Freedom Line Blog

Several news sources, including the Associated Press, are reporting that President Obama will nominate Judge Merrick Garland to fill Justice Scalia’s seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.

From the AP piece:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama will nominate federal appeals court judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, congressional sources said Wednesday. …

Garland is the chief judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, a court whose influence over federal policy and national security matters has made it a proving ground for potential Supreme Court justices. …

Congressional sources spoke on condition of anonymity because Obama had not yet announced his choice. …

Obama planned to introduce his pick at 11 a.m. in the White House Rose Garden.

Five things Mississippi taxpayers should know and worry about the Gulf Coast “Fiber Optic Ring”

1)  A new plan proposes to use a portion of Mississippi’s British Petroleum (BP) oil spill settlement to build a government-owned broadband network in South Mississippi. The network or “Fiber Ring” would, in theory, connect a dozen Gulf Coast cities across three counties. Local officials estimate that it could cost over $100 million.

2)  So far, the state has promised $5 million of the BP funds towards the Fiber Ring, though it is not a fiscally sound proposal.  In fact, there’s no indication of where the additional $95 million needed to finance this project will come from, but taxpayers will likely foot the bill.

3)  Government-owned networks rarely succeed, and residents already have access to high-speed Internet provided by private companies. Competing with the private sector will only force taxpayers to subsidize a costly failure.  Private Internet Service Providers (ISPs) already bring high-speed broadband to 97 percent of Harrison County residents, according to BroadbandNow.com.

4)  When the government enters a broadband market, prices for consumers do not decrease.  In fact, government-owned broadband networks have been found to charge consumers more than private firms, for similar services.

5)  Other regions have tried (and failed) at building and running government-owned broadband networks.  Here’s a look at some of the results:

Burlington Telecom, VT
Burlington Telecom was started in 2008 to provide telecommunications services to the citizens of Burlington, VT.  The network floundered, and by 2014, it owed $33.5 million to Citibank.  The city reached a final settlement in which it agreed to pay about a third of what was owed, and turned to the private sector for help financing the settlement.

Memphis Networx, TN
Memphis Networx was started as a public-private partnership by Memphis Light, Gas, and Water Division (MLGW) in 1999.  By 2007, the network had failed and MLGW sold Networx to Colorado holding company Communications Infrastructure Investments for $11.5 million after losing about $28 million in public funds on the venture.

UTOPIA, UT
UTOPIA was started in 2002 to provide Internet services to 11 cities in Utah.  The network’s initial capital investment was $135 million, and by 2014 the debt had climbed to $500 million.  The cities involved have been looking for a private buyer to take over their network for several years.

CDE Lightband, TN
CDE Lightband was started in 2007 with a $16 million loan from the Clarksville Electric Power Board’s electric division to its broadband division.  In 2009, the utility was approved to take an additional $4.5 million in loans to finance the network, leaving taxpayers and utility ratepayers on the hook for the debt.

Help CFIF spread the word.  Email this link to your colleagues, friends and family members in Mississippi and/or share it on social media.  To download a copy of CFIF’s educational fact sheet about the Gulf Coast “Fiber Optic Ring,” click here (.pdf).

Following the tragic news of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s passing, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Republican lawmakers rightly have been arguing that Scalia’s replacement should be left to the next President.

Predictably, Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY), Harry Reid’s hand-picked replacement to become the Senate Democrat leader following Reid’s retirement in 2016, is crying foul.  On ABC’s “This Week,” Schumer bemoaned, “You know, the kind of obstructionism that Mitch McConnell’s talking about, he’s harkening back to his old days.”

But it was Schumer, back in July 2007, who argued in a speech to the American Constitution Society that, except for in extraordinary circumstances, the Senate should block any Supreme Court nominations made by President George W. Bush during his remaining time in office.  At the time, Schumer said:

We should reverse the presumption of confirmation. The Supreme Court is dangerously out of balance. We cannot afford to see Justice Stevens replaced by another Roberts, or Justice Ginsburg by another Alito.

