On January 6 2011, U.S. Representative Trent Franks participated in a show in the U.S. Capitol Building: the reading of the United States Constitution. Rep. Franks was assigned to read the Fifth Amendment: No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a [...]

H.R. 1981 would require the linkage of all our online activities to our names and other personal information. This, in turn, would enable government intelligence agents to search through its massive databases of online activities, collected under the FISA Amendments Act, by citizen name, address or telephone number.

The House of Representatives rejected protections that might have saved the lives of the workers on the Deepwater Horizon and prevented the tremendous oil spill that resulted from its explosion.

Yesterday’s markup was an opportunity for reform of the abusive law, with amendments that could have brought the Patriot Act closer to compliance with the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment guarantee of protection from unreasonable search and seizure. Yet, every single reform that was offer was rejected by the House Judiciary Committee.

Most members of the House Tea Party Caucus voted in favor of big government and against constitutional rights in yesterday’s vote on extending the abusive Patriot Act.

The Founding Fathers explicitly defied the first of the Ten Commandments, placing in the Constitution a ban on religious tests for any public office, and further establishing freedom of religion and the separation of

Missile defense testing is pork barrel spending. It funnels money to defense contractors who in turn spend a lot of money buying influence with members of Congress. It’s a source of corruption in our nation’s politics, and it doesn’t make us one bit more secure.

With H.J. Res. 23, Trent Franks manages to take an extremist pose without actually getting anything done. Once more, we see that the Franks agenda is made up of a bizarre mix of radicalism and ineffectiveness. If we weren’t in the middle of an economic crisis, these kinds of antics would be entertaining.

The Larochelles were seeking to separate the flag from the Constitution, and to make it a symbol of religious belief – and officially recognized by Congress as such. Congressman Mike Turner was more than happy to help them do this – and to try to use the boy scout as a tool to push religion as a wedge issue – when he introduced H.R. 3779.

If an oil company isn’t even using the leases of public lands they already have, why should they take on yet more leases… unless what those oil companies really want to do is just squat on their leases of public lands with oil under them only in order to prevent the oil from being drilled, thus decreasing supply and artificially driving up the cost of petroleum products so that they can make a bigger profit without doing any more work.