Republican Sen. Ted Cruz said Tuesday that if Republicans do not seize the opportunity to defund the Affordable Care Act using a continuing resolution, that the health-care law would become a “permanent feature of the American economy.”

Cruz is one of several Senate Republicans who are calling on Republicans to vote no on any continuing resolution unless it defunds the much derided health-care law, along with Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.

“If there is ever a time to defeat Obamacare, it is now,” Cruz said at a briefing at the Heritage Foundation. “Moreover, we have, I believe, the best opportunity we will have, and possibly the last good opportunity we will have to defund Obamacare with the continuing resolution.”

“If we do not pursue this strategy,” he said later, “we are saying we surrender. Obamacare will be a permanent feature of the American economy.”

Cruz argued that once the law were implemented, people who were receiving subsidies as a result of the law would fight to keep it, noting that historically, no entitlement program in modern times has ever been rolled back after it was implemented.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) appears to be losing its intimidating touch as it goes about its business of trying to stop people from praying and expressing their faith in public. The atheist group’s latest attack has come against the city council of League City, Texas, which has included prayer by local clergy in its regular government meetings since the early 1960s.

In a July 15 letter to Mayor Tim Paulissen and the League City Council, the FFRF went through its customary paces in attempting to browbeat the city fathers into submission. Appealing to the First Amendment’s supposed “separation of state and church,” the godless group’s staff attorney, Elizabeth Cavell, called the city’s tradition of allowing both local residents and government officials to open the meetings in prayer of “dubious legality,” insisting that such prayers are “unnecessary, inappropriate, and divisive.”

Cavell advised that while government officials “are free to pray privately or to worship on their own time in their own way,” they “do not need to worship on taxpayers’ time.” Cavell complained that inviting council members and locals to offer invocations at the government meetings “is coercive and beyond the authority of any government.”

While citing a selection of court cases to buttress the FFRF’s case against public prayer, Cavell conceded that there is no clear precedent for her group to demand that the city end its tradition, since courts have issued conflicting opinions that make the legal landscape on the issue “unstable.” The only warning she could muster was that prayer at government meetings “continues to be litigated, divisive, and problematic for local governments across the nation precisely because of this instability.”

She dubiously suggested that the “best course” for the city would be “to halt the prayers. If you wish to pray prior to the meeting, do so on your own time in your own way — do not make it part of the secular business of your local government.”

As it happened, Mayor Paulissen and the city council appeared to be disinclined to follow the FFRF’s self-serving advice. Paulissen told the Houston Chronicle that he and the other city fathers had no plans to drop the 52-year tradition of opening council meetings with an invocation.

“The city has been doing this since 1962, and nobody has ever complained, to my knowledge,” Paulissen said. He added that “it’s not just my stance. I have the full support of those on the city council, too.”

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Just Resting: The otherwise estimable Conn Carroll reacted to the news of Obama’s latest pivot-to-the-economy with this tweet:

”White House basically admitting immigration reform is dead”

That is so not the case, alas. “Comprehensive” immigration reform might well die–especially if average voters oppose it to their Congresspersons’ faces in the crucial August Recess War. But if it dies it won’t be because of the four developments currently being billed in the press as harbingers of its doom:

1) Obama is focusing on other issues: He’s pivoting to the economy, giving Castro-length addresses on income inequality! So? If he gave speeches on immigration, that would only alienate Republican legislators and focus public attention on a proposal a vocal plurality of voters in many constituencies doesn’t like (and which, it happens, would increase income inequality). By “pivoting,” Obama tamps down the immigration-related anger Republicans will face when they go home in August. In the meantime, the GOP’s donor-driven insiders can quietly do his work for him. Obama’s doing exactly what he’d do if he still intended to pass an amnesty/legalization bill. Which he does.

The Obama administration’s Justice Department has pressured a California school district into allowing an incoming high school freshman who is anatomically female but identifies as a boy to use the restroom and changing facilities assigned to her preferred sex, rather than her biological sex.

Her family filed a federal discrimination lawsuit after the school district twice refused to allow the girl to sleep in a room with boys without a chaperone.

The Obama administration pressured the school district to allow the girl to use the boys’ facilities, saying in a letter that failure to do so constitutes sexual discrimination against “students who do not conform to sex stereotypes.”

Under a new agreement, every transgender student in the district will have full access to the opposite sex’s changing rooms and sleeping quarters during school trips.

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If illegal alien activists thought the ruling of a liberal Federal judge against Sheriff Joe Arpaio was going to stop him from enforcing the rule of law against illegals, they can think again.

