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Unemployment remains high, job growth is sluggish and millions of Americans have given up hope of ever finding work. So how do creative legislators propose to generate new hiring? Easy: Make it more expensive. That’s right. In Congress and several states, some lawmakers want to increase the legally mandated minimum wage. They think employers should…

AS oil and gasoline prices rise, political pressure to tap the roughly 700 million barrels in the national Strategic Petroleum Reserve is building, including among some in Congress. The global oil market is fundamentally strained and suffering from an array of unwelcome but unremarkable problems. Yet the oil reserve is neither designed nor well equipped…

How dare President Barack Obama brush back the Supreme Court like that? Has this former constitutional law instructor no respect for our venerable system of checks and balances? Nah. And why should he? This court, closseted behind white marble pillars, out of reach of TV, accountable to no one once they give the last word,…

Posts Related to Congress

During the presidential campaign, Cabinet departments are wide targets for candidates touting efficiency and fiscal responsibility. This makes for a nice sound bite, but how badly are these departments performing? It is high time to have a top-to-bottom review of all Cabinet-level departments to determine the purpose, mission and efficacy of the organization. Every Cabinet…

THE historian Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote a brutally clear-eyed piece in The National Review, looking back at America’s different approaches to Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and Afghanistan and how, sadly, none of them could be said to have worked yet. “Let us review the various American policy options for the Middle East…

I WONDER if we in the talk radio media aren’t inadvertently leaving the impression that there is a genuine debate among experts about whether an Israeli military strike on Iran makes sense this year. There really isn’t such a debate. Or rather, it’s the same kind of debate as the one about climate change –…

On Monday the Supreme Court began three days of oral arguments concerning possible — actually, probable and various — constitutional infirmities in Obamacare. The justices have received many amicus briefs, one of which merits special attention because of the elegant scholarship and logic with which it addresses an issue that has not been as central…

They were born on August days 15 years apart, at opposite ends of the baby-boom generation, Bill Clinton in 1946 and Barack Obama in 1961. Both came into the world under circumstances that made it surpassingly unlikely either boy would grow up to be president of the United States. It is hard to imagine two…

Florida’s now-infamous “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law may not, in the end, protect the man who killed an unarmed teenager in a shooting last month that has sparked national outrage. That would be the most just outcome, given the mounting evidence that George Zimmerman followed and confronted 17-year-old Trayvon Martin before shooting him as he…

As the Republican primaries continue to follow a long dream sequence imagined by David Plouffe — another muddled weekend, but more signs of Santorum strength — it’s worth keeping an eye on what the White House is doing. The people there aren’t twiddling their thumbs or using them to high-five each other in glee over…