Free Republic

As Congress returns for a blink-and-you'll-miss-it session before the November elections, Republican leaders don't want any trouble. They just want to make sure the government doesn't shut down at the end of the month, temporarily reauthorize a little-known federal lending agency, and get the heck out of town. As usual, conservatives are not on board. Two of the most vocal advocacy advocacy groups on the right, Club for Growth and Heritage Action, welcomed House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) back to Washington on Monday with a letter warning him not to attach an extension of the Export-Import Bank to legislation...

Several Republican candidates in the year's most competitive Senate races have begun their fall sprint to Election Day, not by embracing Tea Party-fueled conservatism but by defensively tacking leftward. Let’s start in Colorado, site of a strategic GOP retreat in the “War on Women.” The Republican backtracking there is being done by Rep. Cory Gardner, following withering attacks by Democrats on his past support for “personhood amendments” that bestow rights to fertilized human eggs and effectively ban some forms of birth control. Gardner released an ad claiming he would make access to “the pill … cheaper and easier” than would...

The missing component in the machinery of American politics has been moderate-to-liberal Republicanism, and the gears of government are grinding very loudly. You wonder if Kansas and Alaska have come up with a solution to this problem. In Kansas, Democrat Chad Taylor shook up the Senate race by dropping out last week, giving an independent candidate, Greg Orman, a clean shot at the incumbent, Pat Roberts. At least one poll showed Orman with a 10-point lead over the 78-year-old Roberts in a two-way race. Republicans are so afraid of Orman that Kansas’s Republican (and unabashedly ideological) secretary of state, Kris...

Hispanic lawmakers and immigration advocates harshly criticized President Barack Obama's decision to delay executive action on immigration and vowed to keep pressuring him to make bold changes. Democratic Representatives Luis Gutierrez and Tony Cardenas on Sunday accused Obama of playing politics the day after the president said he would wait until after November's congressional elections to change policy on immigration. The announcement marked a reversal for Obama, who publicly promised to act by the end of summer. "Playing it safe might win an election," Gutierrez said on ABC's "This Week" program. "But it almost never leads to fairness, to justice...

Labor Day week ought to start clarifying the partisan battle to control the Senate, but if anything, the picture just got muddier and the map bigger. An afterthought all year, conservative Kansas is suddenly abuzz. An independent candidate drove the Democrat from the race and positioned himself to consolidate discontent with three-term Republican Sen. Pat Roberts. Washington-based GOP strategists are rushing to help Roberts, who's accused of sleepwalking through the race in the deeply Republican state. If Kansas brought welcome news to Democrats, Alaska did not. First-term Sen. Mark Begich initially was seen as running a smart campaign with excellent...

Fomer Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney argued Sunday that he'd make a better president than Hillary Clinton -- but that he's not planning to mount a third bid for the White House. "No question about that in my mind," he said on "Fox News Sunday" when asked by host Chris Wallace whether he'd be a better leader than Clinton. Prodded by Wallace, Romney insisted he has no plans to run but stopped short of a Shermanesque refusal. "I’m not running, I’m not planning on running," he said. Romney said that while he also would've made a better president than Barack Obama,...

As Republicans contemplate the possible size of their November victory, outlier races may get interesting. Scott Brown, a few weeks ago considered certain to lose, may well win in New Hampshire. Most folks would not have thought that Republican Terri Land had a chance in a blue state like Michigan, but she continues to run close to Peters in the race. Al Franken also cannot pull away in his re-election fight, and all the polls show that race tightening. Surely the trophy in any general election is for one party to knock off a legislative leader of the other party....

What is up with the ubiquitous Mitt? He’s flitting about—as would any public office aspirant trying to gain voter interest in their candidacy—making the scene on radio and T.V., while enthusiastically endorsing the go-along-to-get-along hack candidates backed by the Progressive RINO Establishment; champions of crony capitalism, electoral criminality (remember Mississippi), and fraternal loyalty to the ruling class: still neglecting to embrace a concise articulation of the Constitutional Conservatism they rightly view as a threat to their established Inside-Beltway political racket pecking order. The elitist, morally relativistic, self-serving behavior of the establishmentarians illustrates a resistance and incapacity to communicate with their...

"...The PICO National Network’s Campaign for Citizenship, one of the country’s largest grassroots, faith-based organizing network, also expressed disappointment in Obama’s reported decision. “The odds of us being let down by President Obama were high,” said Eddie Carmona, the group’s campaign manager. “The president and the Senate Democrats have made it very clear that undocumented immigrants and Latinos are simply viewed as political pawns.”....

