The concept of personal liberty is that our rights come from our humanity. If you believe in a Supreme Being, as I do and as the Declaration of Independence presupposes, then you acknowledge these rights as a gift from the Creator. If you doubt or reject the existence of a Supreme Being, you can still accept the personal origin of these ...

Death of America's personal freedoms in slow motion. During the past month, as Americans have been terrified of the coronavirus, another demon has been lurking ready to pounce. It is a demon of our own creation. It is the now amply manifested inability of elected officials to resist the temptation of totalitarianism. And it is slowly ...

At the core of the campaign could be an effort to win votes. What if the latest craze among the big-government crowd in both major political parties is to use the power of government to force employers to pay some of their employees more than their services are worth to the employers?What if this represents an intrusion by government into ...

Protesters can voice their opposition, but they may not silence a speaker. On Feb. 7, 1946, Arthur Terminiello, a Roman Catholic priest who was a fierce opponent of communism and believed that President Harry Truman was too comfortable with it, gave an incendiary speech in a Chicago hall that his sponsors had rented.The hall held about 800 ...

What if Democrats don’t care what she did? What if Hillary Clinton is in legal hot water and she knows it but won't admit it? What if she has decided to go on the offensive and make her case that she did nothing unlawful with her emails that contained state secrets?What if the essence of her defense is that other secretaries of state ...

Her email scandal still imperils her journey to the presidency. Surely, Hillary Clinton hopes for a happy conclusion to the maddening string of primaries and caucuses that have exhausted her. Surely, she hopes to be the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party this year. And surely, she hopes to be elected president. These hopes are ...

Hillary’s mishandling of email could cost lives. This has not been a good week for Hillary Clinton. She prevailed over Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Iowa Democratic presidential caucuses by less than four-tenths of 1 percent of all votes cast, after having led him in polls in Iowa at one time by 40 percentage points. In her statement to ...

Obama has no authority to issue firearms laws that Congress has rejected. In 2008, the Supreme Court laid to rest the once-simmering dispute over the meaning of the Second Amendment. In an opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the court articulated the modern existence of the ancient personal right to keep and bear arms as a ...

More government surveillance only produces a false sense of security. The tragedy in Paris last Friday has regrettably been employed as a catalyst for renewed calls by governments in western Europe and even in the United States for more curtailment of personal liberties. Those who accept the trade of liberty for safety have argued in favor of ...

Hillary's new lies about Benghazi could lead to her indictmentThe self-inflicted wounds of Hillary Clinton just keep manifesting themselves. She has two serious issues that have arisen in the past week; one is political and the other is legal. Both have deception at their root.Her political problem is one of credibility. We know from her ...

Hillary Clinton lied over her role in ousting Libya’s Gadhafi. The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd captured the moment last weekend when she referred to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as “the midwife to chaos” in Libya. Ms. Dowd apparently came to that conclusion after watching Mrs. Clinton bobbing and weaving and admitting and denying ...

The pope fails if his concern is more for secular than sacred. Rep. Thomas Massie, Kentucky Republican, has invited me to the House of Representatives to watch Pope Francis address a joint session of Congress. This generous Methodist congressman has invited your traditionalist Roman Catholic columnist and cable TV guy to this grand event. I ...

While the scandal surrounding the emails sent and received by Hillary Clinton during her time as U.S. secretary of state continues to grow, Mrs. Clinton has resorted to laughing it off. This past weekend she told an audience of Iowa Democrats that she loves her Snapchat account because the messages automatically disappear. No one in the ...

Diverting sensitive emails to the foundation server violated the law. In a column I wrote in early July, based on research by my colleagues and my own analysis of government documents and eyewitness statements, I argued that in 2011 and 2012 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton waged a secret war on the governments of Libya and Syria, with ...

Clinton approved arms for terrorist enemies of the United States. In the course of my work, I am often asked by colleagues to review and explain documents and statutes. Recently, in conjunction with my colleagues Catherine Herridge and Pamela Browne, I read the transcripts of an interview Ms. Browne did with a man named Marc Turi, and Ms. ...

It is not evil expressions but evil actions that are criminal. The tragedy of a mass murder in Charleston, South Carolina, last week, obviously motivated by racial hatred, has raised anew the issue of the lawfulness of the State expressing an opinion by flying a Confederate flag at the Statehouse, and the constitutionality of the use of the ...

The ‘compromise’ USA Freedom Act fails to curtail NSA spying. Last week, Republicans and Democrats in Congress joined President Obama in congratulating themselves for taming the National Security Agency’s voracious appetite for spying. By permitting one section of the Patriot Act to expire and by replacing it with the USA Freedom Act, the ...

The feds give the false impression that spying means security. In their continuous efforts to create the impression that the government is doing something to keep Americans safe, politicians in Washington have misled and lied to the public. They have violated their oaths to uphold the Constitution. They have created a false sense of security. ...

