Author: Campaign For Liberty Blog

By Tim Shoemaker

FOXNews.com reports some Republicans are considering surrendering their successful filibuster of the financial “deform” bill (the third round of which was successful today, 56-42).

Senate Republicans…will attempt to change the bill on the Senate floor, Republican officials said.

Sen. Richard Shelby, the top Republican on the Senate Banking committee, said he has assurances that Democrats will adjust his banking regulation bill to address concerns that it perpetuates bailouts.

The concession sets the stage for Republicans to withdraw objections that have stalled the bill in the Senate.

The agreement does not bridge other significant differences between the parties on the bill.
Democrats tried three times to begin debate on the bill only to be thwarted by Republican opposition.

Contact your Senators now and urge them to continue the filibuster!  Make sure they know a vote for cloture will be seen as a vote for empowering the Federal Reserve!

Sen. Shelby’s trust in the ‘assurances’ of the Democrats to change the bill after the filibuster is over is misguided and extremely naive. 

By Andrew Ward

The Cato Institute has an interesting video laying out some advice to activists in the Tea Party:

1. Republicans aren’t always your friends.
2. Some tea partiers like big government.
3. Democrats aren’t always your enemies.
4. Smaller government demands restraint abroad.
5. Leave social issues to the states.

Here’s their video:

What do you think?

By Matt Hawes

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano spies one of our Audit the Fed ads that ran on Drudge.  Thanks for your support in making our Banner Bomb such a success!

By dljholt

The Virginia Liberty Forum with Ron Paul, Bob Marshall, and Patrick McSweeney is just a week away.

Hundreds of liberty enthusiasts have reserved their seats for the free Liberty Forum and purchased their tickets to the Reception and Private Briefing with Ron Paul.

There are still a limited number of tickets available for the Reception. But ticket sales have been heavy over the last week, so don’t delay if you want to take advantage of this rare opportunity to meet Ron Paul.

For an even greater chance of getting some personal time with Ron Paul, we have a small number of tickets still available for the Private Briefing, but you’d better act fast.

Virginia Campaign for Liberty is providing complimentary hors d’oeuvres and cocktails at the Reception and Private Briefing.

Want an opportunity to meet personally with Ron Paul but just can’t spend the money to attend either of these great events? Perhaps you’d like to take a chance an winning admission to both.

Raffle tickets are only $25, but the winner gets $350 worth of tickets. Can you imagine how amazing it would be to be able to attend the Reception and the Private Briefing? The winner will also get their name in the event program.

But you’d better act fast.  Raffle ticket sales end at midnight on Friday, April 30.  The drawing is on May 1 at noon.

May 6 in Springfield is going to be an exciting evening filled with the words of liberty in what will be the Virginia event to beat all others this season.

Time is running out to reserve your seat for the Liberty Forum and purchase tickets to the Reception and Private Briefing. 

Get your tickets today!

By Tim Shoemaker

The Hill reports this morning:

A financial regulatory reform bill has at least one supporter outside of Congressional Democrats, Lloyd Blankfein, the head of investment bank Goldman Sachs.

“I’m generally supportive,” Blankfein told the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

Wall Street will benefit from the bill because it will make the market safer, Blankfein said.

“The biggest beneficiary of reform is Wall Street itself,” he said. “The biggest risk is risk financial institutions have with each other.”

Washington Examiner columnist Tim Carney writes:

While this probably sounds odd or unlikely to those who follow the President’s and Sen. Dodd’s populist, bomb-throwing rhetoric, it’s nothing new for readers of the Washington Examiner. Here are some of my articles on this:

* “Obama brings purrs from Wall Street ‘fat cats’,” Dec. 16, 2009
* “Beware the Goldman Sachs populist,” Jan. 22, 2010.
* “Obama’s cronies thrive at the intersection of Wall and K,” Feb. 17.
* “Goldman rallies for Obama on Wall Street ‘reform’ ,” April 16.
* “Goldman Sachs wants regulation, not laissez-faire,” April 21.

If you haven’t been keeping up with Carney’s analysis of how Wall Street will benefit from new finanical regulations, you’ll want to start by reading those articles listed above to gain a better understanding.

By Doug Bandow

Say it ain’t so!  Rep. Ron Paul votes against corporate welfare.  And the Chamber of Commerce marks him down.

My friend Tim Carney explains in the Washington Examiner:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has issued its 2009 congressional scorecard, and once again, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Tex. – certainly one of the two most free-market politicians in Washington – gets the lowest score of any Republican.

