Make Government Accountable Again

May 27, 2016

In a little over eight months, a new president will take the helm of a federal bureaucracy that inflicts almost $2 trillion in costs on the American economy annually. And under current law, the American people have little opportunity to limit how the next president will use this bureaucrac

Making Welfare Work Again

May 26, 2016

The key to understanding America’s social-welfare system today — and why it needs to be reformed — is not its bloated annual budget but its tendency to undermine the two most dependable routes out of poverty: work and marriage.

We Don’t Need a National Zoning Board

May 16, 2016

The Obama economy has been tough on America’s working families. Just last week Pew Research Center reported that in the last 15 years “the middle class lost ground in nearly nine-in-ten U.S. metropolitan areas.” One cause of this 15-year squeeze of hardworking Americans? Rising housing prices.

Let's close the email privacy loophole now

May 10, 2016

This week the House of Representatives took an historic step for Americans’ privacy rights. By an overwhelming vote of 419-0, it passed bipartisan legislation to protect Americans’ email and other information in the cloud from warrantless searches. Now that the House has passed the Email Privacy Act to finally update our laws for the digital age and without a single opposing vote, the Senate should do the same.

Obama’s Violating the Constitution by Not Submitting Climate Treaty to Senate

Apr 22, 2016

"If Congress fails to specifically prohibit taxpayer money from being spent implementing the Paris Climate Agreement, then they will be complicit in President Obama’s subversion of the Constitution."

Obama broke the law with DAPA. Will the Supreme Court stop him?

Apr 18, 2016

One of the most fundamental challenges facing the United States today is the deep and growing distrust between the American people and their political system in Washington, D.C. And the inconvenient truth — rarely acknowledged by Washington elites — is that the American people’s distrust of their public institutions is totally justified.

Sen. Mike Lee: Let the American people decide what kind of Supreme Court we will have

Mar 7, 2016

“We the People….” The opening words of the Preamble to the United States Constitution are a familiar refrain that Americans learn from youth. It was “the People” who established the United States Senate in Article I, Section 1, of that document, and it is for them that my colleagues and I now serve. That same charter established “one supreme Court,” consisting of judges appointed “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate.” As law professor John McGinnis stated in “The Heritage Guide to the Constitution,” this provision gives the Senate “complete and final discretion in whether to accept or approve a nomination.” And as legal scholar Adam White has demonstrated, in a 2005 article carefully analyzing the Appointments Clause, that the Senate retains complete discretion with respect to whether it should even consider – much less accept or reject – presidential nominees.

Lee: Senate well within its rights, and within precedent, to wait on court nominee

Mar 7, 2016

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was an extraordinary man whose contributions to this country and its people are so prodigious that it will take generations for us to fully comprehend our debt to him. His untimely death is a tragedy, and his legacy a blessing to friends of freedom everywhere. Justice Scalia was a learned student of history and a man who relished a spirited debate. So it is fitting that his passing has sparked a conversation about the constitutional powers governing the appointment of Supreme Court justices and the historical record of court vacancies. This debate gives the American people a unique opportunity to discuss our nation's founding charter at a time when our collective choices have real consequences. So it's important that this debate proceed with candor, mutual respect and deference to the facts. In that spirit, I'd like to address a few of the errors that we have heard so far in this debate.

Bringing freedom back to the Internet

Feb 25, 2016

A year ago today, five unelected bureaucrats at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decided to exploit an 80-year-old law meant for regulating radio, telephone, and telegraph operations, in order to begin regulating the Internet.

Sen. Lee: Don’t Force Women to Fight

Feb 22, 2016

If you haven’t been paying attention lately, you might have missed a controversy crop up about an issue that I imagine most Americans did not realize was controversial. Over the last week, prominent military and political leaders have called for requiring all American women to register for the selective service – that is, potential military conscription.