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The U.K. Election: A Near Run Thing
When the polls closed at 10:00 p.m. local time last night, the Tory leadership was nervous and even depressed; when the BBC exit poll was published at 10:06 p.m., their mood lightened up considerably; and four hours later they were ...
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Sorry, Jeb, Puerto Rican Statehood Is an Awful Idea
‘Puerto Rican citizens — U.S. citizens — ought to have the right to determine whether they want to be a state,” Jeb Bush said this week. But they have had the right to determine that several times, and they seem to ...
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The Constitution Is Silent on Same-Sex Marriage
If the Supreme Court rules that all state governments must recognize same-sex unions as marriages, it will not just be saying that the view that marriage should be defined in law as the union of a man and a woman ...
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After several weeks stalled in the Senate (by Democratic intransigence on an unrelated measure), Loretta Lynch’s nomination to replace Eric Holder as attorney general is finally set for a vote. Republicans should vote her down.
#ad#There is no ...
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The Trans-Pacific Partnership Deserves a Hearing
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) isn’t a trade agreement: It’s a trade, environment, labor, human-rights, and digital-copyrights agreement, among other things. We would prefer that our trade agreements be trade agreements, but current political realities are not entirely aligned ...
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Senator Sessions Is Right on Immigration
Writing last week in the Washington Post, Senator Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) suggested: “It is time for an honest discussion of immigration.” This week, the New York Times editorial board proved him right.
Relying on a rebuttal from the libertarian ...
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The suspense is over. Hillary Clinton is running for president. Gird yourselves for a grim forced march to a Democratic coronation.
Republican candidates should do more than that, obviously. Although the Republicans will spend the next several months running against ...
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We now have a definitive answer to the oft-asked but hardly challenging question of whether President Obama wanted a deal with Iran so badly he would accept a truly awful bargain. The answer: Of course he did.
Iranian negotiators have ...
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Liberals against Religious Liberty in Indiana
Indiana has adopted a state-level version of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), thereby imposing a “strict scrutiny” legal standard when the state government or local powers pass laws that interfere with the free exercise of religion. For this, ...
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On Monday, Senator Ted Cruz became the first Republican to formally announce he is running for president next year. We heartily welcome him into the race.
This publication is a longstanding fan of his, dating back before he was the ...
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Did the DOJ Lie to Judge Hanen?
When federal judge Andrew Hanen, of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Texas, issued an injunction temporarily blocking President Obama’s most recent executive amnesty as of February 16, he did not choose the date arbitrarily. To ...
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Obama Manufactures an Israel Crisis
‘Words matter,” White House secretary Josh Earnest told reporters today, by way of explanation for the Obama administration’s fresh, newly intense scorn for the government of Israel.
So they do — which is why it is so disturbing that the ...
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The Democrats’ Despicable Filibuster
Abortion has been legal throughout the United States for 42 years, and for nearly 40 years Congress has repeatedly authorized general prohibitions on the use of public funds to pay for it through legislative language called the Hyde amendment, named for Illinois ...
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If the new Republican majorities in Congress have a mandate to do anything, it is not to inflict hundreds of billions of dollars in new entitlement liabilities on the American taxpayer, but that is what they are positioning themselves to ...
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Torturing the Meaning of Words
The lesson Democrats took from the last Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act (NFIB v. Sebelius) is not that the law is well crafted or that all of its provisions fall within constitutional boundaries — it is that the ...
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Stop Caving on Immigration, 2016 Contenders
The Republican presidential field is united in its opposition to President Obama’s executive amnesty, and also united in a lazy consensus on immigration policy.
The range of opinion among prospective GOP candidates is astonishingly narrow, and the proposed measures ...
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Fund Homeland Security, But Block Amnesty
Senate Democrats are filibustering a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security, which runs out of spending authority February 26, because it also blocks a number of President Obama’s unilateral executive actions on immigration. At least six Senate Democrats ...
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On Net Neutrality, Time to Regulate the Regulators
The Federal Communications Commission’s decision to effectively convert broadband Internet providers into regulated utility companies, stifling both technological innovation and consumer choice, is the latest example of the footrace dynamic that will dominate national domestic politics from now until ...
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Gordon College is a small Boston-area missionary-training institute turned liberal-arts college whose 1,800 undergraduates take as their motto “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.” It was, then, perhaps only a matter of time before it found itself, as it does now, ...
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What could be described as “the fundamentals” of the Russo-Ukrainian crisis have now been in place and even stable for the better part of a year. Ukraine is governed from Kiev by a democratic government (originally the result of a ...
