Free Republic

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Days after House Republicans overhauled much of their leadership team, House Speaker John Boehner said Tuesday that he's "all in" to remain as speaker in the new Congress that will meet next year. The Ohio Republican's remarks came after months of questions about whether he would continue holding the House's No. 1 job after the current Congress ends in January 2015. Boehner has been speaker since 2011. For much of that time, he's managed a fractious Republican majority that includes conservatives who at times have rebelled against his leadership, including a handful who refused to vote for...

House Speaker John Boehner is backing off his support for renewing the Export-Import Bank in face of conservative opposition. His new stance adds uncertainty to the outcome of the bank, a top priority for the business community. [...]

It becomes painfully obvious why Koskinen was appointed commissioner of the IRS. He is a lawyer but hasn’t practiced law in 45 years. He is ignorant of the law and specifically ignorant of tax law. He’s perfect for the job. He’s perfect for Obama. He’s a partisan goober. Utah Rep. needled Koskinen about a short-term data backup that the IRS had in place – but never used – when Lerner’s hard drive crashed in 2011. ‘It’s actually a disaster recovery system,’ the IRS commissioner testified, ‘and it backs up for six months in case the entire system goes down …...

Since it swept into Congress during the 2010 wave elections, the Tea Party has claimed small victories in blocking President Obama's legislative priorities and extracting spending cuts through debt-ceiling ceasefires. But if things go their way this fall, they would get their first true scalp: the Export-Import bank. Reinvigorated by the GOP primary loss of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the Tea Party is on the verge of claiming perhaps its biggest policy victory in Washington. Its victim would be an institution that has existed for 80 years and far beyond the Obama era — since the New Deal era...

In a rare gesture, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) applauded Tea Party favorite Rand Paul on the Senate floor Tuesday to express his approval for Paul’s proposal to restore voting rights to ex-felons. Paul, the junior Republican from Kentucky, plans to introduce legislation to restore voting rights to people convicted of nonviolent felonies. Reid beamed over the development and noted that he introduced similar legislation earlier in this career. “I want to congratulate Rand Paul,” Reid said. “About 15 years ago … I offered an amendment here on the Senate floor that said if someone has been convicted of...

On his Monday radio show, conservative talk show Mark Levin reacted to how congressional Democrats in a House Oversight Hearing had conducted themselves earlier over the committee’s inquiry into missing emails related to an investigation of former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner. Levin said it was clear to him the response from congressional Democrats was orchestrated in advance in tandem with the highest level of the Obama White House to obstruct the inquiry into the Internal Revenue Service missing emails congressional hearing. “So let me be very blunt about it – the Democratic Party now is conducting itself as...

House Majority Leader-elect Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) blamed crossover votes by Democrats for Eric Cantor’s (R-VA) surprise primary defeat at the hands of David Brat in an interview on Sean Hannity’s radio show on Monday. He stated that was surprised by Cantor’s defeat, and did say that “all politics are local” when asked why he thought Cantor lost. McCarthy added that he had “read five different analyses” and one theory he came across was “Democrats voted 30 percent in [that race].”

Live link to today's 7:00Est congressional hearing with IRS commissioner http://www.c-span.org/video/?320097-1/irs-targeting-investigation

"Rand Paul took, I think, a really wrong-headed step on the immigration issue last week. I mean, he’s not completely where Jeb is, but almost!"

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) told America’s Newsroom Monday that IRS Chief John Koskinen was not honest with Congress about the lost Lois Lerner emails. Issa also said Lois Lerner was acting on President Obama’s behalf when she targeted conservative groups. “You came before us. You said you’d tell the whole truth but the truth under oath. Do you believe you told the whole truth? And, of course, the answer would be he did not tell the whole truth… I believe Lois Lerner is hiding something. I believe the Justice Department, the IRS and the...

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-South Carolina) had an audience in Maryland rolling in laughter after telling a joke about Heaven, John Boehner, Lindsey Graham and local Republican Rep. Andy Harris.