Paul was one of a handful of GOP lawmakers not to win the Chamber’s “Spirit of Enterprise Award.” He scored only a 67%, bucking the Chamber on four votes, including:

• Paul opposed the “Solar Technology Roadmap Act,” which boosted subsidies for unprofitable solar energy technology.
• Paul opposed the “Travel Promotion Act,” which subsidizes the tourism industry with a new fee on international visitors.
• Paul opposed the largest spending bill in history, Obama’s $787 billion stimulus bill.

(Rep John Duncan, R-Tenn., tied Ron Paul with 67%. John McHugh, R-N.Y., scored a 40%, but he missed most of the year because he went off to the Obama administration.)

It’s too bad that the national Chamber of Commerce puts the interests of business before that of the free marketplace and liberty.  Thankfully Rep. Paul puts the interest of the American public before that of the Chamber of Commerce.

Doug Bandow, American Conservative Defense Alliance

By Matt Hawes

Congressman Paul’s speech in support of the bill is currently displayed in our top box.

Here’s the press release from his office:

Paul, Mitchell Again Block Congressional Pay Raise

Washington, D.C. – Congressman Ron Paul and Congressman Harry Mitchell have again stopped the increase in pay that Members of Congress automatically get every year unless it is voted down.

Their efforts to block the pay raise for 2010 was successful last year, and today their bill to block the pay raise for 2011 passed overwhelmingly in the House after passing the Senate last week.

“We should not be padding our pocketbooks when our constituents are still tightening their belts and losing their jobs,” stated Congressman Paul. “As well, we could continue with this symbolic first step and stop increasing taxes, expanding the federal budget, and spreading our military so thin. These additional measures would do much to begin our economic recovery.”

Check out the roll call here.

By Tim Shoemaker

By the same vote as yesterday 57-41, the cloture vote failed.  Let’s keep up the pressure & make sure round 3 fails as well!

By Heather D

On Sunday, April 25, activists from Chicago-land and beyond met for Kirk Shelley’s One Day Activist School. Tickets for the event sold out quickly, and although a couple of ticket-holders were unable to attend, we had 2 members register at the door, and a third member volunteered his services to help Mr. Shelley run the show, bringing our total attendance to 46. (A BIG thank you to Tony for helping to make this event a success!)

One of the most important functions of the Campaign for Liberty is to train fellow freedom fighters so we are well-equipped for the battles that lie ahead. Fighting for liberty is not easy – we face adversaries that have honed their skills for years, and it’s imperative that we understand their tactics so that we can overcome and defeat them. This class was a great first step in learning how to out-maneuver those who would steal even more of our liberties.

To start the day, we learned about the Real Nature of Politics, and though many might find the truth of politics a little hard to stomach, if we don’t understand it we’ve no hope of winning.

We learned how to pick our legislative battles, where to focus our efforts with the greatest chance of success, and the tactics that bureaucrats will use when fighting our efforts, to name a few things.

Illinois will hold more of these classes in the near future; stay tuned for details as they come available! Until then, be sure to sign up for the Campaign for Liberty Regional Conference in Des Moines, Iowa, May 14-16. With an exciting list of speakers and training sessions, you DON’T want to miss this event.

By Matt Hawes

On May 14-16, Congressman Ron Paul, C4L, and speakers including Tom Woods, Robert Murphy, and Bruce Fein will be in Des Moines, Iowa for our Iowa Regional Conference.

You can hear Dr. Paul and these other great speakers at our Freedom Celebration and Forum on the Future of Conservatism for free! Top notch grassroots training is also available for our lowest price ever of only $59!

Click here for more information.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XmicYqLzQs

By Matt Holdridge

From Politifact.com:

Democrats like to parry Republican criticism of the recently passed health care law by talking about how it includes ideas that originated with conservatives. During an interview on NBC’s Today show on March 30, 2010, President Barack Obama offered a specific example.

Obama told host Matt Lauer that “when you actually look at the bill itself, it incorporates all sorts of Republican ideas. I mean a lot of commentators have said this is sort of similar to the bill that Mitt Romney, the Republican governor and now presidential candidate, passed in Massachusetts. A lot of the ideas in terms of the exchange, just being able to pool and improve the purchasing power of individuals in the insurance market, that originated from the Heritage Foundation. …”

We zeroed in on the notion that the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that is no fan of Obama’s health care law as a whole, might have “originated” the idea of the health insurance exchange — a virtual marketplace where individuals can purchase health insurance. Our interest only grew after we received an e-mail from Heritage president Ed Feulner that blasted Obama’s claim.

After analyzing the facts, the conclusion,

We agree with Heritage that the differences between its original vision and the version enacted into law are not trivial, and are enough to undercut the president’s effort to secure a Heritage Foundation seal of approval for his bill. But the president helped his case by wording his statement with extreme care. Intentionally or not, he gave himself subtle linguistic running room by saying that “a lot of the ideas” for the exchange came from Heritage, including the concept of “just being able to pool and improve the purchasing power of individuals in the insurance market.” Even if not all of the ideas in the two plans are identical, we feel that it was fair of him to say that “a lot of the ideas” are in common, including the notion of pooling. So we conclude that the president’s statement qualifies as Mostly True.

