Author: Phil Kerpen

There is a big problem with the prevailing liberal narrative that the phrase describing subsidy eligibility in Obamacare, “established by the state,” could not possibly mean what it says. The problem is named Jonathan Gruber. For years Gruber understood Obamacare precisely the same way the challengers in King v. Burwell do. When the bill passed […]

The EPA proposal to impose a de facto ban on new coal-fired power plants received more than two million comments from the public – but it looks like it was just one five-page comment from the Energy and Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal) that sent EPA scrambling back to the drawing board. The draft rule […]

Federal taxpayers spent a shocking total of $5.4 billion – with a B – on grants to establish what ended up being just 13 state Obamacare exchanges. In some states the failures have been spectacular enough to embarrass officials and imperil political careers, and in far too many places, Republicans who should have known better […]

One of the most outrageous but least reported ongoing scandals in Washington is that the House and Senate have both falsely certified themselves as small businesses in order to fund health insurance for themselves and their staff with taxpayer dollars, sidestepping provisions of Obamacare. Senator David Vitter (La.) recently tried to subpoena the documents in […]

The United States Postal Service is careening toward financial catastrophe, posting a $5.5 billion loss in fiscal year 2014. It’s the eighth year in a row with multi-billion-dollar losses, and the Postal Service has maxed out its $15 billion line of credit from the U.S. Treasury. If it is declared insolvent, much of this debt […]

Since President Obama’s first year in office, the federal government has been illegally using your federal tax dollars to pay lobbyists at the state and local level to lobby for tax hikes, zoning restrictions, and other nanny state policies that pick your pockets and limit your freedom. Every time a scandal breaks or Congress tries […]

For decades Democrats have gone to extraordinary lengths to impose new energy taxes. They do not, to put it mildly, have the support of the American people. So they have turned to increasingly complex schemes to pretend the taxes they are advancing are not taxes. They’ve now reached an unprecedented level of obfuscation: a federal […]

Senator Bob Menendez will soon be indicted on corruption and obstruction of justice charges stemming from his relationship with Salomon Melgen, a West Palm Beach eye doctor. Melgen thought he could get away with Medicare fraud because he gave Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid’s Super PAC $700,000 and lavished Menendez with private jet flights to […]

The rule of law is in grave danger, as federal regulators use ever thinner legal pretexts to enable vast public policy changes without votes by our elected representatives. In a span of just seven days from February 26 to March 4, the FCC declared the Internet a public utility, Congress acceded to DHS implementing executive […]

Jonathan Gruber was, in the lower courts, the government’s principal expert. They relied on his “three-legged stool” metaphor to argue that (even though the law says they are only available through an “exchange established by the state”) subsidies must be available through federal exchanges. Then he was caught on tape, not once but twice, expressly […]

Proponents of President Obama’s 332-page plan to regulate the Internet insist they oppose content control. They even style themselves defenders of free speech. But there is a very serious risk that changing the Internet from an unregulated free enterprise into a heavily-regulated public utility will lead over time to content control. This risk is dismissed […]

The full-court press is on from every organ of enlightened liberal opinion: the Supreme Court must not decide this term’s big Obamacare case, King v. Burwell, on the actual legal merits, which are a slam-dunk for the plaintiffs. Instead, supporters of the government want the case decided on the consequences of the Court stopping the […]

President Obama’s EPA is executing a massive power play, attempting to coerce states into adopting draconian policies that would steeply increase the price of energy. States that don’t cooperate are being told they’ll have their federal highway funding cut off. That’s unconstitutional. Obama’s cap-and-trade energy tax scheme spectacularly crashed and burned in his first term, […]

For decades conservatives have advocated scaling back the role of the federal government in transportation, yet the federal gas tax that was supposed to end in 1969 is still hanging around 46 years later. Fortunately, there is a feature of the current law that gives states the the upper hand, and they should seize the […]

The politics of the crude exports issue are confused by a lot of irresponsible reporting. Almost every story on the issue asserts that allowing exports would be politically dangerous because it would supposedly raise prices at the pump, but the claim is never credibly sourced. In fact, every single serious study has found precisely the […]

