Free Republic

Former Trump Justice Department head William Barr, in the course of reiterating his strong preference that his party nominate a less deranged presidential candidate next time, expressed a fear that has been in wide circulation: If defeated in the primary, Donald Trump “will burn the whole house down by leading ‘his people’ out of the GOP.” One version of this is that Trump will either form a third party or simply refuse to endorse another Republican, thereby dooming his party’s chances. Those of us considering the question from a less friendly standpoint than Barr — I consider the Republican Party...

The House Progressive Caucus has drawn scorn for its hardball tactic of holding up the bipartisan infrastructure bill in order to pressure moderate Democrats to support President Biden’s larger climate and social policy initiatives. “The liberals’ tactics,” observed the New York Times last month, “were reminiscent of those employed by the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, whose members routinely threatened to withhold their bloc of votes unless Republican leaders met their demands.” The Freedom Caucus has cultivated a toxic reputation in Washington for its destructive predilections, issuing impossible and constantly changing demands with no clear goal except derailing legislation of almost...

During Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate testimony last week, Orrin Hatch asked the prospective Supreme Court justice, “When did you first hear of Ms. Ramirez’s allegations against you?” Kavanaugh replied, “In the last — in the period since then, the New Yorker story.” Hatch was referring to Deborah Ramirez’s charge that Kavanaugh humiliated her by waving his penis in her face while she was intoxicated. Kavanaugh appeared to be saying he heard of the charges after they appeared in The New Yorker in September. NBC reports that this, like many things Kavanaugh said in his testimony, is false. Kavanaugh’s friends gathered testimony...

Over the last year and a half, there have been three things one could say about Donald Trump’s standing with the public, depending on which aspect you wished to emphasize: (1) Trump is not very popular. (2) Given his scandals and wildly unpresidential conduct in office, Trump is surprisingly popular. All three of these points are neatly brought together in a chart compiled by political scientist Patrick Egan, comparing presidential approval rating to consumer sentiment. The historically large divergence between the two illustrates just how badly Trump is underperforming given the buoyant assessment of the economy: But beneath all these...

My wife subscribes to a magazine, the very sight of which turns my stomach. She believes that it’s beneficial to have this reading matter around so we can know how the “non-deplorables” think. But as a retired college professor, I know whatever is to be known on this subject. The unpalatable piece of mail that arrives to my disgust each month is called New York, and it is cram full of PC clichés. The lead tirade is usually from Jonathan Chait, who lately has been railing against the plutocrat and Putin-look-alike who is about to enter the White House. Chait...

“Give a man a reputation as an early riser,” said Mark Twain, “and he can sleep ‘til noon.” Hillary Clinton finds herself in the opposite situation: She has a reputation for venality — the merits of which we can set aside momentarily — that forces her to a higher ethical standard. Her inadequate response to the conflicts of interest inherent in the Clinton Foundation show that she is not meeting that standard, and has not fully grasped the severity of her reputational problem. The purpose of the Clinton Foundation is to leverage Clinton fame into charitable donations. That purpose has...

Around 2 a.m. on December 12, four students approached the apartment of Omar Mahmood, a Muslim student at the University of Michigan, who had recently published a column in a school newspaper about his perspective as a minority on campus. The students, who were recorded on a building surveillance camera wearing baggy hooded sweatshirts to hide their identity, littered Mahmood’s doorway with copies of his column, scrawled with messages like “You scum embarrass us,” “Shut the **** up,” and “DO YOU EVEN GO HERE?! LEAVE!!” They posted a picture of a demon and splattered eggs. This might appear to be...

A couple of years ago, the basketball team I root for, the University of Michigan, had a player named Zack Novak. Everybody loved his story. He was slow and pudgy coming out of high school, recruited by nobody, and offered a spot at Michigan. Turned out he could play, at least some. He was only six foot three, but he played power forward, compensating for his lack of size and skill with unrelenting effort. He graduated from the business school and became team captain. If you watch college sports, you know the kind of player I’m talking about. Right: a...

Last night, Douglas Kamerow and I debated Megan McArdle and Scott Gottlieb at Intelligence Squared over the notion, “Obamacare is now beyond rescue.” Intelligence Squared picked the topic two months ago, when the website was still broken, insurers were frantic, congressional Democrats were in a full-scale panic, and it seemed genuinely possible to many people that the law would simply fail. The arguments McArdle and Gottlieb made last night bore little resemblance to the sorts of failure predictions that were widely circulating last November. Many of their arguments simply took issue with the law’s goals; they argued that Medicaid does...

