Free Republic

With a seriously unpopular Republican president and congressional Republicans desperately attempting to pass an even more unpopular health-care bill only to fall flat on their faces, Democrats are anticipating big pickups in the 2018 midterms. And to increase their odds, they're trying to revive a group once left for dead: The conservative Blue Dog Democrats. Nearly wiped out in the 2010 and 2014 Republican victories, the few remaining members of this caucus are working closely with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to recruit and fundraise for 2018 candidates. These people are the absolute last ones the Democrats need. Not only...

Former Democratic National Committee Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (Fla) is in the midst of deciding whether or not to cooperate with DC police investigating possible violations of national security laws by her former top information technology (IT) aide, Imran Awan. Awan and several of his relatives are accused of abusing access granted by their Democratic Party employers to obtain and sell classified information. Thus far, Wasserman-Schultz has been refusing to turnover computers used by Awan so police can examine them. She has claimed exemption from law enforcement saying that "according to the Constitution, members of congress are privileged from arrest....

The Democratic Party will consider proposing a single-payer health insurance system, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York said. “We’re going to look at broader things [for the nation’s health care system.] Single-payer is one of them,” Schumer said to ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos on “This Week” Sunday. The top Democrat in the Senate added that single-payer is among a number of health insurance options. “Many things are on the table,” Schumer said. “Medicare for people above 55 is on the table. A buy-in to Medicare is on the table. Buy-in to Medicaid is on the table.”

A new report by a prominent Democratic think tank argues that the party needs to look beyond the suburbs to win back power. The centrist Democratic think tank Third Way reliably supports socially liberal, fiscally sensible policies that are catnip to the cosmopolitan wing of the party—and as a result, the group often aggravates the party’s base of populist progressives. But a new study of last year’s election results, provided exclusively to National Journal, underscores the idea that Democrats need to win back working-class Donald Trump voters before they chase moderate Republicans who defected to Hillary Clinton. The analysis comes...

A majority of Democrats find it stressful to talk with supporters of President Donald Trump, according to a Pew Research Center poll released Thursday. The latest national survey by Pew, conducted June 27 through July 9 among 2,505 adults, found that 68 percent of both Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents find it “stressful and frustrating” to talk about politics with people who have a different opinion of Trump. Just 28 percent of the two groups found it “interesting and informative.” Republicans in the same poll were more split on the question. Only 52 percent of Republicans or Republican-leaning independents said that...

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer ripped his former colleague, Hillary Clinton, over her election loss to President Donald Trump and her subsequent efforts to explain why she lost. “When you lose to somebody who has 40 percent popularity, you don’t blame other things—Comey, Russia—you blame yourself,” Schumer told The Washington Post. “So what did we do wrong? People didn’t know what we stood for, just that we were against Trump. And still believe that.” Schumer’s comments—referring to Clinton blaming Russian meddling and the former FBI director for her loss to Trump—come as Democrats are trying to re-brand ahead of the...

Despite the continual drama surrounding President Trump and his administration, it is comforting to know that his political opposition is in total chaos. Since the 2008 presidential election of Barack Obama, Democrats have lost over 1,000 state legislative seats across the country. While Democrats have total control of the Governorship and state legislatures in only five states, today Republicans have the most legislative seats in the history of the party. With 33 GOP Governors, control of the U.S. House, Senate and White House, the Republican Party dominates the national political scene today. Unfortunately for the President, Democrats still maintain control...

**SNIP** Democratic leaders shared few details to preserve suspense around the plan, which is scheduled to be unveiled Monday at an event in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District, where the party hopes to defeat incumbent Rep. Barbara Comstock (R). But some lawmakers, aides and outside advocates consulted on the new agenda said that it is expected to focus on new proposals to fund job-training programs, renegotiate trade deals and address soaring prescription-drug costs, as well as other issues. It is also expected to endorse long-held Democratic principles, including “a living wage” of $15 per hour and already unveiled spending plans for...

Six months into Donald Trump’s term, and Democratic politician’s ability to be an opposition party is, in a word, pathetic. When the poll came out saying that “Democrats stand for nothing more than opposing” Trump, I thought to myself, ‘If only that were true!’” But they can’t even do that well. When House Democratic Caucus chairman Joe Crowley was asked by the Associated Press just what his party’s core message was, he “hesitated” and then said, “That message is being worked on.” It was as tone deaf (but honest) an answer as when Mother Jones writer Kevin Drum – as...