The provision for collection of bulk data must be allowed to expire. The Patriot Act has a bad pedigree and an evil history. In the fearful days immediately following Sept. 11, 2001, the Department of Justice quickly sent draft legislation to Congress that, if enacted, would have permitted federal agents to violate their oaths to uphold ...

Government that usurps natural rights is unmoored from the Framers’ intent. What if we didn't have a Constitution? What if the government were elected by custom and tradition, but not by law? What if election procedures and official titles and government responsibilities merely followed those that preceded them, and not because any of this ...

Are there special standards of behavior for Hillary? Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former first lady, U.S. senator from New York and secretary of state, used a private email server for all of her emails when she was President Obama’s secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

During that time, she enjoyed a security clearance identical to that of the president, the secretary of defense, the director of the CIA and others. It is the highest level of clearance the government makes available. ...

Violating the Fourth Amendment is not the president’s prerogative. What if the current massive spying on Americans began with an innocent secret executive order signed by President Reagan in 1986? What if Reagan contemplated that he was only authorizing American spies to spy on foreign spies unlawfully present in the ...

Nothing in the Constitution gives the government ownership of our bodies. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie unwittingly ignited a firestorm earlier this week when he responded to a reporter's question in Great Britain about forced vaccinations of children in New Jersey by suggesting that the law in the United States needs to balance the rights ...

Some Americans fail to notice when government is stealing their freedom. A British author, residing in the United States for the past 30 years, created a small firestorm earlier this week with his candid observations that modern-day Americans have been duped by the government into accepting a European-style march toward socialism because we ...

When the government is waving at us with its right hand, so to speak, it is the government’s left hand that we should be watching. Just as a magician draws your attention to what he wants you to see so you will not observe how his trick is performed, last week presented a textbook example of public disputes masking hidden deceptions. Here is ...

Will new attorney general circumvent the Constitution as freely as Eric Holder? Within hours of realizing that his party lost control of the U.S. Senate last week, President Obama nominated Loretta Lynch, the chief federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, N.Y., and an outstanding and apolitical professional, to be the next attorney general. The ...

Restraining freedom without due cause is a violation of natural rights. In the years following the adoption of the Constitution, before he was secretary of state under President Thomas Jefferson and then president himself, James Madison, who wrote the Constitution, was a member of the House of Representatives. During that period of his life, ...

Obama’s war plan has no basis in the Constitution. As the debate rages over whether the president needs congressional authorization for war prior to his deployment of the military to degrade or destroy the Islamic State, the terrorist organization that none of us had heard about until a few months ago, the nation has lost sight of the ...

The Constitution gives Congress sole authority on the use of military force. James Madison is commonly referred to as the father of the Constitution, in large measure because, in the secrecy of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, he kept the most complete set of notes. He also had a very keen mind and a modest demeanor and ...

CIA spying and lying reveal relentless disregard for the Constitution. In some respects, the recent admission by CIA Director John O. Brennan that his agents and his lawyers have been spying on the senators whose job it is to monitor the agency should come as no surprise. The agency’s job is to steal and keep secrets, and implicit in those ...

Neither offers Americans much prospect for hope. It has been well established under the Constitution and throughout our history that the president’s job as the chief federal law enforcement officer permits him to put his ideological stamp on the nature of the work done by the executive branch. The courts have characterized this stamp ...

Celebrating Independence Day the way President Obama would. After a brief holiday last week, I returned to some heavy reading, courtesy of the federal government. Some of the materials that I read were gratifying, and one of them was terrifying.

In one week, the Supreme Court told the police that if they want to examine the contents of our cellphones, whether at traffic stops or serious crime scenes, they need to get a warrant. The court told small-business owners that they needn’t pay for government-mandated ...

This time, America must resist the temptation to slay monsters. As we watch the collapsing government in Baghdad, surrounded by a highly disciplined and serious force of Sunni-oriented fighters that has taken control of the most populous third of the country, we must, in John Adams’ words, resist the temptation to slay the world’s monsters. ...

Liberty is endangered by liberals with inflated trust in their own leadership. The president is an ardent progressive. This dastardly philosophy of government was brought into the American mainstream 100 years ago by a Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, and a Democrat, Woodrow Wilson. Its guiding principle is the belief that government — ...

Obama hones his contempt for the Constitution. On the same weekend that the secretary of veterans affairs resigned amid the scandal of veterans dying before the government’s doctors could treat them in government hospitals; on the heels of another revelation of the National Security Agency’s unconstitutional spying, in which federal agents ...

New book tells how the NSA spies on Americans. With heart-pounding suspense, John le Carre-like intrigue and Jeffersonian fidelity to the principles of human freedom, Glenn Greenwald’s “No Place to Hide” has just been published.

