Free Republic

Congress includes some of the “dumbest” and “raunchiest” people in the country — but also some of the smartest — House Speaker John Boehner said in a report published this weekend. Boehner (R-Ohio) told the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan that it can be difficult to wrangle misbehaving members of Congress, while arguing that the chamber is not uniquely corrupt or scandal-prone.

Dr. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale, president and dean of the Episcopal Divinity Church, testified at a House hearing on March 8, 2012 against a bill that would make it a federal crime to transport minor girls without parental consent across state lines to get an abortion. (CNSNews.com/Penny Starr) (CNSNews.com) – Were Congress to outlaw the transporting of a minor without her parents’ permission across state lines to get an abortion, an abortion- and gay-rights activist testifying on Capitol Hill Thursday she would break the law to continue to help girls end their pregnancies.Appearing as a Democratic Party witness at a...

Democratic support for President Obama’s controversial health care overhaul may have single-handedly caused the party’s historic “shellacking” in the 2010 mid-term elections, a new study finds. The study was conducted by a group of political science professors and published this week by American Politics Research. It found that, had it not been for the health care law, House Democrats likely would have held at least 25 seats and maintained their majority.

A razor close vote is expected in the Senate Thursday on a Republican amendment to bypass the Obama administration's objections and approve the Keystone XL pipeline, Senate aides from both parties told CNN. Democratic aides, however, expressed some optimism the provision would be defeated. President Obama lobbied wavering Democrats by phone to shore up Democratic support for his position, a senior Democratic source told CNN. It could be embarrassing for the White House if a large number of Democrats voted to overturn the administration's Keystone policy, which has been hotly debated as gas prices continue to rise during this election...

Via PoliticoPresident Barack Obama is intervening in a Senate fight over the Keystone XL oil pipeline and personally lobbying Democrats to reject an amendment calling for its construction, according to several sources familiar with the talks.The White House lobbying effort, including phone calls from the president to Democrats, signals that the vote could be close when it heads to the floor Thursday. ..

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta appeared at a Senate Armed Services Committee congressional hearing, where he said “legal basis” was needed to initiate a no-fly zone over Syria. (video at link)

WASHINGTON, March 8 (LID) – The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday is expected Thursday to take up the bipartisan-supported Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act. The legislation — outlined in H.R. 3606 — is aimed at helping fledgling companies to more easily raise capital, proponents said.

Ever since Sarah Palin’s end-of-life counseling “death panel” remarks exploded into national consciousness in 2009, I have researched the real power ObamaCare will have to overrule your doctor’s decisions about what’s best for your health care. Forget death panels. Starting in July 2014, if Barack Obama is still president, a 15-member board that he selects with Senate confirmation — the Independent Payment Advisory Board — will be in charge of deciding when to reduce government spending per capita (for each person) on health care. Opponents such as Congressman Phil Gingrey, R-Ga., who is also a doctor and the co-chairman of...

Update: One observer notes to me, "[Rep. Bob] Turner and [Rep. Maurice] Hinchey are gone. [Rep. Gary] Ackerman doesn't really have a district either, but there are seats he could run for." (Don't say we didn't warn you about a possible consolidation of the regions represented by Ackerman and Rep. Carolyn McCarthy. Also, we've known since January that Hinchey's hanging it up after this Congress.) It also looks to me like the Rangel seat (NY-15) is majority Hispanic, but looks nothing like the highly calibrated Washington Heights/Bronx/Queens map advocated by those who signed on to this letter. And by the...

Bob Kerrey looks to be a challenging replacement for Ben Nelson in the Nebraska 2012 senate race, so constituents need to be reminded of his left-leaning track record. Most prominent was his August 1993 deciding vote in favor of Clinton’s 1993 tax hike, which he himself declared as the “biggest tax increase in the history of the country.” “Kerrey helped lead the fight to unravel Ronald Reagan’s bipartisan Tax Reform Act of 1986 when Kerrey supported first George H.W. Bush’s 1990 tax increases and then Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax increases,” stated Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. “Both...

http://www.mittvmitt.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=K9njHHyRI7g (half a million hits and climbing)

Rep. Donald Payne, a New Jersey Democrat first elected to Congress in 1988, has died after a battle with colon cancer. He was 77. Payne just went public with his illness last month. At the time, he vowed to fight the disease, saying his doctors “expect my full recovery, as do I.” But as his condition deteriorated, he was flown from Washington to New Jersey in early March on a medical transport. He passed away on Tuesday, according to news reports confirmed by a congressional aide.

