President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance on Thursday slammed the continuing resolution before Congress and told Republicans to call Democrats’ bluff on a government shutdown.
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Treasury Department officials warn that the IRS may lose $20 billion in funding if Congress does not intervene.
Last year, $20 billion was rescinded from the IRS, but the budget cut could be inadvertently duplicated due to a legislative mechanism that keeps the government afloat, the Associated Press reported.
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As the second Trump administration prepares to commandeer the regulatory apparatus, blue states may be hoping the Supreme Court strikes down Biden administration demands on red states to protect them from the same treatment under President Trump.
More than 20 states, nearly as many federal lawmakers and dozens of conservative, pro-life and religious groups asked SCOTUS to overturn a ruling that refused to block the Department of Health and Human Services from cutting off Oklahoma’s Title X family planning funds for not giving women information about abortion.
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House Republicans voted on Wednesday to nominate House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to lead the lower chamber once more.
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Although America’s ferociously anti-Trump media refuses to admit it, there is a powerful group of people who cannot vote in the U.S. presidential election but are rooting for Kamala Harris to win: the leaders of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, terrorist groups, and other U.S. adversaries.
America’s adversaries took full advantage over the past three years of a sharp decline in American global influence and deterrence. This resulted in new wars and massive terrorist attacks, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a surge in provocations and threats by China against Taiwan and in the South China Sea, the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre against Israel, a new 7-front war against Israel, a dangerous increase in Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism and major gains in its nuclear weapons program, a huge increase in North Korean missile tests, 11 million illegal migrants crossing our southern border, and other threats.
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The Biden-Harris administration is lying to the American public when they claim that FEMA is out of money. Speaker Mike Johnson just posted on X that, “Last Wednesday, I led Congress to provide $20 billion extra dollars (available immediately) to FEMA so they would have operational funds right now to respond to Helene.”
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The United States is deep into a season of severe discontent. Our politics are polarized, our Congress is moribund, and our purchasing power has tumbled. A Gallup poll in early 2024 showed that only 20 percent of Americans are satisfied with the “way things are going.” Nearly 70 percent believe the country is on the “wrong track.”
While innumerable failures of government factor into this public cynicism, evidence suggests that U.S. immigration policy is among its most powerful components. Despite our self-image as a “nation of immigrants” and our public celebration of “diversity,” a growing number of Americans sense that immigration, especially in its most frenzied illegal form of the past three years, is implicated in some of the country’s most vexing problems.
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The Michigan township that turned against a planned battery plant project led by a China-tied company, and is now being sued over their decision, alleged in court filings that former board trustees failed to disclose conflicts of interest and apparent inducements to approve the controversial project.
The allegations filed late last week are poised to shake up battery-maker Gotion’s lawsuit against the Green Charter Township and its new board, which moved to reverse efforts by the previous trustees to facilitate the firm’s plans to build and electric vehicle battery plant in the community. The new board’s efforts, Gotion claims, violate a Development Agreement signed between it and the township last year.
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The U.S. Senate on Tuesday voted 51-44 to kill the “Right to IVF Act” which had previously failed in June.
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After finally adding a list of policy positions to her beleaguered campaign website, Vice President Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) has doubled down on her support for giving amnesty to illegal aliens if she is elected in November.
As Fox News reports, a platform has been added to the Harris-Walz campaign website after nearly two months. In an attempt to distance herself from her radical past stances, including supporting giving taxpayer-funded healthcare to all illegals, Harris has tried to portray herself as much more hawkish on the immigration crisis.
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Vice President Kamala Harris’s tax proposal plan is getting significant pushback from Congress members and others as the costs of tax hikes on the American people across the political spectrum are being examined.
Upon a closer look at Harris’s tax proposals, an economist, a New York Times reporter, a small business owner advocate, and members of Congress all voiced their concerns over what the plan entails. Most of them note how the economy will be negatively impacted by her plan and the real-world implications for everyday Americans.
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Already facing a potential breakup from a devastating antitrust court ruling, Google got more bad news Wednesday when the main congressional oversight committee announced it had opened a probe into whether the search engine misled Americans about the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump last month.
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The Harris campaign misstated Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s congressional accomplishments in a statement widely reported by the corporate media.
Harris campaign spokesman James Singer falsely said that Walz served as chair of the House Veterans Affairs Committee during his tenure as a federal lawmaker in a statement addressing the “stolen valor” scandal swirling around Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate. Walz was only ever the committee’s ranking member, and the statement was reported by outlets including The Associated Press, Axios, Politico, PBS and NBC News.
