The Republican Study Committee (RSC), a conservative caucus of which well over half of House Republicans are a member, has just released a memo outlining a bold, free-market plan for improving America’s health care. The plan, A Framework for Personalized, Affordable Care, is leadership in an important policy area that has been missing for some time. It’s extremely encouraging to see Republicans uniting around a plan that focuses on the ability of individuals to afford and keep their own health benefits.

Four years after the passage of the USA FREEDOM Act, Section 215 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and its related “lone wolf” and “roving wiretap” provisions are back up for reauthorization. Section 215 is best known for being the portion of law used to justify the dragnet, warrantless mass collection of tens of millions of Americans’ phone call data, as revealed in 2013 by Edward Snowden. Although the USA FREEDOM Act of 2015 did make some substantial advances in curbing warrantless mass surveillance of Americans, disclosures over the intervening four years have borne out concerns that it was an incomplete reform.

Capitol Hill Update, 14 March, 2016

Capitol Hill Update, 29 February, 2016

With Justice Scalia’s death leaving a gaping hole in our nation’s highest court, Senate Republicans have only one clear choice. In the midst of a highly charged presidential election, far better to let voters choose who should appoint our next Supreme Court justice than fight a bloody and fully partisan battle with President Obama over shifting the ideological balance of SCOTUS. So far, Republican leaders in the Senate have been very clear that they agree with this assessment, vowing that they will neither hold hearings nor votes on any nominee to replace Scalia this year.

Capitol Hill Update, February 22, 2016

Capitol Hill Update, 8 February, 2016

Boldly wielding his pen and phone, President Obama has shamelessly used executive power to bypass those pesky Republican majorities in Congress. But these broad powers that he has used (and abused), the executive orders and the overbroad regulations, can in most respects be blamed on decades of Congressional atrophy. Which is why it is so encouraging that reasserting Congress’ constitutional authority has finally become a top-line issue in Washington D.C., with the launch of multiple major projects dedicated to the restoration of the full range of powers in Article I of the U.S. Constitution.