World Net Daily is citing an outdated post-Revolutionary War act repealed by Congress that only recognized “free white persons” as citizens to make its case that Miami born Marco Rubio is not a “natural born citizen.”

WND’s argument comes in the wake of several 2011 articles, which make a birther argument that recently elected U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida is not natural born because his parents were alien residents at the time he was born in Miami in 1971.

WND’s editor Joseph Farah pushed that theory on FOX News with Sean Hannity last week,  an interview that was quickly picked up by The Hill and the Daily Caller. The birther movement’s attention turned to Rubio last year when rumors began surfacing that he was a potential candidate for the vice-presidential position on the 2012 Republican ticket, despite his assertion that he was not interested in the position. Since the 12^th Amendment requires that the vice-president possess all the necessary constitutional requirements to serve as president, Rubio’s citizenship came into play.

Throughout their reporting, WND has relied on three major arguments: the first being the treatise “The Law of Nations” by Swiss philosopher Emer de Vattel, which they argue was an influence on our forefathers. Vattel wrote, “The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens.” They also cite a U.S. Supreme Court case from 1875, Minor vs. Happersett, alleging that the case only uses the term “natural born citizen” by referring to persons born in the United States of U.S. citizen parents. Finally, they rely on the Naturalization Act of 1790, which defined a natural-born citizen as: “The children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond sea, or out of the limits of the United States shall be considered as natural born citizens: Provided, that the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States.”

There are significant problems which each one of these three flawed arguments.

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House Republicans will be prepared with a plan to replace ObamaCare with free-market alternatives after the Supreme Court delivers its decision in June. The High Court is planning to hold oral arguments on the healthcare law in March.

Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pennsylvania), who serves on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and chairs its Subcommittee on Health, said that Republicans will be ready for the open window provided by a Supreme Court ruling regardless of the nature of that decision.

Congressman Pitts said he expects the High Court to strike down the individual mandate, but not the entire law. He added that it is also possible the Court could say that federal tax law precludes its decision on the mandate’s constitutionality until after 2015. “We’ll have a window of opportunity with everyone looking to explain that the Affordable Care Act is not fully implemented yet…We’ll use that opportunity and that window to discuss the full ramifications of the Affordable Care Act,” Rep. Pitts said.

Rep. Pitts, who has a Heritage Action for America score of 79%, indicated that the Republican plan will include long-standing GOP priorities, such as limits on medical malpractice suits, the ability to purchase health insurance across state lines, and expansion of the use of health savings accounts. In addition, his committee plans the following:

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This past weekend marked the two-year anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United.  Protesters, dubbed Occupy the Courts, gathered at the Court to voice their disapproval of the decision:

As Institute for Justice campaign finance expert Paul Sherman explains in the video above:

The irony of those protests is that you had groups of people getting together to speak out against a Supreme Court decision that protected the right of people to get together and speak out.

Indeed, people should not lose their right to free speech simply by exercising their right to freely associate.   And when people group together—be it on the steps of a courthouse, in the form of a trade union or as a corporation—they don’t lose their freedom to speak out.

Occupy the Courts protesters also mistakenly believed that the Citizens United ruling held that “money is speech.”  In fact, the Court never said that.  Rather, it ruled correctly that money facilitates speech.  And if the government has the power to control how much money you can spend speaking, then it effectively can control your speech.

Importantly, the law in question in the Citizens United case empowered the government to fine and even imprison ordinary people for engaging in certain types of speech.   The government argued in court that it had the power to ban videos and books.  I don’t believe that many Americans, including the Occupy the Courts protesters, think the government should be in the business of banning books.

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The Supreme Court is back in session with major decisions coming on the legality of Obamacare, Arizona’s anti-immigration law, and the right of property owners to due process.

How’s the court expected rule in these cases and what are the likely implications of its decisions?

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“If you wanted to destroy a city’s housing – short of bombing – the best way to do it is rent control,” says Cato legal associate Trevor Burrus.

While most cities in America long ago got rid of rent control, New York remains a bastion of government-mandated limits on what landlords can charge renters. About 50 percent of New York’s rental market is affected by rent control or rent stabilization, policies that keep rents artificially low and produce housing shortages, higher overall housing costs, and all sorts of corruption.