Schumer went on to add:

We should not confirm any Bush nominee to the Supreme Court, except in extraordinary circumstances.

For the record, there were 18 months left in George W. Bush’s term when Schumer argued that the Senate block any additional nominees the President may have made to the Supreme Court.  The nation is now less than seven months away from electing Obama’s successor.

In a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, the Center for Individual Freedom (“CFIF”) today joined a coalition of more than 40 other organizations representing tens of millions of consumers from across the nation to urge support of a permanent extension of the Internet Tax Freedom Act currently embedded in H.R. 644, the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act.

“In the 17 years since Congress first passed a ban on Internet access taxes, the Internet has evolved from a luxury into a necessity of modern life. ITFA helped to spark this revolution,” the letter states.  “Without ITFA, it is likely that Internet services would be taxed at the high rates of tax imposed on traditional telecommunications services, which often are more than double the rate of tax imposed on other goods and services.”

The letter concludes by urging the U.S. Senate “to act swiftly and decisively to pass a permanent extension of ITFA.”

To read the letter in its entirety, click here (.pdf).

To read the coalition press release, click here.

When the clock strikes midnight tonight, the federal moratorium blocking states and localities from taxing Internet access and shackling electronic commerce with multiple and discriminatory taxes will expire.  Consumers beware.

Congress first passed the federal law banning state and local governments from taxing Internet access in 1998. Since then, the moratorium has been extended on a temporary basis five times – a move that, among other benefits, has helped keep access to the Internet affordable for citizens and families of all economic levels. 

With the current ban set to expire, however, a number of state and local governments are eager to impose new taxes on the Internet. According to a recent report by the American Action Forum, lifting the ban on Internet access taxes could cost consumers as much as $16.4 billion.

That’s why the Center for Individual Freedom yesterday joined an impressive coalition of national free-market organizations on a letter urging Congress to pass H.R. 644, a trade bill that contains language to finally make the Internet tax ban permanent, something for which we have been advocating for well over a decade. 

To be sure, few in Congress dispute the benefits of keeping the Internet tax ban in place.  Except for a handful of Members of Congress who continually work to hold the policy hostage to the completely separate issue of whether the federal government should give states and localities new powers to force out-of-state retailers to collect and remit sales taxes on their behalf, the ban on Internet access taxes probably would have been made permanent long ago.

Fortunately, the House of Representatives today passed H.R. 644 by a vote of 256-158.  It’s time for the Senate to end the political games and follow suit.

To understand the Syrian refugee crisis, Walter Russell Mead’s analysis in The American Interest is a must read and then must read again.  Mead is not a politician; he’s a Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and Professor of American foreign policy at Yale University.
 
He asks and answers, in no uncertain terms, “Why is there a Syrian refugee crisis in the first place?”

Read the piece here.

Chairman Trey Gowdy’s blistering letter to Elijah Cummings.  Read it here.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is pushing the boundaries of its regulatory authority, as it’s set to issue a rulemaking on the basis of outdated data and faulty reasoning.

Specifically the CPSC, long known for its overzealous overregulation, voted to move forward in late December (in the midst of the holidays), with a draft rulemaking that would ban a class of chemicals called phthalates from some consumer products. Phthalates are used in a variety of consumer goods to make them more durable and to prevent plastics from shattering. CFIF’s Timothy Lee covered the issue more in-depth last week.

The circumstances surrounding CPSC’s ruling truly fly in the face of any pretense of scientific objectivity or transparency. The Commission completely ignored four years of the most recent data and made sure that no pesky third party scientists would point this out by refusing to open the peer review process to the public.

Placing the review behind closed doors also left the public in the dark about a new review process CPSC used called a cumulative risk assessment.  This method is so new and untested that the EPA, an agency not exactly renowned for being a model of scientific integrity, has decided to review it before using it for its regulatory decisions. The result of using this method and general overreach of the Commission could be previously safe chemicals being banned in everyday products and replaced with unknown and potentially unsafe alternatives. The level of overreach has prompted two of CPSC’s own commissioners to question its validity.

