FREEDOMWORKS 09/06/2015

Congressional Republicans Can't Afford to Get Pushed Around on Budget Caps    - by Josh Withrow Congress is coming back to town, and that means it’s time to hide our wallets. If the leadership of both parties are left to their own devices, by the end of September the government’s spending will have increased once again. This outcome is by no means inevitable; indeed, it shouldn’t even be possible after the Republicans took solid control of both the House and Senate. It will be up to those principled leaders who do care about the financial peril our nation faces to put the brakes on any effort to speed up the government’s spending. President Obama and Senate Minority leader Harry Reid have made it clear for months that their priority has been to increase spending above the spending restraints they agreed to in 2011 when the president signed the Budget Control Act (BCA) into law. And in June, Senate Democrats straight-up threatened to shut the government down if they didn’t get the increases in spending that they desired. Read more here... Fourteen States May See Double-Digit Increases On at Least 40 Percent of ObamaCare Health Products  - by Jason Pye In case you have not already heard, health insurance companies operating on the ObamaCare exchanges in several states have requested big premium increases for health plans that will be available in the 2016 open enrollment period. Insurers have cited a higher utilization of healthcare as one of the reasons for the proposed increases, which must be approved by state regulators. In short, in many instances, they are paying out more in claims than they are receiving in premiums. A report released on Wednesday by Agile Health Insurance offers some details on the extent of the rate increases. Insurers request increases on a plan-by-plan basis with justification for the hike required. The report is based on a review of products, which, as it notes, "is a collection of plans from the same insurer" and "may contain plans with different metal levels." Read more here... Free Market HealthCare with Dr. Gray - Part II FreedomWorks' Congressman of the Month - Tim Huelskamp     -by Logan Albright This month’s spotlight falls on Rep. Tim Huelskamp, who has represented Kansas’ 1st District since 2011, and who has one of the most impressive voting records of any member of Congress, amassing a lifetime grade of 97 percent on Freedom Works’ Congressional Scorecard. He is also a proud member of the House Freedom Caucus, the group of 40 or so representatives dedicated to supporting a liberty agenda in Congress. Apart from being a fearless champion of freedom, Rep. Huelskamp understands the true meaning of his title “Representative.” More than perhaps anyone else in the federal legislature, he truly represents the people of his District by working tirelessly to listen to their concerns and receive their input. Read more here... Oil, America's Inexhaustible Resource - by FreedomWorks Senior Economic Contributor Stephen Moore via The Washington Times “The United States of America cannot afford to bet our long-term prosperity, our long-term security on a resource that will eventually run out, and even before it runs out will get more expensive to extract from the ground. — Barack Obama, 2011. In August 1859 on the eve of the Civil War, Col. Edwin Laurentine Drake completed the first commercial oil well in the United States on Oil Creek just outside of Titusville, Pa. Over the next century and a half, oil and gas companies have extracted tens of billions of barrels of oil from the ground from California to New York and nearly everywhere in between. Read more here... The Creation of the American Republic Judge Andrew Napolitano explains how America came to be. After oppressive laws from the British drove the original thirteen colonies to revolution, the Founding Fathers were determined to create a new nation based on the principles of limited government and individual liberty. After the war, the colonies were united under the Articles of Confederation, which ultimately led to the framing of the U.S. Constitution. Read more here... Student Privacy Is in Danger, but Arizona Is Fighting Back - by Logan Albright via The Blaze One of the most pernicious aspects of Common Core is the data collection that has come hand-in-hand with the standards. The Department of Education has been extremely tight-lipped about what kind of information schools are actually collecting, but we know from anecdotal evidence that students are being asked to surrender all sorts of personal details without parental knowledge, much less parental consent. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has stated that he wants to be able to track students from preschool all the way to their careers using personally identifiable information (PII), and a report from the Department of Education presented a wish list of data collection, including the terrifying concept of monitoring facial expressions and eye movements for diagnostic purposes. Read more here... Liberty Beats "The Right To Be Left Alone"   The Case for Criminal Justice Reform - by Jason Pye and Jorge Marin via The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner For 30 years, America’s correctional policies put more people in prison and kept them there longer. This practice made our country the world’s most enthusiastic jailer by far. We have roughly 2.3 million people behind bars today, or nearly one in every 100 American adults. The painful legacy of our incarceration spree includes billions of dollars in costs, fractured families and disappointing results. Fortunately, a movement driven by facts and common sense is now steering the nation onto a wiser, more productive path. Read more here... Is the Age of Obama Over? - by Rev. C.L. Bryant Nearly eight years have passed since progressive liberals packaged the grand deception called Barack Obama. The promise of hope and change was intoxicating to a war-weary and economically stressed nation. Obama was the perfect foil and a modern day Trojan Horse who would appear to be a gift and answer to a country with a history of racial strife and tension. The Greek Column Night of his first election victory would encourage even the hardened sceptic to have a moment of pause and marvel at just how far America had come on the political evolutionary scale. Read more here... Judge Brings California One Step Closer to Killing Uber - by Logan Albright In the state of California, the popular ridesharing service Uber is under serious attack. We’ve covered how earlier this year, the California Labor Commission issued a ruling that the company’s drivers should be classified as employees, rather than the independent contractors Uber claims they are. This classification has major implications for Uber and all similar services in the future, since employees are subject to massive labor regulations from which contractors are exempt. The cost of complying with these regulations would be crippling, if not fatal, for Uber’s services in California, and the door would be closed on any businesses with a similarly innovative business model in the future. Until now, all of this has been hypothetical, since the Labor Commission’s ruling was non-binding. The courts ultimately get to decide how Uber drivers are classified, not a regulatory board. However, in a decision announced on September 1st, a federal judge granted class action status to a separate but similar lawsuit that makes the case that drivers should be treated like employees. Read more here... Sign up for the FreedomWorks Morning Update If you want an update like this newsletter twice a week, be sure to sign up for the FreedomWorks Morning Update! The Morning Update is your tool to keep up-to-date with all the threats to your freedom. Sign up here. Make freedom work, Iris Somberg Press Secretary, FreedomWorks