Free Republic

Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra admitted during a congressional hearing on Wednesday that hospitals with religious objections to transgender mutilation will lose federal funding. “Can you commit here today that your department will not withhold federal funding from hospitals or doctors who refuse to provide the gender-affirming care that you are, you know, mandating, if it violates their religious beliefs?” Republican Rep. Mary Miller, chairwoman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, asked Becerra. Becerra ignored the question and scolded Miller for asking it. “You’re going somewhere completely different. First, you started talking about how a doctor should...

In December 2022, Congress passed the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA), a pro-life bill that aimed to make the workplace more accessible to pregnant women by requiring employers to provide accommodations to pregnant workers under The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). This bill was implemented at the end of June 2023.However, the Biden administration is manipulating the bill’s language to require that employers provide accommodations for abortion. The PWFA requires employers to provide “reasonable accommodations to a worker’s known limitations related to pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions, unless the accommodation will cause the employer an undue hardship.” However, the...

President Joe Biden suggested Tuesday it is false that his administration is restricting consumer choice in the automobile market, but his administration recently finalized a rule that will force electric vehicles (EVs) to make up a much larger share of overall auto sales over the next decade. Biden made the remark during a Tuesday speech about his administration’s decision to significantly bolster tariffs against Chinese products including steel, semiconductor chips and EV batteries. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a rule in March that requires manufacturers to make EVs constitute between 35% and 56% of new cars sold in 2032,...

Dozens of Democratic lawmakers signed a letter to President Biden, pleading with him to act on high grocery prices that have been slow to fall as inflation has come down. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., led the letter Monday morning, calling on Biden to "exercise your executive authority to take additional action to address rising food prices without congressional action." The letter amassed 40 Democratic signatories between the House and Senate, including senators Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and representatives Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., among others. The lawmakers acknowledged "Americans are facing sky-high...

Federal prosecutors on Tuesday requested the judge overseeing ex-Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon's criminal contempt of Congress case to order that he begin his four-month prison sentence, after an appeals court last week upheld his conviction. Prosecutors said there is no legal basis for Judge Carl Nichols to continue the stay on Bannon serving his sentence after the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals' conclusive ruling that rejected the basis for Bannon's appeal on all grounds. "Consequently, there is no longer a 'substantial question of law that is likely to result in a reversal or an order for a new trial,'"...

DOJ’s report on FBI leaked memo on traditionalist Catholics leaves many questions unanswered, omits Biden admin’s targeted persecution of Catholics.In mid-April, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) under the Joe Biden administration released a 10-page report to Congress stating that those who penned an internal memo dated January 23, 2023, likening traditionalist Catholics to violent extremists “failed to adhere to FBI standards” but displayed no proof of “malicious intent”. The memo was subsequently leaked to the public.Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s recent April report to Congress claimed that it found no proof that anyone instructed either of the unnamed authors of...

Biden routinely misrepresents Donald Trump as a dictator, but the evidence shows convincingly that it’s Biden who acts in dictatorial fashion. There’s an old trial lawyers’ saying: “When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. When the law is on your side, pound the law. When neither is on your side, pound the table.” That may be the only thing President Biden learned in law school—from which he was almost expelled for plagiarizing. He said the plagiarizing was due to ignorance; he had simply misunderstood the need to cite sources carefully. Now, fifty-nine years later, Biden routinely misrepresents...

... Disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D), who resigned amid sexual harassment scandals, admitted in a recent interview with so-called public health expert and COVID-19 vaccine advocate Leana Wen that his administration never had the actual authority to enforce pandemic mandates, despite imposing them with a tyrannical approach during the COVID-19 crisis. ..

"By departing from this sensible arrangement, and allowing the Secretaries to dismantle National Guard units on a whim, Legislative Proposal 480 would set a dangerous precedent," he added. "Members of the Texas National Guard must always stand ready to respond to natural disasters, civil disturbances, and cartel activity that threaten our way of life."

Your next new home air conditioner could set you back $12,000 or more, with federal regulators contributing to the rising cost of staying cool. Before 2020, buying and installing a new residential central air conditioner typically cost well under $10,000. Many jobs, including both purchase and installation, fell in the $6,000 to $7,000 range—about half the current price—says Martin Hoover, a co-owner of Atlanta-based Empire Heating & Air Conditioning. While many factors, including rising material costs, have contributed to the increase in prices, regulations have played an outsize role. The Energy Department in January 2023 issued a new efficiency standard...