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Resist the Lynch Nomination
In November, just days after the American electorate gave Republicans strong majorities in both chambers of Congress, President Obama thumbed his nose at several million voters by issuing an executive order effectively granting amnesty to 5 million–plus immigrants residing in ...
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Republicans could learn a few things from President Obama’s State of the Union address.
It’s not that they have much to learn from his policies. The president took a victory lap for his economic policies because the economy ...
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Obama’s New Tax Plan: Destructive Social Engineering
The tax proposals in President Obama’s new economic plan are significantly worse than we expected, combining several tax increases on investment with an especially destructive form of social engineering.
Republicans are likely to concentrate on the plan’s attacks ...
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A Community-College Plan Doomed to Fail
The logic behind the “free” community-college program President Obama announced last week is understandable. A high-school education once put many well-paying jobs within reach of Americans. Today, post-high-school work is increasingly necessary. So President Obama has proposed that two years ...
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The Charlie Hebdo Massacre
Twelve people were killed today at the Paris office of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo for mocking Islam and the Prophet Mohammed and thereby offending their murderers. Let us therefore begin by considering blasphemy and other offenses. Someone who ...
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Here are four names, long forgotten, that should be noted today: Armando Alejandre, Carlos Costa, Pablo Morales, and Mario de la Peña. They were three U.S. citizens and one permanent resident. They were pilots with Brothers to the ...
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Jeb Bush, who says he is considering running for president, is a strong conservative. As governor of Florida from 1999 through 2007, he advanced conservative goals on taxes, school choice, privatization, racial preferences, the right to life, and many other issues. He ...
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Beware of Democrats bearing votes: The Republican leadership’s tenuous bipartisan deal to pass a “cromnibus” today may be falling apart.
The bargain would fund most of the federal government through the end of next September, while funding the Department ...
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The nature and timing of the report on CIA interrogation operations released this week by the Senate Intelligence Committee were ideal for Democratic members of the committee and their allies, and harmful for just about everyone else.
How the report’...
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The Unnecessary Death of Eric Garner
The death of Staten Island resident Eric Garner at the hands of a New York City police officer was tragic and unnecessary. Whether it was criminal is a more complicated question. A Staten Island grand jury did not believe so, ...
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Keep Sessions as Budget Chairman
One of the best advocates Republicans and conservatives have had on Capitol Hill for years has been Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, now the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee. It’s unfortunate that there’s a chance he ...
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Eisenhower Deserves a Statue
The irony would not be lost on Dwight D. Eisenhower, a man of integrity, simple tastes, and decisive action, that the commission established to create a memorial in his honor is characterized by backscratching, apologetics for avant-gardism, and bureaucratic torpor. ...
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It’s How They Wrote the Law
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear King v. Burwell, a case that threatens to undermine the basic architecture of Obamacare — if it is decided on what the law actually says rather than on what the Obama administration wishes it ...
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No to the Judicial Filibuster
One of the most obvious, enduring benefits of the Republicans’ resounding victory on Tuesday will be their ability to check the president when it comes to judicial nominations. Especially since the end of the judicial filibuster almost exactly one year ...
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Around 9:00 last night, the TV pundits realized that it would no longer do to say that it was an anti-incumbent year: The vast majority of the incumbents losing — all of them in the Senate — were Democrats. Nor could the election ...
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Obamacare: Unpopular as Ever
Republicans are poised to retake the Senate, but panicky Democrats are assuring themselves that if that happens, it will have nothing to do with Obamacare. “Republican attacks on the health care law dominated the early months of the campaign, but ...
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What to Do about ‘Inequality’
What the issue has to do with her duties as Fed chairman is not obvious, but Janet Yellen has joined the nation’s self-appointed Committee for Panicking about Economic Inequality, and begins by offering a slightly more rigorous repetition of ...
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The Democrats’ “war on women” strategy has always been frivolous and intellectually dishonest, and it is now being revealed as ineffective, too.
Let us call the roll: Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Kentucky secretary of state hoping to oust Senate Majority ...
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Judicial Activism and Judicial Abdication
Are the people of the United States owed at least the opportunity to make an argument, before philosopher-kings in robes change the meaning of their Constitution? We would have thought so. Are they owed an opinion that at least takes ...
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The Wrong Side of AP History
The College Board’s new model curriculum guidelines for Advanced Placement U.S. history courses has been widely criticized, by our Stanley Kurtz and others, as being the biased product of a group of ideologues led by New York University’...
