Elena Kagan’s treatment of military recruiters while dean of Harvard Law School was supposed to be an insignificant blip during her Supreme Court confirmation. Vice President Joe Biden, for instance, brushed aside the suggestion that she did anything wrong in a recent TV interview. But a closer look at the timeline of events reveals Kagan mounted an unprecedented legal challenge to bar recruiters from visiting the Cambridge campus. Today the Washington Post adds new details of the struggle Kagan faced: appeasing gay activists on campus vs. satisfying the military’s desire to …
RICHMOND — Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli said he will file a formal response as early as next week to the federal government’s attempt to dismiss Virginia’s legal challenge to Obamacare. In an exclusive interview with Heritage, Cuccinelli said the federal government’s motion to dismiss, released on Monday, was mostly predictable. He said the attorney general’s office had already anticipated the government’s arguments and will have its response ready on or before June 7. “What they filed on Monday was very much what we expected,” Cuccinelli said in an interview …
House Democrats have tentatively scheduled a floor vote this week on the DISCLOSE Act, a campaign finance measure they hope will counter the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. A source on Capitol Hill confirmed the Democrats’ plans, but noted that Speaker Nancy Pelosi has a lot to get done before Congress breaks for its Memorial Day vacation at the end of the week. With the support of President Obama, congressional Democrats have seized the campaign-finance issue as an election-year ploy to attack corporations. The DISCLOSE Act, which stands for Democracy …
The federal government’s Head Start program comes under scrutiny today by the House Education and Labor Committee, which will examine a Government Accountability Office investigation that discovered fraudulent behavior and unlawful actions in the program’s enrollment and eligibility processes. Chairman George Miller (D-CA) called today’s 1:30 p.m. committee hearing after learning of GAO’s undercover investigation. Last week Miller asked Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to conduct an immediate review of Head Start, an early childhood education program first started in 1965. The GAO report is not yet publicly available. These …
The National Federation of Independent Business, representing the interests of small businesses across America, today joined more 20 states on the lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Obamacare. The move is the latest blow to President Obama’s post-passage public relations effort. NFIB’s involvement was prompted by the individual and employer mandates, new taxes and onerous paperwork requirements. An accompanying statement said the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would devastate small business, threatening their viability. The lawsuit’s two main legal claims involve the unconstitutionality of the individual mandate. Last month Heritage’s …
Sheltering Arms Senior Services won a contract worth $22.3 million in stimulus funds to weatherize homes of low-income families in Houston, but a new report from Texas Watchdog reveals the work performed was so shoddy that 33 of 53 homes will need to be fixed. The contract, awarded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, is the second largest weatherization contract in Texas, running through March 2012. Yet with nearly two years left on the agreement, Sheltering Arms Senior Services is already under fire after a state report criticized the …
Labor Secretary Hilda Solis rewarded six former staffers from her congressional office with political appointments and huge raises upon taking over at the Department of Labor. The appointees had significant pay increases averaging 50 percent upon changing jobs; one employee’s salary nearly doubled. Solis, a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives from California, began hiring the employees shortly after she was confirmed by the Senate in February 2009. Political appointments are non-competitive government jobs that differ from career positions, which often involve a long hiring process. The information …
Four years ago this week The Heritage Foundation co-founded a weekly policy discussion for bloggers, online journalists and digital strategists. It started as an off-the-record discussion among a dozen conservatives in a conference room at Human Events in 2006. At the time, the conventional wisdom in Washington was that conservatives were far behind their liberal counterparts in both adapting to technological changes and embracing them as a new communications outlets. And while the left still dominates online—Tucker Carlson said at our President’s Club event this week that Huffington Post is …
Ohio is struggling with double-digit unmployment, but not all workers are facing tough times. State government employees in Ohio are doing quite well. In fact, nearly 1,800 of them earn more than $100,000 per year. The contrast couldn’t be more stark between bloated government bureaucrats and struggling private-section workers in a state with an 11 percent unemployment rate. What’s most alarming is the rapid rise of state employees making salaries of $100,000 or more. Just look at the rapid increase over the past six years. Thanks to public data compiled …
The Washington Examiner today exposes a dirty little secret about Washington bureaucrats: Federal employees are bringing home twice as much pay as the average private-sector worker. Data compiled by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis reveals the extent of the pay gap between federal and private workers. As of 2008, the average federal salary was $119,982, compared with $59,909 for the average private sector employee. In other words, the average federal bureaucrat makes twice as much as the average working taxpayer. Add the value of benefits like health care …