Since the COVID scare worked so well for the left, could a climate lockdown be next? We all vividly recall the absurd COVID lockdowns. While they had no effect on the spread of illness, the imposed restrictions certainly proved that a large segment of the population was easily compelled to come to heel and submit to the government’s outrageous demands. Given the facts I provide in my new book, Climate Cult: Exposing and Defeating Their War on Life, Liberty, and Property, such a scheme should come as no surprise, especially given that the Biden administration and Congressional Democrats are priming...

On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee released an 800 page report on the Biden White House censorship regime. The report included numerous times the Biden regime threatened social media companies to censor, silence and take down information on the COVID origins and the COVID vaccines. Here is the full 800 page report released by the House Judiciary Committee on the Biden Administration’s Censorship Industrial Complex. On Thursday, investigative reporter Mike Benz revealed “10 flaming examples” Facebook, YouTube and Amazon explicitly said they only passed censorship policies because they were threatened by the Biden government. Here are 10 flaming examples of...

America First Legal (AFL) is celebrating a victory in its lawsuit on behalf of former Ambassador Ric Grenell against the Biden Administration's “Homeland Intelligence Experts Group.” The Biden Administration has agreed to dissolve this unlawful group and hand over its records to AFL.

The Biden administration hasn’t hesitated to rule by fiat, especially when it comes to environmental regulations. Separation of powers? Who cares? Why worry about constitutional processes when you can ramrod your agenda through the bureaucracy? Congressional Republicans are taking on the Environmental Protection Agency’s latest rule that seeks to govern greenhouse gas emissions for heavy-duty trucks. The rule is set to take effect on June 21. Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) and Rep. Russ Fulcher (R-Idaho) introduced a resolution in their respective chambers on Wednesday that would invoke the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to allow Congress to vote to nullify the...

The Biden administration has saddled the U.S. economy with more than $1 trillion worth of final rules and regulations thus far in 2024, according to analysis conducted by the American Action Forum (AAF).The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) final emissions regulations for light- and medium-duty vehicles, which some have characterized as an electric vehicle (EV) mandate, pushed the costs of the Biden administration’s regulatory agenda over the $1 trillion threshold for 2024, alone, according to AAF’s analysis. Across all agencies and regulatory actions last week, the federal government published regulations imposing $103 billion worth of total costs and 11.6 million annual...

The California Department of Water Resources (DWR) last week released its next five-year plan for the State Water Project—Update 2023. After years of meetings, California’s premier water agency has decided to focus on “three intersecting themes: addressing climate urgency, strengthening watershed resilience, and achieving equity in water management.”Lake Shasta Dam in Shasta Lake, Calif., on Feb. 14, 2023. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)Water supplies for California’s 40 million people and the planet’s most productive agriculture have third- to fifth-level priority.There is nothing new here, except to publicly admit to betraying the public trust. Really?Over several decades, the public has been deceived...

A group of six Republican state attorneys general filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration’s Department of Education on Tuesday over what they said were “radical and illegal” changes to Title IX rules.The lawsuit, led by Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman and Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky.In their legal filing, the GOP attorneys general argued that the department overstepped its authority when rolling out new updates to Title IX rules that expanded protections to students by incorporating gender identity into the legal text.They further claimed the changes...

If you are having trouble keeping track of all the major regulations President Joe Biden has issued recently, you’re not alone. In just the past two weeks, the Biden administration has functionally banned all coal power plants, forced college women to accept men in their locker rooms and dorm rooms, and empowered government regulators to set price controls on internet services. That is all on top of previous Biden regulations banning the sale of cars with internal combustion engines, banning the sale of new gas stoves, and making refrigerators far more expensive than they currently are. Biden is radically transforming...

The left says there’s a civil war brewing, a conflict whose roots it finds in parents angry about LGBTQ indoctrination in the schools, pro-life protesters and the Jan. 6 fiasco, but not in the orgy of Black Lives Matter/antifa violence of 2020, chaos at the border, anarchy in the streets of our cities or the pro-Hamas mobs swarming over college campuses. The fact that “Civil War” is the most popular movie in the country shows that audiences will swallow any absurdity as long as it’s sufficiently coated with graphic violence. “Civil War” is about a future conflict that pits secessionist...

Canada has fallen. It’s become the North Korea of the West, and it’s getting worse every single day. This new bill they’ve introduced is the cherry on their tyrannical sundae. It’s called the Online Harms Bill C-63, and it would make even Stalin blush. As a matter of fact, tyrannical dictator Kim Jong-Un would look at this bill and feel an instant rush of communist inadequacy. With this new bill, Justin Trudeau is fueling those online rumors that his real father is actually communist dirtbag Fidel Castro. This new bill is supposedly aimed at safeguarding the masses from online “hate...