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Barbara Comstock for Congress
Barbara Comstock began her career in government in 1991 under the tutelage of Representative Frank Wolf. Now, after 34 years in the House, Wolf is retiring, and voters in Virginia’s tenth district have the opportunity to elect Comstock, currently serving a ...
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Yes to Over-the-Counter Birth Control
George Stephanopoulos finally got his way: Republicans are talking about birth control this campaign season. But they’re running, appropriately, to get government out of the birth-control business as much as possible, and to free up access to it for ...
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More Defense Dollars, Now
Congressional Republicans cannot do much to make President Obama devise a credible strategy to defeat the Islamic State, or to counter Russian expansionism. There is one thing they can do, however, to contribute to the recovery of American strength overseas, ...
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It’s been nine months since the Islamic State took Fallujah, and President Obama shrugged off what should have been a fire-bell in the night.
In his notorious JV-team interview with the New Yorker, the president explained away the capture ...
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Pull the Plug on the Export-Import Bank
Who says Republicans can’t compromise? Their first stab at a continuing resolution, the funding bill that has to be passed by October 1 to keep the federal government running, already includes a concession to Democrats and big business. It will ...
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In May, the White House announced that unless Congress moved forward with the type of immigration bill favored by President Obama, he would consider taking unilateral executive action on the matter. The threat was soon fleshed out: The president might ...
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In mid August the Ukraine crisis seemed to be moving toward a diplomatic solution in talks scheduled in Minsk between Russian president Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart, Petro Poroshenko, with European Union officials hovering in the background offering advice ...
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Republicans, Make Your Case
Republicans continue to lack any strategy for winning the November elections beyond avoiding mistakes and hoping that President Obama’s unpopularity, especially in key states, delivers control of the Senate to them. It must be said that the party has ...
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Putin’s Failures in Ukraine
There was a small clue that indicated something unusual was happening in the Kremlin to which too few observers paid attention. Ten days ago Russian president Vladimir Putin gave a major speech on Ukraine and Russian foreign policy in Crimea. ...
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How Not to Look at the Garland Attack
On Sunday evening, two gunmen sought to reenact in suburban Dallas the horrors of January’s attack on French humor magazine Charlie Hebdo. That they failed to reach their target — a Mohammed-cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, sponsored by Pamela Geller’...
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To the People of Baltimore: Stop Making Things Worse
We condemn in the strongest terms the violence and looting that has been inflicted on the people of Baltimore. Whatever the zigzags of thought among those who perversely call themselves “liberals” while condoning the most illiberal of social mechanisms — freelance ...
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A Better Way to Roll Back Obamacare
Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wisc.) has a plan in case the Supreme Court strikes down the Obama administration’s illegal subsidies for insurance plans in 37 states. He has gotten 31 of his Senate Republicans to join him in sponsoring his bill. ...
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Congress Should Try to Kill the Iran Deal Now
We thought we had a bad deal with Iran; then it looked like we didn’t really have a deal at all. Now it appears President Obama is doing everything he can to make whatever we have worse.
The interim ...
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Follow Sweden: Kill the Inheritance Tax Now
Class warriors on the left argue that the United States should be more like Sweden, and we agree: Senate Republicans should move forward with a plan to repeal the inheritance tax, which the House passed Thursday.
#ad#Sweden had an ...
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Marco Rubio Has the Right Ideas, and More
Marco Rubio seems to like taking risks. Announcing that he will run for the presidency, as he did in Miami on Monday, means that he may lose his Senate seat next year. But we’re glad he’s running, as ...
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Rand Paul Has Something to Bring to 2016, But Be Wary
Senator Rand Paul is the second Republican to announce his official run for the 2016 presidential nomination. He brings some strengths to the race, and some glaring weaknesses.
#ad#On the positive side of the ledger, he has emphasized outreach to ...
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Don’t ‘Fix’ Indiana’s RFRA
Caught in the throes of the theatrical moral panic that followed Indiana’s passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), critics wailed that Governor Mike Pence had just signed a bill that would allow private companies to hide behind ...
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Harry Reid, a boxer and a brawler, is throwing in the towel.
Good riddance.
#ad#There is no gentle way to characterize Senator Reid’s career: He is and long has been one of the worst things about American government — ...
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Lee Kuan Yew, Father of the Singapore Miracle
Lee Kuan Yew, who has just died at the age of 91, was the preeminent Asian statesman and one of the greatest men of his time. He was also one of the few national leaders who defied the saying of Enoch ...
