Barack Obama News

Arguing that internet freedom and the constitutional power of the purse are at risk, a coalition of more than two dozen civil society groups and activists are calling on Congress to lawyer up and sue the Obama administration. The Commerce Department has violated federal law, the coalition of groups argued in an Aug. 10 letter…

The shifting of $81 million to combat Zika is overdue and demonstrates the Obama administration has had untapped resources to fight the mosquito-borne illness, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers, R-Ky., said. “For over six months we have been calling on the administration to use every existing resource at their disposal to address this crisis,”…

While Republican leadership insists that the next president will nominate the ninth justice to the Supreme Court, a cadre of Republican senators is pushing a plan to confirm Merrick Garland if their party fails to take the White House this November. The best contingency plan in case Republicans lose, supporters of the plan argue, is…

In President Barack Obama’s final year in office, the administration’s annual draft report to Congress on new federal regulations is later than usual and on track to arrive at least as late as last year. When the report does land, it likely will show Obama far outpaced his immediate predecessors by imposing a tangle of…

A leading Republican critic of the Obama administration’s policy toward Iran is alleging that the U.S. government violated federal law when it delivered $400 million in cash to Tehran on the same day the country freed four American prisoners. “I want to know what Obama administration employees were involved with this and how long do…

The entire Texas Republican delegation in Congress signed a letter to President Barack Obama Friday, asking for answers on hundreds of millions in unspent money to fight the mosquito-borne Zika virus. The administration pledged in April to spend $589 million from unused Ebola funds for Zika. However, only about $180 million of that was obligated, according…

Republicans in Congress are criticizing President Barack Obama’s administration for its approval of a $400 million delivery of cash to Iran on the same day the country released four American prisoners and formally implemented the nuclear deal. Though the administration says the timing of the $400 million money transfer was coincidental, and part of a…

Civil service laws have made it nearly impossible to remove government bureaucrats from their jobs. President Barack Obama has a chance to place many of his political appointments in these secure positions for life and make it difficult for a new president with a different agenda to enact reforms. It’s a process commonly known as…

While lawmakers are away from Capitol Hill on August recess, the two largest conservative caucuses in Congress are working to keep a lame-duck spending bill from getting off the ground after the elections. Before Congress recessed, the Freedom Caucus and Republican Study Committee gathered enough signatures to force GOP leadership into scheduling a conference to…

As mosquitoes seem to be spreading Zika inside the United States, the Obama administration has been sitting on some of the resources intended to fight the virus. The administration has spent or obligated less than half of the $589 million that it has available, Congressional Quarterly reported, citing numbers from the Office of Management and…

Conservative critics of President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Library of Congress were blindsided Wednesday when a key Republican engineered her lopsided confirmation by the Senate despite concerns she is, in the words of one opponent, “an unqualified, far-left progressive.” The Senate voted 74-18 to confirm Carla D. Hayden, who leads Baltimore's public library…

As President Barack Obama visited Dallas on Tuesday to speak at the memorial service for five slain police officers there, some law enforcement advocates faulted his legacy on the issue as negative. “Because these are not isolated incidents. They’re symptomatic of a broader set of racial disparities that exist in our criminal justice system,” @Potus…

Resigned to the strong possibility that the House will need to fund the government through a continuing resolution after this fiscal year, conservatives are warning party leaders of what it would take for them to support such a stopgap measure. With the much-hyped regular order appropriations process looking stalled—if not finished—before it really started, conservatives…

President Barack Obama said he won’t withdraw nearly half the remaining U.S. troops in Afghanistan, much less completely withdraw as he originally intended, so the next president will have a stronger hand in a country where American forces have battled the Taliban and al-Qaeda for nearly 15 years. “Today’s decision best positions my successor to…

The Obama administration refuses to enforce federal law that protects Americans’ freedom of conscience, a Christian legal aid group says. In 2014, California began mandating that employee health plans cover elective abortions. A state agency is refusing to exempt churches from the mandate, said Casey Mattox, senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom. “Churches should never…