Free Republic

WASHINGTON (AP) — A treaty governing the high seas is all but dead in the Senate as two Republican senators announced their opposition Monday, giving conservative foes the necessary votes to scuttle the pact. Sens. Rob Portman of Ohio and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire — both mentioned as possible running mates for likely Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney — said they had serious concerns about the breadth and ambiguity of the Law of the Sea treaty and would oppose it if called up for a vote. The Constitution requires two-thirds of the Senate — 67 votes — to ratify...

One test for economic conservatives is whether they are willing to oppose constituent business interests looking for government favoritism. On that score, two recent contrasting votes by Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Marco Rubio of Florida are instructive. The political habit of favoring big business is bipartisan, as the sugar and Ex-Im Bank votes show. If Republicans want the political credibility to reform middle-class entitlements, they had better be prepared to eliminate corporate welfare too. Kudos to Mr. DeMint for understanding this.

Aponte’s recess appointment expired at the end of the year, but almost every Republican (except for Brown and Collins) united to oppose cloture on her nomination. Aside for the national security concerns, Republicans were concerned that Aponte would promote her radical social agenda in a country where we are trying to develop a close relationship. A while back, Aponte published an opinion piece that called into question the religious and pro-family culture of Salvadorans. Yesterday, the media reported that Harry Reid would try to bring up cloture on the Aponte nomination once again. I didn’t think much of it at...

It is no secret that The Fed is mulling over further monetary stimulus. Whether it is quantitative easing (QE3) or curve twisting (Twist3) remains to be seen. Senators Jim Demint (R-SC) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) have proposed legislation, S.3240, that caps the balances of reserves of depository institutions. AYO12664 In order to prevent the Federal Reserve from further quantitative easing, Sen. DeMint’s No QE3 amendment would prevent the Fed from expanding its balance sheet again, as well as establishing that the Fed should return the size of its balance sheet to pre-2008 levels. Wow, THAT is a provocative piece of...

An interesting online poll from ConservativeHQ a Tea Party friendly publication. For the past month, they’ve been polling readers about the favorability of 29 different Republicans, and report only 5 got a favorable rating of 50% or more. Along those lines, they asked who, of those 5, would readers like to see Mitt Romney choose as his running mate. It wasn’t even close, with Sarah Palin receiving 45% of the vote. The closest to here was Jim DeMint with 17%. Interestingly, None of the Above beat out Paul Ryan. Sarah Palin 45% Jim DeMint 17% Rand Paul 15% Rick Santorum...

There's a story on the national journal about how tensions are rising again between the party's establishment and Demint. Does this mean that the GOP-E is planning on doing what it did in 2010 - that is, not support every candidate we the people nominated? Let's examine this logically: Deb Fischer is up in the polls by 18 points, yet the republicans have still found some reason to go out and whine. Why? There's only one answer. They're sick of us conservatives thinking that this is a conservative party, and they don't like it. They want the good old by...

The Senate Republican primary in Nebraska has turned into a proxy war between conservatives and establishment Republicans that could complicate efforts to wrest control of the Senate from Democrats. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), a leading voice for Tea Party conservatives in Washington, has made an aggressive bid to defeat Jon Bruning, the front-runner in the primary, because of lingering doubts about his commitment to conservative principles. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Some Republicans question whether DeMint’s strenuous intervention will do anything more than alienate a likely future colleague. “There’s no question he’s the front-runner,” said David Kramer, a former Nebraska Republican Party chairman who...

"Excited" after a meeting Thursday with Mitt Romney, tea party favorite Sen. Jim DeMint urged fellow Republicans to be realistic and rally around the party's eventual nominee, making his plea the same day the ex-governor's chief rival suggested voters would be as well off with President Barack Obama as they would Romney. In addition to fundraising events, Romney was in Washington to hold talks with DeMint as well as legislators from Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which hold primaries next month. The legislators included House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, according to GOP aides. "I'm not only comfortable with Romney, I'm excited...

Mitt Romney huddled privately with Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill on Thursday and came away with a big prize: something close to an endorsement from the Senate’s most outspoken conservative. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who backed Romney in 2008 but has remained on the sidelines this year as the former Massachusetts governor labors to win the nomination, said it’s time the rest of the field consider bowing to the inevitable. “We all need to look at this presidential primary and encourage the candidates to do a little self-reflection here on what’s good for our country,” DeMint told reporters after a...