The book, which reads like a thriller, is Mr. Greenwald’s story of his nonstop two weeks of work in May and June 2013 in Hong Kong with former CIA agent and National Security Agency contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden. Mr. Greenwald was the point man who ...

Americans are starting to hear the lies in Obama’s signals to his base. I am not a fan of former U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner. He presided over the politically conceived, patently unconstitutional and anti-free-market taxpayer bailouts of banks, automakers and insurance companies in the latter part of the administration of ...

Why a Watergate-type investigation is called for. The White House responded to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the fearless private watchdog group Judicial Watch and turned over an email about constructing the appropriate narrative response to the tragedy at Benghazi written by Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser ...

Freedom gives haters the room to reap contempt of society. Cliven Bundy should be happy for the public revelation of the private comments of fellow racist Donald Sterling.

The latter has replaced the former as the person Americans most love to hate. These two bigots recently spewed racial hatred: Mr. Bundy suggesting that blacks might do well to consider slavery over freedom, and Mr. Sterling offering disjointed comments that reveal his ...

Easter symbolizes the freedom to choose eternal life. What is the connection between freedom and rising from the dead?

When America was in its infancy and struggling to find a culture and frustrated at governance from Great Britain, the word most frequently uttered in speeches and pamphlets and editorials was not safety or taxes or peace — it was freedom. ...

Last week, Director of National Intelligence Gen. James R. Clapper sent a brief letter to Sen. Ron Wyden, Oregon Democrat, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in which he admitted that agents of the National Security Agency (NSA) have been reading innocent Americans’ emails and text messages and listening to digital recordings of ...

Spying on Americans elicits many questions but few answers. What if the National Security Agency (NSA) knows it is violating the Constitution by spying on all Americans without showing a judge probable cause of wrongdoing or identifying the persons it wishes to spy upon, as the Constitution requires? What if this massive spying has come ...

The government is caught up in another scandal in which federal agents have been accused of hacking into one another’s computers.

When the CIA was established in 1947, Congress and President Truman were concerned that it might not confine itself to spying. ...

U.S., European Union in no position to resist. What happens when the U.S. government participates in toppling foreign governments in the name of spreading democracy? That behavior usually results in unintended consequences and often produces disasters.

With the invasion of Iraq in 2003, initially to search for weapons of mass destruction that we now realize the Bush administration knew did not exist there, and eventually for regime change, the United States succeeded in changing profoundly the Iraqi government. ...

The right of clients and attorneys to speak feely is under siege. In the months since Edward Snowden revealed the nature and extent of the spying that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been perpetrating upon Americans and foreigners, some of the NSA’s most troublesome behavior has not been a part of the ...

Obama becomes imperial president without Republican resistance. The political philosopher Edmund Burke once remarked that all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good folks to do nothing.

A glaring example of the impending triumph of a constitutional evil that could be stopped by folks who have been largely silent is the tyranny coming from the White House. The folks who can stop this and are doing nothing about it are our elected representatives in ...

Obama would govern by pen, phone and whim. Can the president legally bypass Congress and rule the government by decree?

The answer to the question above is no. You wouldn’t know that, though, by listening to President Obama. During the past three weeks, the president has made it clear how he plans to run the executive branch of the federal government in the next three years: with a pen and a ...

Obama maneuver changes nothing about snooping on Americans. When President Obama chose a Friday before a three-day holiday weekend to address a matter as profound as the National Security Agency (NSA) spying scandal, I suspected he would raise issues that he hoped the media would ignore. That’s because the Reagan White House did a study in ...

Is there no one brave enough to open this unconstitutional can of worms? Happy New Year. Just when you thought the National Security Agency spying scandal couldn’t get any worse, it has.

Last week, Sen. Bernard Sanders, Vermont independent, wrote to Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA’s director, and asked plainly whether the agency has been or is now spying on members of Congress or other public officials. The senator’s letter was no doubt prompted by the ...

Fourth Amendment says Obama is not at liberty to collect metadata. “Almost Orwellian” — that’s the description a federal judge gave earlier this week to the massive spying by the National Security Agency (NSA) on virtually all 380 million cellphones in the United States.

In the first meaningful and jurisdictionally grounded judicial review of the NSA cellphone spying program, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee sitting in Washington, D.C., ruled that the scheme of asking a secret judge on a secret court for a ...

Privacy vanishes as the Snowden revelations breed more government spies. Readers of this page are well aware of the revelations during the past six months of spying by the National Security Agency (NSA). Edward Snowden, a former employee of an NSA vendor, risked his life and liberty to inform us of a governmental conspiracy to violate our right ...

Church teaching on personal freedom includes a moral imperative to work and share. What is the worst problem in the world today? Might it be war, starvation, genocide, sectarian violence, murder, slaughter of babies in the womb? Any of these would be a rational answer. When Pope Francis was asked this question recently, he replied, ...

