Center For Individual Freedom

A fatuous new meme has gained sudden social media popularity among gun-grabbers in their ongoing campaign to render the Second Amendment meaningless. The meme features a portrait of former Chief Justice of the United States Warren Burger, alongside a 1990 quote that somehow sprang to life after thirty years of dormancy. [Read More]

We are unwinding at both ends. Tribalism, the erosion of the middle class and de facto open borders are turning Americans into mere residents of a particular North American region between Mexico and Canada. Yet even more dangerously, thanks to the fiats of unelected bureaucrats and officials, along with the social media lynch mobs who boycott, harass and shame us, our constitutional rights are now increasingly optional. [Read More]

Take the Center for Individual Freedom's 17-Question Quiz to test your knowledge of the U.S. Constitution. [Read More]

In recent days, Representative Joaquin Castro (D – Texas), brother of 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro, used his high-profile platform to tweet the identities and occupations of local donors to President Donald Trump within his district. Those donors were everyday, ordinary citizens doing nothing more than exercising their legal rights to participate in America’s electoral process. Yet for that they were intentionally targeted and exposed by this vindictive, petty, power-abusive man. What this latest episode reconfirms is the need to end this unconstitutional abomination once and for all, and enact legislation protecting donor privacy. [Read More]

This week, Democratic Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro, who chairs the presidential campaign of his twin brother, Julian, tweeted the names and employers of more than 40 San Antonians who maxed out their donations to President Donald Trump's reelection campaign. [Read More]

Take our 13-Question Independence Day Quiz to test your knowledge of American history and civics. [Read More]

This week, representatives from Facebook, Google and Twitter will join with European leaders and the prime minister of New Zealand to launch a chilling proposal to curb free speech across the internet. Americans should be alarmed. Internet freedom is being extinguished fast in Europe. How long will it survive in the U.S.? [Read More]

Who says Roe must say Lochner. So wrote Judge Robert H. Bork in The Tempting of America. This week, Judge Bork's admonition gained renewed salience as Senate confirmation hearings began for Judge Brett Kavanaugh to fill the seat for which Judge Bork was nominated, due to a budding debate within the conservative community over the proper role of the judicial branch in our governmental system. [Read More]

This week offered a perfect example, when the House of Representatives approved legislation guaranteeing reciprocity rights between states for holders of concealed carry permits. Under the legislation, entitled the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017, American citizens who possess concealed carry permits in their home state can't be denied the same rights in other states to which they travel. That ensures that law-abiding Americans won't be suddenly rendered unable to protect themselves and their families simply by traveling from one state to another. It also protects against anti-Second Amendment jurisdictions harassing travelers who simply exercise their right to keep and bear arms. [Read More]

The idea that gun-control advocates don't want to confiscate your weapons is, of course, laughable. They can't confiscate your weapons, so they support whatever feasible incremental steps inch further toward that goal. Some folks are more considerate and get right to the point. [Read More]

Last week, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Kolbe v. Hogan egregiously sustained a Maryland law broadly prohibiting so-called assault weapons and large-capacity magazines under the logic that such items are most useful in military service. That logic, however, contradicts what Second Amendment restrictionists had been telling us prior to the seminal 2008 Supreme Court decision in D.C. v. Heller. [Read More]

Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., the odds-on favorite to become the Democratic National Committee's chairman, had a long association with the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam. He compared then-President George W. Bush and 9/11 to Adolf Hitler and the destruction of the Reichstag, the German parliament building: 9/11 is the juggernaut in American history and it allows ... it's almost like, you know, the Reichstag fire, Ellison said. After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it, and it put the leader of that country (Hitler) in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted. Comparing Republicans to Nazis has long been a national pastime of the Democratic Party. [Read More]

It's been a traumatic week for liberals (although conservatives face their own struggle to stifle laughter and schadenfreude at liberals' expense). But things aren't all bad. There are some silver linings among the liberal clouds. They're suddenly realizing that some of the political tactics they cheered throughout the Obama Administration, such as lawless presidential overreach in the form of executive orders, might not have been so wise after all. What Obama did with his pen and phone, Trump can just as easily un-do with his own pen and phone. [Read More]

An excessively deferential judiciary constitutes a threat to liberty. But so does an excessively aggressive judiciary. Unfortunately, George Will, perhaps the leading beacon of conservative thought, performs a disservice in advocating the latter in his ongoing effort to rehabilitate the discredited judicial concept of substantive due process. [Read More]

If only Barack Obama exhibited as much contempt and tenacity toward America's foreign adversaries - particularly Russia, China and Iran - as he does toward fellow Americans who happen to interpret the Bill of Rights and Second Amendment more expansively than he does. [Read More]

