Free Republic

Behold the beast the Democrats never intended to create: a thrice-elected Republican governor in a swing state with a cult following, appreciated by both the establishment of his party and the conservative base. He’s a governor with an enviable base approval rating who received an even larger share of his own party’s vote in 2014 than 2010. This despite another year of John Doe drama, an unemployment picture that improved but fell short of his promises, a presidential appearance for his opposing Democrat (which had been missing in 2012), and the apparent flare-up between him and the Republican Governors Association...

A core group of House Republicans are currently signing on to a letter to House Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Majority Whip Steve Scalise urging them to hold the line against funding for President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty. Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC) is leading the effort to thank leadership, and urging it to remain stalwart. “We write you today to thank you for standing firm and forcing the Senate to act on a Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill that stops President Obama’s unlawful executive actions on immigration,” the Republican House members who have thus far signed...

This is a damn embarrassment. Sorry, but there is no other way to put it. Elected Democrats are not capable of feeling shame over switching their stated positions. One need only look to the filibuster fight – which McConnell also lost, in recent memory – to know this to be an undisputed fact. So the executive amnesty bill gets brought the floor and Democrats will filibuster it. Even if they don’t, Obama will veto it. Life will go on and the press will not care, nor will they hold Democrats’ feet to the fire. The only way this action stood...

The Department of Homeland Security is catapulting toward a shutdown this weekend as Republicans and Democrats remain at odds over whether funding for the agency should be tied to a broader debate about the president's executive actions that allow young immigrants and their families to stay in the U.S. without threat of deportation. With just four days left to find consensus, the Senate voted for a fourth time Monday night on a House-passed bill that fully funded DHS, but rolled back President Obama's orders on immigration. The bill was again blocked. But there may now be early signs of a...

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Monday took steps to prevent a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security by splitting off legislation attacking President Obama’s immigration actions from the funding fight. McConnell’s actions would bring to the floor a bill blocking Obama’s actions late last year to shield millions from deportation. The new bill would not be connected to legislation funding the Department of Homeland Security, however, and it would not attack Obama’s earlier executive actions in 2012 to shield certain young people from deportation. Those actions are more popular than the steps Obama took last year. McConnell...

Karl Rove wrote the following in the Wall Street Journal: The good news for Republicans is that Monday’s preliminary injunction by federal district Judge Andrew Hanen, which stopped implementation of Mr. Obama’s November immigration executive order, gives the GOP an opportunity to extract itself. It’s his usual tripe; he disregards, or rather, has no ability to read, the views of the American people, looks for a way the Republicans can beg off of a difficult road in a manner in which they can allow the Democrats get their way, and themselves a plausible explanation of why their hands were tied....

No, DHS may not grant work permits to whomever it wishes. Judge Hanen’s Presidents’ Day drubbing of Obama’s amnesty agenda was so comprehensive in its rebuttal of the DOJ’s arguments that the DOJ’s initial reaction was stunned silence rather the immediate flurry of filings that usually follow their rare defeats. In his ruling, the judge swiftly smacked down the Department of Homeland Security’s attempt to assert that it had a “generalized discretion” to enforce or not enforce our immigration laws. Such a generalized approach, he wrote, would render Congress’s carefully drafted statutes on immigration “superfluous” and “meaningless.” Hanen further pointed...

On Monday, the Justice Department asked a federal judge in Texas who issued an injunction last week against President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty to stay his injunction. The Obama administration also proposed that the judge issue a partial stay that would allow every state except for Texas to start implementing Obama’s executive amnesty. The Justice Department gave U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen until Wednesday to decide on the matter. If Hanen does not act, the Justice Department will ask the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals for a stay. The Justice Department argued that the Department of Homeland Security would “sustain...

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said Monday that Republicans will have to make “tough choices” in the debate over funding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) this week. On CNN’s “This Hour,” McCaul said the ball currently rests in the Senate's court. “It’s up to the Senate to determine what they send back to the House and we'll probably see something come back from the Senate this week and then we have to make some tough choices,” he said. “I fully believe that we should not be playing politics with the National Security Agency, like Homeland Security,...

Monday on Newsmax TV’s “America’s Forum,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said he will not be voting for President Barack Obama’s attorney general nominee, Loretta Lynch. “Unfortunately Mrs Lynch, through the course of the entire hearing, refused to acknowledge a single limit on the president’s authority under the Constitution,” Cruz said. “When I asked her in what ways she would differ from Eric Holder, she said no ways whatsoever.” When the junior Texas senator was asked if Lynch would be worse than Eric Holder, Cruz answered “Yes I think she would be materially worse.”

