Free Republic

The furor over the Supreme Court case considering limits on gerrymandering has reminded me of a conference I attended years ago. This was a meeting mostly composed of legal scholars focused on progressive reforms to the American judicial system. Gerrymandering, which is a hot topic today, wasn’t a major focus of the conversation. But we did get one presentation from a distinguished scholar of redistricting matters who explained that redistricting is a particularly hard problem to solve because there are a number of different goals that are mostly incompatible:

Flipping through my TV channels, I stumbled upon the 2017 Congressional Black Caucus Annual Prayer Breakfast on the Word Network; the world's largest black religious channel. This year's theme was, "And Still I Rise". Folks, I thought, "Oh my gosh, these people have no shame." This breakfast was all about exploiting black's Christian heritage to deceive them for the purpose of furthering Leftists' anti-Christian agenda. Every musical performance praised Jesus. Leftists despise Jesus, aggressively seeking to ban the God of Christianity from the public square. Several of the all-Democrat speakers quoted the Bible to strengthen their political deceptions. The truth...

WASHINGTON — If House Speaker Paul Ryan comes down with the flu this winter, he and his security detail won’t be screeching off toward the closest CVS for his Tamiflu. Instead, he can just walk downstairs and pick up the pills, part of a little-known perk open to every member of Congress, from Ryan and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell down to the newest freshman Democrat. Nearly every day for at least two decades pharmaceutical drugs have been brought by the carload to the Capitol — an arrangement so under the radar that even pharmacy lobbyists who regularly pitch Congress on...

The "non-scandal" scandal involving a former I.T. aide to several Democratic congressmen, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz, took an interesting turn when the wife of the alleged hacker and fraudster Imran Awan showed up in court separate from her husband and had retained a separate attorney. Imran Awan's own wife, Hina Alvi, filed papers in a Pakistani court accusing her husband of fraud and of marrying another woman.  The couple did not look at each other when they showed up in federal court on Friday.

FULL TITLE: Bannon: Corker Should ‘Resign Immediately’ After Revealing GOP Establishment Wants to Nullify ’16 Election Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon called on Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) to “resign immediately” on Monday evening after Corker revealed on Sunday that Bannon was right when Bannon said the Republican establishment wants to “nullify the 2016 election” in which Donald Trump won the White House by aggressively running on an economic nationalist agenda. Corker got into a Twitter spat with Trump on Sunday, tweeting that, “It’s a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed...

“Michigan’s strictest-in-the-nation term limits law will force nearly 70 percent of state senators out of office in 2019 and more than 20 percent of representatives,” reports the Detroit News, “a mass turnover that is fueling renewed interest in reform.” What?!! Could term limitation laws actually make our poor underpaid and overworked politicians vacate their powerful perches . . . even when they don’t want to? Heaven forbid! Who could have foreseen this strange turn of events? Who could have predicted that limits on the number of terms politicians may stay in office would mandate that politicians, having reached that limit,...

The Trump administration is taking a hatchet to ObamaCare after failing to pass legislation through Congress repealing President Obama’s signature law. The administration has cut funding for advertising and outreach by 90 percent, raising the odds that fewer people will join the health-care exchanges during the fall enrollment period. It has slashed funds by 41 percent for outside groups that help reach and enroll likely ObamaCare consumers.

President Trump reached out to the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, on Friday to propose yet another effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, but Mr. Schumer later said he had quickly shot down the offer. Mr. Trump’s phone call, which he announced in a tweet on Saturday morning, was his latest overture to Democrats, after reaching a bipartisan spending deal and forging an unexpected, if tentative, alliance on immigration with Mr. Schumer and the House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi. The president has vented frustration with the serial failure of Republicans in the Senate to strike down the...

Donald Trump made a lot of hay on the campaign trail by decrying the foreign adventurism of previous administrations. Trump positioned himself as the righteous outsider ready to rein in the executive overreach of his predecessors. None of that began with Barack Obama or George W. Bush, but Americans with short historical memories readily identified illegal and ill-advised wars as a major problem in America, particularly since some of those wars were often carried on without any congressional input. See Obama in Libya for example. But what if the problem of executive overreach in foreign policy began long before either...

What is wrong with Nancy Pelosi? While the House Minority Leader was participating in the town hall meeting televised on CNN Wednesday night, she suffered awkward brain freezes, stared at the audience, and waved her hands while she appeared to be struggling to speak.

