FW Newsletter: Forever In Our Memory

IRS Impeachment Vote Could Happen In Just A Few Days - via The Daily Caller House Freedom Caucus member Rep. John Fleming of Louisiana is slated to file a privileged resolution Tuesday to force a floor vote on the impeachment of Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen. Republicans pushing for the vote allege Koskinen misled Congress and violated a subpoena related to the IRS targeting of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. Read more here... The Argument for Justice Reform at the Federal Level - by Christina Delgado This month, Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) hopes to bring a number of justice reform bills to the House floor. “We’ve learned that there are better ways to dealing with these problems than locking up someone for 20 or 30 years. You end up ruining their lives, ruining their families, hurting communities. And then when they try to reenter into society, they’re destitute,“ he said. Several bills, in fact, – including the FreedomWorks-backed Sentencing Reform Act, Recidivism Risk Reduction Act, and the Criminal Code Improvement Act – have already made it through the House Judiciary Committee. Criminal justice reform has been championed by notably strong and principled conservatives such as Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID), Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI), and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), indicating its roots in fundamental conservative ideals. The topic has gained significant attention by those on both the left and right-side of politics, highlighting additional significance of its impact. As our leaders are eventually confronted with this topic, whether they support or oppose reform, Americans outside the policy-driven, DC-insider environment are left to wonder why exactly this is the case? Why is justice reform a popular subject, and why is reform so important? 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 House Freedom Caucus Is Not a 'Cancer' in Congress, It's the Future of Our Movement - by Adam Brandon via Fox News The Washington political establishment took its first conservative scalp of the cycle with the recent defeat of Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.), an outspoken member of the House Freedom Caucus. This race is being used as a playbook to target other members of the group of about 40 fiscal and constitutional conservatives in the lower chamber, and those sharpening their knives aren’t shy about it. Members of the House Freedom Caucus are a rare breed in Washington. They believe in free-market principles, reject cronyist policies that take advantage of taxpayers, and fight for constitutionally limited government. Occasionally, these convictions put them at odds with Republican leaders, who are often eager to cut deals with the White House and Democrats, and with Beltway insiders. Read more here... Sen. Mike Lee Sits Down With FreedomWorks to Discuss Conservative Justice Reform ObamaCare Will Set Back Real Health Reform for Years - via Investor's Business Daily The Affordable Care Act appears to be in a death spiral, with a shrinking pool of insurers offering coverage, far fewer individuals purchasing insurance than advocates had anticipated, and double-digit price increases making policies unaffordable -- not only to many individuals and families, but to taxpayers, who are required to underwrite the hefty subsidies Washington promised. ObamaCare isn't working and its condition is getting worse. The centerpiece of the program, the health insurance exchanges (misleadingly labeled "Marketplaces" by the administration), will pretty much cease to exist within a few more years. Read more here... The Entrepreneur Jeffrey Tucker discusses the role of the entrepreneur in identifying and taking advantage of economic opportunities. The ability to anticipate and meet market needs allows economies to be flexible and innovative in ways that are impossible through central control. The special quality of entrepreneurship is an alertness to things that don’t exist yet—products and services that consumers don’t even know they want. Profits and losses provide the feedback necessary to steer entrepreneurs in the right direction. Watch it here... The EPA Uses New Math to Justify Costly Global Warming Regulation - by Kenny Stein When calculating the future impacts of government action, the federal government has very specific rules about how the calculation should be done. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) clearly states that when calculating the cost of future impacts a standard “discount rate” of 7% should be used (a discount rate is used to take account of the fact that $10 today is worth more than $20 10 years from now). But when it comes to global warming regulation, that 7% rate is a problem for bureaucrats. With a 7% discount rate, the present cost of future global warming is virtually zero, even using the federal government’s excessively alarmist models. What’s a radical federal bureaucrat to do when math says that global warming will have virtually no negative economic effect? Well, they take a page from Common Core and change how they do the math. In 2010, global warming alarmists in the Obama administration set out to find a way to justify the huge costs of the global warming regulations they wanted to pursue. This effort focused on creating a “social cost of carbon,” which purports to put a dollar figure on the alleged future economic harms of global warming. The bureaucrats could then take this theoretical “cost” and use it to claim that their regulations were actually saving the economy from future damage. Read more here... Work Is Changing, Employment Regulation Needs to Change Too - via Competitive Enterprise Institute For many people, the 9 to 5, office- or factory-based, corporate job that Dolly Parton lamented in the 1980s is a thing of the past. Thanks to revolutions in the way businesses operate and the costs of economic transactions, those workers now have flexible working hours, the ability to telecommute, or even to be their own boss. The dreams of a better life Dolly sang about are with reach for many. Yet government regulators using 1930s labor law threaten those advances. The Department of Labor’s proposed overtime rule is a case in point. Since the last time the agency significantly raised the wage threshold for its overtime requirement, businesses have developed new practices to give ambitious junior managers the chance to prove themselves by, yes, working longer hours, but also by giving them more responsibility. In franchise businesses, these are often the people who become managers, then owners. Read more here... FreedomWorks in Action Sign up for the FreedomWorks Morning Update If you want an update like this newsletter twice a week, be sure to sign up for the FreedomWorks Morning Update! The Morning Update is your tool to keep up-to-date with all the threats to your freedom. Sign up here. Make freedom work, Jason Pye Communications Director, FreedomWorks           Forward To A Friend | Update Your Email Preferences 400 North Capitol Street, NW Suite 765 Washington, DC 20001