Which of Trump's Supreme Court picks are most 'Scalia-like'?
- via The Washington Examiner
President-elect Trump promised to fill Justice Antonin Scalia's vacancy on the Supreme Court with a like-minded justice, and an extensive legal analysis is putting the candidates on Trump's shortlists to the test.
Mercer University law professor Jeremy Kidd along with three other researchers studied the legal reasoning of Trump's shortlist candidates — rather than the outcomes of their judicial opinions — to determine how "Scalia-like" they are. Kidd's analysis probed the candidates' adherence to originalism, citations of Scalia's nonjudicial writing in their opinions, and how often the candidates wrote a dissent or concurrence when not writing the majority opinion. Originalism is a judicial philosophy popularized by Scalia and beloved by his followers. Read more here...
FreedomWorks CEO Adam Brandon Discusses Tax Reform, House Freedom Caucus on Fox Business
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...
Welcome to the Party of Trump
- by FreedomWorks Senior Economic Contributor Stephen Moore via National Review
I stirred up some controversy last week when I told a conference of several dozen House Republicans that the GOP is now officially a Trump working-class party. For better or worse, I said at the gathering inside the Capitol dome, the baton has now officially been passed from the Reagan era to the new Trump era. The members didn’t quite faint over my apostasy, but the shock was palpable.
I emphasized that Republicans must prioritize delivering jobs and economic development to the regions of the country in the industrial Midwest — states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Missouri. These are places that, for the most part, never felt the meager Obama recovery and where blue-collar Reagan Democrats took a leap of faith this election and came back to the Republican party for the first time since 1984. The GOP will be judged in 2018 and in 2020 on whether they deliver results for this part of the country and for the forgotten middle-class men and women (“the deplorables”) whom Democrats abandoned economically and culturally. This is all simply a political truism. Read more here...
Congressman of the Month for December 2016: Rep. Dave Brat
- by Emily Moore
FreedomWorks is proud to name Rep. Dave Brat (R-VA) as the Congressman of the Month for December 2016. Rep. Brat has tirelessly advocated for less regulation and a more comprehensive and responsible budget. In September, he voted against a stop-gap spending bill that would fund the federal government through December 9 because it would come at a time when Congress was at their least accountable, would skyrocket the federal deficit, and leave entitlement reform out of the picture.
Over the summer, Rep. Brat introduced the Health Savings Account Expansion Act, H.R. 5324. This legislation would increase the maximum contribution limit on health savings accounts (HSA) to $9,000 per year for individuals, and $18,000 per year for families. These HSA’s are tax-deferred and, if used to pay healthcare expenses, are tax-free as well, returning the power to the consumer. This gives the consumer the option to either save their money, use it on a health plan of their choice, or opt in for their employer’s health plan. Read more here...
An Important Victory for Small Businesses Against the Obama Regulatory State
- by Ken Cuccinelli
Last week, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction halting the implementation of President Obama’s new overtime regulations. The regulations, previously scheduled to take effect on December 1st are a declaration of war on job flexibility and small employers, imposing new compliance costs and limiting employment arrangements in pursuit of big government social engineering. Given the large costs and dubious benefits, the Obama administration’s justifications for these massive, expensive, meddling regulations were always suspect as policy matter, but now a federal judge has agreed with the 21 states challenging the regulations and recognized them as probably illegal as well.
Under current Department of Labor (DoL) rules, salaried workers with certain types of job responsibilities and who are paid more than $23,660 can be classified as exempt from overtime pay. This classification allows for flexible working arrangements, liberating employees from punching a clock, and reducing compliance costs for businesses who don’t have to track what their employees are doing at any given second. Read more here...
- via Competitive Enterprise Institute
Adobe Digital Insights predicts that Cyber Monday’s sales will surpass last year’s sales by 11.5%, for a total of $3 billion this year. But if state officials and some big box retailers, who’ve been busy lobbying Congress to pass the dubiously named Marketplace Fairness Act (MFA) get their way, there could be a lump of coal in consumer’s stockings in the form of more and higher sales taxes online.
State and local governments can already tax in-state sellers regardless of their method of delivery to consumers—online, through the mail, or in person. But this comes with a political cost. If politicians raise rates too high, they may be voted out of office or lose taxpaying residents and businesses to lower tax jurisdictions. So states want new powers to tax businesses in other states that sell to their own residents. Read more here...
After $11K Seized At CVG, Man To Get Money Back Plus Interest In Settlement
- via Cincinnati.com
The Cincinnati native who lost $11,000 to deputized federal agents in a so-called civil seizure because his luggage smelled like marijuana is getting all his money back from the government plus interest in a settlement filed with the federal courts Tuesday.
In June 2015, Charles Clarke II sued with assistance from the Institute of Justice, a Washington-based legal advocacy agency, to get his money back from the seizure, which occurred in February 2014.
At the time, two local police officers, including one from Covington and one from the police force at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, took Clarke's money after a ticket agent reported that his luggage smelled like pot. A drug dog also indicated marijuana was present near the cash that Clarke was carrying in his pocket. Read more here...
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For Freedom,
Jason Pye
Communications Director, FreedomWorks
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