When Barack Obama addressed a joint session of Congress on September 9, 2009, he had a direct response for critics who warned that his proposed health care overhaul would extend benefits to people who had no legal right to them. "There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants," he said from the House chamber. "This, too, is false. The reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally." From the Republican side of the aisle, Congressman Joe Wilson of South Carolina broke with decorum and shouted two words: "You lie!" History has been considerably kinder to Wilson than the Washington press corps was that evening.
White House Religious Liberty Commission released its final draft report to President Trump, detailing the ongoing fight to protect religious freedom in the nation.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) will be teaching a course at the University of California, Berkeley, at a new "nonpartisan" institute bearing her name.
The U.S. Postal Service would refuse to mail election ballots in states that decline to provide the federal government with their absentee voter lists, Postmaster General David Steiner told a Senate panel Wednesday.
When Congress enacted the War Powers Resolution in November 1973, overriding President Nixon's veto by the constitutionally required two-thirds majority in each chamber, its intention was historically legible. The Vietnam War had consumed more than 58,000 American lives, prosecuted for years without a formal declaration of war. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964, passed on the basis of factual claims later shown to be false or exaggerated, had been used to justify an open-ended military commitment that the country spent a decade trying to escape. Congress intended that no president would again commit American forces to armed conflict without the collective judgment of the legislative branch bearing on the decision.