President Obama has delayed action to reshape the nation’s immigration system without congressional approval until after the November elections, bowing to the concerns of Senate Democrats on the ballots, White House officials said on Saturday. The decision is a striking reversal of Mr. Obama’s vow to take action on immigration soon after summer’s end. The president made that promise on June 30, standing in the Rose Garden, where he angrily denounced Republican obstruction and said he would use the power of his office to protect immigrant families from the threat of deportation.

<p>Abandoning his pledge to act by the end of summer, President Barack Obama has decided to delay any executive action on immigration until after the November congressional elections, White House officials said.</p>

US President Barack Obama has abandoned a plan to force through immigration reform before the end of the summer. In June, he promised to use executive orders that were expected to change visa rules, boost border security and give a path to citizenship for some 11 million US-based illegal immigrants. But the White House says the plans have been shelved until after mid-term elections in November. Each year tens of thousands try to get into the US from Mexico. Many are unaccompanied children, and Mr Obama has called the situation a "humanitarian crisis"....

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) - Caught between competing political demands over immigration, President Barack Obama will now wait until after the November election to take executive action that could shield millions of immigrants from deportation and ignite a clash over the extent of his presidential authority.</p>

President Obama said "politics did shift midsummer" because of the ongoing border crisis, forcing him to delay any executive action on immigration until after the midterm elections. "The truth of the matter is-- is that the politics did shift midsummer because" of the "surge in kids who were showing up at the border, got a lot of attention," Obama said in an interview with NBC's Meet the Press, which is set to air Sunday. Obama's comments come after the White House announced that the president decided against taking action "soon" on immigration, citing the "political season" and "Republican's extreme politicization...

During Thursday night's California gubernatorial debate against Republican Neel Kashkari, California Governor Jerry Brown (D) revealed that nearly 30% of the state's schoolchildren are either illegal immigrants or do not speak English. Brown, who recently said that illegal immigrants from Mexico were "all welcome in California," praised his administration's immigration policies. He said that California is "setting the pace" on immigration laws and mentioned bills he signed that gave driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, made California a sanctuary state (Trust Act), and granted in-state tuition to illegal immigrants (CA DREAM Act).

Editor's Note: In the September issue of Townhall Magazine, where this column originally appeared, RedState's Bryan Pruitt explains why it's long past time for change at the NRSC. Perusing the National Republican Senatorial Committee website, you would think it’s all kumbaya around the campfire as Republicans throughout the country work to take back the Senate in November. What is really going on is a behind-the-scenes, Washington–based political war against conservatives who dare to challenge the status quo. The NRSC says it “provides invaluable support and assistance to current and prospective Republican U.S. Senate candidates.”Its real mission today is to protect...

Is this really “breaking news” if it was sadly predictable all along? The AP thought so: They lead the actual story by emphasizing that Barack Obama broke a promise by kicking this can down the road: Abandoning his pledge to act by the end of summer, President Barack Obama has decided to delay any executive action on immigration until after the November congressional elections, White House officials said. The move is certain to infuriate immigration advocates while offering relief to some vulnerable Democrats in tough Senate re-election contests. Two White House officials said Obama concluded that circumventing Congress through executive...

U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) kicked off his fall re-election campaign this week by reaming his opponent, Republican Jeff Bell, over all the things a popular, liberal-minded incumbent might take issue with in a policy-minded conservative who's spent the last 30 years of his political life living in Washington D.C. Lobbyist. Washington insider. Perpetuator of "defunct and defective" Nixon-era ideologies. It was a verbal assault that should have (or, at least, that one might have expected it to have) drawn an immediate response from Jeff Bell for U.S. Senate cheerleaders across the state. Particularly, one might have expected a reaction...

Here are some numbers, straight from my own checkbook register. In October 2011, before the start of Obamacare, I was paying $386 a month. Yes, fairly reasonable, but less so when you factor in my $10,000 deductible (and two teenage children who keep falling off things). The following October, the premiums rose 23 percent to $474. In October 2013, my monthly rate rose again, nearly 32 percent, to $623. Same exact coverage, just more money. Then, this year, come Sept. 30, my new premiums will be $1,097. That’s a 76 percent increase from the previous year, and, all told, my...

(CNSNews.com) – While unemployment nationwide is 6.1%, the unemployment rate for black Americans at 11.4% is more than double the rate for white Americans, who have an unemployment rate of 5.3%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The unemployment rate for Latino Americans, at 7.5%, is also lower than the unemployment rate for blacks, the BLS data show. For black Americans, age 16 and older, seasonally adjusted, the unemployment rate between July and August stayed the same at 11.4%, and that is up from the 10.7% rate in June. The last time the black unemployment rate was 11.4%...