Opinion and commentary on news, politics, culture, and policy impact.
>>> Want to learn more? Read "Arresting Your Property: How Civil Asset Forfeiture Turns Police Into Profiteers" This cartoon was based on an real-life incident Heritage Foundation's Jason Snead and Andrew Kloster wrote about for The Daily Signal in 2014: It was highway robbery, but they called it civil asset forfeiture. On the last day…
When I was first elected to Congress in 1998, South Carolina’s Fourth Congressional District was a reliably protectionist vote. In the words of former Sen. Fritz Hollings, the entire delegation viewed free trade as “the commercial equivalent of unilateral disarmament.” If we cannot win a legislative debate on the merits of free trade, the deal…
Have you heard your member of Congress say much about what he or she would do to control the national debt lately? If you’re like most Americans, you probably haven’t heard the debt mentioned very much for quite a while now. That’s because Congress suspended the debt limit in February 2014 and the day of…
This week, The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies is proud to announce the release of Arresting Your Property: How Civil Asset Forfeiture Turns Police Into Profiteers. This booklet highlights the important problem of civil asset forfeiture and tells lawmakers how states and the federal government can help fix these…
The Congressional Budget Office released its annual 2015 Long Term Budget Outlook today, including the economic assumptions on which that outlook relies. Setting aside the report’s confirmation of rapid growth in federal spending and a daunting fiscal outlook, the report contains some noteworthy changes in economic assumptions that affect the future budget outlook. For starters,…
The Heritage Foundation has long pushed for dynamic scoring, going back almost 20 years to the creation of its Center for Data Analysis (CDA). This long and arduous work is starting to pay off, as an event tomorrow at Heritage will show. Heritage has pushed for dynamic scoring because Congress has long used incomplete information…
Today, the Food and Drug Administration released its de facto ban on artificial trans fat. In November 2013, the FDA published a tentative determination that partially hydrogenated oils, the primary dietary source of trans fat in processed food, are not “generally recognized as safe.” The agency has now decided to finalize this determination. But the…
The New York Times ran an article this weekend profiling and quoting many children of gay and lesbian parents under the headline “What Could Gay Marriage Mean for the Kids?” Noticeably absent were any children who, while loving their two moms or two dads, yearned for both a mom and dad. In my new book,…
Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter and Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, could be in for a rough ride when they go before the House Armed Services Committee this week to explain the Obama administration’s strategy toward Iraq. There is a widespread and growing criticism that the “No Boots on the Ground Plus…
While it is no surprise to most Americans that government tends to operate less efficiently than the private sector, the amount of money that is lost or mishandled is often much higher than many people imagine. The United States Postal Service (USPS), for example, faced losses of approximately $2 billion per quarter in the 2014…
Today, The Heritage Foundation releases “Arresting Your Property: How Civil Asset Forfeiture Turns Police Into Profiteers.” This booklet highlights the important problem of civil asset forfeiture and tells lawmakers how states and the federal government can help fix these broken laws. The booklet reveals the dark side of civil forfeiture, where the government seizes your…
What do you do when one-third of your budget is limited by a spending cap? Shift funding to the part of the budget that is not capped, of course! That is, if you are a Member of Congress. The House Energy and Commerce Committee recently passed the 21st Century Cures Act (H.R. 6) with unanimous…
Garland Tucker is the author of a new book, "Conservative Heroes," which chronicles 14 leaders who shaped America—dating from the time of America's founding to President Ronald Reagan's administration. The author, who previously wrote, "The High Tide of American Conservatism: Davis, Coolidge, and the 1924 Election," spoke to The Daily Signal about his latest book…
President Obama’s engagement policy with the Castro regime, announced in 2009, has led to a massive increase in arbitrary detentions, violence against activists and the deaths of high-profile opposition leaders under circumstances that point to extrajudicial executions carried out by Cuban state security. The White House not only began to loosen sanctions on the Castro…
The Supreme Court will soon hand down its decision in King v. Burwell. That case asks the court to decide if the statutory text of the Affordable Care Act authorizes the Treasury to pay subsidies to individuals who purchased coverage through HealthCare.gov—the federally operated health insurance exchange for states that did not establish their own…
The debate over the Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) bill backed by President Obama, House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has turned into a debate over just about anything except free trade. The easy interpretation is that if you’re pro-TPA you are pro-trade, and if you’re anti-TPA you are anti-trade. The truth…
Former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet famously said when asked about so-called open source (unclassified) intelligence, “we only pay for secrets.” He spoke with the confidence of a man born and raised in the world of the 20th century spy and the Cold War. With the massive leak of government employee information from the…
Abortion rates continue to drop nearly everywhere in the United States—and by impressive amounts. The Associated Press reported last week on a new survey of state health agencies that found abortions in 45 states had fallen by 12 percent since 2010. The numbers—which stand in contrast to other cultural indicators, such as marriage and out-of-wedlock birth rates—reflect…
There is nothing social about using social networks to help slaughter innocents and disseminate murder porn. But that kind of activity is merely symptomatic of the fundamental challenge that social media poses to national security. The key to winning cyberwars has more to do with securing physical space than dominating cyberspace. Social networks are powerful….
Islamist terrorists are busier than ever trying to kill us. That’s a fact. Two years ago, The Heritage Foundation conducted an exhaustive review of publicly available U.S. court and federal and state government records. The researchers documented at least 60 terrorist plots related to Islamist extremism following the 9/11 attacks—all aimed at the U.S. And the pace…