FREEDOMWORKING 03/08/2015

Hillary Clinton's Email Problem - by Logan Albright The press may finally have found the chink in the seemingly impenetrable armor of Hillary Clinton. It is now known that Clinton, during her time as Secretary of State, used a private email address to send official government communications, violating clear cut rules from the State Department that require all emails to be stored on official government servers. The reason for this is simple: These types of communications are subject to requests under the Freedom of Information Act, and without clear protocol for preserving them, there is no way to guarantee that certain emails are not being concealed from the public. Transparency is important, so that government officials can be held accountable for their conduct in office. If emails can be hidden on private servers or deleted, there is no effective check against corruption at the highest levels of government. Read more here... Another Illegal ObamaCare Action - This Time Bailing Out Insurers - by Josh Withrow While the Supreme Court is considering the King v. Burwell case about the IRS illegally funding a part of ObamaCare (the subsidies), last week it was revealed that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has… illegally funded another part of ObamaCare. At issue is nearly $3 billion in payments made to insurers to help cover losses caused by ObamaCare’s various regulations and insurance mandates – effectively a bailout to prevent insurers from raising prices as much next year. Read more here... Empower NC Tour with Rev. C.L. Bryant - by Garry Terry Hello Patriots! On February 26 - 28, FreedomWorks launched a series of Empower townhall events here in North Carolina featuring Rev. C.L. Bryant. These townhalls are an opportunity to have a frank discussion about topics entrepreneurship, criminal justice reform, school choice, financial literacy, and growing the economy in urban communities. Read more here... The IRS Can't Write Its Own Laws - by Jackie Bodnar via U.S. News If you think Obamacare is a disaster now, just wait until the courts enforce the law as it was actually written. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the case of King v. Burwell, the appeal of a decision that allows the IRS to implement health care subsidies in states that did not set up insurance exchanges. The issue at hand: There is no language in the president’s health care law that specifically empowers the IRS to implement those taxes and subsidized premiums in states that did not set up their own exchanges. In fact, they intentionally left that language out in order to incentivize states to participate in Obamacare. Read more here... Activists Rally Outside King v. Burwell - by Michael Love On the morning of March 4th, conservative activists from FreedomWorks and elsewhere braved the decidedly raw D.C. weather to make sure their voices were heard on King v. Burwell. As the case was argued inside the Supreme Court, activists who were outside heard from FreedomWorks’ Executive Vice President Adam Brandon, other conservative leaders, and Representatives Gohmert, Blackburn, and Heulskamp. At stake in this case is the provision in ObamaCare that makes subsidies available under the law. Should the court rule in favor of King, citizens in states that did not set up their own exchanges would lose subsidies that had been illegally granted to them by the IRS. Read more here... Wyoming Misses a Great Opportunity to Protect Innocent People from Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture - by Jason Pye Seeing the growing backlash toward abuses of civil asset forfeiture laws by law enforcement agencies across the country, Wyoming lawmakers recently passed legislation that would enact strong protections for innocent people who may have their property wrongly taken by overzealous police officers. In its 2010 report, Policing for Profit, the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest firm, noted that Wyoming "has horrible civil forfeiture laws," due to law enforcement needing to show only probable cause to seize assets that they believe were used in a crime even without charging, let alone convicting, the property owner. Essentially, the property seized is guilty until the owner proves its innocence, setting a high standard of proof that discourages people from fighting to get their property back. Read more here... SC Activists Fight Common Core - by Linda Elsor The Lowcountry Conservatives in Action in Summerville, South Carolina, have made frequent use of the "stop Common Core" signs they received from FreedomWorks. The signs have shown up at state Board of Education meetings in Columbia, Senate Education Oversight subcommittee meetings, and local board meetings across the great Charleston area. We are really grateful to FreedomWorks for helping us fight the standards! Read more here... Common Core: A Major Deciding Factor for Independent Voters in 2016 - by Daisy Belden On the first day of the Conservative Political Action Conference, a panel, moderated by Sabrina Schaeffer of the Independent Women’s Forum, met to discuss what’s next for Common Core. Their conclusion: Common Core will be a very important platform stance in the 2016 election. They are completely right. With public support for Common Core standards steadily declining, and more and more states pulling out of Common Core, in addition to teachers resigning over the federal standards, attitudes towards a single policy have never been more clear and uniform. Teachers hate having their freedom to teach restricted, parents want their children to be taught, not taught how to take a test, and children want to be treated like individuals, not statistics. Recent protests of the standards and walkouts on Common Core testing have indicated that increasing opposition to Common Core will not be silenced, and will not go away. Read more here... What FreedomWorks Saw at CPAC 2015 What brought people to National Harbor and Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) 2015? And how did millennials vote in the straw poll? Here is what FreedomWorks saw at the largest annual gathering of conservatives from across the country. CPAC Panel on the Export-Import Bank - by Nate Russell Last weekend, the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) met in Washington, DC to address the most important issues in America. Everybody who attended was well aware that free markets in America have been under assault by the federal government’s crony relationships with private corporations. One institution that epitomizes this crony relationship is the Export-Import bank. Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner was on a panel at CPAC that specifically addressed this issue. He brought up the point that cronyism has falsely distorted the meaning of capitalism, from one of free-market competition to one of protecting the interests of rich corporations. 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, Adam Brandon Executive Vice President, FreedomWorks