The globalist Economist is accusing Republicans seeking to defund President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty of pursuing an “impeachment-lite” strategy, sparing Democrats who are putting executive amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants above guaranteed funding for the Department of Homeland Security of any blame. The publication, which has often advocated for open borders and a comprehensive amnesty bill in the United States, accuses Republicans of “political weakness” and “pandering to their party’s angriest grassroots supporters, who have convinced themselves that Mr Obama is not just mistaken in his policies, but is a constitution-trampling tyrant.” The Economist concedes, though, that Republicans may...

We knew it would come to this. Alternate headline: “Party that promised to avoid shutdowns will avoid shutdown.” At least we’ll get some entertainment over the next few days from GOP aides trying to convince the media this isn’t a total cave. Senate Republican leaders are plotting a new strategy that they hope will allow them to prevent a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) next week. They are considering a plan in which they would split off legislation attacking President Obama’s executive action on immigration from funding for DHS, according to a Senate GOP aide familiar with...

HOUSTON, Texas – A grieving Texas father told Breitbart Texas, “my son is dead because the concept of borders is dead.” Spencer Golvach was senselessly murdered by an illegal alien who had been deported a number of times after being convicted of committing crimes, including as law enforcement officers now tell us, crimes of violence. Golvach was shot in the head on January 31st while sitting in his car waiting for a stoplight to change. Golvach’s father said he wants the “boomerang” of deportation and illegal reentry into the country to be stopped. Victor Manuel Reyes was a violent man...

Why is the Republican Party so unreliable on the immigration issue? There is little doubt that they are unreliable. Conservatives want iron-clad border-security measures firmly in place before any legalization process begins. Yet GOP members of Congress are eager to switch it around, and then accept milquetoast security. It is strange. After all, congressional Republicans are not bad on taxes; they’re not secretly looking to hike the rate you’ll pay the IRS in April. They’re not bad on regulation; they are serious when they say they want less, not more red tape. Why immigration? This is, after all, a party-based...

This week Capitol Hill Republicans face two showdowns with President Obama and the Democrats that will either make or break their standing with grassroots limited government constitutional conservative voters – defunding Obama’s unconstitutional executive amnesty and the confirmation vote on Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch. It is hard to decide which is the most important, and in some sense they are inextricably linked. The Attorney General is one of the most important Cabinet offices, presiding as it does over everything from voting rights, to civil rights to immigration “judges,” and with Eric Holder in charge it has been the leading...

Calling Sen. Rand Paul’s rhetoric regarding the Federal Reserve “dangerous and irresponsible,” via Politico, the Wall Street-backed establishment GOP is pushing back on what’s become a Paul talking point, just as it was for his father, Rep. Ron Paul. Paul could face a significant challenge if he emerges from Iowa with a legitimate shot at the Republican nomination. Because experts say he gets many of his arguments about the Fed flat wrong. And the establishment wing of the GOP — backed by piles of Wall Street money — views Paul’s approach to the Fed as dangerous and irresponsible. “He seems...

KING, Wis. — At the old union hall here on a recent afternoon, Terry Magnant sat at the head of a table surrounded by 18 empty chairs. A members meeting had been scheduled to start a half-hour earlier, but the small house, with its cracked walls and loose roof shingles, was lonely and desolate.

The Democratic National Committee Saturday released a report blaming the lack of a central narrative and waning support from Southern, white voters for "devastating" losses in midterm elections and at the state level. “It is strongly believed that the Democratic Party is loosely understood as a long list of policy statements and not as people with a common set of core values (fairness, equality, opportunity),” said the long-awaited DNC autopsy of what went wrong for the party in 2010 and 2014. [Snip] Democrats, most recently President Obama, suggested that Americans side with liberals on most issues — they just say...

It was just another Tuesday for the vice president of the United States, and another week in which the mainstream media turned their genteel eyes away from the highly questionable conduct of the figure of low comedy whom tragedy might make our president. On Tuesday morning, Joe Biden was photographed placing his hands in a cringe-inducingly inappropriate manner on the shoulders of a much younger woman — the wife of the about-to-be-sworn-in secretary of defense — and keeping them there . . . and keeping them there . . . and keeping them there . . . for 28 full...

The Department of Homeland Security is up to its old tricks, warning police departments across the country of the threat of "right wing" terrorism. DHS points out that there have been 24 attacks by the sovereign citizen extremists since 2010, some of them deadly. But just who is a "sovereign citizen"? The definition used by DHS could sweep up a lot of people who hold relatively mainstream views on government power. CNN: Mark Potok, senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said that by some estimates, there are as many as 300,000 people involved in some way with sovereign...