Free Republic

The War Powers Resolution passed Thursday by the House in an effort to restrict President Trump’s ability to take military action to defend America against attack from Iran is a meaningless political document designed only to embarrass the president. The nonbinding resolution criticizes the president for not “consulting” with Congress and receiving its “authorization” before ordering the killing of Iranian general and terrorist mastermind Qassem Soleimani. The resolution also orders Trump to stop using military force against Iran until he gets congressional approval. Trump acted fully within his constitutional authority when he ordered the drone strike against Soleimani, a mass...

Those who claim that President Trump is guilty of obstructing justice because he fired James Comey or because he asked Comey if he could go easy on Michael Flynn are way off base. And so is Robert Mueller if he is actually conducting such an investigation. What none of these critics seems to understand is that under our Constitution, the executive power of the federal government is fully vested in the president. That includes the responsibility to ensure that “the Laws be faithfully executed.” In other words, the president is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States, not...

Cruz #1 in Fox News’s Weekly Analysis of Candidates’ Ranking in 2016 RaceHOUSTON, Texas – Yesterday, in the weekly update of Fox News’s Presidential Power Index, Digital Politics editor Chris Stirewalt offered his analysis on America’s Newsroom with Gretchen Carlson for why Ted Cruz replaces Jeb Bush as this week’s number one pick to win the 2016 GOP Primary, citing Cruz’s strong positioning to compete against the party’s establishment candidate.To view the full TV segment, please click here. Excerpt of segment transcript included below:Gretchen Carlson: Time now for the 2016 Presidential Power Index, where we look every week at who’s...

"President Obama went back to his vacation on Martha's Vineyard Tuesday evening after spending less than 48 hours in Washington, leaving people puzzled over why he came back in the first place," Justin Sink wrote yesterday at The Hill. Actually, Obama probably dropped into Washington, D.C., in August--not the most pleasant time of year to visit the swamp that neither Virginia nor Maryland wanted--because he was getting his balls busted from every ideological point on the compass over his absence. Why won't he do something about the unrest in Ferguson and ISIL beheading James Foley? Ummm...What? Exactly? ... The United...

This ad from Stansberry just appeared on Drudge, predicting that the economy will boom in Obama's second term, giving him the leeway to expand his power so far as to enable a third and maybe fourth term. To save you the trouble of watching/listening to the whole video, here's a summary: Obama is in the right place at the right time to take advantage of the forthcoming oil and gas boom due to fracking and horizontal drilling technology. Spindletop (1901) made possible the expansion of presidential power under Teddy Roosevelt. The East Texas field exploited by H.L. Hunt (1934) led...

President Barack Obama is starting to channel his inner Cheney. For years, Obama talked about the limits on presidential power. Now, driven either by principle or political expediency, he's working to build and maintain a powerful presidency that pushes the edge of what it can do, while often telling Congress and the courts to mind their own business. In the last week alone, he refused a subpoena to share Justice Department emails with Congress, told courts he doesn't have to justify his claimed power to assassinate suspected terrorists, and decided to stop deporting certain illegal immigrants even though Congress has...

ANN ARBOR, MICH. -- In July 1987, then-Representative Dick Cheney, the top Republican on the committee investigating the Iran-contra scandal, turned on his hearing room microphone and delivered, in his characteristically measured tone, a revolutionary claim. President Reagan and his top aides, he asserted, were free to ignore a 1982 law at the center of the scandal. Known as the Boland Amendment, it banned US assistance to anti-Marxist militants in Nicaragua. "I personally do not believe the Boland Amendment applied to the president, nor to his immediate staff," Cheney said. Most of Cheney's colleagues did not share his vision of...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration was running several intelligence programs, including one major activity, that it kept secret from Congress until whistle-blowers told the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, the committee's chairman said on Sunday. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, said on Fox News Sunday he had written a four-page to President George W. Bush in May warning him that the failure to disclose the intelligence activities to Congress may be a violation of the law. In doing so, he confirmed a story that first ran in Sunday editions of the New...

WASHINGTON -- The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, accusing the White House of a ''very blatant encroachment" on congressional authority, said yesterday he will hold an oversight hearing into President Bush's assertion that he has the power to bypass more than 750 laws enacted over the past five years. ''There is some need for some oversight by Congress to assert its authority here," Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said in an interview. ''What's the point of having a statute if . . . the president can cherry-pick what he likes and what he doesn't like?" Specter said he plans...

Unfortunately, George Will believes that Congress has the power to micromanage the president's explicit commander-in-chief responsibilities. He reads the "necessary and proper clause" the way activist judges read the commerce clause, i.e., without context or limitation. Will properly notes that the Constitution "empowers Congress to ratify treaties, declare war, fund and regulate military forces, and make laws ’necessary and proper’ for the execution of all presidential powers." [Will's emphasis.] But as Joseph Story, the great Supreme Court justice and constitutional scholar correctly wrote: "The clause, in its just sense, then, does not enlarge any other power, specifically granted; nor is...

Election-Year Forecast January 15, 2004 Secretary of State Colin Powell now admits, or acknowledges, or however you want to put it, that he hasn’t seen a “smoking gun” proving that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or terrorist connections, though he says it was nonetheless “prudent” to suppose so “at the time.” The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has concluded that the Bush administration misrepresented the “threat” from Saddam Hussein. Paul O’Neill, President Bush’s former secretary of the Treasury, says Bush was determined to depose Saddam Hussein as soon as he took office, long before the 9/11 attacks, and...

Historian Richard Neustadt Dies at 84 By BIPASHA RAY Associated Press Writer BOSTON (AP) -- Richard E. Neustadt, the noted presidential adviser, scholar and historian who was a founder of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, has died, close friend and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich said Saturday. He was 84. Neustadt died Friday in England, Reich told The Associated Press, adding he learned the news from Neustadt's wife. The historian had fallen about a week ago and his health rapidly declined, he said. "He was a very vigorous man, intellectually sharp as a tack and obviously one of America's pre-eminent...

<p>Critics claim office is more potent now than at any time in recent history.</p> <p>WASHINGTON -- It's not a bad job considering it comes with a rent-free mansion and door-to-door limousine service, but President Bush maintains that the position he holds as the leader of the free world should come with an additional perk -- power.</p>