choice after comprehensive legislation that passed the Senate in 2013 stalled in the GOP-led House. The senators, led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case of United States v. Texas. A lawsuit from 26 states, led by Texas, challenges Obama’s actions, with the Supreme Court set to hear arguments later this month and possibly rule...

New York is taking steps to stop therapists from trying to change young people's sexual orientation, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Saturday, joining a number of states that have acted against what's known as gay conversion therapy. The Democratic governor's move, announced Saturday, comes as gay rights advocates have campaigned state by state with mixed results to try to ban a practice that major mental health organizations have repudiated. Using executive power in a state where legislative bids to ban the therapy have stalled, Cuomo announced planned regulations that would bar insurance coverage for the therapy for minors and prohibit mental...

Judge Andrew Hanen has issued a scathing written rebuke directed at government lawyers and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for their misrepresentations made in the case filed against President Obama’s executive amnesty plan. He has ordered the Government to produce related documents by April 21st. He also warned the government against destroying any of this evidence. Hanen is the federal district judge in Brownsville, Texas, who denied the U.S. Government’s request to remove the block of Obama’s amnesty plan on Tuesday. Texas and 25 other states (Plaintiff “States”) filed a motion asking for early discovery asserting that federal lawyers...

The pilot was locked out of the cockpit. That phrase finally revealed the full horror of the crash of Germanwings flight 9525. Co-pilot Andreas Lubitz waited for the pilot to leave the cockpit, then locked the door to prevent his re-entry. After which Lubitz, for reasons unknown and perhaps unknowable, deliberately steered the jet into a harrowing 8-minute plunge ending in an explosive 434 mph impact with a rocky mountainside. One hundred fifty men, women and children met an immediate, unthinkably violent death. Lubitz, in his single-minded madness, couldn't be stopped because anyone who could change the jet's disastrous course...

The Hill reports on the House Oversight Committee and Senate Governmental Affairs Committee demanding correspondence between the nominally independent Federal Communications Commission and various organs of the Obama Administration, in an effort to determine whether the White House exerted improper pressure on the FCC to engineer the proposed “Net Neutrality” takeover of the Internet:

Anyone want to float a theory as to why? We all understand that they don’t much care about the suit and talked it up only for the benefit of suckers like you and me, who are outraged at Obama’s continued power grabs. Boehner needed a way to placate his base, if only to channel the anger so that it doesn’t veer towards impeachment demands. He doesn’t want to go down that road, especially with Republicans now set to control both chambers of Congress.So the lawsuit was a political move, “boob bait” to get us excited before the election. But...

For a few months in 1966, the budding romance between film star George Hamilton and Lynda Bird Johnson, daughter of the 36th president, was the talk of Washington....But a previously confidential FBI file - which a Philadelphia judge last week outlined in an opinion and ordered to be released - shows for the first time how far Johnson went to protect his daughter and his presidency

President Obama’s claim that he can refuse to deport 800,000 aliens here in the country illegally illustrates the unprecedented stretching of the Constitution and the rule of law. He is laying claim to presidential power that goes even beyond that claimed by the Bush administration, in which I served. There is a world of difference in refusing to enforce laws that violate the Constitution (Bush) and refusing to enforce laws because of disagreements over policy (Obama).