The court case Harmon v. Kimmel may finally bring an end to rent control laws that have been on the books in one form or another since the 1940s. James D. Harmon owns a building in Manhattan where the tenants are paying rents that are about 60 percent below the going market rate. After losing various legal battles at lower levels, Harmon has petitioned the Supreme Court to hear his argument that rent stabilization is a form of takings that should be prohibited under the Constitution. The Court has not yet announced whether it will hear the case but has asked the state and city of New York to respond to Harmon’s argument.

Cato’s Burrus wrote a friend of the court brief on the case and explains why rent control and rent stabilization are bad at promoting affordable housing and abridgments of economic freedom. (more…)

Two years ago the United States Supreme Court decided the landmark case of Citizens United v. FEC.  The Court reversed an anomaly in campaign finance law by restoring the First Amendment protection of political speech.

Over the past two years Citizens United’s victory has been the subject of countless attacks. It has inspired some members of Congress to attempt to pass legislation to chill political speech, caused the President to chastise the Supreme Court during the State of the Union, and even led to irrational demands that we amend the Constitution to curtail the Freedom of Speech.

Despite the heated rhetoric, little in politics has changed.  Before Citizens United, candidates, independent groups and political parties ran political ads.  Shockingly, the same is true after Citizens United.  Some lament the amount of money spent on political speech, but as George Will has noted, Americans will spend more money on Easter candy than they spend electing a President.

The liberal drumbeat against the decision seems to be led by a group of leftist non-profit organizations.  These groups, with such good governance names as Democracy Unlimited, Democracy 21, Public Citizen, and Common Cause, are fighting to overturn the First Amendment.

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This week the United States Supreme Court made a landmark unanimous decision that protected the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. The decision, Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC, rejected an argument made by the Obama Justice Department, which sought to eliminate the “ministerial exception” in employment discrimination law.

The ministerial exception allows religious organizations to terminate employees who perform religious responsibilities. The Hosanna-Tabor decision reinforces the First Amendment principle that religious organizations can continue to choose their own leaders.

The majority opinion, authored by Chief Justice Roberts stated that although protecting employee rights against discrimination are important, the First Amendment dictates that the right to exercise ones religion freely is more important.

“The interest of society in the enforcement of employment discrimination statutes is undoubtedly important,” Roberts opined.

“But so too is the interest of religious groups in choosing who will preach their beliefs, teach their faith, and carry out their mission.” When those principles are in conflict, the First Amendment has struck the balance for us.”

The case involved Cheryl Perich, a Redford, Michigan teacher at the Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School who was fired in 2005 after she was diagnosed with narcolepsy, which would typically be considered a violation of the American Disabilities Act.

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The United States is at a fork in the road regarding which way we will go as a people. The 2012 election could be the most important in our lifetime, and conservative leaders have reached a consensus on how to channel the energy and concerns of the American people to realize historic change this year.

The status quo will not survive the year. Our debt and spending have reached catastrophic proportions in the context of global financial difficulties and political upheaval. Consequently, by the end of 2012, America will either have taken a decisive step toward socialistic collectivism in the name of “equality” and “social justice,” where businesses and owners are punitively taxed to “pay their fair share,” or America will take a major step in the direction of returning to our Founders’ constitutional government, restoring the rule of law, federalism, free enterprise, and individual initiative and responsibility.

The American people will decide which path to take in the 2012 elections, not only in the general election on November 6 but also in the nominating process in primaries over the next several months for all major offices, including the presidency. Conservatives must act in a concerted and informed fashion in all of these contests to shape the public dialogue and thoroughly vet the candidates.

To achieve these ends, top conservative leaders acting under the umbrella of the Conservative Action Project have released “A Conservative Consensus for 2012” announcing agreement on major policies. These issues span all three wings of the conservative movement: economic, social, and national security.

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Repeal and Replace. That was the common refrain when House Republicans actually repealed ObamaCare in their chamber a year ago. Of course, the Senate Democrats rejected the repeal. But now there is a chance- some would say even a strong chance- that ObamaCare will be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court before the election in November. If the high Court decides that the individual mandate, which forces individuals to purchase health insurance, is unconstitutional, and that President Obama’s signature legislation cannot go forward without that mandate, ObamaCare will stop dead in its tracks. Then what?

That’s where the Replace part comes in. Now, I won’t whine and complain about how things seem to take a long time to get done in Washington, but the replacement for ObamaCare should be on the assembly line, waiting to be packaged and sent to stores near all of us. We know the talking points that make good common sense: purchase health insurance across state lines, own our health insurance policies so they are portable, tort reform, free-market principles, etc. Of course, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin), the reliable person that he is, has thought through a great deal of this, and has based his conservative answer to health care reform on his Medicare reform proposal.

