Adam Dick

Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC), while a guest last week on the Laura Ingraham Show, criticized United States Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) for supporting giving President Barack Obama “fast track” authority for potential international agreements including the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Jones says giving fast track authority — sometimes called trade promotion authority — to the president is “absolutely a threat on our Constitution, on our sovereignty.”

Noting that McConnell and Boehner are regularly complaining about Obama’s actions, Jones asks if the two congressional leaders have “lost their minds” in seeking to hand over to Obama more power that the Constitution says belongs in the legislative branch of government. Jones, a Ron Paul Institute Advisory Board member, explains:

When you allow a president to have the authority to bring before Congress the issue but not allow Congress to debate, to amend, or to change the agreement, then that in itself is not what the Constitution intended for this country….

All you’re doing is giving away our constitutional responsibilities. And for me it is just laughable, to be honest with you, Laura, that McConnell and Boehner who constantly complain … about President Obama, they want to give him this authority. Have they lost their minds?

Continue reading at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

Judge Andrew Napolitano, speaking with Neil Cavuto on Fox Business, explained that United States Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen‘s apology last week regarding the US government routinely seizing bank accounts based on the mere suspicion that the money in the accounts may be related to a crime is not enough to rectify the constitutional violation. Napolitano charges that “Congress is the culprit” for passing legislation allowing the seizures and that Congress is doing nothing to repeal the seizures authorization.

Continue reading at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

Interviewed Tuesday on the Real News Network, Ron Paul Institute Academic Advisor Lawrence Wilkerson warned that following the advice of “warmongers like Senator John McCain and his cohorts” to “arm majorly” the Ukraine government is “probably one of the fastest ways” to deepen, widen, and make more profound the Ukraine crisis.

Wilkerson, a professor at the College of William & Mary and former US Army colonel, explains in the interview with host Sharmini Peries the disadvantageous position the US would be entering by choosing military escalation:

We’re 6,000 miles — depending on what part of us you want to look at — we’re a long way away.

Let me just add that that makes the problem, the military problem, significant. And I frankly cannot believe that former military people in some respects are talking about this in the way they are. Putin is operating on what we in the military call interior lines. We would be operating on the opposite of that. What that means, in very basic terms, is he’s got a few kilometers to go — difficult, to be sure — over land, and he can reinforce and he can put major force to bear. We have got how many miles? Two, three thousand miles of water to go over, and we’ve got lots of land to get through, too, once we come to a friendly port.

This is not a thing we want to get involved with, because he owns all the escalatory chips. He owns the military situation.

Continue reading at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

Ron Paul, who served in the US House of Representatives as a Republican from Texas, submitted comments on Wednesday to the Immigration and Border Security Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee warning of many dangers that may arise from making E-Verify a mandatory component of hiring under US law. Mandatory E-Verify is one of the “tough on illegal immigration” proposals being considered in Congress.

Paul, who is the founder and chairman of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, includes in his detailed discussion of mandatory E-Verify dangers the following synopsis:

Mr. Chairman, mandatory E-Verify violates the Constitution.  More importantly, requiring every American “show their papers” in order to obtain federal permission to hold a job is incompatible with a free society.  Mandatory E-Verify will also deprive Americans of job opportunities through false positives while providing politicians and others with opportunities to use the information in the database to harass their political and other enemies.  Furthermore, there is no way a future Congress can be restrained from increasing the uses of the E-Verify system or syncing it to other databases to complete a massive, universal data system that could seal the transformation of America into a total surveillance state.

Continue reading at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

The momentum in the United States government seems to be behind piling more and more sanctions on countries with abandon. In opposition to this trend, Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity Founder and Chairman Ron Paul and RPI Advisory Board Member Lew Rockwell present in Rockwell’s latest podcast an in-depth discussion of the dangers sanctions pose.

Here is a sample of the sanctions-happy US government in action during just the last two months:

• President Barack Obama on December 18 signing into law additional, extensive Russia sanctions authority;

• Obama imposing further sanctions on North Korea via a January 2 executive order purportedly in response to the dubious claim that North Korea hacked Sony Pictures Entertainment emails; and

• A large, bipartisan majority in the US Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee approving on Thursday new Iran sanctions legislation.

Continue reading at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.