As we at CFIF often highlight, strong intellectual property (IP) rights - including patent rights -…
CFIF on X CFIF on YouTube
Senate Must Support Strong Patent Rights, Not Erode Them

As we at CFIF often highlight, strong intellectual property (IP) rights - including patent rights - constitute a core element of "American Exceptionalism" and explain how we became the most inventive, prosperous, technologically advanced nation in human history.  Our Founding Fathers considered IP so important that they explicitly protected it in the text of Article I of the United States Constitution.

Strong patent rights also explain how the U.S. accounts for an incredible two-thirds of all new lifesaving drugs introduced worldwide.

Elected officials must therefore work to protect strong IP and patent rights, not undermine them.   Unfortunately, several anti-patent bills currently before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee this week threaten to do exactly…[more]

April 02, 2025 • 08:29 PM

Liberty Update

CFIFs latest news, commentary and alerts delivered to your inbox.
Obama’s 2012: Governing Without Congress Print
By Troy Senik
Thursday, January 05 2012
In our constitutional system, presidents don't get to 'refuse to take no for an answer.'

2011 was Barack Obama’s year of living dangerously. Whether it was the debt ceiling showdown, the prospect of closing the federal government or the push for a macroeconomically meaningless payroll tax cut, the president’s standard operating procedure was to wait until the eleventh hour, then hope that the resultant chaos in Congress would be sufficient to get the legislative branch to bend to his will.
 
If a contempt for Congress was the hallmark of Obama’s lawmaking strategy in 2011, however, the president looks to be taking it one step further in 2012: ignoring the legislative branch outright.
 
The predicate for this strategy was laid late last year, when the White House rolled out the "We Can’t Wait" campaign, a political maneuver designed to capitalize on Republican “intransigence” (read: garden-variety opposition) to the president’s agenda. Manning his old “fierce urgency of now” parapets, Obama responded with unilateral action in the form of administrative directives and executive orders. The resultant policies – all of which were disreputable and middling in equal measure – included spending $4 billion to improve energy efficiency in buildings, allocating $1 billion for a crony capitalist-style startup fund for small businesses and making it more expensive to hire in-home health care workers.
 
On Wednesday, however, Obama made it clear that he would up the ante in 2012, announcing the recess appointments of Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and three new members to join the National Labor Relations Board. There’s only one problem: The Senate was not in recess, having met the day before.
 
The president’s announcement amounts to a naked power grab. Republicans had long opposed the president’s nominees to both bodies because of the excessive power that the administration would exercise from within them. The NLRB already showed this tendency for intemperance last year when it attempted to prevent Boeing from creating new production jobs in the right-to-work state of South Carolina instead of union-dominated Washington (the NLRB dropped the case in December).  The CFPB, a creation of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, would have unaccountable and virtually unlimited power to regulate an enormous variety of non-bank financial transactions, ranging from how consumers can pay bills over the phone to what kind of paperwork developers must give to prospective homebuyers. Republicans had sat on the nomination to head the CFPB primarily because they were waiting on changes to the law that would provide some measure of congressional oversight for this far-reaching authority.
 
Obama, however, couldn’t be bothered with the niceties of the separation of powers, making the implicit claim that it was he – not the Senate – who would determine when the Senate was in session. Announcing Cordray’s appointment in Ohio on Wednesday, Obama referenced GOP opposition to his nomination, saying, “I refuse to take ‘No’ for an answer.” Cute, but wrong.  In this case, the president doesn’t even have the power to refuse. While there are legitimate disagreements about how long the Senate must be adjourned for the president’s power to make recess appointments to become operative, there is no debate that he can’t do so when the body is still meeting. In our constitutional system, presidents don’t get to “refuse to take ‘no’ for an answer.”
 
As disquieting as it is, expect this to be the template for 2012. Throughout the year, the President will pop up behind a microphone somewhere outside of Washington (it will always happen – by sheer coincidence – to be a swing state), announcing some bold (and legally dubious) action to override a recalcitrant Congress. This instinct is born from a belief that Americans are fed up with a legislative branch that won’t act. It ignores the countervailing possibility: that they’ve had it with a president whose hyperactivity is matched only by his imprudence.

Notable Quote   
 
"To most Americans, the big problem with the Democratic Party is that it has moved too far left in recent years. If you're among those who believe that, brace yourself.The worst is yet to come.A serious push is underway to move the party even further away from the political center, embrace economic plans close to pure socialism and launch radical woke culture battles.It sounds like a bad joke, but…[more]
 
 
— Michael Goodwin, New York Post
 
Liberty Poll   

Should any "peace" agreement with Iran specifically and unconditionally force the country to halt all nuclear development?