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Pump the Brakes on Fracking Regulations
In yet another Obama-administration Friday-afternoon news dump, the Bureau of Land Management announced that it is issuing broad and cumbrous new regulations on certain techniques of drilling for natural gas and oil — hydraulic fracturing, a.k.a. “fracking” — on land ...
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Netanyahu’s Win, Obama’s Loss
It would be a stretch to say that President Obama lost Israel’s election. But our president has made it pretty clear what he thinks of Benjamin Netanyahu, and last night, Israeli voters made it pretty clear what they think ...
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Building Bipartisan Support for Blocking Obama’s Iran Folly
It’s heartening when mainstream Democrats remind us that they don’t always march to the beat of MoveOn.org’s drum circles.
A number of Senate Democrats clearly disapprove of Senator Tom Cotton’s decision to tell Iran that ...
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Scott Walker’s Righteous Victory in Wisconsin
We are halfway there: On Friday, the state assembly of Wisconsin voted to make the state the 25th to pass right-to-work legislation, and Governor Scott Walker is expected to sign the bill with some satisfaction. That’s 25 down, 25 to go. (...
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House Leaders Surrender on DHS Funding
The House has passed a bill funding the Department of Homeland Security in its entirety through the remainder of the fiscal year, ending with a whimper, not a bang, a weeks-long standoff over House Republicans’ efforts to defund President Obama’...
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The Hate Whose Name They Dare Not Speak
In Washington, they are practically praying for a Christian terrorist. At a breakfast in January, President Obama reached all the way back to the Crusades for an example of violence purportedly motivated by Christian extremism. Days later, when three Muslims ...
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An Authorization for Failure
President Obama has sent Congress a proposed Authorization for the Use of Military Force against the Islamic State, and it’s not immediately clear why. His administration says it already has said authority via at least three different channels. Indeed, ...
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Republicans are making progress, albeit slowly, toward replacing Obamacare. Last year, three Republican senators — Tom Coburn, Richard Burr, and Orrin Hatch — outlined a serious plan to replace it with a set of health-care policies that are much more free-market and ...
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‘We’ll put people to work repairing crumbling roads, bridges, and schools by eliminating the backlog of well-planned, worthy, and needed infrastructure projects.” So promised President Barack Obama in 2009, arguing for a gigantic stimulus bill, which he secured, at an ...
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Put More Pressure on Iran
President Obama says he can’t reach a nuclear deal with Iran if Congress authorizes consequences to take effect in the event he reaches a bad deal, or the Iranians keep stalling. Even members of his own party recognize the ...
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Republicans Abdicate on Abortion
Not many Republican elected officials these days argue for a right to abortion. The pro-choice wing of the party is a shriveled thing, as is the once-strong pro-life wing of the Democratic party. But there is still a spectrum of ...
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Republicans in the House of Representatives deserve credit for passing a bill, belatedly, to block President Obama’s unconstitutional immigration orders. We had our differences with Republican leaders on when and how that confrontation should happen, but it has begun.
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Our Jihad Problem, and Obama’s
The White House is convening a conference on “violent extremism,” and the president and his underlings are, depending on your point of view, either painfully, hilariously, or terrifyingly reluctant to call the thing by its name, which is Islamist extremism — ...
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The GOP’s Mandate Strategy
Republican leadership has an odd idea for one of its first big policy pushes of this Congress: a change to Obamacare that threatens to make the law worse.
The idea, expected to come to a vote in the House on ...
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Assassinating New York’s Finest
This Saturday, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were assassinated on on the streets of New York for wearing the uniform that keeps those streets safe. Only one man, a felon who may have been mentally ill, bears responsibility for robbing ...
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Sony Should Release The Interview Online
Seth Rogen and James Franco give every indication of being in life something very much like the loveable dopes they play in the movies, and that they should be central figures in a matter of international importance is unlikely indeed. ...
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For Whatshisname, the Dustbin of History
Two Australians who set off yesterday for a regular day of work are dead because they met in a coffee shop — one to sell coffee, one to buy it. They were in the coffee shop when an Islamist fanatic came ...
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The federal government’s funding authorization expires tonight at midnight, and the Republican plan to renew it bodes poorly for the GOP’s leadership of Congress next year.
The proposal: Pass an omnibus spending resolution that funds most of the ...
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Consider the almost comically inept, and entirely unethical, reporting of Rolling Stone in the matter of the gang-rape allegation at the University of Virginia: the university’s ham-fisted overreaction in suspending all fraternities and sororities; the enraged protests; the subsequent ...
