Free Republic

-snip- A very insightful PBS documentary "The Immigration Battle" lays out exactly what took place during the 2013/2014 legislative time frame (i.e., Gang of 8). If you have not watched the documentary I would strongly recommend you do so, it is profoundly enlightening. The documentary walks you through a timeline explaining exactly who was doing what at the times discussed. - snip - They had enough votes to pass it. - snip - On Tuesday June 10th Speaker Boehner, Eric Cantor (Majority Leader) and Kevin McCarthy (Majority Whip) had lunch together discussing timing the vote Thursday night or Friday Morning....

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump wants more than a wall to keep out immigrants living in the country illegally. He also wants to end "birthright citizenship" for their children, he said Sunday. And he would rescind Obama administration executive orders on immigration and toughen deportation, allowing in only "the good ones." Trump described his expanded vision of how to secure American borders during a wide-ranging interview Sunday on NBC's "Meet The Press," saying that he would push to end the constitutionally protected right of any family living illegally inside the U.S. ...

The NPT was signed in 1968 and became affective in 1970. Concerning non signatories for the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty), Pakistan, India, Israel and South Sudan fall into this list. North Korea withdrew from it, and the rest of the world is either a recognized nuclear weapon state ratifier, a recognized nuclear weapon state acceder, and so on. There are five nuclear weapons states from the NPT (the U.S., Russia, China, France and Great Britain), other states known and/or highly suspect for possessing nuclear weapons (Israel) and states suspected of developing nuclear weapons (Saudi Arabia, Iran and others). There are...

Violent attacks by Boko Haram have caused many to flee their homes, creating a humanitarian crisis within Nigeria and neighboring countries. Refugees say they have witnessed brutal acts of savagery, with men's throats being slit and women being held as "war booty." Chad has become the latest country on the border with Nigeria to be affected by a Boko Haram attack. The BBC's Tom Oladipo went to Yola village in Aadamawa state in northeast Nigeria and spoke to refugees there. ...

Michigan’s 38 senators and 110 representatives missed a combined 1,626 votes in 2014 according to the Missed Votes Report compiled by Jack McHugh, editor of MichiganVotes.org. The 2014 Legislature held 1,747 roll call votes, 936 in the Senate and 811 in the House, not counting purely procedural votes. This is up from the combined total of 1,256 roll call votes held in 2013, when individual legislators missed 1,093 votes altogether. In contrast, there were 21,162 missed votes in the 2001-2002 legislative session, the year MichiganVotes.org began. “The days of some legislators no longer showing up for work are long past,”...

Republican lawmakers closed ranks Sunday behind the No. 3 House GOP leader, Steve Scalise, as the party aimed to move past the controversy over his speech 12 years ago to a white supremacist group. Scalise has said the speech was a mistake he now regrets, and party leaders, including House Speaker John Boehner, have backed him. Several incoming rank-and-file lawmakers added their support Sunday, including Utah’s Mia Love, the first black female Republican elected to the House. …

Sen. Jay Rockefeller and West Virginia were an odd mix at first—a Harvard-educated native New Yorker from one of the nation’s richest families arriving in one of the poorest states. Through a half century of public service, he made it work. And as he heads into retirement as the last member of the Rockefeller family dynasty in political office—and the only Democrat—the five-term U.S. senator leaves a blueprint for fighting to fix real-life problems for burdened families and to protect the nation’s coal miners. […] Rockefeller was the state’s junior senator for 25 years, yet carved his own path of...

For the first time in 70 years, no World War II veteran will be sitting in the House of Representatives or in the Senate when 114th Congress convenes Jan. 3, according to the Association of Mature American Citizens. Michigan’s John Dingell, 88, and 91-year-old Ralph Hall, of Texas, were the last of what’s known as the Greatest Generation to serve. Dingell, a Democrat, enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1944, when he turned 18, and rose to the rank of second lieutenant. He was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1955 and holds the distinction of being the...

A new poll out today reveals GOP opinions about Speaker of the House John Boehner. The poll was commissioned by a group called The People’s Poll, supervised by Pat Caddell of Caddell Associates and fielded by EMC Research. The survey was conducted among self-identified Republicans and independents who say they lean Republican so the opinions in the poll come from the GOPers around the country, not the public-at-large. When asked if Speaker of the House John Boehner should be re-elected only 25% say so, with a paltry 11% strongly supporting Boehner. On the other hand, almost two-thirds (60%) want someone...

