Showing posts with label State's Rights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label State's Rights. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

The Constitution is not a suicide pact

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Thursday, June 14, 2018

(E)mbrace the “health care wars”—because with the help of the Trump administration and free-market state lawmakers across the country, consumers have more options now than at any time since Obamacare was first imposed.



...as the histrionics over who is to blame for today’s rising health care costs has already begun. Democrats blame Republicans for effectively getting rid of Obamacare because insurers are threatening higher premiums, but Republicans have the better argument because premiums and deductibles were rising before Obamacare started its death spiral.

As of yet, there aren’t hard and fast solutions to these problems, but there are good reasons for Americans to feel hopeful about health insurance again. They need only look in the right place. And that place is much closer to home than Washington, DC.

Reporters are doing their best to convince Americans health care should be the primary issuein the 2018 midterm elections and that Trump and Republicans deserve the blame for the system’s current woes, but many average Americans desperately looking for inexpensive health insurance should stop looking to the federal government for answers and start examining what the legislators in their own state are doing to make health care more affordable. Many states are now introducing numerous cost-saving innovations and utilizing market forces to improve health care access.
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Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Across the nation, there are 20-week abortion prohibitions in 18 states, according to the Guttmacher Institute













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Friday, April 13, 2018

Trump has committed to back congressional efforts to protect states that legalize marijuana







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Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Trump signs order directing Education to review where it "unlawfully overstepped state and local control"

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Thursday, April 13, 2017

President Trump Signs Law to Let States Defund Planned Parenthood



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Monday, March 27, 2017

Congress Takes Important Steps to Lessen Federal Footprint in Education. President Trump just signed two GOP-led measures that block key Obama-era education regulations.



...Using the oversight authority granted to it by the Congressional Review Act, the Senate passed resolutions of disapproval for accountability regulations under the Every Student Succeeds Act and regulations for teacher preparation programs. These resolutions now proceed to President Donald Trump.

The use of the Congressional Review Act to roll back these regulations provides immediate relief for states and schools. It also prevents the Department of Education from promulgating substantially similar regulations in the future without congressional approval....

We have tried the accountability-enforced-from-Washington model for the last 15 years under No Child Left Behind, and it hasn’t worked.

The Senate’s vote against the Obama-era accountability regulations is a step in the right direction, though it still leaves significant power in the hands of the federal government. As Heritage Foundation expert Lindsey Burke noted upon passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act, good intentions still produced a mediocre law.

The Every Student Succeeds Act missed the opportunity for real reform by maintaining dozens of ineffective programs and high levels of federal spending, and by failing to incorporate the policies contained in the Academic Partnerships Lead Us to Success (A-PLUS) provision.

One of the strengths of our federal system is the possibility of innovation and experimentation in the decentralized context of the states. The A-PLUS provision would allow states to opt out of the complex federal regulatory environment and direct dollars toward any education purposed allowed under state law.

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Monday, February 27, 2017

President Trump to Governors: We’re Giving Power Back to the States











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Sunday, February 26, 2017

Trump hosts governors at White House: 46 Governors, 33 Republicans 13 democrats.



















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Thursday, February 23, 2017

Returning Power to States, School Boards





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Monday, January 23, 2017

#PatientFreedomAct: New Obamacare replacement proposal leaves repeal up to states













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Wednesday, December 28, 2016

One conservative idea liberals will start to love in 2017



Governing from the state and local level has long been something conservatives prefer to federal action, given their desire for a limited federal government and affinity for the 10th Amendment, which reserves for states and "the people" any powers not given in the Constitution to the feds. For the past six years, it's helped that so many state legislatures and governorships have been held by Republicans.

But next year, as Republicans start to dismantle President Obama's legacy, liberals will start to warm to the idea of state-level reforms. Why does everyone have to lose Obamacare coverage, they might say, when most of the people in deep-blue California or New York want to keep it? Why should every state jettison environmental regulations, they might say, when people in blue states in the northeast want to keep many of them?

The good news for liberals is that the 13 states where Democrats control both legislative chambers are welcome to pass such laws on their own (though some of those states, such as Illinois, Maryland and Massachusetts, have GOP governors, which will make it difficult).

