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| Support for Common Core Drops to New Low - via The Washington Examiner For the first time, support for the Common Core educational standards no longer outdoes opposition. According to the 2016 Education Next poll released Tuesday, among those who take a stand on the issue, 50 percent of the general public supports Common Core, with 50 percent opposed. Although fewer Republicans than Democrats support Common Core, Democratic support dropped by 10 percentage points in the past year, while Republican support dropped by 4 points. Read more here... Rebuilding After Louisiana Floods Will Require Government Permission Slips- via Reason After two weeks of devastating flooding in Louisiana that left at least 13 people dead and thousands homeless, residents are starting the arduous task of cleaning up and rebuilding. President Barack Obama joined the fray on Tuesday, making a visit to some of the hardest hit areas of East Baton Rouge Parish and promising government aid to those affected by the historic flood. As residents of the area will learn in the coming weeks: that government aid comes with strings attached that could drive up the cost of rebuilding or even prevent people from staying on the same property. Even if that's not the case for others, mandatory government permission slips are required before any substantial work can be done. Read more here... FreedomWorks' Book Club Spotlight: "Our Lost Constitution: The Willful Subversion of America's Founding Document"In Our Lost Constitution, Senator Mike Lee tells the dramatic, little-known stories behind six of the Constitution's most indispensable provisions. He shows their rise. He shows their fall. And he makes vividly clear how nearly every abuse of federal power today is rooted in neglect of this Lost Constitution. Get your copy here... The Disaster In Louisiana Calls for a Measured Response From Congress- by Neil Siefring via The Daily Caller The flooding in Louisiana has been nothing short of tragic. The loss of life, the people displaced, and the damages that have permanently altered the lives of the people of Louisiana in the “worst disaster since Sandy” requires a response from Congress that is measured and fiscally responsible. There is talk on Capitol Hill of implementing supplemental spending for the disaster in Louisiana that may be included in a continuing resolution — a bill instructing the Treasury Department to keep funding the government at current fiscal year levels – which Congress will likely take up in September. Congress has failed once again to pass the 12 spending bills that fund the government and get them to the president’s desk for his signature before the end of the fiscal year on September 30. Therefore, lawmakers will have to pass a continuing resolution when it gets back in September in order to avoid a federal government shutdown. Read more here... The Federal Communications Commission Should Take a Selfie- via Forbes There are either dozens of federal agencies or hundreds, depending, seemingly, upon the day of the week or whom one asks. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC ) is not the top dog among regulatory bureaucracies by the number of rules issued–but it’s a contender going by influence. The FCC merits far closer scrutiny from Congress than it gets, because it wields extraordinary authority over major economic growth engines in today’s economy: telecommunications, the Internet and the information economy generally. By extension, it’s likely to try to wedge itself into influencing such domains as autonomous vehicle communications on land and air, even though Congress hasn’t a passed law giving it such power over emerging frontier sectors. Read more here... A Conservative Way on Infrastructure- by Adam Brandon via RedState It is easy to forget that bad policy ideas aren't limited to one particular political party. Recently, Hillary Clinton proposed $275 billion in infrastructure spending over five years and $225 billion in loan programs through a national infrastructure bank. Not one to be outdone, Donald Trump pledged to double Clinton's proposed spending, saying in an interview with Fox Business, "We need much more money to rebuild our infrastructure." As it stands now, neither candidate is looking at other ways to address our country's infrastructure by empowering states to prioritize projects based on their needs, without the influence of bureaucrats and special interests. The top-down, federally-driven approach to infrastructure will be preserved. Read more here...   Prices, Information, and Coordination Donald Boudreaux explains how scarce resources are allocated in a free economy. The price system, where every producer is free to charge what he wants, contains an immense amount of information that tells producers how much to make, and consumers how much to buy. Through millions of transactions every day, coordination happens throughout an entire economy—which is impossible for a central authority to replicate. Watch it here... Aetna Has Revealed ObamaCare's Many Broken Promises - via Time They’re dropping like flies. The health-insurance giant Aetna has announced it will exit 11 of the 15 health-insurance exchanges where it sells Obamacare plans. Aetna’s announcement comes on the heels of news that UnitedHealthcare, Humana, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of New Mexico, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, and Texas’ Scott and White Health Plan, and 70% of Obamacare’s failed Co-Ops, and other insurers will exit many or all of the exchanges for which they had previously shown such enthusiasm. The ongoing and nationwide exodus of insurers is just the latest piece of evidence that Obamacare is a failed law built on false promises. Read more here... Federal Judge Denounces Judicial Deference to Federal Regulatory Agencies- via Reason In a landmark 1984 decision known as Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the U.S. Supreme Court held that when the federal courts are confronted with an "ambiguous" statute, the default position is for federal judges to defer to the statutory interpretation favored by the federal agency charged with enforcing that statute. "Federal judges—who have no constituency—have a duty to respect legitimate policy choices made by those who do," declared the majority opinion of Justice John Paul Stevens. "While agencies are not directly accountable to the people, the Chief Executive is, and it is entirely appropriate for this political branch of the Government to make such policy choices." In other words, Chevron instructs the courts to tip the scales of justice in favor of federal agencies in cases dealing with questionably worded federal statutes. Lawyers call this approach "Chevron deference." To say the least, the existence of Chevron deference raises some significant legal questions. For example, don't federal judges have an independent duty "to say what the law is," as Chief Justice John Marshall famously put it in Marbury v. Madison? What's more, doesn't the separation of powers doctrine stand in the way of unelected federal bureaucrats defining the scope of their own authority? Read more here... FreedomWorks in Action For Freedom, Jason Pye |
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