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Wading into the confusing abyss of administrative law, on June 28 the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 6-3 vote, overruled the much-criticized 1984 decision in Chevron, restoring the bedrock principle — commanded by both Article III of the Constitution and Section 706 the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act — that it is the province of courts, not administrative agency bureaucrats, to interpret federal laws. This may sound like an easy ruling, but the issue had long bedeviled the Supreme Court. Even Justice Antonin Scalia, an administrative law expert, supported Chevron prior to his death in 2016. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, Chief Justice John Roberts sure-footedly dispatched Chevron.
If, as I wrote for The American Conservative in 2021, “Taming the administrative state is the issue of our time,” why did the Supreme Court unanimously (albeit with a bare six-member quorum) decide in Chevron to defer to administrative agencies interpretations of ambiguous statutes, and why did conservatives — at least initially — support the decision? In a word, politics. In 1984, the President in charge of the executive branch was Ronald Reagan, and the D.C. Circuit — where most administrative law cases are decided — was (and had been for decades) controlled by liberal activist judges. President Reagan’s deputy solicitor general, Paul Bator, argued the Chevron case, successfully urging the Court to overturn a D.C. Circuit decision (written by then-Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg) that had invalidated EPA regulations interpreting the Clean Air Act. Thus, in the beginning, “Chevron deference” meant deferring to Reagan’s agency heads and their de-regulatory agenda.
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The GOP-led House has quietly filed a rare intervention in Steve Bannon’s contempt of Congress case, arguing the Democrat-led House January 6 Select Committee failed in its formation to follow chamber rules – invalidating the two subpoenas it served Bannon that he ignore and ultimately put him behind bars.
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The National Rifle Association (NRA) has filed a lawsuit against the Biden Administration’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), as well as Attorney General Merrick Garland, over a new federal rule pertaining to firearms dealers.
As the Daily Caller reports, the ATF first imposed a new rule in April redefining what it means to be “engaged in the business” of selling firearms, so that the law would now include anyone who simply sells a smaller number of guns. The NRA filed its lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, seeking an injunction to block enforcement of the regulation.
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“In the heart of the Middle East, standing in Iran’s way, is one proud, pro-American democracy—my country, the state of Israel!”
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Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., is expected to resign his office on Aug. 20 following his conviction in a federal corruption trial, according to a report.
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The Secret Service confirmed Friday agency Director Kimberly Cheatle will testify as planned at a July 22 House Oversight Committee hearing about the assassination attempt on GOP nominee Donald Trump.
The committee is investigating the security lapses at former President Trump’s campaign rally in Pennsylvania last weekend where a gunman opened fire, killing one and wounding three others, including the former president himself.
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Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser, must report to prison by Monday after the Supreme Court rejected his appeal on Friday.
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The Office of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has issued another report identifying ongoing problems with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) processes.
A regional CBP and ICE detention and removal processes were ineffective at one major international airport, the OIG audit found. The report redacts the name and location of the airport and CBP and ICE regional offices.
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House Republicans have built a mountain of incontrovertible evidence that Hunter Biden made millions while his father was vice president from business associates with unsavory backgrounds, including a Ukrainian energy firm deemed corrupt by the State Department, a Chinese executive convicted by DOJ of corruption, a Russian oligarch unable to get an American bank account because of red flags, a Romanian oligarch charged with bribery in his country, and two Americans convicted of securities fraud.
And now, an Associated Press/University of Chicago poll shows that two thirds of Americans believe Joe Biden did something illegal or unethical.
But the tangle of complex transactions and foreign names can often complicate the explanations of influence peddling.
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The GOP-led House voted to pass a resolution holding Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress on Wednesday.
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Former Border security leaders serving under multiple presidents and whose careers span decades in law enforcement say President Joe Biden’s “border security” announcement Tuesday won’t secure the border but instead will facilitate more illegal immigration, bringing in another two million people into the country illegally a year.
“The border will never be ‘shut down’ under this executive action but rather serve to legalize an unjustified level of open borders that will further perpetuate the chaos and lawlessness we’ve experienced during the entirety of the Biden Administration,” former U.S. Border Patrol Chief Mark Morgan told The Center Square. “The proposed action will, at a minimum, allow more than one million illegal aliens to be released into the county annually, along with another one million inadmissible aliens being allowed to fly into interior airports within the U.S.,” referring to the CBP One app that allows migrants to apply for entry remotely.
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House Republicans have referred Hunter and James Biden to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution, accusing the pair of making false statements to Congress during the impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.
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The federal debt continues to climb to unprecedented levels, but the “actual, true” debt is higher if the Treasury weren’t being drained, a national economist says.
