Free Republic

Defeated Democrat declines to address her political future.Alison Lundergan Grimes, Kentucky’s secretary of State, is threatening to take Rand Paul to court to block him from running both for president and reelection to the Senate in 2016. In her first television interview since Sen. Mitch McConnell routed her by 15 points last month, the Democratic Senate nominee declared that she will not be “bullied” by Paul, who is a heavy favorite to win a second Senate term if he’s allowed to stay on the ballot. “The law is clear,” Grimes told WHAS-TV in Louisville. “You can’t be on the ballot...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)There's no doubt that many Republican senators, and plenty of conservative commentators, were angry at GOP Sen. Ted Cruz for raising a time-consuming objection to passage of the "Cromnibus" spending bill in an effort to oppose President Obama's unilateral executive action on immigration. It's not that fellow Republicans don't oppose the president's move; they do. It's just that 1) Cruz's gambit had no hope of succeeding, and 2) the maneuver set off a series of parliamentary events that allowed Majority Leader Harry Reid to get a head start on his other remaining business, which was the confirmation of a number...

Church bells rang out Wednesday afternoon in Havana, marking a major moment in history -- Cuba and the United States are renewing diplomatic relations after decades of ice-cold tension. Word of the massive change was met with passionate opinions and some protests in the United States. And tearful celebrations erupted in the streets of the island after President Raul Castro announced the news in a televised address. SNIP In Miami, where the vast majority of the large population of Cuban exiles once fiercely opposed any change in the U.S. stance toward the island, reactions were split, largely along generational lines....

Yesterday at a lunch attended by members of the Senate’s Republican caucus, Ted Cruz reportedly made an unsolicited apology to his colleagues for ruining their weekend. It’s not clear whether most of his fellow GOP senators accepted the apology. As mad as some of them were for having to cancel their plans in order to stay in the Senate over the weekend, many were also furious about the way Cruz’s decision to oppose a deal that would have passed the Cromnibus on Friday led to weekend sessions that also gave Democratic leader Harry Reid the opening that he used to...

H.R.927 Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (LIBERTAD) Act of 1996 (Enrolled Bill [Final as Passed Both House and Senate] - ENR) [....] SEC. 3. PURPOSES. The purposes of this Act are-- (1) to assist the Cuban people in regaining their freedom and prosperity, as well as in joining the community of democratic countries that are flourishing in the Western Hemisphere; (2) to strengthen international sanctions against the Castro government; (3) to provide for the continued national security of the United States in the face of continuing threats from the Castro government of terrorism, theft of property from United States nationals...

Mark Halperin claims that the MSM has an "anti-Clinton bias." That might send the blood pressure of a Newsbusters reader rocketing. But before downing a dieuretic, consider what else he and John Heilemann had to say on their Bloomberg TV show today. Halperin and Heilemann were riffing off the New York Times report that Hillary's State Department permitted a rich Ecuadorean woman to enter the US after her family donated big bucks to Dem campaigns. According to the Bloomberg duo, there are 20-30 such stories out there, and the media will be eager to research them, with Hillary's scalp being...

After Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz attacked the 2015 spending agreement in the Senate last week from opposite ends of the political spectrum, Washington engaged in a little parlor game: Is Warren the Cruz of the left? Though there are superficial similarities between the Massachusetts Democrat and the Texas Republican, the question is actually easy to answer. Elizabeth Warren is not Ted Cruz. She cannot possibly be Ted Cruz — because she is Jim DeMint. DeMint, the former Republican senator from South Carolina who now runs the conservative Heritage Foundation, is widely seen as the godfather of the tea-party movement....

Congress Quietly Ends Federal Government's Ban On Medical Marijuana Under a provision in the spending bill passed by Congress over the weekend, states where medical marijuana is legal would no longer need to worry about federal drug agents raiding retail operations. Agents would be prohibited from doing so. By EVAN HALPER Tucked deep inside the 1,603-page federal spending measure is a provision that effectively ends the federal government's prohibition on medical marijuana and signals a major shift in drug policy. The bill's passage over the weekend marks the first time Congress has approved nationally significant legislation backed by legalization advocates....

The liberal news media has gleefully been reporting the GOP's political quarrels for many years. But that exaggerated story line all but vanished last week in the aftermath of the Democrats' humiliating defeat in the midterm elections. Democratic leaders and their rank and file were deeply divided over the budget that was worked out in a deal with House Republicans. Not only among themselves but with President Obama, too, whom they bitterly blamed for their deep losses in Congress. Democratic Party discipline has been eroding fast as a result of Obama's growing unpopularity, but last week the Democrats were deserting...

