Free Republic

Democrats have long lamented that they do not enjoy the kind of enthusiasm which Republicans benefited from with the rise of the tea party. The left has gone to great lengths to manufacture this sort of energy, including touting the volatile Occupy Wall Street movement as a rough tea party equivalent. Though some have fretted that tea party’s downsides – the targeting and ousting of electable Republican candidates – would necessarily follow the ascension of a liberal version of this grassroots movement to prominence. Democrats got lucky, in a fashion, when it became clear that the Occupy movement had no...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) President Obama has invited senior lawmakers to the White House for dinner Wednesday night so that he can explain his plans to use executive authority to change the nation’s immigration laws, according to several congressional aides. Obama has invited Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the leaders of the congressional Asian, Black and Hispanic caucuses....

Watch for a shift in their perspective, which is already underway.Conventional wisdom is malleable, and it appears that conventional wisdom on the wisdom of shutting down the government is shifting, at least within the Republican party. While the old CW was that it was a terrible idea that Republicans suffered for, and it would be foolish to do it again, the new CW seems to be, "Hey, didn't we shut down the government and win the next election?" The other day, influential conservative journalist Byron York began pushing this line, writing that the 2013 shutdown "so deeply damaged GOP prospects...

Sen. Ted Cruz’s piece in Politico Magazine on Wednesday has drawn a lot of attention, not all of it kind. In the piece, the Texas Senator charges that President Obama’s impending executive action on immigration “is lawless” and that if he makes the move, “he will be acting as a monarch.” Since his election in 2012, Cruz has vocally opposed comprehensive immigration reform. A fellow Republican in the Texas congressional delegation said that Cruz’s energetic opposition to comprehensive immigration reform doesn’t adequately represent his constituents. “I don’t think it’s reflective of Texas as a whole,” said Rep. Gene Green, chuckling....

On Tuesday, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) said President Barack Obama’s forthcoming unilateral action on immigration is not “amnesty” and declared that America would be “selfish” to deny illegal immigrants temporary work permits and amnesty. Speaking on the House floor, Jackson Lee, who handed out candy to illegal immigrant juveniles this summer at detention centers, mentioned that Texas has 1.3 illegal immigrants and said she loves “living in a country that is known around the world for its humanitarian generosity.” She said the illegal immigrants are working, paying taxes and love their children, some of whom are U.S. citizens or...

In an op-ed entitled "Obama is Not a Monarch" posted on November 19 in Politico, Senator Ted Cruz made the essential constitutional argument that all too few other Republicans have been willng to make: the Constitution was drawn to stop exactly the kind of arbitrary unilateral executive action President Obama has time and again imposed upon the American people. As Senator Cruz wrote in Politico: The Constitution designs a system of checks and balances for our nation, and executive amnesty unilaterally decreed from the White House would seriously undermine the rule of law. Our founders repeatedly warned about the dangers...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) ALEX WAGNER, MSNBC: Is the sense that Republicans in Congress will try to unwind this [Obama administration executive action on immigration] in the budget process? LUKE RUSSERT, NBC NEWS: That is certainly an option, Alex, and it is something that they will address while they are in the lame duck to some capacity. I basically heard three things are a possibility. That they would actually try to strip the funds available to the president to carry out this executive action within the actual budget bill, of course it is due by December 11th, then that would be sent over...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Making a rare Capitol Hill appearance, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Monday encouraged the GOP's newest members of Congress to embrace compromise and common ground as they shift to a governing role following their party's midterm rout. The Republican governor, who is contemplating a 2016 presidential bid, addressed newly elected House Republicans and their spouses during a closed-door orientation luncheon inside the Capitol. The often-outspoken Christie declined to answer questions from reporters afterward, but attendees said offered a distinctly bipartisan tone. "He did talk about compromise and finding common ground," said incoming Rep. Tom MacArthur, R-N.J....

DEMOGRAPHICS is not enough. For years now, it’s been an article of faith among Democrats that the future belongs to them, thanks to the country’s changing demographic mix. The rising percentage of voters who are women, Americans of color and especially Latinos were always about to turn the country deep “blue.” I never believed this — largely because I have been hearing it since 1971. That was the year the 26th Amendment passed, lowering the voting age to 18. Democrats had already been the dominant political party since the 1930s, and now with young people getting the vote, a permanent...

Being the real "Democrat Intent" of Amnesty is to enroll a few million more votes to the base, Red State Governors need to fight back, establish & legislate laws requiring who is allowed to vote. In other words, the Dem's can try to pull this stunt against the will of the people, but Governors in Red/Purple States can still fight back by enforcing their own laws whereas all residents have to be "Legal Americans" to vote. What's Obama's plan? send the new illegals to Ohio, Florida and Wisconsin to insure victory in 2016?