If anyone doubted that the Republican Party would become more conservative after the ousting of Eric Cantor, his successor put those doubts to rest over the weekend. In an interview with Fox News, incoming House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) revealed leadership's first significant policy shift: opposition to reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank when its current charter expires on Sept. 30, a move that would shutter the credit agency. "One of the problems with government is it's going to take hard earned money so others do things that the private sector can do. That's what Ex-Im Bank does," he said. "I...

On Friday, the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives continued its wholly political, and ultimately theatrical investigation of the IRS Tea Party-targeting scandal. Chairman Dave Camp's(R-MI) committee brought current IRS Commissioner John Koskinen before the committee to testify as to the loss of Lois Lerner's emails, among other misdeeds. You may argue that Paul Ryan(R-WI) was very aggressive in his examination of the witness, but that entire exchange was mere political theater that will evince nothing at the end of the investigation (snip) The problem may be that to uncover Lois Lerner's email would reveal something no Representative in...

Republicans in the U.S. House caucused on Thursday and chose U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., to replace U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., as House majority leader. They also selected U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., to replace McCarthy as GOP whip. U.S. Rep. Ted Yoho, R-Fla., weighed in on Thursday after the vote and said he backed U.S. Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Ind., over McCarthy but did back Scalise. Yoho also tried unsuccessfully to move the vote back a week. “Yesterday in the House Republican conference I introduced a motion to delay the vote for the majority leader of the Republican Party...

On Tuesday, The Daily Caller‘s Mirror blog reported that Alaskan Republican Rep. Don Young was clowning around on the House floor during the naming of a post office. He stuck his fingers in his ears and made funny faces, much like Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble on The Flintstones. Post office namings, as you might imagine, are not terribly exciting legislative moments in Washington. But this one actually meant something. Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.) sponsored the bill to honor a fallen solder.

The timing is not merely suspicious, it is damning. [T]he alleged disappearance of Ms. Lerner's hard drive—and the fact that the missing conversations are those the former IRS director had with people outside the IRS—has suddenly resurrected, with force, the explosive possibility that she was chatting with Democrats who mattered. There's plenty of reason to believe she was. Just last week Congress discovered (via a subpoena to the Justice Department) emails showing that Ms. Lerner had conversations with Justice prosecutors about investigating conservative nonprofits. Who else in the Obama administration was Ms. Lerner talking to? I'm omitting all of the...

In his first Congressional appearance since news of the lost Lois Lerner emails, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen was alternately attacked by Republicans and praised by Democrats who apologized to him for his treatment and called the investigation an “endless conspiracy theory” by Republicans. Under oath before the House Ways and Means Committee, Koskinen restated what Congress had been told privately: that emails of Lerner and six other relevant IRS officials have been irretrievably lost because of crashes of their hard drives and servers. Koskinen defended not telling Congress in numerous previous appearances about the email losses. In those appearances, he...

The U.S. House on Thursday overwhelmingly adopted an amendment to the 2015 defense appropriation bill that would prohibit the Pentagon from spending any money to retire the A-10 Thunderbolt II jet — a mainstay of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. But the fate of the venerated “Warthog” close-air-support jet remains far from certain, as the Senate still must act, and the issue will likely be hammered out in conference committee. The amendment’s bipartisan adoption was a victory for Rep. Ron Barber, a Tucson Democrat, and other A-10 supporters, who were chagrined when the House Appropriations Committee left A-10 funding out of...

House Republicans have picked Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise to be their No. 3 leader. Scalise was elected majority whip Thursday. He’s joining his party’s leadership team following last week’s unexpected defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a Virginia primary election. The 48-year-old Scalise has been in the House since 2008 and leads a group of House conservatives. In his whip campaign, he touted his conservative credentials and noted that he’d be the only GOP leader from the South. The heart of his party’s strength in the House lies in that region. Scalise defeated Illinois Rep. Peter Roskam, who...

This is Joe Biden’s reality after nearly four decades in the Senate, countless fundraisers for his party and endless ego-massaging of his colleagues: Not a single Democratic senator, including the two from his home state, are publicly urging him to run for president. And this is Hillary Clinton’s lot: A majority of current Democratic senators are calling on her to run in 2016, years before the election and months before she’s expected to even make up her mind whether to seek the White House again. That despite the fact that her eight years in the Senate ended with more than...