Dan McCarthy, senior editor of the American Conservative magazine and C4L contributor, put it this way, 

“Every think tank on the left and right knows that its recommendations will undergo some deformation before they make their way into law, if they ever do,” McCarthy told PolitiFact. “Heritage might prefer state insurance exchanges with greater individual choice, including for workers already covered by their employers. But I don’t imagine Ed Feulner would be complaining at all if a Republican president or a Republican Congress had passed a plan that deviated from the Heritage blueprint to the same degree that Obama’s bill has. While it’s not true that ‘lots of’ the specifics in the Obama plan were dreamed up by Heritage, the overall approach is similar to policies Heritage has long championed, including the individual mandate as well as the insurance exchanges. This is only controversial because the wrong party happened to pass the law, and it’s poison for any conservative to be identified with it.”

What do you think? Do many on the right only have “sour grapes” because it wasn’t them who passed the sweeping health care reform bill? 

By Matt Hawes

Reid will once again try today to advance Dodd’s bill to further entangle the government in the economy, benefit big Wall Street companies like Goldman Sachs, and give the Federal Reserve even more power.

Via Politico:

Senate Democrats are doubling down on financial reform, forcing a second consecutive procedural vote Tuesday even though there have been no reported breakthroughs that would significantly change the outcome of Monday night’s failed vote.

The short turn around between votes is part of the Democrats’ larger strategy of forcing Republicans to vote repeatedly against a motion to proceed on the sweeping regulatory reform package. Democrats hope they can eventually wear down enough Republican senators who will vote to begin debate on the Democratic bill, but there is no sign that Republicans have any cracks in their unity….

Read the rest.  Keep contacting your senators and urge them to fight for true reform!

By Tim Shoemaker

From The Daily Caller:

“They came in the dark, shining bright flashlights while my family was asleep, keeping me from milking my cows, from my family, from breakfast with my family and from our morning devotions, and alarming my children enough so that the first question they asked my wife was, ‘Is Daddy going to jail?’”

That’s how Amish farmer Dan Allgyer described an early morning visit last week from two FDA agents, two U.S. Marshals, and a Pennsylvania state trooper. Apparently, investigating a single farmer for possibly trafficking raw milk across state lines requires a show of force.

Without telling him what is was, one of the agents handed Allgyer an FDA warrant that allowed the agents to inspect Allgyer’s farm. The warrant read: “You are authorized to take all necessary actions, including, but not limited to, the use of reasonable force, to effectuate entry to the above-named premises, the land and buildings located there, at reasonable times during ordinary business hours and to remain thereon to inspect within reasonable limits and in a reasonable manner all portions” of Allgyer’s farm.

When Allgyer asked why the agents wanted to inspect his farm, FDA investigator Joshua C. Shafer said, “We have credible evidence that you are involved in interstate commerce.”

Read the rest of Allgyer’s story.

As Ron Paul has said countless times, if we believe in personal liberty, then we must defend one’s right to eat, drink, or put into one’s own body whatever they choose.  Raw Milk is an example of government regulations not keeping up with the times.

Like other prohibitions, this is one that turns everyday, ordinary, law-abiding citizens into criminals for no reason other than our nanny state says it’s bad for you..

By Matt Hawes

By a vote of 57-41.  Thanks for putting pressure on the Senate for true reform!  Let’s keep it up.

By Gary Howard

A new Zogby poll illustrates the frustration, and wisdom, of the general public when it comes to judging the state of affairs in Washington, DC.

80% That’s the percentage of likely voters who agree that the people in Washington, D.C. are out of touch with the rest of the country. Only 19% disagree and 1% are unsure.

I will take a completely unscientific guess and say of the 19% who disagreed, most were involved with beltway insider business of some sort. I would only hope so.

And then we have this other poll from Zogby showing that a slight percentage more (84%) of folks are smart enough to know that 3000 page monster bills are bad news anyway you slice.

I am beginning to be more and more enthralled with the whole random selection of Congress idea.

By Matt Holdridge

From the DailyCaller: 

Most people understand that the IRS is likely to need thousands of new agents to enforce the Obama Administration’s new health insurance mandate – starting in 2014, you can either buy health insurance or the government will confiscate your tax refund, at least.

But hidden deep within the 2,000 plus page law is a vast new authority for the IRS that proponents admit has nothing at all to do with health care.

Instead, its purpose is to squeeze more and more tax dollars from businesses to eliminate the so-called “tax gap” – bureaucratese for every red cent Americans owe the IRS but don’t pay up come April 15.