But, where are the details and how do we plug ObamaCare’s replacement into our lives if the law is declared unconstitutional?

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We were so full of “hope” for “change.” No, I am not talking about the election of Barack Obama, one of the most effective Progressive presidents in American history. I am speaking of the excitement felt within the Conservative, Libertarian and Center Right and Left political communities after the 2010 election delivered the House and a non-filibuster proof Senate to the American people. Finally, most of us thought, some balance in the federal government. Maybe, just maybe, the Progressives and Liberal Democrats in federal government would be forced to the table of true and honest compromise; compromise fitting of a truly free people. But, as we look back over the year, what did we really get for all that so-called “compromise?”

With Republicans in control of the US House of Representatives, the body where – by the mandate of the US Constitution – all legislation relating to revenue is to begin, many on the Right and in the Center believed that the reckless and spendthrift fiscal actions of the 111th Congress would be constrained if not reversed. With a sizable number of new members identifying with the oft demonized TEA Party, there was high hope for a glimmer of fiscal sanity to emerge from the halls of Congress. And while the TEA Party members of Congress are to be congratulated for doing exactly what their constituents sent them to Washington to do, in the end, they were thwarted by establishment, inside the beltway Republicans and the despotic obstructionism foisted upon them by Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, D-NV, (to be fair, Reid was aided by a less than reform-minded Republican leadership in the senate, led by Mitch McConnell, R-KY).

The Budget
In absolute defiance of the fact that it is law that Congress must pass an annual budget for the federal government, Senate Democrats – once again, led by the indignant political disgrace that is Harry Reid – refused to abide by said law in passing, reconciling and advancing to the President an annual budget. It has been over 900 days – almost three years – since the last budget has been presented to the President for his signature or veto.

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Recent statements by Republican presidential candidate and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich regarding the powers of the Supreme Court have opened up a conversation that is crucial to every American, especially now that the court has agreed to consider the case of the constitutionality of the Affordable Health Care for America Act (Obamacare) and the individual mandate.

The argument that the Supreme Court has been entrusted with the power of judicial review dates back to the case of Marbury v. Madison in 1803, which established the Supreme Court’s power to strike down an act of Congress. Chief Justice John Marshall asserted that it is “emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department, to say what the law is.” The Supreme Court is the arbiter between the people and the legislature and protects the people from unlawful actions by Congress. The dilemma is, and has always been, that the Constitution does not provide a remedy for an overreaching Supreme Court.

While many believe that a Supreme Court justice, with a lifelong appointment, will rule on legislation based on its constitutionality, an unchecked Supreme Court could impose its will on the country against the will of the people.

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Against the expressed wishes of Obama White House lawyers, the United States Supreme Court has agreed to resolve the Obama Department of Justice’s lawsuit against the State of Arizona over its get-tough illegal immigration law (SB 1070). The decision comes just weeks after the High Court announced it would take on a lawsuit over the constitutionality of Obamacare, setting the stage for two extremely contentious legal battles in the middle of a heated presidential election year.

According to Bloomberg:

The U.S. Supreme Court said it will consider reviving the trailblazing Arizona law that would use local police and prosecutors to crack down on illegal immigration.

Already set to rule on President Barack Obama’s health-care law by the middle of next year, the justices today added another high-profile case that has implications for similar laws around the country and for the 2012 elections.

On April 11, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld an injunction against the enforcement of some of the law’s provisions, prompting the State of Arizona to petition the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case.

Back in September, Judicial Watch filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief with the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of our client, the Arizona State Legislature, which is now a defendant in the lawsuit in support of the Supreme Court petition. And as I said in a press statement at the time, “We hope the Supreme Court accepts the State of Arizona’s petition, protects the rule of law and upholds the rights of the States to protect its citizens.”

Well, we’re one step closer. (more…)

The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), under Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, released a surprising bulletin on Friday, announcing that states will have greater flexibility in implementing ObamaCare.

The announcement comes on the threshold of the presidential election year, when President Obama must defend his signature legislation both to the Supreme Court, which will take up the constitutionality of the law in the spring, and the American people, the majority of whom want the law repealed. The administration likely hopes that the new flexibility offered to states will help to minimize the perception that the federal government is “taking over” healthcare.

