President Obama has used his executive power in many ways to expand the role of government. But there’s one area that stands out: Obama’s frequent and repeated use of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to issue emergency and disaster declarations. Heritage’s Matt Mayer reports that Obama “eviscerated the record books by issuing 243 declarations in 2011,” continuing an alarming pattern that begin under President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush. Mayer says FEMA has become a “political pork-barrel spending agency.” The trend is illustrated in this week’s chart, which …
Over the past 50 years, 10 U.S. presidents have made annual budget requests to Congress, projecting deficits both big and small. But no other president compares to Barack Obama when it comes to the size and scale of the current budget deficit facing the United States. The country is facing an 8.3 percent estimated average national deficit of a two-term Obama administration — the biggest of the past 50 years. By comparison, the current estimate for Obama is nearly double the percentage under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush — and …
Former President Bill Clinton recently compared voter identification laws to Jim Crow-era statutes that suppressed the black vote after the Civil War. “There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today,” Clinton told liberal activists in July. Not so, says John Fund, author of “Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy.” Speaking at Heritage this week, Fund said voter ID laws have won the …
When House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s (D–CA) staff released a chart in May that attempted to illustrate how much past Presidents increased the national debt, it collided with a meticulous critique from Politifact that in turn led to a revised chart. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler weighed in as the original chart resurfaced recently, reporting on its methodological faults and misleading presentation. Even the revised version makes President Obama’s debt accrual appear minor compared to that of past Presidents. The facts show, however, that the Obama Administration is well on …
Five years ago ABC aired “The Path to 9/11,” a five-hour docudrama that explained how terrorists plotted to attack America on that frightful September morning in 2001. The movie sparked protests and attempts to stop ABC from showing it. Former President Bill Clinton was among those most displeased. As America marks the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the movie remains under lock and key at ABC. The network never released it on DVD. In fact, last week’s screening at The Heritage Foundation was the first public showing of the film since its …
In the nearly 160,000 pages of recently released documents that relate to Elena Kagan, precious little appears about Paula Jones — even though Kagan was intimately involved in President Clinton’s sexual harassment lawsuit in her capacity in the White House Counsel’s office. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) today had something to say about that. “The people who decide which documents we get are representatives of President Clinton and President Obama,” Sessions told bloggers in a preview to the Kagan confirmation hearings to bloggers. “Would President Clinton want to release something that …
Federal statutes seem to contradict a memorandum from the White House counsel released on Friday that claimed that no law was violated when Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA) was offered a government post in exchange for dropping out of the Pennsylvania Democratic Senate primary against Sen. Arlen Specter. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs blithely dismissed the issue for months. “Lawyers in the White House and others have looked into conversations that were had with Congressman Sestak, and nothing inappropriate happened,” he said. But the two-page memorandum admitted that White House …
Robert Bauer, the White House Counsel, has released a two-page memorandum in response to the controversy involving Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA) and the promise by President Obama at his news conference yesterday that there would be “an official response shortly” from the White House. The administration has been stalling for months about giving a full explanation of what happened and who was involved in potentially violating federal law ever since Sestak first claimed he had been offered a position in the administration in exchange for withdrawing his primary challenge to …
Violent extremism of any stripe is beyond the pale. The intentional murder of innocents remains one of the world’s ultimate evils. If only everyone speaking on the issue of anti-government extremism chose their words as carefully as President Clinton. Alas, the talking heads of MSNBC have not. They have used the anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing to declare open season on almost anyone right of center. The suggestion by Oklahoma lawmakers that they might want to form a state defense force is completely legal and appropriate under both the …
In the wake of the White House’s health care summit, reconciliation is still seen as the likely route that congressional leaders and their liberal allies will take to jam Obamacare through Congress. Congressional Democrats and President Barack Obama already are using the summit as a public relations vehicle to help fast-track the Senate health care bill through a parliamentary process used primarily for budgetary issues. But beware Plan B — the more “modest” plan. There’s a surer, well-worn path that the Clinton Administration took after the collapse of Hillarycare in …