Here is a quick pop quiz. Which presented more harm to human life and personal freedom: the 16-day partial shutdown of the federal government last month or the rollout of Obamacare this month?

Obamacare is the greatest single expansion of federal regulatory authority in American history. In one stroke, it puts 16 percent of American economic activity — virtually all of health care and health insurance — under the thumb of federal bureaucrats. It dictates the ...

One of the bedrocks of our governmental infrastructure is federalism. This is the constitutional recognition of the legal origins of the United States as a union of independent states. America started, of course, with 13 colonies, which became 13 states, and gradually added 37 ...

When German Chancellor Angela Merkel celebrated the opening of the new U.S. Embassy in Berlin in 2008, she could not have imagined that she was blessing the workplace for the largest and most effective gaggle of American spies anywhere outside of the United States.

It seems straight out of a grade-B movie, but it has been happening for the past 11 years: The National Security Agency (NSA) has been using Mrs. Merkel as an instrument to spy on the president of the United States. We now know that the NSA has been listening to and ...

Every American who values the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, every American who enjoys the right to be different and the right to be left alone, and every American who believes that the government works for us and we don’t work for the government should thank Edward Snowden for his courageous and heroic revelations of ...

From April 1917 to November 1919, when President Woodrow Wilson borrowed $30 billion to pay for World War I, he was able to do so because of the promise he made to lenders that the commitment to repay them would be backed by the full faith and credit of the United ...

Before you rejoice that the government has seized an alleged terrorist in Libya who was indicted for planning the notorious 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa, before you join the House of Representatives in a standing ovation for the Capitol Hill police who killed a woman whose car struck a White House fence and who then drove away at a ...

After President Nixon left office in 1974, a bipartisan congressional investigation discovered many of his constitutional excesses. Foremost among them was the use of FBI and CIA agents to spy on Americans in violation of federal law and the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Nixon argued that the government needed to monitor “subversives” ...

The feds hound Snowden for deeds like their own. How is it that the government can charge Edward Snowden with espionage for telling a journalist that the feds have been spying on all Americans and many of our allies, but the National Security Agency itself, in a public-relations campaign intended to win support for its lawlessness, can ...

Obama pursues maximum control and minimum freedom. Fidelity to the rule of law is the centerpiece of a free society. It means that no one is beneath the protection of the law and no one is absolved of the obligation to comply with it. The government may not make a person or a class of persons exempt from constitutional protections, as it ...

The Framers didn’t intend to form a ‘least untruthful’ union. Which is more dangerous to personal liberty in a free society: a renegade who tells an inconvenient truth about government lawbreaking, or government officials who lie about what the renegade revealed? That is the core issue in the great public debate this summer, as Americans come ...

Snowden regarded his oath as superior to official secrecy. When former spy Edward Snowden revealed to the world that the federal government is spying on most Americans, most Americans were surprised and unhappy. But half of official Washington yawned before it roared. Somehow the people in the government had a pretty good idea of what ...

Ancient colonial intrusions pale in comparison to infringement today. When British soldiers were roaming the American countryside in the 1760s with lawful search warrants with which they had authorized themselves to enter the private homes of Colonists in order to search for government-issued stamps, Thomas Paine wrote, “These are the times ...

Asking questions can evoke disturbing realizations. What if government officials have written laws that apply only to us and not to them? What if we gave them the power to protect our freedoms and our safety, and they used that power to trick and trap some of us? What if government officials broke the laws we hired them to enforce? What if ...

Obama’s Justice Department is writing off the First Amendment. The firestorm commenced by the revelation of the execution of a search warrant on the personal email server of my Fox News colleague James Rosen continues to rage. The conflagration engulfing the First Amendment continues to burn, and it is the Justice Department itself that is ...

The president’s men trash the Constitution to pursue antagonists. A few weeks ago, President Obama advised graduates at Ohio State University that they need not listen to voices warning about tyranny around the corner, because we have self-government in America. He argued that self-government is in and of itself an adequate safeguard ...

A pattern of government lies shows disregard for the Constitution. Government is bad for personal freedom. That argument is premised upon the truism that everything government does interferes with freedom because it either prohibits or compels. Everything it owns it has taken from others. Much of what it says is divorced from the truth. ...

It should come as no surprise that President Obama told Ohio State University students at a graduation ceremony last week that they should not question authority and they should reject the calls of those who do. He argued that “our brave, creative, unique experiment in self-rule” has been so successful that trusting the government is the same ...

Here we go again. The Obama administration has asked its allies in Congress to introduce legislation that would permit the feds to continue their march through the Fourth Amendment when it comes to obtaining private information about all of us.

The Fourth Amendment, which guarantees the right to be left alone, was written largely in response to legislation Parliament enacted in the Colonial era that permitted British soldiers to write their own search warrants and then use those warrants as a legal basis to enter ...