Fortunately, the CPSC has started its public review and has opened the docket for comments from the public.  Take a stand now and tell CPSC that this type of overregulation is exactly what we don’t need from them. Follow the link here to take action and comment now.

On the even of today’s confirmation hearing for President Obama’s Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch , the Center for Individual Freedom (“CFIF”) yesterday joined with a coalition of other prominent national organizations on a letter urging Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley to ask serious questions about the position of Ms. Lynch as it relates to “Operation Choke Point.”

Under the leadership of Attorney General Eric Holder, the U.S. Department of Justice has used the controversial program to intimidate, target and even shut down legitimate businesses (like gun shops and payday lenders) disliked by the Obama Administration.  Operation Choke Point, together with the IRS targeting scandal, serves as a prime example of how an unaccountable federal government can be abused to target out-of-favor legal businesses and individuals, and political enemies. 

The letter, which was organized by Taxpayers Protection Alliance, reads in part:

“The confirmation process is an important tool for the Senate in gauging where potential appointees stand on some of the most important issues they will be facing. … Ms. Lynch, like most Presidential nominees, has kept mostly quiet on some of the major issues she will be answering questions about once her confirmation process begins and that includes her views on Operation Choke Point.

“We hope that you will take this opportunity during the confirmation process to pose serious questions to Ms. Lynch about her views on Operation Choke Point and whether or not she will put an end to this harmful and destructive DOJ program and what her views are when it comes to the power of the federal government to use regulations to interfere with institutions and industries an administration may not like.”

To read the letter in its entirety, click here.

At the pace with which new videos continue to surface of ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber insulting American voters and exposing the Administration’s legal and deceitful public relations case for the president’s signature health care law, it truly is hard to keep up. 

Therefore, a big thank you is in order to the good folks at American Commitment, the organization that released the first Gruber video, for compiling everything you need to know about GruberGate, including Mr. Gruber’s most controversial comments – all in this in one handy two-minute video.

There has been no shortage of commentary in recent weeks and months addressing the illegality of President Obama’s planned executive action on immigration.  Even Obama himself, despite his plans to announce a sweeping new executive order on immigration tonight on prime-time television, has argued that circumventing Congress and acting unilaterally would be illegal.

In fact, Fox News’ “The Kelly File” dug up some 25 instances in which Obama said so on camera over the last several years. 

Watch the video here.

The 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is by now a fading memory for most Americans.  The U.S. Supreme Court, however, will soon decide whether to hear a case stemming from the spill that could, at long last, restrain abusive trial lawyers who game our legal system.

The case involves BP, which immediately accepted responsibility for the spill and asked attorney Kenneth Feinberg to handle claims on a rapid and completely independent basis. Ultimately, Feinberg ordered more than 200,000 payments totaling $6 billion over 16 months.

The problem at issue arose when opportunistic plaintiffs’ lawyers decided that they weren’t receiving their customary windfall.  Consequently, they rushed to court and demanded a class-action settlement, which a federal district court in Louisiana granted.

Then the court appointed a well-connected local Louisiana lawyer to administer claims for what are broadly categorized as “business economic losses.” For example, a restaurant owner on the coast could demonstrate damages by comparing pre-spill revenues and profits versus post-spill revenues and profits. Victims who could establish a decline in revenues and confirm a causal connection between the losses and the spill itself, were entitled to payment.

Unfortunately, the claims administrator also steered vast sums toward businesses whose losses clearly had nothing to do with the spill. BP’s lawyers cite 64 representative examples of such abuse in their writ to the Supreme Court, including:

• A real estate rental company that leased properties to two Saturn dealerships, which both went out of business because GM stopped making Saturns in 2009, put in a claim and received $238,000.
• A group of emergency room physicians received $2.3 million after claiming that revenues dropped sharply, but that decline resulted not from the spill, but from a one-time earnings adjustment to accounts receivable over a period of five years.