Obamacare repealed? California can pass its own version, if that's what its people really want. Environmental regulations undone nationwide? Oregonians can pass their own....
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Saturday, January 9, 2016

Texas Gov. Abbott calls for Constitutional Convention

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Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Governors Can’t Stop Obama on Refugees, but Congress Can



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Monday, November 16, 2015

Arkansas joins Michigan, Alabama and Texas in refusing to accept Syrian refugees in wake of #ParisAttacks

























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Thursday, July 16, 2015

Marriage Policy Is a Mess. Here’s How to Make Sense of It.



...If the government ever got out of the marriage business, we might suddenly find it much more in all of our family lives.

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If the actual words Congress uses no longer constrain the IRS, what will?



Obama & SCOTUS have amended the ACA to the point that it has been transformed into something no Congress ever enacted
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Sunday, July 12, 2015

Sixteen Attorneys General File Suit to Block EPA Waters Rule

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Tuesday, June 30, 2015

The Supreme Court has declined to hear a case allowing states to require proof of citizenship for those applying to vote in federal elections, effectively upholding a lower court ruling against Kansas and Arizona.

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Tuesday, May 12, 2015

WANTED: ALICE MILLER

◼ When a federal bureaucrat is a bigger menace than a big government regulation. - Peter Hannaford/American Spectator 5.11.15

Who is Alice Miller and what’s she wanted for? She is a Washington bureaucrat and, no, she is not wanted for breaking a federal statute. Rather, she misinterpreted a regulation and, in the process, nullified the laws of two states.

She used the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (passed by Congress and signed by then-President Clinton), which requires state governments to allow a person to automatically register to vote when applying for a driver’s license or social services.

The law requires states to use a registration form designed by a federal office called the Election Assistance Commission; however, states may petition the commission to revise the form to include state qualification laws. Laws in both Kansas and Arizona require registrants to show that they are U.S. citizens in order to qualify to vote. The Obama administration does not like voter qualifications and, presumably, Alice Miller doesn’t either. Her title is “Acting Director” of the Election Assistance Commission. She refused to reprint the forms for Kansas and Arizona to conform to state law, as both had requested.

Alice Miller’s action would have gone unnoticed had it not been for an item published in PJ Media by J. Christian Adams. No doubt she would have preferred anonymity.

Was she even authorized to take such an action? Probably not. She was named “Acting Director” in a “line of succession” document written by the commission’s general counsel who was, at the time, himself, the Acting Director. His “line of succession” document was never voted on by the members of the commission, thus lacked authority. Hence Ms. Miller’s action became an unprecedented policy decision supported by Attorney General Eric Holder’s Department of Justice.

Prior to her role as “Acting Director,” Ms. Miller was a garden-variety bureaucrat at the commission. Before joining it she had been the staff lawyer for the District of Columbia’s Board of Elections and Ethics. That office oversaw D.C. elections. In that job, she once said that elections should be run with a more “‘holistic’ approach to ensuring that elections are usable, secure and reliable.” “Holistic” is a made-up word meaning, “relating to or concerned with wholes.” In this case, her refusal to adjust the forms for Kansas and Arizona means those forms definitely are not “holistic.” So much for consistency.

The two states promptly sued. A federal court sided with them, ordering the EAC to reprint the forms with the corrections in them. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, however, reversed this and held that Alice Miller did have the power to deny new forms to the two states.

Now, the states have asked the Supreme Court to take the case. The Public Interest Legal Foundation and the American Civil Rights Union (not to be confused with the American Civil Liberties Union) have filed an amicus brief in support of the Kansas and Arizona case.

An underlying problem here is that Congress passes laws without many specifics, leaving it to federal bureaucrats to write (and enforce) regulations that activate the laws. The Federal Code of Regulations now comprises 175,000 pages. As Charles Murray puts it in his new book By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission, “let’s withhold compliance with regulations that are pointless, stupid and tyrannical.” Good idea. Alas, it won’t work in this case, where it is a tyrannical bureaucrat, not the regulation, that has caused an unnecessary problem.
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Peter Hannaford was closely associated with the late President Reagan for a number of years. He is a member of the board of the Committee on the Present Danger. His latest book is ◼ “Presidential Retreats.”
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