Candidates with terror-tied CAIR for House, Senate, governor. This election season, there are several candidates running for office who are connected to the terror-tied Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). The group positions itself as a modern-day civil rights organization for American Muslims, but that’s far from the truth. CAIR, which has been declared a terrorist organization in the UAE (an Arab-Muslim country), was founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood with the goal of raising funds for the Hamas terrorist organization. Additionally, the organization was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism financing case in U.S. history. And...

Last month Keith (Hakim Mohammad) Ellison of Minnesota became the first Muslim elected to serve in the United States Congress and shocked many Americans by declaring that he would take his oath of office by placing his hand on the Quran rather than the Bible. Can a true believer in the Islamic doctrine found in the Quran swear allegiance to our Constitution? Those who profess a sincere belief in Allah say “no!” In 1789, George Washington, our first president under the Constitution, took his oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. So help me God.”...

An old rule of thumb holds that when someone says it's not about the money, it's really about the money. But there are exceptions to almost every rule. The National Rifle Association is a case in point. In the wake of the horror in Las Vegas this week, countless politicians, journalists and commentators are insisting that the National Rifle Association has a "stranglehold" on the Republican Party. Hillary Clinton claimed that the GOP-controlled Congress simply does "whatever they are told to do" by the NRA and the gun lobby. The Washington Post and New York Times laid out splashy reports...

U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy announced Wednesday that he will not seek a ninth term in Washington as a marital scandal envelops him, including allegations that the married, pro-life Republican asked his mistress to get an abortion. “After discussions with my family and staff, I have come to the decision that I will not seek re-election to Congress at the end of my current term,” Murphy, 65, of Upper St. Clair, said in a statement. “I plan to spend my remaining months in office continuing my work as the national leader on mental health care reform, as well as issues affecting...

div class="salem-content-injection-wrap">The House of Representatives has passed overwhelmingly a bill to ban most abortions after 20 weeks.House Republicans have done this now three times in four years. This time, however, the measure has the full support of a Republican White House.But wait! The measure faces a dim future in the Senate, which is also controlled by Republicans. Trouble is, the Senate uses fuzzy procedural math in which a majority of 100 is not 51. It’s 60.Republicans only have 52 senators there. Some of them are unreliably Republican on this issue, among others. So, to reach 60 under current Senate rules,...

On Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) said he is for a ban on semi-automatic rifles. Co-host Willie Geist asked, “How could this have been prevented? Is there a law? Congressman Himes ultimately said yes, he’d be for a ban on semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15. How about you?” Murphy answered, “Absolutely. Let’s just be clear that the pace of these epic mass shootings, 10 or more people being killed, doubled after the Assault Weapons Ban expired. That’s not a coincidence. I think we also have to look at these aftermarket modifications that [allow] you, fairly...

Saturday on the New York Times’ podcast “The New Washington,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said the chances Democrats take back the House in the 2018 midterm elections were “very excellent.” When asked why she stayed in her leadership role after President Donald Trump’s victory, Pelosi said, “I thought Hillary Clinton would win and we’d have a woman president and so there would be a woman not at a seat at the table, but at the head of the table for the world.” She continued, “We wanted to have a woman president. But when we didn’t, then I couldn’t...

When he was shot in June, there was a lot of talk from members of Congress of all stripes calling for the kind of unity we witnessed Thursday. So after his emotional welcome back we followed Congressman Scalise to his office, and asked him if the appearance of unity could result in something more lasting. 

Dear Reader (and everyone else I have failed), I would respect Roy Moore a lot more if he began his victory speech last week by taking his gavel and hurling it at the CNN cameras in the back of the room, shouting “Are you not entertained!” But, unlike Russell Crowe’s Maximus, Moore can’t, or won’t, let the mask slip to show his disdain for the spectacle he has become. Whether that’s because he’s extremely disciplined in his cynicism or because he’s extremely sincere in his jackassery, I have no idea. Nor do I really care. What’s going on with his...

Take the war on immigrants. Where did that start? That started with the Clinton policies that militarized the border and began to criminalize undocumented immigrants. You can look at the mass incarceration and thank the Clintons as well for their omnibus crime bill of the 1990s. You can look at Obama’s deportations that equal those of Trump that many say have actually exceeded what Trump has done,” she said. “I don’t buy this ‘lesser evil’ stuff and I think we will go to our graves here splitting hairs waiting for Democrats to save us. Democrats are not coming to save...