The pro-amnesty and open borders Wall Street Journal wants former Florida Governor Jeb Bush to not back down on Common Core and amnesty, the two issues that may represent the greatest divide between the bipartisan political class and Main Street. The Journal, which Bush has hailed as his "paper of record," argued that Bush was right when he recently said during a Journal event that a Republican must be willing to "lose the primary to win the general" election."Mr. Bush’s two main political liabilities in the primaries are said to be his support for immigration and for Common Core education standards," the Journal opined. "Neither is...

California's health insurance exchange said 144,178 people have newly enrolled in Obamacare coverage during the first month of sign ups. Officials also reported that 216,423 people have joined Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid program for low-income people, since Nov. 15. That's in addition to the 2.2 million who had already enrolled in 2014 as part of the health-law expansion.

Just hours after he announced his plan "actively explore" a 2016 presidential run on Monday, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush said he would have "no problems" pushing for comprehensive immigration reform in a GOP primary.

The National Children’s Study has been cancelled despite almost 10 years of work and $1.3 billion of funding after a National Institutes of Health working group concluded that the project was flawed and too expensive to continue. The ambitious study, commissioned through the passage of the Children’s Health Act in 2000, set out to follow 100,000 children from birth to age 21 and track the effects of a broad range of environmental and biological factors on their health. However, concerns about the study’s design, research methodology and management that led to increased cost projections and triggered questions about whether the...

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) on Wednesday afternoon conceded to Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) after a race to become the next chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. Sessions, currently the panel’s ranking member, said he reached an agreement with his “good friend” Enzi. “We have talked and I am deferring to his seniority so that he can lead the Budget Committee as its Chairman beginning in 2015,” Sessions said in a statement. “Mike graciously deferred to me two years ago after he timed out on HELP as Ranking Member, and it has been my enormous privilege to serve as the panel’s...

Sen. Cruz Responds to the President’s new Cuba Policy WASHINGTON, DC -- U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, today released the following statement regarding the President’s announcement to change U.S. policy with Cuba and lift economic embargos. “We rejoice that Alan Gross’ wrongful imprisonment by the brutal Castro regime has finally come to an end, and that he will be able to spend the holidays with his loved ones. But make no mistake, although we are glad Alan is now free, the agreement the Obama Administration has entered into with the Castro regime has done nothing to resolve the underlying problem. Indeed,...

Following the return of Alan Gross to the U.S., Sen. Ted Cruz slammed the “Obama, Clinton, Kerry foreign policy,” saying the Castro brothers are “state sponsors of terrorism” and that President Barack Obama “does not understand the difference between our friends and our enemies.”Cruz, one of three Cuban American members of the upper chamber in Congress, also called the normalization of relations between the two nations “a tragic mistake” made the comments to Fox News’ Neil Cavuto Wednesday afternoon. TED CRUZ: “This is yet another manifestation of the failures of the Obama, Clinton, Kerry foreign policy. For six years we followed...

DECEMBER 17, 2014 Is Jeb Ready for Hillary? By Jim Geraghty Back in 2005, Peggy Noonan wrote about the increasingly public friendship between George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton:

Republican leaders are so far refusing to telegraph their strategy for combating President Obama’s unilateral action on immigration. But they’re under enormous pressure from the right to act fast. Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) have no shortage of options. The question is whether any of them would stop Obama in his tracks. Aides to GOP leadership say one weapon in their armory would be for Republicans to sue the president, either by expanding the GOP’s current lawsuit against him on ObamaCare or bringing new legal action. Republicans, who will take...

Republicans clinched their 247th U.S. House seat on Wednesday when GOP challenger Martha McSally officially unseated Rep. Ron Barber (D-Ariz.), bringing to an end the final unresolved congressional election of the midterms and handing the GOP its largest majority in the chamber since the Great Depression. McSally's narrow win, which came after a recount, means that House Republicans will begin the 114th Congress with a 247-188 advantage over Democrats. It is the largest GOP majority since Republicans claimed 270 seats in the 1928 election.

Fox News reports:Graham thinking about presidential bid http://fxn.ws/1BUZ2XFWhich Graham? I mean, it couldn’t be Lindsey Graham, the senior U.S. Senator from South Carolina, in Congress from 1995 to 2003 and in the Senate ever since. There’s no market for a moderate Republican whose main passion is foreign interventionism, right? And yet, that’s exactly what the story says. Here are six other Grahams you’d probably rather see run for the highest office in the land before Lindsey Graham. Heather Graham:? She was great as Rollergirl in Boogie Nights but also as Daisy in the satire Bowfinger. She’s a children’s rights activist...