Capitol Hill Update, 1 February, 2016

FreedomWorks has signed onto the following coalition letter, led by the R Street Institute. This letter urges support for H.R. 4350, a recent bipartisan bill introduced by Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) that would repeal the Cybersecurity Act of 2015. As you may recall, this major bill was tucked into the omnibus government funding bill in December of last year, with no chance for most lawmakers to even read it. The bill contains fundamental flaws with regard to privacy and due process, detailed in the letter below, and should be repealed.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has released its updated budget projections, and there's no sugar-coating the numbers. The federal government’s annual budget deficits were already slated to start rising again in 2016, but thanks to some discouraging economic growth predictions and a bloated budget deal that added tens of billions in new spending, we’re now looking at returning to trillion dollar annual deficits in only six years (2022).

Capitol Hill Update, 11 January, 2016

The House is set to send the president a bill repealing the majority of his signature health care law. While the president will certainly veto the bill, doing so merely underscores its implied promise: elect the right president in 2016, and ObamaCare's days are numbered.

Capitol Hill Update, 14 December, 2015

Capitol Hill Update, 7 December, 2015

The Senate and House intelligence committees are working towards selling out Americans' privacy this weekend for the illusion of cybersecurity. Specifically, the Senate's Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) and its two House counterparts (the NCPAA and PCNA) are merging -- but indications are that they may be doing so by adopting the worst provisions from each of the three bills. Worst of all, the majority of the input appears to be coming more from the intelligence committees, and not from the people who would actually have oversight of the information sharing regime in the Homeland Security Committees.

Republican leadership seemed determined to fumble the ball on the reconciliation process, but in the end a pretty good ObamaCare repeal package has finally crossed the goal line in the Senate. The House will certainly pass it, and it will proceed to President Obama's desk, where he has promised to veto the legislation in spite of the overwhelming evidence that the law is fundamentally unsound.