- by Adam Brandon via The Washington Examiner
When the 115th Congress convenes in January, the House of Representatives may vote on a rules package that guts a powerful tool that allows members of the lower chamber to keep the speaker in check.
In September, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., proposed a change to the rules of the House that would dissolve the privileged status of the "motion to vacate the chair," which allows any member of the House to introduce a resolution to depose the speaker. Under the current rules of the House, the resolution must receive a vote by the full chamber.
The proposal put forward by Nunes would require a majority of either party's conference to support the motion before it can move forward. Because party conferences are controlled by either the speaker or the minority leader, the motion to vacate the chair would essentially become an empty threat. Read more here...
Stephen Moore Sits Down to Discuss the Origins of ObamaCare as an Entitlement Program
FreedomWorks' Book Club Spotlight: "Our Lost Constitution: The Willful Subversion of America's Founding Document" In Our Lost Constitution, Senator Mike Lee tells the dramatic, little-known stories behind six of the Constitution's most indispensable provisions. He shows their rise. He shows their fall. And he makes vividly clear how nearly every abuse of federal power today is rooted in neglect of this Lost Constitution. Get your copy here...
Obama on Course to Set a New Regulation Page Count Record in His Last Year
- by Kenny Stein The Federal Register chronicles federal government’s rules, proposed rules, and public notices. It serves as a running tally of activity by the federal regulatory state. The record page count for the Federal Register is 81,405, set in 2010. In fact, six of the seven all time highest page counts have been recorded under the Obama administration. But the Obama administration is not done yet and in its last year it is on pace to set a new all-time record by the end of the year. This stands as a stark reminder of the massive expansion of the regulatory state under President Obama, an expansion which comes at the expense of the rights and freedoms of the American people.
As of the beginning of this week, the Federal Register clocked in at 71,103 pages. For comparison, during the whole of the 1990’s, the record high for an entire **year **was just 71,161 pages, reached in 1999. With more than two months to go in the year, the Obama regulatory state has already blown by the most active regulatory year of the Clinton administration. Read more here...
The Trillion-Dollar Deficit Question
- via Reason Have you noticed that for a few months, President Barack Obama has stopped bragging about how the federal budget deficit is shrinking? That's because it's not. For the first time since 2009, the deficit has gone up rather than down.
The Congressional Budget Office recently released its budget review for September 2016. It shows that in fiscal 2016, which ended Sept. 30, the deficit grew by $149 billion, from $439 billion to $588 billion. It now stands at 3.2 percent of gross domestic product, up from 2.5 percent last year. It's also the first increase in the deficit as a share of GDP since 2009. Read more here...
Global Warming Concerns 'Not a Blank Check' for Clean Power Plan
- via Competitive Enterprise Institute The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals last week released a 320-page transcript of the September 27th oral argument on the Environmental Protection Agency’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emission standards for existing fossil-fuel power plants, the agency’s so-called Clean Power Plan (CPP). From a constitutional perspective, the best moment of the marathon proceeding was Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s reminder to his colleagues that “global warming is not a [regulatory] blank check.”
The fun part of it is that Kavanaugh, a conservative judge appointed by President George W. Bush, invoked liberal Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s concurrence in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, a case invalidating the Bush administration’s use of special commissions to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Read more here...
The System is Rigged: Licensing Limits the Pursuit of Happiness
- via Reason Americans have always taken the idea of "the pursuit of happiness" rather literally. From east to west, south to north and back again, each generation tends to reshape the country by moving from place to place in search of better things.
Though it hasn't attracted as much attention as overblown fears about declining economic mobility, residential mobility—how easy or hard it is for someone to move from place to place in pursuit of better economic conditions—is on the decline. That matters, because when it's harder for people to move where the jobs are, it's also harder for them to move up the economic ladder. Read more here...
Before Year's End, the PA. House Needs to Pass Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform
- by Adam Brandon, Timothy Head, and Grover Norquist via Penn Live Civil asset forfeiture reform is on the minds of legislators in Harrisburg.
The Pennsylvania Senate recently voted to pass much-needed reforms to improve property rights across the state.
The bill is now before the House Judiciary Committee and time is running out for action with the legislative session ending in late November,
Civil asset forfeiture is the now-infamous practice in which the government takes a person's property without actually charging them with a crime. Read more here...
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For Freedom,
Jason Pye
Communications Director, FreedomWorks
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