According to multiple reports, Senators Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell are close to a deal to reopen the federal government and lift the debt ceiling. The deal would fund the federal government through January 15, and lift the debt ceiling until February 15. Attached to that would be a pair of minor provisions. Republicans would get some kind of assurance that people can't lie about their income to get Obamacare, and Democrats would get the delay of a small "reinsurance tax" that was intended to expire after three years anyway (and which unions hated). This is a huge win for...

The generation that came of age during World War II famously — and, in time, tragically — came to apply the formative lessons to every foreign-policy event that followed it. The generation that came of age during the Vietnam War, and then, more recently, the Iraq War, was imprinted with the opposite lessons. I’m not immune: My formative experience in college was the Gulf War and, soon after that, the eventual, successful interventions in the Balkans. (I have a cousin who is married to a Kosovar, whose husband was murdered by Serbian militants, and who was saved by the United...

Mitch McConnell delivered a speech today at the American Enterprise Institute to officially signal that the IRS scandal has entered its post-fact phase. When the IRS first revealed that its Cincinnati office had attempted to enforce its nonprofit laws using a search function that disproportionately impacted conservatives, Republicans were certain it must have come from the White House. They were going to follow the facts. But all of the facts point in the same direction, which is that the Obama administration had nothing to do with it at all. That was the conclusion of the agency’s inspector-general report, as well...

The most intellectually interesting portion of tonight's Republican presidential debate occurred in its opening moments, when Rick Perry and Mitt Romney sparred over their states' record of job creation. Perry cited his states record of creating jobs. Romney replied that his state inherited a worse situation, and wound up with a lower level of unemployment, while of course ignoring that Perry has governed during a recession. Perry responded that Romney created jobs at a lower rate than Michael Dukakis. The whole exchange seemed to demonstrate conclusively that the method of evaluating a governor's record by its job creation, by any...

Okay, it's a little over the top for Sarah Palin to accuse her critics of "blood libel." But she does have a basic point. She had nothing to do with Jared Loughner. He was not an extremist who embraced some radical version of her ideas. And her use of targets to identify districts Republicans were, um, targetting is not exceptional or prone to incite anybody. What's happening is that Palin has come to represent unhinged grassroots conservatism, and people in the media immediately (and incorrectly) associated Loughner with the far right. Moreover, the Republican establishment understands her potential candidacy as...

I am constantly amazed at the way conservatives- the ones who genuinely want to reduce the size of government-so consistently reject the one proven method of achieving their goal. Here's National Review's John Hood:

Piggybacking off of this Politico article on conservatives attacking RomneyCare, Jon Chait asks why in 2008, "nearly all (conservatives) were fine with Romney's health care plan." If you were reading the National Review -- which had a soft spot for Mitt -- I can see why you would have that impression, but the reality is a lot more complicated. For starters, there were a lot of conservatives who did raise issues about his health care plan, and we published a lot of them here at the Spectator. I was a frequent critic of both Romney and his health care plan,...

I've written before about Journolist, a liberal email list that conservatives have claimed was the center of a liberal media conspiracy but in reality was anything but. The Daily Caller, a conservative website, has a new story claiming to have obtained evidence that Journolist was everything conservatives feared: the epicenter of a deep liberal plot to control media discourse. "It's everything you may have suspected," comments an excited Sarah Palin. "It is no less corrupt than the comically propagandistic Fox News and the lock-step orthodoxy on the partisan right in journalism - but it is nonetheless corrupt," asserts Andrew Sullivan....

I confess to not having read this guy’s blog before, but (a) his sidebar resume is certainly respectable and (b) he’s taken seriously enough by Jonathan Chait to have earned a post today at TNR showcasing his glorious, glorious results. The standard “anything can happen before November” caveat applies, but between this and Charlie Cook’s warning last week, we’re slowly moving from a “can the GOP take back the House?” reality to a “how many more seats than the Dems will the GOP end up with?” reality. Here’s where things stand on the Great Liberal Realignment of 2008: The generic...

Harry Joe crunches the numbers and, based on the generic balloting right now, says the House is all but gone for the Democrats: With current polling in conjunction with Bafumi et al.'s paper predicting a Republican national vote between 53.6% and 54.7%, the Republicans could easily gain 50-60 seats from their current 178. Gains of greater than 60 seats also look quite possible. Even in the best case scenario for the Democrats, it would seem that holding the House would be very, very difficult. The whole post is worth reading -- he's not just pulling numbers out of his ass....

The New Republic is well-known for its quirky, thought-provoking articles. (See this clever defense of Jay Leno). But at other times articles can read as though their writers have taken leave of their senses. Despite reports that Democrats are looking for a way to drop health care and move on to something else, TNR Senior Editor Jonathan Chait argues the bill is still in good shape: In my opinion, the issue is in a similar place as last summer, when the national media was also declaring reform dead, or on life support.