Regarding the announcement, Secretary Sebelius said:

Under the Affordable Care Act, consumers and small businesses can be confident that the insurance plans they choose and purchase will cover a comprehensive and affordable set of health services. Our approach will protect consumers and give states the flexibility to design coverage options that meet their unique needs.

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The Obama Administration has initiated a major “Affirmative Action” policy reversal, that could create major new social divisions in the run up to the 2012 election.

According to the Communist Party USA’s People’s World

Affirmative action, the policy designed to assist historically under-represented minority groups and women with access to university admissions, has received an important boost from the Obama administration.

On Friday, the Department of Education jointly with the Department of Justice issued a new Guidance on the Voluntary use of Race to Achieve Diversity in Post-secondary Education.

The new guidelines reverse anti-affirmative action policies adopted by the Bush administration that forbad any use of “quotas” emphasizing instead so called “race neutral solutions.”

“Post-secondary institutions can voluntarily consider race to further the compelling interest of achieving diversity,” says the guidelines.

Bush’s rule stressed limitations on the use of affirmative action. By way of contrast the Obama policy opens the door of possibility again to achieving diversity by considering race and ethnicity as one of several considerations in admissions. In this regard the New York Times writes, “The guidelines focus on the wiggle room in the court decisions.”

In place of the Bush measures, which resulted in a steep drop in minority admissions in top universities, with the new framework “the Obama administration has aligned itself strongly with the right of colleges to consider race and ethnicity in admissions decisions,” writes Inside Higher Education.

The new policy will have major implications for educational and judicial policy across the nation, all in perfect time for the 2012 election.

In 2003, the Supreme Court in rulings involving the University of Michigan, rolled back the use of race and ethnicity.

Now, the Department of Education and the Justice Department say that universities seeking diversity may include consideration of high schools attended, including cases in which the class population is mostly minority, mentoring programs aimed at minority students, and high schools who partner with historically black colleges, among other factors.

While acknowledging the use of some race neutral admissions programs, the new policy says schools need not be bound by them. “Institutions are not required to implement race-neutral approaches if, in their judgment, the approaches would be unworkable,” the guidelines argue. The document continues, “In some cases, race-neutral approaches will be unworkable because they will be ineffective to achieve the diversity the institution seeks. Institutions may also reject approaches that would require them to sacrifice a component of their educational mission or priorities (e.g., academic selectivity).”

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On the same day that the Supreme Court announced that it would take up the challenge to President Obama’s healthcare reform law, Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) launched the Health Care Innovation Challenge, a competitive program that will award up to $1 billion in taxpayer-funded grants to applicants who will “implement the most compelling new ideas to deliver better health, improved care, and lower costs to people enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid and CHIP…” At a press conference, on Monday, Ms. Sebelius said, “Efforts like these to improve the health of communities and reduce cost while sparking the economy are a priority of the Obama administration.”

Using the Obama administration’s new theme of “We Can’t Wait,” a slogan which refers to Congress’ inability to obtain the votes to pass the president’s Jobs Act, the secretary said, “In recent weeks, Congress has failed to act on the full jobs agenda, so we will continue to do what we can.”

A new Rasmussen poll, however, indicates that most American voters oppose the Obamacare jobs plan, and believe the president should wait to enact the plan in order to reach an agreement with Congress. 63% of those polled said that the president should wait to work with Congress.

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The Supreme Court has announced today that it will hear the challenge to President Obama’s signature health care reform law. The Court is expected to hear oral arguments in February or March, with a decision given by June of next year.

A key issue of the challenge, brought by 26 states, is that of the individual mandate in the new health care law, which requires nearly all Americans to purchase health insurance by 2014 or receive penalties. Many economists, as well as states, have strongly suggested that the law cannot stand without the individual mandate.

As the oral arguments are heard at the same time the presidential race heats up, it will be interesting to see how Republican candidate and former Massachusetts Governor, Mitt Romney, who supported an individual mandate in his state’s health insurance reform plan, distances himself from the mandate on the federal level. Mr. Romney has said that, if elected President, he would repeal Obamacare.

American taxpayers are on the hook for who-knows-how-many trillions of dollars in government bailouts/takeovers. And yet, to date, we have little information about how the federal government legally justified unprecedented its use of tax dollars to “bail out” private companies.

