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 …
In August, three voters in Wake County, North Carolina, were charged with voting twice in the 2008 presidential election, apparently for President Barack Obama. In April, a member of the executive committee of the NAACP in Tunica County, Mississippi, was convicted on 10 counts of fraudulently casting absentee ballots and sentenced to five years in prison. She voted in the names of six other voters, as well as in the names of four dead voters. There are pending indictments of city council members and an ongoing grand jury investigation of …
“We might be a healthier democracy if we were a slightly less democratic one.” Really? Writing for the New Republic, Peter Orszag, Obama’s former head of the Office of Management and Budget, suggested that Americans need to transfer much of the operation of government out of the hands of Congress and into the hands of unelected bureaucrats. As a remedy to supposedly systemic gridlock, Orzsag proposes creating automatic boards of unelected administrators and “trigger” mechanisms that automatically set policy unless Congress specifically proposes an alternative. Orszag is not alone in …
Last month’s employment report from the Department of Labor offered more dismal news about the U.S. economy. And while many areas of the country continue to struggle, there are a few bright spots. Gov. Scott Walker happens to be presiding over one in Wisconsin, which added a net of 9,500 new jobs in June — more than half the 18,000 created nationwide. Wisconsin’s resurgence comes after three years of job losses — more than 150,000 jobs were lost in the three years before Walker became governor. Since he took office …
A former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board on Thursday blasted a proposed rule that would expedite elections for workplace unionization, insisting the proposed rule represents a “radical manipulation of the board’s election process” and an attempt to “tilt the process in favor of organized labor.” “The proposed rule demonstrates once again,” claimed Peter Schaumber in his prepared testimony before the House Education and Workforce Committee, “that the current board majority feels unconstrained by the limits of the law and its role under the [National Labor Relations] Act to …
Is President Barack Obama trying to perform an end-run around Congress in order to implement restrictions on political speech? It’s a question that 27 senators put to President Obama in a letter this week in which they urged him to reconsider a draft executive order (EO) that would require government contractors to disclose political contributions. In the letter, the senators cite to Hans von Spakovsky, Senior Legal Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, who raised concerns over the underlying purpose of the executive order: Given similarities between the draft EO and some …
Almost immediately after it was announced that President Goodluck Jonathan won Nigeria’s presidential election this past weekend, violence erupted in many northern states. This post-election violence unfortunately tarnishes the nationwide vote that most observers deemed to be an improvement over previous elections, although it is evident that some rigging did occur. Since the government transferred from military to civilian rule in 1999, each election has been riddled with violations. The 2007 presidential elections were generally considered deeply flawed. Election rigging, electoral fraud, and voter intimidation have been fixtures in Nigerian …
The American people spoke loud and clear on Tuesday. They do not want to continue on the path that the Obama Administration was taking us on. The Heritage Foundation released a checklist of five things the new Congress MUST do. Brian Darling, Director of Government Relations for The Heritage Foundation will take your questions concerning what the elections mean for conservative policies. Lunch With Heritge feat. Brian Darling
With due respects to Abraham Lincoln, one can say that Venezuela is a “house divided against itself.” The question for the Obama Administration is how long this important nation can remain half free and half a Hugo Chavez fiefdom. A powerful tug-of-war is underway between those who support Chavez’s radical, anti-American program of “Socialism of the 21st Century” and those in Venezuela who have had enough and believe that tyranny, repression, and economic misery take root in the accumulation of unchecked executive power. Chavez took a pummeling in the September …
