The House passed an amendment on June 19 to require the National Security Agency (NSA) and other intelligence agencies to obtain a warrant prior to collecting the communications of American citizens. This is pretty basic stuff, and it’s not a partisan issue - the amendment passed with the support of 158 Democrats and 135 Republicans.

Good news! The Email Privacy Act has reached 218 cosponsors!

In the final days before the deadline to sign HB 3399, FreedomWorks grassroots activists are sending thousands of messages to Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin to repeal Common Core in Oklahoma. The fate of education in Oklahoma rests in Governor Fallin’s hands, who needs to sign HB 3399 into law to stop the federal takeover of education.

When Blanche DuBois stepped off that streetcar named Desire and stepped into her sister’s rough French Quarter neighborhood, it was an era far different from our own. The New Orleans portrayed in Tennessee Williams’s iconic play wasn’t idyllic or gentle, but it had the charm of post-war cheerfulness. America had slogged through the Great Depression, won the fight against Hitler, and was rewarded with decades of prosperity. Stanley Fischer may have been a violent lout to his wife and sister-in-law, but there was a certain innocence to the time after the Great War’s sequel and before Lyndon Johnson’s guns-and-butter debauchery. Civil society was still a strong presence in American life and disputes were handled neighbor-to-neighbor. The idea of ubiquitous government surveillance in peacetime was alien.

If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet.

On today’s edition of the FreedomCast, CJ Ciaramella joins me to discuss the latest revelations in the IRS targeting scandal, whether the White House received confidential taxpayer information against the law and if there’s any chance the DoJ will act to protect your privacy.  Related Links:

A report in The Daily Caller should scare each and every taxpayer. An investigation by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee found that IRS officials Sarah Hall Ingram and Lois Lerner emailed confidential taxpayer information to the White House. This is the IRS that has persecuted Tea Party groups and it appears the illegal interactions between the IRS and White House had to do with challenges to Obamacare by religious organizations.

Nothing is safe from the scrutiny of the surveillance state, not even your Facebook likes. Especially if you're under investigation by any national government.

Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled the New York Police Department's "stop and frisk" procedure unconstitutional, indicating it amounted to "racial profiling." Sounds like a solid win for the Fourth Amendment, right? Maybe not.As Mayor Bloomberg explained:As recently as 1990, New York City averaged more than six murders a day. Today, we’ve driven that down to less than one murder a day. If murder rates over the last 11 years had been the same as the previous 11 years, more than 7,300 people who today are alive would be dead.