In late May, U.S. District Judge Murray Snow absurdly ruled that Arpaio had engaged in racial profiling against “Latinos” and targeted Latino drivers based on their “race” (there is no such “race” as “Latino”, but logic isn’t Snow’s strong point). Snow prohibited sheriff’s deputies from “using race as a factor” in law-enforcement decisions related to immigration. Advocates for illegals who share Snow’s far-left views rejoiced, and declared that Sheriff Joe’s workplace raids against illegal aliens were a thing of the past.

They were dead wrong.

On Wednesday, Maricopa County sheriff’s deputies and posse volunteers executed search warrants at three locations of Uncle Sam’s following a nine-month forgery and ID theft investigation.

Sheriff’s detectives say as many as 121 people hired to work for the restaurant chain since October gained employment by using falsified documents and stolen IDs. Sheriff Joe Arpaio said many of the victims are local residents.

As many as 50 deputies and posse members attempted to locate 70 suspects currently employed at two restaurant locations. At least 10 of the 70 suspects were arrested by MCSO deputies at the scene.

Detectives also searched the owner’s Scottsdale home office – and he may face state penalties for harboring illegal aliens.

Arpaio said the investigation began in October after his office received a tip from a caller. Detectives found 121 discrepancies including multiple names, addresses, no existing records and/or names not matching the Social Security numbers provided.

This was the 73rd workplace ID theft operation conducted by sheriff’s detectives in just the past 5 years.

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A new poll by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal reveals that public perceptions about race relations in America have taken a devastating hit since the election of Barack Obama. At the beginning of the president’s first term, 79 percent of whites and 63 percent of blacks had a positive view of American race relations. Those numbers have plummeted to 52 percent and 38 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, 45 percent of whites now consider race relations fairly or very bad, compared with 20 percent in 2009, and the negative views held by black Americans has jumped from 30 percent to 58 percent. Thus, the idea that the election of Barack Obama would usher in a golden age of so-called post-racial relations has exploded. And the president and his administration bear the lion’s share of the responsibility for lighting the fuse.

The poll, conducted in mid-July by Hart Research Associations and Public Opinion Strategies, has tracked Americans’ attitudes about race since 1994. And despite only a single poll question regarding the Zimmerman trial, which asked whether the outcome increased, decreased, or didn’t affect one’s confidence in the legal system, the steepest decline in positive views, and greatest increase in negative views, occurred in the last two years. That the timeframe largely coincides with the Trayvon Martin shooting controversy is likely no coincidence.

The Trayvon Martin case is one of the most visible examples of the Obama administration’s deliberate poisoning of race relations; all in coordination with the NAACP, the racial grievance industry and the corrupt leftist media. We now know that the administration had direct involvement in fanning the flames of racial discord that brought the case to the national stage. The Eric Holder-led Justice Department’s Community Relations Service (CRA) was sent to Sanford, FL to help set up meetings and organize protests. Among other services, the administration arranged an escort for college students participating in a 40-mile march to “demand justice” for Trayvon. When the situation erupted, Obama then famously took the racial motif national, saying, ”If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”

Even after the jury rendered its not guilty verdict in the Zimmerman trial, Obama, once again, injected himself into the case, this time noting that “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” and launching into a lecture on race — despite the fact that a Martin family lawyer, Trayvon’s stepmother, the Sanford police, and an investigation conducted by the FBI all concluded the case had nothing to do with race.

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On the eve of a House vote Wednesday on his amendment to curb the National Security Agency’s daily dragnet collection of Americans’ phone records, Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) tweeted, “Washington’s elites fear liberty. They fear you.” On Thursday, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (shown) demonstrated just how eager he is to join the Washington elite.

Speaking at the Republican Governors Conference in Aspen, Colorado, Christie delivered what Aaron Blake at the Washington Post described as a “clear broadside” against Republicans of a libertarian bent, including Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, expected to be competing with Christie for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016.

“As a former prosecutor who was appointed by President George W. Bush on Sept. 10, 2001, I just want us to be really cautious, because this strain of libertarianism that’s going through both parties right now and making big headlines, I think, is a very dangerous thought,” Christie said.

Asked whether he meant to include Paul in that call for caution, Christie said, “You can name any one of them that’s engaged in this. I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation…. I’m very nervous about the direction this is moving in.”

One of the things making Christie nervous is the battle for privacy rights against what some see as a flagrant overreach by the federal government in the kind of surveillance conducted by the NSA in the name of national security. “I think what we as a country have to decide is: Do we have amnesia? Because I don’t,” Christie said. “And I remember what we felt like on Sept. 12, 2001.”