Why? Because the Obama administration continues to stonewall the release of documents that would almost certainly shed light on the internal discussions that took place in the Bush administration!

On November 1, 2011, we filed a petition on behalf of former Federal Reserve employee Vern McKinley, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review a lower court ruling validating the Federal Reserve’s decision to withhold documents about this $29 billion Bear Stearns bailout. (Bailout Nation began with the Bear Stearns bailout in 2008.)

At issue in our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit is whether or not the federal government can withhold documents under the deliberative process privilege of FOIA Exemption 5 without demonstrating that the release of the documents would result in specific harm to government agency decision-making. As you might imagine, the “deliberative process” is loved by government officials who use it to keep as much information as possible about controversial decisions away from the American people.

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The past week was very interesting in Presidential politics.  The darlings of the rank and file Republican Party, New Jersey governor Chris Christie and former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, have concluded it is not time to run for President. Herman Cain (who was recently labeled a racist by a Democrat strategist on CNN) has become the sweetheart of the white-supremacist, right-wing Tea Party.

The popular press is lauding liberal Democrats for having finally found their own voice in the Occupy Wall Street protests. And Missouri’s Democratic Senator, Claire McCaskill, did not even show up for President Obama’s (who polls below 30% in MO) fundraiser in St. Louis. And a rumor is circulating that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has told Obama he cannot win passage of the jobs bill as proposed and will only take it in pieces to the Senate floor, thus distancing himself from the President.

Does anyone need to know anything else about the 2012 elections?

The problem for decades in Washington has been that lawmakers, Republican and Democrat, have spent their way to political success. Now that there is no more money, nobody knows what to do.  In fact, there is only one Congressman, Darrell Issa (R-CA) who has started (not inherited) a successful company that sold a product and wasn’t just in the service industry, law, accounting, insurance, medicine, banking, you get the idea.  The genesis of American capitalism is an agrarian society taking the risks necessary to make something from nothing and selling it.  He is likely the only one that has made the sacrifices necessary to build something from nothing, and make a profit.  The concept is that without actual profit you can’t spend money.  Everyone else, Democrat and Republican more resembles the Occupy Wall Street group who want to tell everyone where money should be spent, decisions based on personal interests and taxes, not capitalism.  The situation is exacerbated by the contempt and lack of cooperation between the congressional parties, as well as between members of Congress of both parties and the executive.

For some time, the question of when that animosity began has gone unanswered. Certainly there have always been hard-fought ideological battles in the halls of government. But there have also been famous relationships between party leaders, relationships that helped bring these leaders and the country together. When did our modern politics deteriorate so much? Recently a longtime friend and Washington insider suggested that it began with the defeat of the nomination of Judge Robert Bork, the highly respected and superbly qualified candidate, for the Supreme Court. (more…)

Many are focused on the Supreme Court’s take-up of the question of the constitutionality of the individual mandate clause in Obamacare as the means to stop President Obama’s signature legislation. However, some of the law has already been funded and put into place, and, until the High Court rules- and if it rules that the individual mandate is unconstitutional- there are already clear plans to change healthcare in this country as we know it.

The fact that our doctors are all walking around from one examining room to another with laptops, rather than “charts,” lets us know that regulations for those in the healthcare field have already been in place for awhile, and that all that personal health information about us, that is being collected electronically, will likely be finding its way to the federal government soon.

Bill McCollum, former Attorney General of Florida, who led the multi-state lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Obamacare, wrote an editorial in Politico, in which he urges Congress to pass a bill, brought forward by Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Texas), which would essentially “freeze” the implementation of the law in its tracks, a critical move since Obamacare’s costs, including economic, quality of care, and personal privacy aspects, are catastrophic to the nation. Knowing that, even if Congress passed a “freeze,” the president would not sign it, Attorney General McCollum recommends that the new Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, or “supercommittee,” take it up as a realistic, and relatively expedient, way to cut the deficit.

In light of the fact that there will still be some time before the Supreme Court will hear the case against Obamacare, the joint committee must consider the multitude of evidence that now exists about the costs of this program. According to Attorney General McCollum, in just 2012-2013 alone, for example, Obamacare owns $50 billion in tax increases, including $20 billion in payroll tax hikes on small businesses. The law institutes 159 new federal programs, costing $19 billion, and the controversial Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), which will have never-before-seen power- no Congress needed- to make cuts to Medicare.

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