Former President Bill Clinton said Saturday that Democrats lacked a "national advertising campaign" in the recent midterm elections and that he's surprised many Senate races were not closer. Clinton said in an interview with Politico that Republicans were helped by a larger bloc of voters who felt more strongly about the elections than members of his party. Democrats could have benefited from a national message that reinforced the party's positions on refinancing student loans and promoting equal pay for women, he said. "The people who were against us felt more strongly than the people who were for us. The people...

There is an idiom that parents and employers likely put in practice when an important task has to be completed correctly; “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” President Obama certainly understands that sentiment with a slight variation; if the nation wants anything done at all, the President has to do it himself due to Republicans who have done nothing since January 2009. Sometime next week, after waiting patiently for Ted Cruz to order House Republicans to take up, and pass, the Senate’s bipartisan immigration reform, the President will take action on immigration reform. The...

The party’s economic populism doesn’t reach that far.The Democratic Party styles itself a fighter for the working class. But a substantial part of that class—the white part—wants nothing to do with it. If we count the white working class as whites without college degrees, then congressional Democrats lost them by 30 points in last week’s elections, contributing to losses in states as diverse as Iowa, Maine, Colorado, North Carolina, and Florida. But then none of this is new. Democrats lost working class whites by a similar margin in 2010, with almost identical results: A wipeout of Senate seats, House districts,...

At certain moments during the past year’s long and often tedious march to November, the political class, already bored with discussing a GOP Senate takeover most considered nearly certain, started debating a few post-election hypotheticals. With Republicans in control in both the House and the Senate, would the president try again to strike the elusive grand bargain?(No.) Would Senate Republicans retaliate against Democrats for choosing the so-called nuclear option? (Maybe.) Would Democrats filibuster relentlessly, like Republicans did when they were the minority party in the Senate? (Probably not.) Of all the questions about a Republican Senate that hovered over the...

And who didn't take notice? If that is the manner of how Nancy Pelosi speaks, with the pauses, stuttering, stammering and "Brain Stoppages" as she was trying to explain to us that she never heard of Jonathan Gruber, you would think it was time for her to retire. And to think there was once a time when she was third in line for the Presidency? And this also applies to Harry Reid, then again, we all share the same opinions of "Prince Harry".

Not a perfect strategy but if you’re grasping for last-minute ways to deter Obama from dropping the A-bomb, this may be your best shot. Impeachment’s not happening. If it did happen, Obama would welcome it as a post-landslide deus ex machina that turns the country against the GOP. Defunding’s probably not happening either, I hate to tell you. McConnell and Boehner will have no choice now but to insert language defunding executive amnesty in the new continuing resolution next month, but Obama will veto that CR. And I just don’t believe B&M have the stomach for a protracted shutdown so...

In this year's midterms, Jews voted for Republican candidates more than they have in any election in the last decade. First, some raw facts. In the 2006 midterm elections, 87 percent of Jews voted for Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives. Last week, in the 2014 midterm elections, 66 percent cast ballots for Democrats. That's a 21-point drop in eight years—and, it might seem, a major cause for celebration among the likes of the Republican Jewish Coalition and philo-Semitic political strategists everywhere. But while Jewish support for Democrats has definitely declined over the last decade, the context is important....

Nancy Pelosi does not believe the midterm results were a Republican wave; she says they were more of a Democratic ebb. And in a new interview, the House Minority Leader says that it didn’t help that voters were distracted during the final leg of the campaign by various international crises. In an interview with Politico out today, Pelosi continued to insist there was “no wave of approval for the Republicans” and even admitted that Democrats need to do a better job mobilizing voter turnout on their side the next time around. But when pressed on whether the Democrats lost because...

As recriminations continue over whose fault it is that Democrats lost the Senate one potential positive is Hillary Rodham Clinton will be able to run full-out against the ultra-conservative Congress. When as many believe she will announce her candidacy for President in the beginning of 2015 she will be helped by the likes of senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), the current incarnation of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy (D-WI), who was quoted in the Washington Post saying “The first order of business should be a series of hearings on President Obama, looking at the abuse of power, the executive abuse, the...

It’s rarely worth much time crying or rejoicing over spilt political milk -- but it can be fun. Be they ever so virtuous, be they ever so malicious, the politicians who wore out their welcomes last week will be replaced. And the geniuses who devised the U.S. Constitution and the rules of the House and Senate arranged for new members of Congress to undergo ordeals of process that cool the passions of recent arrivals before they attain much power. Like it or not, it took Republicans four election cycles to retake the Senate majority after losing it in 2006. Once...