Most people do not realize but there is a Commodity Empire that is run by New York’s biggest banks/Investment Banks that are in a continued struggle with the Federal Reserve over the right to retain the power of their commodity trading empires. They control the storage warehouses, storage tanks, and silos constituting hard assets worth multi-billions of dollars. But it also gives them inside information regarding inventories and the ability to manipulate the prices by moving inventory back and forth to unreported warehouses or to London. ----------------------- Page 2----------------------- At the center of this power struggle has been the issue...

Rep. Rich Nugent (R-Fla.) said his decision to use his congressional House office for the duel purpose of a bedroom was a "financial decision." "We wanted to cut back our expenses. Living up here in D.C. I'm only up here typically three nights a week and then we're off quite a bit, too, back in the district, so it was a financial decision," said Nugent in an interview with The Shark Tank, a news organization that covers Florida politics, which was uploaded to YouTube Sunday. Nugent, the former Hernando County sheriff, said that sleeping in his office was a "personal...

It turns out that "budget sequestration," portrayed as an evenhanded way to spur bipartisan negotiations over budget deficits, is actually a dagger aimed at defense spending. So: the sequestration now scheduled for next January means about another $500 billion in military cuts over the decade. These are in addition to the $487 billion in defense reductions already in the BCA and billions of earlier cuts ordered by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who ended some major programs including the F-22 stealth fighter. Nor do these cuts count the automatic reductions occurring from withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan. Even without sequester,...

Obama: Tell Congress to stop $4B 'giveaway' to oil companiesBy Amie Parnes - 03/03/12 06:23 AM ET President Obama called on Congress Saturday to stop using federal dollars to subsidize the oil industry and put an end to a so-called "taxpayer giveaway." Saying that every year $4 billion in taxpayer money goes to subsidizing the oil industry, Obama urged lawmakers to put an end to corporate welfare. "I don't think oil companies need more corporate welfare," Obama said in his weekly address. "Congress should end this taxpayer giveaway." He asked Americans to "email, call or tweet" their representatives to tell...

WASHINGTON - Democratic Rep. Norm Dicks, a former UW football player who cast a giant presence over state and national politics for decades, announced Friday he'll retire at the end of the year after 18 terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.

According to Rebeccah Heinrichs, an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, President Obama’s fiscal year 2013 budget request reveals that “that the president has utterly failed to make good on his promises” on nuclear modernization and missile defense. During the ratification debate on the New Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty (New START), President Obama promised to modernize the U.S. nuclear infrastructure, claiming that such investment is “essential to facilitating reductions while sustaining deterrence under New START and beyond.” However, the Administration failed to include in its budget the additional $4.1 billion that was promised for the nuclear weapons...

In 1942, one of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal Supreme Courts ruled that an Ohio farmer named Filburn was NOT permitted to raise the amount of wheat he wished on his own farm, for the purpose of feeding his own family. And for 70 years this and a handful of similar, overreaching decisions by the Court have resulted in the wholesale abuse of a power granted Congress in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, namely the “Commerce Clause.” (1) In the Wickard v Filburn case, the Court opened to Congress the nearly unlimited power to exercise legislative authority relating to...

The Obama administration’s proposed defense budget calls for military families and retirees to pay sharply more for their healthcare, while leaving unionized civilian defense workers’ benefits untouched. The proposal is causing a major rift within the Pentagon, according to U.S. officials. Several congressional aides suggested the move is designed to increase the enrollment in Obamacare’s state-run insurance exchanges. The disparity in treatment between civilian and uniformed personnel is causing a backlash within the military that could undermine recruitment and retention. The proposed increases in health care payments by service members, which must be approved by Congress, are part of the...