Citing Bureau of the Fiscal Service data, E. J. Antoni, Ph.D., an economist at the Heritage Foundation, argues that as the federal debt increases, the “true daily deficit” is being masked by the amount of cash being drained from the U.S. Treasury by Treasury Department Secretary Janet Yellen.
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In Tennessee, the battle to protect pharmacy benefits is not merely a matter of policy, but a battle to protect our country from unnecessary government overreach by the extreme Left. I am deeply troubled by recent attempts at the federal level that target pharmacy benefits and our free market – all in one swoop.
People across our state are already experiencing immense financial strain as they grapple with the soaring costs of inflation and prescriptions, and we need to advocate for policies that will effectively lower these prices through free market competition.
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While the Chinese Communist Party’s possibly imminent invasion of Taiwan could spark a war in the region, experts and lawmakers in Congress on Thursday expressed that the Taiwan issue is just one part of a broader Chinese strategy countering the U.S.
U.S.House lawmakers raised the alarm about the Chinese communist government’s threat to the U.S. via cyber security and the border crisis at two separate hearings Thursday.
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Special Counsel Jack Smith was supposed to be basking in glory right now.
In his ideal world, Smith would be hot off a quick conviction of Donald Trump in Washington, D.C. for the former president’s alleged role in the events of January 6 and attempts to “overturn” the 2020 election. The special counsel then would have immediately moved his victorious prosecutors to Palm Beach for the summer to prepare for Trump’s second federal trial related to allegedly stealing national defense information and impeding the Department of Justice’s investigation.
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Telehealth has become a health care gamechanger for tens of millions of Americans.
We all know the time and effort an in-person health visit takes – travel to the appointment, time off work, hours spent in an office, follow ups that require us to do the whole process over again. But telehealth expansion in the post-COVID world has changed everything.
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Congress has spent more money on interest so far this year than it has spent on both national defense and Medicare.
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The number of known or suspected terrorists (KSTs) apprehended at the northern border in the first six months of fiscal 2024 continue to outpace those apprehended at the southwest border.
There have been 143 KSTs apprehended at the northern border through the first six months of this fiscal year compared to 92 at the southwest border, according to the most recent CBP data.
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Two reports released Monday show that the U.S. combined Social Security trust fund is projected to deplete its reserves by 2035.
The Trustees for Social Security and Medicare released annual reports on Monday. The Trustees projected the Medicare Hospital Insurance trust fund will exhaust its reserves in 2036. The Social Security Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) trust fund was projected to be insolvent by 2033.
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Nearly two years after Nina Jankowicz briefly led the Disinformation Governance Board at the Department of Homeland Security, she’s launched an organization demanding transparency and the public release of documents about the public debate on disinformation. An interesting move, likely without true transparency in mind.
My organization, Americans for Prosperity Foundation, has spent the same two years fighting DHS for documents on the federal board Jankowicz managed. We’re filing a second lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act to fight continued government stonewalling of our requests. Thus far, DHS has refused to provide unredacted versions of documents that outline its purported authorities to regulate disinformation. Nor will the agency release more information about its work on misinformation related to “irregular migration” and “Ukraine” before the board was disbanded in August 2022.
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The House of Representatives finally acted Wednesday to remedy an injustice that has been getting worse as the number of illegal aliens coming into the United States has skyrocketed: the distortion caused by including noncitizens when determining how many House members each state gets.
The House passed HR 7109, the Equal Representation Act, to mandate a citizenship question on the census form and use of only the citizen population in the apportionment formula for representation applied after every census.
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The federal government loses up to $521 billion a year to fraud, according to a first-of-its-kind estimate from a Congressional watchdog.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office, which serves as the research arm of Congress, estimated annual fraud losses cost taxpayers between $233 billion and $521 billion annually, according to a new report published Tuesday. The fraud estimate’s range represents 3% to 7% of average federal obligations.
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The sad reality is that the Republicans in the House after a narrow victory in the 2022 Congressional midterms do not have enough of a majority to be able to accomplish many big things.
This is not the fault of anyone in leadership, but instead is just the reality of what is at this time a one-vote majority with wildly divergent priorities amongst the GOP members in the House.
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The Biden administration has just supercharged the electric vehicle (EV) revolution. With its finalized tailpipe emissions rule, the administration expects that by 2032 70% of new U.S. car sales will be electric.
This lightning-fast transformation of the nation’s car fleet faces myriad challenges but perhaps none are greater than sourcing the minerals needed for millions of EVs and addressing the nation’s alarming reliance on Chinese-controlled mineral supply chains.
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Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., announced Friday that he would be resigning from Congress early, leaving the House GOP with a slim one-vote majority.