Scalise Apologizes For Event He Didn't Attend The venality and outright lies about House Republican Whip Steve Scalise’s association with David Duke’s racist organization, EURO, keep getting more obvious as Speaker of the House John Boehner, House Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy struggle to contain the damage keeping Scalise on the House leadership team is doing to the Republican Party. None of what Scalise has said to try to explain away his association with David Duke, and Duke’s principle Louisiana political operative Kenneth Knight, has passed the smell test, and the more Scalise tries to explain it away, the deeper...

Voters across America gave the GOP one of the biggest ever election victories in November, expanding its dominance in the U.S. House, giving it control of the U.S. Senate, dozens and dozens of state legislative chambers and governors offices. All in response to the constitutionally doubtful agenda on immigration and Obamacare pursued by Barack Obama. So now the GOP is complaining about being behind the Democrats. And that’s why, according to the man who started a “Dump Boehner” campaign to encourage GOP House members to remove Ohio Rep. John Boehner as speaker, that very campaign is needed. A recent email...

Have Republicans disrupted Democrats’ demographic advantage?Working-class white voters continued their decadeslong defection from the Democratic Party. The president was a major drag on his party, particularly given a challenging Senate map. Turnout was historically low, even for a midterm election. The 2014 Republican landslide has both parties poring over the data, hoping to glean insights about the current state of the electorate before the 2016 elections. But it might take until the next presidential cycle to answer the most pressing question: Is Republicans’ 2014 success the result of significant changes in how voters view the two parties, or is the...

On his Tuesday radio show, Mark Levin criticized two prominent Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee — Virginia Rep. Bob Goodlatte, the chairman of the committee and South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy — for putting the status of those brought to the United States as children of illegal immigrants ahead of securing the border. (SNIP) “So here we have a Republican committee — Gowdy, Mr. Tough Guy on the IRS,” he added. “Mr. Weakling when it comes to the border. Tough guy, IRS. Weakling, border.”

Have you heard? Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) burned a cross on MLK Jr. day while riding on David Duke’s shoulders waving a Confederate flag soaked in African American and Jewish blood. Oh, and he is in the Republican Leadership as the token Conservative.Actually, everything in that first paragraph was a lie. Well, all except for the part about Scalise being the token Conservative in leadership. Despite the fact that the above is a lie, it is the narrative being set by the media and others for various differing reasons. The actual claim which came out this week, while contextually different...

Fox News anchor Sean Hannity, also a nationally syndicated radio host, is tripling down on his calls to demand new blood in House GOP leadership. In the wake of Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) rebuffing his call to run against Speaker John Boehner after the white supremacy scandal that has rocked Boehner’s ally, House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, Hannity is calling on every Republican member of the House of Representatives to reconsider whether Boehner is in fact an effective leader. “Every Republican member needs to ask themselves if John Boehner is really the best person to lead the conservative movement at...

(tweet) Brad Dayspring Candidates who associate with white nationalists & segregationists events give away #GOP seats to Democrats. http://bit.ly/1scpnwC #MSsen 10:30 AM - 3 Apr 2014 But that was before it was a member of the Republican Leadership who did that. Conservatives headed to Washington and asked to vote for Rep. John Boehner need to realize that the leadership in place now isn’t far removed from the pigs at the end of Animal Farm. They view themselves as more equal than others.

ep. Steve Scalise, R-La., the third-ranking Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives, says he made an innocent mistake in speaking to a white supremacist conference in 2002. How was he to know that the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO) was a collection of racists and neo-Nazis?. "For anyone to suggest that I was involved with a group like that is insulting and ludicrous," says Scalise, who was a state representative at the time. "I spoke to any group that called, and there were a lot of groups calling." Why, he even spoke to the League of Women Voters,...

The 113th Congress began with an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws seeming likely, if not inevitable.

Some prominent moderate establishment Republicans in Utah are plotting to target conservative icon Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) with a primary challenge in 2016. Lee’s offense? He didn’t drink the Washington Kool-aid and see the D.C. cesspool as a jacuzzi after he ousted incumbent Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT), who had supported the TARP bailouts, in 2010. When Lee prevailed over Bennett, he gave other conservatives across the country hope that they could also defeat entrenched incumbents who cared more about preserving the status quo above all else. Once Lee arrived in Washington, he didn’t turn his back on the base, which...

A grassroots campaign has been initiated to fire John Boehner as speaker of the House of Representatives. While it is being downplayed by the liberal mainstream media, it is no podunk effort. The “Don’t be Yellow: Dump Boehner Now Campaign” was started by the CEO of WND, Joseph Farah. In just one week, 400,000 letters have been sent to Republican representatives prior to the start of the new legislative session. According to the Conservative Tribune, the letters are urging GOP members to replace Boehner with a more conservative alternative. “While the news cycle has forgotten about Boehner’s betrayal of Republican...