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A St. Louis County grand jury has chosen not to indict Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson in the August shooting death of Michael Brown. From the evidence available, and the careful, long statement of St. Louis prosecutor Robert P. ...
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President Obama plans to announce tonight the most extreme assertion of domestic executive power in our lifetimes. The justification he has offered would be almost amusing if it were not so disturbingly hard to distinguish from blackmail: If Congress won’...
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Republican leaders in both the House and the newly conquered Senate appear committed to giving up the most important responsibility of the 114th Congress before it’s even begun. When Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy floated the idea of passing a ...
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To Preserve Marriage and Democracy
The great deal of lawless judicial opinion written by federal judges about the issue of same-sex marriage now has an important counterweight: The ruling of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which decided on Thursday that nothing in the Constitution ...
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Resist Executive Overreach on Immigration
Votes were still coming in on Tuesday evening when ABC’s Jon Karl reported that, per White House sources, “the president will move forward with an executive order on immigration reform no matter how big a shellacking Democrats get.” The ...
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A Manifesto for Dysfunction
Lena Dunham, actress, television writer, and disturbing memoirist, is displeased that a National Review writer quoted passages from her book and characterized some of the episodes described therein as representing the sexual abuse of her younger sister, Grace. Her lawyers ...
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Putin Loses in Ukraine’s Election
Doubtless they will try, but it will be hard for “realist” commentators to spin the results of Ukraine’s parliamentary elections as another triumph for the bare-chested Machiavellian Vladimir Putin. Three pro-Europe, pro-democracy, and (by necessity) anti-Russian political parties between ...
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The “Freedom Summer” of 2014 started with a bang but appears to be ending with a whimper. Before the investigation had even begun, the progressive narrative of the death of Michael Brown had crystallized: A white police officer murdered a young, ...
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Restrict Travel to Curb Ebola
The threat of a widespread Ebola outbreak in the United States is small; the object should be to keep it that way. Banning travel to and from West Africa — most importantly, Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, where Ebola is epidemic — ...
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Time to Help Syria’s Kurds
Western airstrikes and Kurdish resistance appear to have slowed the Islamic State’s takeover of Kobani, a Syrian town on the border with Turkey, for now. But the situation in the area, where Syrian Kurdish rebels have been steadily losing ...
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Stand with the Hong Kong Protesters
President Obama praised Hong Kong’s “open system” this week during a private meeting with China’s foreign minister. Unfortunately, Hong Kong doesn’t yet have an open system, and President Obama has been disconcertingly quiet about the fact that ...
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Eric Holder’s legal mercies have typically been reserved for Clinton donors and unrepentant terrorists, but his decision yesterday to step down as attorney general of the United States after nearly six years is an act of mercy toward the ...
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‘While there’s no substitute for congressional action, my administration will act wherever we can to protect the progress the American people have worked so hard to bring about.” With this nonsensical statement, President Obama brought about an easy change ...
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Scotland Remains British — for Now
Scotland’s rejection of national independence in Thursday’s referendum has been greeted with deep relief by the current cross-party establishment in Westminster in accord with Churchill’s maxim that there is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at ...
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Free Speech (If No One Objects)
When, this spring, Brandeis University reneged on its commencement invitation to human-rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, it revealed the cravenness that characterizes many of America’s leading institutions of higher education. The decision of Yale’s William F. Buckley Jr. ...
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We’ll Take Free Speech, Thank You
Senate Democrats are on the precipice of voting to repeal the First Amendment.
That extraordinary fact is a result of the increasingly authoritarian efforts of Democrats, notably Senate majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada, to suppress criticism of themselves and ...
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An Obamacare Test for Republicans
Congressional Republicans keep saying they oppose Obamacare. Yet they’re refusing to take the simplest and easiest action against it.
The way the law is designed, insurance companies get taxpayer subsidies if they incur big losses on the exchanges. That ...
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Chaffetz for Oversight Chairman
Assuming no electoral catastrophe for the GOP, immediately after November’s midterm elections the House Republican Steering Committee will select the leaders of the various House committees. Ending a six-year term as chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government ...
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There’s Something about Harry
The Editors would like to extend our condolences to Senator Harry Reid and his family as they go through this difficult time. While we can only guess at the exact nature of the psychiatric or neurological trauma the Senate majority ...
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If you’re looking to move from Miami to Canada, as Burger King Worldwide is, chances are excellent that your motive is something other than the weather.
The word “inversion” has entered the popular vocabulary, describing a tax-driven corporate merger ...