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Donald Trump filed his brief Tuesday at the U.S. Supreme Court to defend his argument that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution. Noting the lack of historical precedent and dire ramifications for the future, Trump’s attorneys warned that “a denial of criminal immunity would incapacitate every future President with de facto blackmail and extortion while in office, and condemn him to years of post-office trauma at the hands of political opponents.”
Oral arguments on the groundbreaking question are set for April 25; a final opinion, which could be announced in late May or sometime in June before the current SCOTUS term ends, represents a do-or-die situation for Special Counsel Jack Smith’s four-count indictment against the former president for the events of January 6 and his alleged attempts to “overturn” the 2020 election. The case is now on hold awaiting a decision by SCOTUS.
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Though windmills and solar panels get the headlines, the big energy topic in Washington is electric transmission. Whether it is Congress’s newfound interest in permitting reform, the U.S. Department of Energy’s new Grid Deployment Office, or the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) upcoming final rule on transmission planning and cost allocation, how to build and pay for long-range transmission to connect generators to customers is considered the final piece in the quest to meet net-zero goals.
Like so many issues in Washington, the need for more transmission lines is accepted without question and the costs are not considered. But for American consumers, especially low-income and elderly, as well as small businesses and energy intense manufacturers, building new transmission lines could result in much higher monthly bills and leave them on the hook for stranded assets.
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Four members of Congress recently reported buying and selling financial assets, despite co-sponsoring a bill that would ban such trades, disclosures show.
Democratic Reps. Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania, Jeff Jackson of North Carolina, Bill Keating of Massachusetts and Republican Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas all reported selling or purchasing assets after they signed on as co-sponsors of the TRUST In Congress Act, financial disclosures show. The TRUST In Congress Act would ban members of Congress from directly trading covered investments, which includes securities, commodities futures and similar assets by requiring them to place such assets in a blind trust.
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Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary under the Trump administration, said Thursday that he is organizing a group to buy TikTok as a bill proceeds through Congress that would force the popular social media app to either be sold or be banned.
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Just when it seemed impossible for things to get tougher for small businesses, the federal government decided to make things worse.
Small businesses have had a tough run for the last few years. Record inflation, high interest rates, and workforce shortages have led to widespread pessimism among small businesses. The last thing they need is more government interference, but that is exactly what is happening.
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Newly-disclosed emails show a Chinese businessman who partnered with Hunter Biden’s Burnham firm was primarily motivated by access rather than financial considerations, bolstering the House Oversight Committee’s contention that the Biden name was the commodity being sold by the younger Biden.
In late February, impeachment witness Jason Galanis—one of Hunter Biden’s partners in the Burnham venture—told Congress the firm served as place to integrate the “Biden Family Office” with a “large-scale financial company.”
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Some lawmakers are once again calling on their colleagues to make Daylight Saving Time permanent.
Ahead of the switch to Daylight Saving Time this weekend, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., highlighted the importance of the Sunshine Protection Act, which would make Daylight Saving Time permanent.
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Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, who led the second impeachment effort against former President Donald Trump, pledged to work on legislation that would set up a process for Congress to determine who cannot run for office under the 14th Amendment’s “insurrection” clause.
Raskin spoke about the legislation Monday on CNN hours after the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Trump can remain on the 2024 presidential ballot in response to a case in Colorado, where the state supreme court ruled that Trump was ineligible under the 14th Amendment for his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election and in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
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Hunter Biden testified to Congress that he did not involve his father, President Joe Biden, in his business dealings as the Republican impeachment inquiry heats up.
“I am here today to provide the Committees with the one uncontestable fact that should end the false premise of this inquiry: I did not involve my father in my business. Not while I was a practicing lawyer, not in my investments or transactions domestic or international, not as a board member, and not as an artist. Never,” he said in his opening statement obtained by Punchbowl News.
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In his opening statement to House impeachment investigators, former Hunter Biden business partner, Jason Galanis, said Joe Biden planned to join the board of his son’s firm which was being backed by a Chinese businessman and state-owned enterprises.
Galanis delivered his opening statement on Friday morning to congressional investigators from inside a federal prison in Alabama where he is serving a prison sentence for engaging in an illegal scheme to enrich Burnham Asset Management.
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On February 13, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the Frederick Douglass Trafficking Victims Prevention and Protection Reauthorization Act with a vote of 414-11. The bipartisan legislation, authored by Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), will reauthorize the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 – which expired in 2021 – and provide approximately $1 billion in funding over five years for programs that combat the scourge of human trafficking.
Among the measures included in the comprehensive legislation are educational grants to provide situational awareness training and prevention for elementary and secondary students; funding reauthorization for the International Megan’s Law and Angel Watch programs; and authorization for programs that support survivors’ employment, housing, and education.
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