The intense emotions surrounding the 2016 campaign were apparent to me during the last month of the race. I spent those final weeks criss-crossing the country with the CNN #myvote campaign camper, talking to voters about who they would pick and why. Most people my colleagues and I talked to were deeply set in their convictions about their candidate and easily overlooked any shortcomings. I rarely met an undecided voter. At the time, I expected that -- like most previous elections -- passions would eventually ease after the race was called and the country had time to process the results....

WASHINGTON, DC – Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi today wrote to White House Counsel Donald F. McGahn, calling on him to publicly disclose all pardons issued by President Trump. Rep. Krishnamoorthi's letter comes in response to the Washington Post’s report that President Trump and his legal team have explored his power to pardon as a means of disrupting Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The signed letter is available here and the text follows: July 21, 2017 The Honorable Donald F. McGahn, II Counsel to the President The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Washington, DC 20006...

The Democrats are working on a re-brand following their near-spectacular collapse from the days when they controlled the entirety of the legislative and executive branches, and are set to officially unveil a new slogan for the 2018 elections: "A Better Deal: Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Wages."The slogan will be officially unveiled on Monday, per Vox's Jeff Stein.If this sounds familiar, it's basically a rip-off of the tagline of the pizza chain Papa John's, which is "Better ingredients, better pizza."While this is truly a terrible slogan, at least it's not anything the DNCC was toying around with at the beginning...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/how-the-democrats-fell-for-trumps-trap

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was embraced by young voters when he ran for president in 2016. And now it’s Rep. Maxine Waters (R-CA) — at 78, she is three years older than Sanders — who says she would run for president “if Millennials want me to.” Ahead of an appearance in New Hampshire, Waters, who has repeatedly called for the impeachment of President Donald Trump, was asked by the Daily Caller if she would consider running for president.

Fact check: Absolutely true, at least to many people outside of California’s 43rd Congressional district. Maxine Waters has been in the House for twenty-six years as one of its most extreme progressives, and has spent much of the past year agitating for Donald Trump’s impeachment. On the other hand, the 78-year-old Waters has gotten a surprising amount of buzz on the Left as a potential 2020 presidential candidate, at least according to The Hill: Waters is emerging as the president’s harshest congressional critic, enraging Trump’s conservative supporters and electrifying the Democrats’ liberal base, some of whom are pushing –– only...

MINNEAPOLIS — The fatal shooting of an Australian woman by a Minneapolis police officer responding to her 911 call “should not have happened,” police Chief Janee Harteau said Thursday, adding that the officer’s actions “go against who we are in the department.” In her first public remarks since the death of Justine Damond, a 40-year-old life coach and bride-to-be, Harteau defended Officer Mohamed Noor’s training but criticized his actions. “The actions in question go against who we are in the department, how we train and the expectations we have for our officers,” Harteau said. “These were the actions and judgment...

The threat of an expanding special counsel investigation into President Trump’s finances has rattled his conservative base with fears that the New York billionaire could be brought down by shady business deals — not collusion with Russia. Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller has widened the scope of the Russia investigation to include Mr. Trump’s business deals, according to a Bloomberg News report. The president had warned that such a move would cross a line. “Those transactions are in my view well beyond the mandate of the special counsel, are unrelated to the election of 2016 or any alleged collusion...

Donald Trump has a secret weapon. Even as controversies swirl around him like galaxies colliding, one scandal or outrage smashing into the next before the last one has fully sunk into citizens’ brains, Trump remains on his feet, defiant. He knows something his foes don’t know—or can’t admit. He knows that as low as he might go in the polls, his enemies are truly, comprehensively, utterly bankrupt in the public’s eyes. The American people may not like Trump, but they loathe the forces of respectability arrayed against him. The media? Congressional Democrats? The Republican establishment? With enemies like those, Trump...

There is something more than a little jarring in the ongoing humiliation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. In an ill-timed, ill-focused interview with the NYT, President Trump revisited his disdain for Sessions, his first, most-ardent and most-loyal supporter in the Senate.When supporting Trump was still considered career suicide, Sessions donned the red cap anyway. Maybe it will prove fatal for Sessions’ career, after all.The president has not made a secret of the fact that he blames Sessions for the scandal that now engulfs the Trump administration, claiming in contravention of all available evidence that somehow if Sessions had not recused...

Liberals and leftists have spent the last few months fighting a rearguard battle to protect the Obamacare status quo against attacks from the right. But after the death of Republican efforts to overhaul the health care system, opposition forces should shift their focus to what’s next. Preserving Obamacare is not enough. The time has come for universal health care through a single public health insurer that covers everyone in the country. In the course of defending Obamacare, centrist pundits and institutions made a moral argument about the brutality of health uninsurance that also renders our current system totally indefensible. The...