With the release of his new book The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer demonstrates that the judicial left suffers the same intellectual contradiction. Despite his continuing defense of state-sponsored affirmative action racial discrimination in the interest of diversity, Breyer advocates that American judges incorporate foreign law, usually of the European variety, into their jurisprudence. In the multipolar, mutually interdependent world, Breyer says, the best way to advance the values that the Founders set forth - democracy, human rights and widespread commerce - is to understand, to take account of, and sometimes to learn from, both legal and relevant nonlegal practices that take place beyond our shores. Justice Breyer actually has it backward, and his is a dangerous idea. [Read More]

Can government officials require American citizens to demonstrate and elaborate good cause and provide supporting documentation before exercising, say, our First Amendment right to free speech or religious practice? The idea is facially preposterous. Yet that good cause showing is precisely what California government officials demand before they'll allow law-abiding citizens to fully exercise their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. [Read More]

If hyper-liberal retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens gets his way, here's how the Second Amendment would read: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, when serving in the militia, shall not be infringed. Consider it a liberal lion's concession of defeat. Specifically, anti-Second Amendment zealots have gone from misrepresenting the Second Amendment's meaning to advocating its revision. [Read More]

Pop quiz: The paramount principle that drew America's first permanent settlers across the Atlantic, and upon which our nation was founded, was: (a) The freedom to practice one's religion beyond government interference; or (b) The right to force private employers to provide birth control and abortive drugs in violation of their religious beliefs, under penalty of law. Although posited in jest, that question actually serves to properly frame the issue currently before the United States Supreme Court in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. [Read More]

The further the country is removed from the Founding in time, the further it is removed from it in spirit. Today's electorate is one that seems increasingly focused on empowering government, rather than encumbering it. The rights of individuals, the rights of states, the ability of the various branches of the federal government to check each other - these are increasingly regarded as little more than nettlesome speed bumps keeping government from simply getting things done. Lost in all this angst is the notion that the process dictated by the Constitution is, in many ways, its substance - a safeguard against rash, illiberal action. There is still time to restore that understanding, but it is quickly running out. We can have unfettered, capricious democracy or we can have a Republic...if we're willing to do what it takes to keep it. [Read More]

Dodd-Frank, ObamaCare, Immigration... As the number of these mega-bills are debated and passed without being read, let alone understood either by lawmakers or the people they represent, We the People may fairly ask: Why? Why must any law exceed a thousand pages? Why can't our elected officials speak and write in more straightforward language, declaring clear principles and drawing clear lines of demarcation understandable to reasonably intelligent citizens? [Read More]

What gives Congress the power to think it can treat the Second Amendment like a second-class right? That was the essential question hanging over a tense exchange between U.S. Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) over the latter's proposed assault weapons ban. [Read More]

What happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut isn't fairly a tragedy. A deadly auto accident is a tragedy. A natural disaster is a tragedy. What happened in Newtown was evil. It was murder. It was depravity of the lowest, most perverse, diabolical, heartbreaking form. The tragedy is the predictable onslaught of unintelligent and opportunistic preening from gun control advocates. [Read More]

If you've been looking for hard numbers to support the argument that the American public sector is putting the nation's finances on an unsustainable path, Jim MacDougald of The Free Enterprise Nation is here to help. A successful businessman and financial planner, MacDougald noticed a recurring theme at the beginning of the Great Recession. Private sector jobs were vanishing while public sector employees were enjoying the best of times. A Florida resident, MacDougald was shocked to read about taxpayers' generosity towards state workers. The combination of job security, early retirement and hefty pensions are unfathomable for MacDougald's private sector clients. To civil servants, they are entitlements. [Read More]

The Center for Individual Freedom this week joined an ideologically diverse coalition, representing millions of American taxpayers, in urging openness and transparency on health care reform. In an open letter to the House of Representatives, leaders of 35 national and state organizations specifically called on each and every Member of the House to sign the discharge petition for H. Res. 847. Introduced by Representative Vern Buchanan (R-FL), H. Res. 847 would force a vote on a bipartisan Sunshine Resolution to call on Congress and the Obama Administration to conduct all negotiations surrounding landmark health care reform legislation in full public view and not behind closed doors. [Read More]

On September 30, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear arguments in McDonald v. City of Chicago, a case challenging Chicago’s convoluted restrictions on an individual’s right to keep and bear arms. The decision in McDonald should once and for all determine whether the Second Amendment applies equally to citizens in all states or only to federal jurisdictions such as the District of Columbia. McDonald arose out of a challenge to Chicago’s 1983 handgun ban, which makes it both illegal to register a handgun as well as to own one without registering it with the City. Last year, in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court struck down a similar ban in the nation’s capital, but failed to address the question of whether the Second Amendment applies to state and local governments as well. [Read More]

Founded in 1998, the Center for Individual Freedom is a non-partisan, non-profit organization with the mission to protect and defend individual freedoms and individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. [Read More]