WASHINGTON -- Jim DeMint, among the nation's conservative leaders, stopped just short Thursday of endorsing Mitt Romney for president as the South Carolina senator called on the former Massachusetts governor's foes to re-evaluate their campaigns. DeMint's appeal for Republicans to focus on defeating President Barack Obama came a day after former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, another influential conservative, endorsed Romney and urged party unity. "What I can tell conservatives from my perspective is that I'm not only comfortable with Romney, I'm excited about the possibility of him possibly becoming our nominee," DeMint told reporters on Capitol Hill. At a time...

Americans must ensure Republicans don’t settle for partial repealEvery election, voters are told that this election is the most important of our lifetimes. In most elections, it’s not really true. In 2012, though, it probably is true, for one reason: Obamacare. Two years after a Democratic Congress and President Obama foisted onto the American people an unpopular trillion-dollar takeover of American health care, we know that Obamacare is, in fact, even more unpopular than before and that it will cost almost $2 trillion. The American people were told Obamacare would reduce health care costs, but premiums already are jumping. The...

WASHINGTON _ The Senate on Tuesday resoundingly rejected a sweeping measure to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other protected areas to oil drilling, as well as to approve construction of the Keystone pipeline project. Tuesday's vote was the first time in four years that the Senate has voted on a measure including ANWR drilling, and it failed miserably.

Tea Party senators unveil five-year plan to balance the budgetBy Alexander Bolton - 03/08/12 02:16 PM ET Members of the Senate Tea Party Caucus on Thursday announed a plan to balance the budget in five years, cutting spending by nearly $11 trillion compared to President Obama’s budget. The plan, dubbed “A Platform to Revitalize America,” is a wish list of conservative policies, none of which have any chance of passing the Democratic-controlled Senate or being signed into law by a liberal Democratic president. The ambitious blueprint would achieve a $111 billion surplus in fiscal year 2017. “The whole point here...

Fox ignored (sat on) substantial news this week including the fact that Romney lied about his support of a national mandate and then yesterday's news of Jim Demint calling "Romneycare" an "unjust law". Both of these would have had the gravity to end the race for any other candidate, especially having been revealed the night before Super Tuesday. When will America have had ENOUGH of the ongoing deception?

(Article linked above) This statement by DeMint should without question be a game changer in this election and should be reported as such by any organization that at least makes pretense to be journalistic in nature. Jim DeMint is the most significant conservative in all of the Senate & House combined. Nobody in all the House or Senate has contributed more to the unseating of appeasing Republicans than Jim DeMint. The significance of him stating this fact is extraordinary as he endorsed Romney in 2008. The media have been very diligent to make certain we know when Romney receives an...

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) said Tuesday that the Democratic Party would “effectively” be “put out of business,” if Congress were to pass a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution. “They can’t work with us on balancing the budget,” DeMint said. “Their whole platform is based on more promises from government and more government spending.

COMPLETE TITLE No Guts, No Glory DeMint: Why 'cooperate and compromise' when 'the other team ... are there to beat you' ### South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint is just saying “no” to compromise with liberals. “I can guarantee you the [Super Bowl] coaches are not telling their players to go out on the field and cooperate and compromise with the other team,” DeMint said at The Heritage Foundation’s Blogger’s Briefing Tuesday, during a discussion about his new book “Now or Never.” “There is a reason for that, the other team has an opposite goal, they are there to beat...

Ted Cruz is surging. Ted Cruz has climbed 6 points to 18% in a new poll, putting him a solid second place in the 8-candidate field. Meanwhile, the frontrunner -- Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst -- has dropped 5 points to 36%. Cruz has cut Dewhurst's lead from 29 points in September down to just 18 points today. This is great news, but it's even better than it looks. If Dewhurst fails to get 50% of the vote in the April 3rd primary, he will be forced into a run-off with the second place finisher. And if Cruz makes it into...

In a recent article published by The Daily Beast, its Washington bureau chief, Howard Kurtz, reasoned that if “moderate” Mitt Romney wins the Republican nomination for President, he’ll need to choose a running mate with the conservative bona fides to balance the ticket. While the notion that Mitt Romney is "on the verge of sewing up the Republican nomination" is still just a neo-con fantasy (especially in light of Ron Paul’s surging poll numbers and his respectable showing in Iowa and New Hampshire), pundits and soi disant opinion makers have suggested that the former Governor of Massachusetts choose a VP...

Everybody was waiting for Jim DeMint. Mitt Romney had reason to hope the South Carolina senator would repeat his 2008 endorsement of his presidential bid. DeMint is the hero of conservatives in South Carolina, so his backing might well have clinched the crucial state for Romney. Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul had just as much reason to hope DeMint might support them, and put him in the role of kingmaker in the Republican race for the White House.At a convention of the conservative Tea Party movement in Myrtle Beach on Sunday, DeMint made clear, however, they could all...