BP appealed the awards to the Fifth Circuit, but lost in a sharply-split decision. Judge Edith Clement, a highly-respected appellate judge appointed by President George W. Bush, minced no words in her dissent.  She warned that the judiciary itself was becoming a “party to the fraud” against BP

Citing Judge Clement, Cardozo School of Law professor Lester Brinkman, a premier authority in the academic study of plaintiffs’ lawyers, wrote, “Make no mistake; fraud it is.  The settlement agreement entered into by BP to provide compensation to those that suffered loss from the spill, states that in order to be eligible for compensation, claimants must affirm under penalty of perjury, that they suffered ‘damages arising from’ the Deep Water Horizon incident.  But the Louisiana legal system has obliterated these words from the agreement.”

So why should informed citizens care? After all, BP admitted to doing great damage to the Gulf of Mexico.

We should care because if the abusive and greedy plaintiffs’ lawyers triumph in this case, few restraints will remain. If ever there was an example of discarding the rule of law in favor of enriching a politically-powerful group, this case is it.

At issue in this case is a straightforward proposition. Namely, a class-action settlement is grossly inappropriate where large numbers of that supposed class have even not suffered harm. That seems elementary

Unfortunately, different federal courts of appeal have ruled inconsistently in similar cases. That inconsistency alone constitutes one reason the Supreme Court could and should accept the case. Another reason is the important and fundamental legal issue at stake: people who haven’t suffered actual harm should not receive unjustified windfall damages.

Whatever one thinks of BP, the case now before the Supreme Court is a critical one, and its legal position is the correct one. Accordingly, the Justices should take the important step of granting cert.

This Veterans Day, the Center for Individual Freedom honors the men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces.

In an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” this morning, Mark Bertolini, the Chairman and CEO of Aetna, explained that ObamaCare is “really not an affordable product for a lot of people.” He goes on to say that we “have to have a more affordable system.”

President Obama’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC), bowing to the demands of liberal special interests, is actually considering a scheme to regulate the Internet like a public utility. And if they get their way, this egregious government overreach into the broadband economy will almost certainly kill job creation, harm consumers and bring a significant amount of investment and innovation to a screeching halt.

Simply put, the federal government micromanaging the Internet under Title II of the Telecommunications Act is a dangerous scheme, one that Congress must halt and the FCC must abandon. That’s why the Center for Individual Freedom this week activated StopNetRegulation.org, a project dedicated to ensuring the Internet remains free from heavy-handed government regulations and stopping this latest power grab by the Obama administration.

Join the fight by visiting StopNetRegulation.org.  While there, use the web form to quickly and easily contact your Members of Congress and the FCC.

Of all the troubling aspects of the Obama presidency, none is more dangerous than the President’s persistent pattern of lawlessness, his willingness to disregard the written law and instead enforce his own policies via executive fiat.

That’s the lead of a new report out by Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) documenting what he argues are more than 75 legally suspect executive actions and “other abuses of power” by the Obama Administration.

The report, entitled The Legal Limit Report #4:  The Obama Administration’s Abuse of Power, was first obtained by The Daily Caller and can be viewed below:

Ted Cruz: Legal Limit Report 4

In an interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly that aired on Super Bowl Sunday, President Obama declared that there was “not even a smidgen of corruption” with regard to the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups.

The American people are not buying it.

According to a Fox News poll released last week, a whopping 64 percent of registered voters, including a majority of Democrats, think the targeting scandal does suggest corruption at the IRS.  A mere 27 percent don’t view the IRS’s targeting as corrupt.

When questioned about whether Congress should continue to investigate the IRS scandal, an even greater majority says “Yes!”

Majorities of Republicans (83 percent), independents (72 percent) and Democrats (60 percent) agree lawmakers should persist until they ‘feel they know the truth.’

For the poll results, click here.