Free Republic

GOP's Sessions: Obama's amnesty 'worse than you think'WASHINGTON – Phone lines are melting on Capitol Hill with outraged citizens calling their elected representatives to complain about the president’s order effectively granting amnesty to illegal immigrants. A number of Capitol Hill offices closed today for the Thanksgiving recess, but aides report hearing from upset voters even at the offices in lawmakers’ home states. The offices of Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Ted Cruz, R-Texas, confirmed a flood of complaints, and an aide to Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., told WND, “We are getting tons of phone calls to block executive amnesty.” “I...

The Obama Non-Enforcement Doctrine holds that a president is not required to implement or enforce laws passed by Congress with which he disagrees. Obama’s use of the doctrine sets an interesting precedent for the next chief executive, who likely will be a Republican. For example, a Republican could adopt the Obama Non-Enforcement Doctrine with regard to corporate income taxes by directing the IRS to cease all efforts to enforce those portions of the Internal Revenue Code relating to income taxes payable by corporations. This would be great public policy. My law school tax professor once remarked that there is no...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)President Obama’s controversial move to open the nation’s door to millions of illegal immigrants is a fulfillment of former President Reagan’s dream of building a “shining city on a hill,” according to a progressive group’s TV ad. The video from Americans United for Change shows Reagan talking about his move to relax immigration rules. In it the Gipper references his “shining city” that has doors open “to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” It immediately flips to Obama who adds, “that’s the legacy we must leave for those who are yet to come.” The ad, previewed...

Dear Republican Party, On November 4th the American people spoke with a resounding voice, and voted “no” to President Obama’s Marxist Progressive agenda/tactics. The numbers show the American people gave you a definitive mandate as well. Democrats are now at their lowest numbers in state legislatures nationwide in 86 years, and Republicans now control more than two-thirds of the state legislative chambers across the country. Republicans have the most seats in the U.S. House of Representatives since before the Great Depression. Republicans posted one of the top five election year swings in the U.S. Senate in the past 70 years....

All but drowned out by Republicans’ clamorous opposition to President Obama’s executive action on immigration are some leaders who worry that their party could alienate the fastest-growing group of voters, for 2016 and beyond, if its hottest heads become its face. They cite the Republican Party’s official analysis of what went wrong in 2012, the presidential-election year in which nominee Mitt Romney urged Latinos here illegally to “self-deport.” “If Hispanics think that we do not want them here,” the report said, “they will close their ears to our policies.” “Both the president and the Republican Party confront risks here,” said...

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".