By Douglas Holtz-Eakin
The young drop coverage to avoid higher premiums
Independent voices from the TWT Communities
It is disappointing that Calvin Coolidge is consistently relegated to the hinterlands of America's presidential landscape. There are several reasons for this. First, he is a victim of what Lincoln called the "silent artillery of time" -- the way the memory of any earthly thing fades with the years.
President Obama and leaders of Congress dedicated a statue of civil-rights hero Rosa Parks on Wednesday in a moving ceremony at the U.S. Capitol, marking the first time a black woman has been honored with a place in National Statuary Hall.
Alexander Hamilton, America's first secretary of the Treasury, issued the first U.S. Treasury bonds on Sept. 18, 1789. The Continental Congress had borrowed money from overseas to help finance the Revolutionary War and could not pay back its loans.
Acase now before the U.S. Supreme Court could clarify a 200-year-old mistake by the great Chief Justice John Marshall.
One look at the ever-growing chorus of radical groups clamoring for Senate filibuster reform should be enough for anyone to understand what's really motivating the efforts.
No one accuses establishment Republicans of being terribly brave or bright, but this insanity has got to stop: Democrats repeatedly frighten Republicans into accepting their statist agenda and then blame them for behaving like, well, Democrats. Republicans just keep falling for it.
Only in America can a president who inherits a deep recession and whose policies have actually made the effects of that recession worse get re-elected. Only in America can a president get re-elected who wants the bureaucrats who can't run the Post Office to micromanage the administration of every American's health care. Only in America can a president who kills Americans overseas who have never been charged or convicted of a crime get re-elected. Only in America can a president who borrowed and spent more than $5 trillion in fewer than four years, plans to repay none of it, and promises to borrow another $5 trillion in his second term, get re-elected.
A curious chorus of Obamacare devotees is being heard today to claim that only an audaciously overactivist Supreme Court could rule unconstitutional Congress' latest attempt to manage the private enterprise of health care.
In "Rush to Judgment," the most prescient evaluation of the presidency of George W. Bush comes from Gil Troy, a history professor at McGill University in Canada. Mr. Troy told the author, "One of the biggest challenges in assessing Bush's presidency is the fact that his greatest achievement may have been a negative one - preventing a repeat of 9/11."
In the early history of the United States, the names of two "might-have-beens" stand out. Each fought bravely in the American Revolution, though each was hamstrung by vanity, easily hurt feelings and a deep-seated rage against those men they considered ungrateful for services rendered.
Liberals are invoking the framers of the Constitution in their latest attempt to employ judges to subvert the institutions of government. At issue is the Senate's cloture rule, the requirement for three-fifths of voting members to vote to end debate and vote on a bill. Supporters of the Dream Act, which passed the House but couldn't get to cloture in the Senate, are suing to have the practice overturned as an unconstitutional imposition on majority rule.
The Founding Fathers would be pleased. President Obama, endorsing same-sex marriage, celebrates his becoming fully evolved by citing the golden rule, Christ's admonition to "you know, treat others the way you want to be treated." (Jesus said it better.) Mitt Romney tells an audience of 35,000 at Liberty University's commencement that central to America's global leadership is "our Judeo-Christian tradition."
What can we learn from allegations against a half-dozen supervisors in the General Services Administration (GSA) about wasting - and perhaps stealing - taxpayer dollars on foolishness in Las Vegas and against a dozen Secret Service agents about dangerously procuring prostitutes in Cartagena, Colombia, while there to prepare for a visit by the president?
For the first time, President Obama's Justice Department has attempted to explain the administration's policy on targeted killings of U.S. citizens. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.'s speech earlier this month came five months after an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed in Yemen by a predator drone without any judicial review. The president's decision to target and kill an American citizen, far from any battlefield, presents one of the gravest constitutional issues we have faced in the war on terror. The Justice Department's defense of unchecked power to kill U.S. citizens raises significant constitutional concerns.
Alexander Hamilton once quipped, "Nobody expects to trust his body overmuch after the age of 50." One could make a similar observation about the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which just entered its fifth decade of existence. In the past few days, WWF has become embroiled in one of the largest scandals to hit the organization since its inception, raising serious questions regarding its accountability, integrity and, most significant, trustworthiness.
As Alexander Hamilton said, "For it is a truth, which the experience of all ages has attested, that the people are commonly most in danger when the means of ensuring their rights are in the possession of those of whom they entertain the least suspicion."
To his core, Coolidge believed in self-government, a view that stemmed from what Alexander Hamilton had written in the Federalist Papers No. 6 about the "ambitious, vindictive and rapacious" nature of mankind.