By citing both September 10 and September 12 of the year 2001, Christie has September 11 surrounded, perhaps with the thought of capturing it as his issue for 2016. By doing so he would be picking up the mantle of fallen presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani, who campaigned so hard on that tragic event in the 2008 campaign that Joe Biden suggested every sentence from the former New York mayor contained only three things: “a noun, a verb and 9/11.”

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A Christian chaplain in the military is being officially censored for engaging in free speech, and anti-Christian activists are demanding he be punished.

Lt. Col. Kenneth Reyes is a Christian chaplain currently serving in the U.S. Air Force. He is stationed at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska. As an ordained clergyman whose duties are to provide religious instruction and spiritual counseling, he has a page on the base’s website called “Chaplain’s Corner.”

Reyes recently wrote an essay entitled, “No Atheists in Foxholes: Chaplains Gave All in World War II.” This common saying is attributed to a Catholic priest in World War II, made famous when President Dwight D. Eisenhower said during a 1954 speech: “I am delighted that our veterans are sponsoring a movement to increase our awareness of God in oåçur daily lives. In battle, they learned a great truth that there are no atheists in the foxholes.”

As reported by Fox News’s Todd Starnes, when Reyes referenced this famous line in his essay, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) contacted the base commander, Col. Brian Duffy, demanding he take action on Reyes’s “anti-secular diatribe.”

MRFF’s letter says that by Reyes’s “use of the bigoted, religious supremacist phrase, ‘no atheists in foxholes,’ he defiles the dignity of service members.” They accuse him of violating military regulations.

My legal research on this issue uncovered no regulation prohibiting Reyes’ speech, which looks like expression protected by the free speech and religious freedom provisions of the First Amendment. Military leaders did not respond to Fox’s inquiries asking the Air Force to identify any such rules.

Nonetheless, only five hours after MRFF’s complaint, the essay was removed from the website. Duffy has profusely apologized to MRFF for not stopping this religious leader from sharing religious thoughts.

But this response—which again appears to be a violation of Reyes’s First Amendment rights—is insufficient for MRFF. They said, “Faith based hate, is hate all the same,” and, “Lt. Col. Reyes must be appropriately punished.” (Emphasis added).

So MRFF is saying that the coercive power of government must be used to punish a military officer, who is also an ordained Christian minister, for making ordinary religious references consistent with his faith.

Retired Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin of the Family Research Council—one of the leaders of a new religious liberty coalition for the military—responded, “A chaplain has been censored for expressing his beliefs about the role of faith in the lives of service members… Why do we have chaplains if they aren’t allowed to fulfill that purpose?”

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An emerging coalition of House Republicans is arguing that young immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children constitute “a special protected class” that should eventually be eligible for citizenship, an approach they say combines sound policy with smart politics.

Conservatives remain adamant, however, that no such legislation be considered until a border-security bill is passed and tough enforcement triggers are in place.

This thinking represents an important shift within the House Republican Conference, where many members have long vocally opposed providing “amnesty” to anyone living in the U.S. illegally. At the same time, it underscores the emphasis on what conservatives have called a “border-first” mentality—that legalization should not be legislated until new border-enforcement laws are on the books.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., is the driving force behind the strategy to focus on legalizing undocumented youths. According to Republican aides, passing such a bill would equip Republicans with a reasonable answer to the question of what to do with the 11 million people living in the U.S. illegally. It would also force Democrats into a political lose-lose: Either endorse a GOP proposal that legalizes so-called “Dreamers” or oppose this longtime policy goal and hold out for blanket legalization for the entire undocumented community.

As one House leadership aide framed it, “How can they say no to the kids?”

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A popular New York City barbecue restaurant that came under fire for renting space to a Christian church, has evicted the congregation because of a sermon about same-sex attraction, the pastor told Fox News.

Freddy Wyatt, the pastor of The Gallery Church, said they had been renting space in a restaurant to hold their worship services for several months. That agreement was cancelled after local residents barraged the restaurant with complaints.

“There was backlash from the neighborhood toward the restaurant for hosting a Christian church in their space,” he told Fox News.

Wyatt declined to name the restaurant because they did not “want to throw them under the bus.”

“We want to maintain good relationships with the people in our neighborhood,” he said.

However, Fox News has learned the church had been renting space from Hill Country Barbecue, a popular eatery in Manhattan. Owners of the restaurant did not return calls seeking comment.

Wyatt said the trouble started when they began promoting a sermon series about sexuality.

“This particular sermon series struck a nerve in the neighborhood,” he said. “There was an enormous amount of backlash. We don’t know specifically what that was. The restaurant said if it had only been a couple of phone calls it would have been one thing – but it was more than that.”

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