The House is set to vote on the Keystone XL pipeline as their first order of business in the new Congress – and this time the newly-elected Senate is expected to have enough votes to break the anti-energy filibuster led by liberals Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer, who is urging President Obama to stop the […]

One of the most perverse consequences of the feverish backroom deals used to get Obamacare past the finish line was the funding formula for the law’s Medicaid expansion, which started with the infamous Cornhusker Kickback, a sweetheart deal for Nebraska alone to get 100 percent federal funding for Medicaid expansion that was used to get […]

On Tuesday December 9, disgraced Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber will face the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.  He has a lot to answer for. Perhaps the most significant issue is Gruber’s videotaped confession that Obamacare “was written in a tortured way to make sure that the CBO did not score the mandate as […]

President Obama is leaning heavily on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), an independent agency, to change the Internet from a competitive, free-market service into a government-regulated public utility. Philosophically and politically, it is a strangely tone-deaf response to a landslide national election calling for smaller, less-intrusive government. But the most important impact for most people […]

The filibuster is dead for nominees and is living-dead for legislation; it exists, but under the precedent set by Harry Reid and Senate Democrats last year, it could be eliminated any time the majority wishes. Democrats are almost certain to do so next time they control the House of Representatives, so Republicans should go ahead […]

Remarkable new wonder drugs have caused a new confrontation over pricing wars between manufacturers and health plans, now reaching a fever pitch over hepatitis C treatments from Gilead. Unfortunately, rather than the industry players settling the issue through negotiation, health plans are turning to Congress to step in and arbitrarily limit prices, which could undermine […]

Everything you need to know about Bruce Braley was made clear by the candidate himself in a thirty-seven second video of him speaking to his real constituents – his fellow trial lawyers – at a fundraiser in Texas. Most of the attention relating to the video has been about his arrogant denigration of Iowa farmers […]

President Obama and his Democratic allies are claiming credit for the latest in a string of positive jobs reports, but if they had their way it wouldn’t have happened. Why? According to empirical research by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York: “most of the persistent increase in unemployment during the Great Recession can be […]

“If you like your health plan, you can keep it” was last year’s Lie of the Year. When millions of cancellations stacked up, the game of make-believe was over. So the Democrats, hoping to survive another election cycle, shifted to a new mantra: they claim they want to fix the law. The facts show this […]

I recently published two stories about outspoken, committed socialists: one, an active member of the Industrial Workers of the World running for U.S. Senate and the other a self-described Marxist college professor leading a movement urging the federal government to regulate the Internet. While the facts I cited were undisputed, the left nonetheless reacted with […]

Since 1998 it has been prohibited by federal law for states and localities to tax Internet access. This policy, known as the Internet Tax Freedom Act, has been extended three times with broad bipartisan support. But it is set to expire again onNovember 1, and some Senate Democrats appear willing, this time, to allow it […]

The language in the Obamacare statute has always been crystal clear. Eligibility for the “affordability tax credit,” or subsidy, requires enrollment “through an Exchange established by the State under 1311 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.” Identical language appears in the definition of a “coverage month,” and every, single place subsidy eligibility is […]

Liberal megadonor Tom Steyer, failing to raise any significant outside money for his global warming Super PAC, turned to one of his San Francisco neighbors for a million dollar check. It was Herb Sandler, the subprime mortgage lender at the heart of the housing crisis, and like Steyer a huge hypocrite. Tom Steyer made his […]

It was so brazen. Right there, over email, Lois Lerner warned her colleagues “Congress has asked for emails… so we need to be cautious about what we say in emails.” Then she asked whether the IRS’s instant messaging application was being archived, and was told that – contrary to law – archiving had been disabled. […]

When President Obama announced an unprecedented effort by the EPA to strong-arm states into adopting cap-and-trade, he made the announcement not by focusing on the benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but rather on the so-called co-benefits that closing coal plants will have on particulate matter, which is already tightly regulated. These purported co-benefits are […]