Author: Phil Kerpen

According to the Washington Post, this is “Obama’s last campaign”; he’s brought back his polling director from the campaign, David Simas, to run the largest sales effort of its kind: an effort to sell expensive health insurance policies to an estimated 2.7 million young and healthy people who don’t use much health care. If that […]

In 2005, Senate Republicans floated the idea of altering Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster for judicial nominees. The proposal, dubbed the nuclear option, involved breaking Senate rules to change Senate rules. (The rules require a two-thirds vote for rules changes, but the nuclear option changes the rules by simple majority.) Democrats fought back against […]

What if Mitt Romney had won the election, and proceeded to disregard sections of Obamacare in precisely the matter President Obama is presently doing? It would go something like this: WASHINGTON – The Romney administration faces a political and legal crisis as blowback from its controversial decision to unilaterally suspend central elements of the Affordable […]

So much for the denials. An administration that throughout its 2012 re-election campaign denied it was waging a War on Coal has now come out and publicly declared its intention to shut down coal-fired power plants – putting hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work and sending electricity prices skyrocketing. Obama claims he can […]

The stories about the declining state of American infrastructure are everywhere – road and bridges, airports, railways, water and sewer systems. There’s never enough money and we’re always being forced as taxpayers to pay more. But there is one type of infrastructure that has had a remarkable boom: broadband Internet. It’s been driven by hands-off […]

Sometimes big government becomes so big that even good conservatives find themselves unwittingly advocating expansions of government in response to its failures. That’s precisely what U. S. Rep. Pete Olson (R-Texas) is doing with the new “solution” he has offered to the egregious humanitarian and economic scandal the ethanol mandate, officially known at the Renewable […]

IRS apologists are furiously trying to change the subject from the outrageous targeting of political opponents by the IRS to a policy debate over forced disclosure of contributions to groups that engage in political speech. The story is that a deluge of applications forced the IRS to cut corners and the targeting scandal was an […]

“We have a large government,” political consultant David Axelrod offered as a plea of ignorance to all of the scandals swirling around his boss. “Part of being president is there’s so much beneath you that you can’t know because the government is so vast.” And yet, thanks to Axelrod and Obama, we now stand on […]

“America’s global leadership in mobile, and the strategic bandwidth advantage so many have worked hard to create, is being threatened by the looming spectrum crunch,” recently departed Federal Communications (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski said. But while Genachowski asked Congress to authorize incentive auctions to free up spectrum, he also opposed language to require free and […]

On April 12, the House passed H. R. 1120, the Preventing Greater Uncertainty in Labor Management Relations Act, on a narrow 219 to 209 vote. The bill would prohibit the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) from taking any action that requires a quorum unless and until the Senate confirms new board members or the Supreme […]

What if you had to choose between making insurance more affordable for Americans with pre-existing conditions or funding lobbyists and political hacks? That’s the decision the House will face when it considers H.R. 1549, the Helping Sick Americans Now Act, sponsored by Rep. Joe Pitts of Pennsylvania. It should be an easy choice. Earlier this […]

One of the most significant votes in the recent Senate budget vote-o-rama was on the federal death tax. Not the disappointingly predictable vote on full repeal, which just two Democrats supported, but the vote on an amendment offered by Senator Mark Warner of Virginia that created a deficit-neutral reserve fund for “the repeal or reduction […]

With over 2000 pages of legislative text and over 20,000 pages of regulations so far, most Americans can’t possibly know all the details of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. Fortunately for opponents of the law, however, the best known provision is also the most hated: the individual mandate, confirmed […]

Obamacare is falling apart before our eyes. The long-term care insurance program known as the CLASS ACT was deemed financially unworkable and shut down by the administration’s own actuaries. Taxpayer-funded health care cooperatives never got off the ground and were shut down in the fiscal cliff deal. Last month the federal Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan […]

The White House continues to inch closer to a carbon tax. In Obama’s first post-election press conference, he dodged the question. The next day his spokesman Jay Carney said: “We would never propose a carbon tax, and have no intention of proposing one.” Great, but they don’t have to propose it. The proposals have now […]

Senate Democrats are finally beginning the process of writing a budget after four years of dereliction. They will almost certainly include some changes to Medicare, the largest driver of federal spending and debt. But unfortunately, there are indications that they intend to focus on the small piece of Medicare (10.6 percent in 2012) that is […]

We should not accept the statist premise that most government spending helps people. Government spending is not just wasteful or inefficient, but all too often serves to crush the private economy and individual freedom. In the coming days the media will provide a constant stream of purported victims of spending cuts. But for every victim […]

President Obama opened his State of the Union address with a quote from President John F. Kennedy: “the Constitution makes us not rivals for power but partners for progress.” But Obama’s speech that followed and the agenda it advocated indicate he failed to study JFK’s famous 1963 State of the Union and its ambitious program […]

Buried in Barack Obama’s budget (last year’s, of course, because this year’s is still late) is a common sense idea for health care savings that is worthy of broad bipartisan support and immediate action: an end to the so-called “bed taxes” Medicaid scam. It goes like this: states tax hospitals (who happen to be begging […]

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals emphatically smacked down the crazy idea that the president has the power to make recess appointments while the Senate is not in recess. “An interpretation of ‘the Recess’ that permits the President to decide when the Senate is in recess would demolish the checks and balances inherent in the […]

In his first term, President Obama passed two of the most sweeping expansions of federal power in history. The first, his federal takeover of the health care system, narrowly survived at the Supreme Court thanks to the refashioning of its mandate into a tax by Chief Justice John Roberts. The second , his federal takeover […]

In 2006, then-Senator Barack Obama inserted a speech into the Congressional Record decrying the increase in the debt ceiling that President Bush was asking for. It’s unfortunate that he didn’t actually deliver the speech, because it would have been a real stem-winder. “Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck […]

The late night drama cast Senator Mitch McConnell and Vice President Joe Biden as heroes. They did what Obama and Boehner failed to do, come together on an agreement to limit the bite of the fiscal cliff’s tax hikes. That agreement led to bipartisan Senate action. But the appearance of the Senate coming to the […]

An impartial rule of law is one of the pillars of a free society, so the curious resolution of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) probe into alleged anti-competitive practice by Google should be cause for concern even for those of us who are skeptical of antitrust law. The FTC investigated Google for nearly two years […]