In section 9006 of the health care law, many businesses will be required for the first time to report every expense they incur over $600.

Right now, businesses must report the wages they pay employees. But they are exempt from reporting payments to other businesses and for merchandise.

Interesting how everyday, after the vote of course, we learn about a new provision in this “health care” bill. 

By Matt Hawes

Via The Washington Post:

Senators will face a crucial test vote Monday that could clear the way for debate on far-reaching legislation to overhaul the nation’s financial regulatory system — or end in a partisan standoff — as Wall Street once again takes center stage on Capitol Hill….

Read the rest.

Be sure your senators hear from you on this crucial issue.  A vote on cloture could still go either way.  Real reform starts with auditing the Fed and continues with ending the government intervention that has helped to wreck our economy – not increasing it.

By John Tate

Ron Paul, Campaign for Liberty, and speakers including Tom Woods, Bob Murphy, and Bruce Fein are coming to Des Moines, Iowa on May 14-16 for C4L’s Iowa Regional Conference and Forum on the Future of Conservatism.

If you are planning to join us at the Embassy Suites on the River in downtown Des Moines for these three packed days of activities and have not yet reserved your room at the Embassy Suites, our specially discounted rate for Conference attendees expires today!

Find out more about the Embassy Suites and our Iowa Conference by clicking here.

Visit the Embassy Suite’s website to register for your C4L room rate directly with the hotel.

Watch the video below to hear Congressman Paul talk about the Iowa Conference:

At this time, I’m proud to announce that Doug Bandow, frequent C4L contributor and former special assistant to President Reagan, as well as Daniel McCarthy, senior editor at The American Conservative, will also be speaking at our Forum on the Future of Conservatism!

Join us in Iowa on May 14-16 for top notch grassroots training (click here to register), issue education, organizational meetings, and a time of motivation and fun with like-minded people.

By Tim Shoemaker

There are plenty of reasons C4L members should be actively opposed to the financial ‘deform’ bill under consideration in the Senate.  The provision that is most deserving of righteous anger however, is Sen. Jeff Merkley’s alleged “audit” of the Federal Reserve. 

From The Huffington Post:

The Senate has been more hostile territory for the Fed audit provision. Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) opposes the Grayson-Paul version, but allowed a much more restrictive audit proposal from Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) into his bill.

The Senate bill would allow an audit of the TALF program and slightly expands authority to audit emergency lending conducted under section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act, but restricts it to very specific purposes.

It would not allow the GAO to look into the Fed’s massive purchase of toxic assets, its hundreds of billions in foreign currency swaps with other central banks or its open market operations, among other restrictions.

We’ve seen this language before.  Rep. Mel Watt tried to introduce a similar “audit” provision to the House financial reform bill.  Thanks to the tireless efforts of our members calling, emailing, and faxing their representatives, the Paul-Grayson amendment was substituted for Watt’s before eventually passing the House.

Contact your Senators and demand that before they grant the Federal Reserve new powers we must have complete transparency!  A standalone vote on S. 604 is long overdue in the Senate.  Let them know the American people will not stand for more secrecy when it comes to their money and this country’s financial institutions.

By Gary Howard

When looking at this Rasmussen poll on American views of capitalism and socialism, I hoped that the percentage of those favoring capitalism over socialism would be much larger.

Sixty percent (60%) of U.S. adults nationwide say that capitalism is better than socialism. A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey finds that 18% disagree, while 21% are not sure.

Adults under 30 are closely divided on the question. While Republicans and unaffiliated voters overwhelmingly say that capitalism is better, just 43% of Democrats agree. Twenty-four percent (24%) of Democrats say socialism is better.

Seventy-six percent (76%) of investors favor capitalism, compared to only 45% of non-investors.

Last year at this time, among all adults, only 53% said capitalism was better. Continue reading…

A better idea of what this means would have come if they asked these folks how they define capitalism, but I guess this sort of answers that question [emphasis added]:

However, it’s important to note that just 35% believe a free market economy is the same as a capitalist economy. In fact, despite tepid support for capitalism, 77% of Americans prefer a free market economy rather than a government managed economy.That’s consistent with the 75% who say that business is better at customer service than government.

One reason for the gap in support for capitalism and free markets is clearly the behavior of some large American corporations. Seventy-three percent (73%) of Americans believe that Goldman Sachs is likely to have committed fraud as charged by the federal Securities and Exchange Commission. Seven-out-of-10 Americans believe that government and big business work together against the interests of consumers and investors. Continue reading…

And that is the best news to take from this poll, that most people see that it’s the collusion of big business and big government that causes most of our problems. Common sense seems to be alive and well, except inside the beltway.

People still need to be educated about what a true free market looks like, but at least there are a lot of people open to it.