Free Republic

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) plans to step down from his leadership post by the end of July, setting off a weeks-long scramble for the chamber’s number two job, according to three Republicans familiar with his plans. Cantor will formally announce his plans later Wednesday in a meeting with his House Republican colleagues in the basement of the U.S. Capitol.

How did the No. 2 man in the House lose a primary? Chalk it up to immigration and the Tea Party. It’s one of the most shocking losses in U.S. electoral history—and it’s bad for America. Here’s the thing: Eric Cantor did not fall asleep in this race. He spent around $5 million. He ran lots of TV ads. He knew this was going to be a close one. He campaigned. And he still got creamed. And here’s the other thing: Cantor was not an enemy of the Tea Party. He was in fact the Tea Party’s guy in the...

This is Primary Election Day for Virginia politicians. Encourage all Conservatives in Virginia to VOTE today! "Rubberstamp for Obama," Eric Cantor is "hellbent" on ramming through the US House Obama's Amnesty for Illegal Alien Invaders from Mexico. The GOP-E Leadership in the US House, (Boehner, Cantor, and Ryan), is always gullible to Obama's tricks. Consequently, Boehner, Cantor and Ryan, have all pledged to ram through this unpopular Obama Amnesty Bill due to Obama's illegal decision to flood the USA with children from Mexico and Central America. It is time to kick the GOP-E out of Congressional Leadership!

ERICA YOON | The Roanoke Times Delegates cheer candidate Ed Gillespie during his introduction at the state Republican convention Saturday in Roanoke. Less than 90 minutes after voting began at the convention, Gillespie’s nearest rival, Shak Hill, conceded the nomination to Gillespie. The low attendance — 4,200 delegates had registered but about 2,700 came to Roanoke — may have expedited the balloting. Ed Gillespie, a fixture in national Republican politics, easily won his party’s nomination Saturday to take on Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., setting up a marquee fight with control of the Senate at stake. At 2:50 p.m., less than...

Saturday, June 07, 2014 The Long March Through the Republican Party Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog The Tea Party's epitaph has been written. A confident Republican establishment is now prepared to possibly take the Senate in 2014 and then lose it again in 2016 to another wave of historical change. In its defense the establishment, a motley collection of men paid by special interest groups whose future involves lucrative lobbying and even more lucrative consulting for the midterm election of 2018 where they will run on opposition to HillaryCare, can point to all the stupid and...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is taking sides in the Mississippi Senate primary run-off, stepping out to help raise money for Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., against his Tea Party challenger, Chris McDaniel. McConnell will host a "run-off reception" benefiting Cochran, a six-term incumbent, on the evening of June 10 at the National Republican Senatorial Committee in Washington. In an email to party donors Friday, obtained by the Washington Examiner, McConnell warned that the outcome of the contest "will have a very real impact on our fight for the Majority," even though Mississippi is considered a Republican stronghold. "Our friend Thad...

Yesterday I noted that the tea party in big states and national elections faces a challenge both in money and support when facing competent, mainstream Republicans. To put it bluntly, there aren’t enough Republicans who think that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is a sellout or that the shutdown was a good idea to sustain the tea party in its current form. I’ve suggested that it, in essence, disappears as a distinct subset of the right and, like most insurgent movements, will be soaked up by the larger political entity, in this case the GOP. But are there other things the...

The NRSC spent a chunk of the weekend pounding Chris McDaniel’s campaign because some people there knew three weeks ago about Cochran’s wife being secretly videotaped in a nursing home but said nothing until the story finally broke on Saturday. Read Ed’s post this morning for the details on that. There’s no evidence that McDaniel’s campaign was involved in the harassment — on the contrary, his campaign manager denounced it in a staff e-mail as soon as she heard of it — but after the news about it broke on Saturday, they claimed incorrectly that they’d never heard of the...

Rand Paul is defending his relationship with Mitch McConnell after helping his fellow Kentuckian defeat a tea party-backed challenger in a GOP Senate primary."I came out of the tea party movement. I'm very concerned about the debt. I'm very concerned about big government," Paul said on Friday. "But I think the misnomer is to think somehow Senator McConnell isn't. That's what his whole entire career has been predicated upon - fighting against big government."The comments by Paul, the state's junior senator, came at a news conference with McConnell in Louisville that was focused on building party unity following a bruising...

The personal attorney for Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) offered little explanation late Monday for why nearly three weeks elapsed between when Cochran's campaign initially learned a crazed blogger had broken into his wife's residence and when he went to the police with information about the incident, leading to the blogger's arrest Friday. “In responding to any inquiries about this legal matter, we are conscious of preserving the confidentiality of attorney client relationship,” Cochran’s attorney Don Clark said in an emailed statement to Breitbart News in response to a story in The Hill.He continued:That said, I can tell you that once...

The media narrative is on full display today. This is a narrative that the left and establishment Republicans want to spin.That spin is that the tea party is losing. The tea party lost in North Carolina and now lost in Kentucky.The tea party did not lose. But the tea party has a major problem: It is being hijacked.In 2010, the Republicans welcomed the tea party movement. The GOP was all but dead, and the tea party movement was the vehicle for a GOP resurgence. In 2012, the Republicans tried to ignore the tea party. This year, Republican consultants in D.C....

Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) repeatedly listed a Washington, D.C. house owned by his executive assistant as his address on a series of official documents in recent years, including several of his statements of candidacy to the Federal Election Commission. Cochran owns a house he has described in documents as a “cabin” in Oxford, Mississippi, which his campaign said is his primary residence. But his opponent, state senator Chris McDaniel, said the documents listing a D.C. address illustrate the six-term incumbent has grown apart from the state he represents in Congress.Additionally, documents signed by Cochran in 2006 and 2010 indicate the...

On Saturday, April 26, at 8:54am, Melanie Sojourner, campaign manager for Mississippi state senator Chris McDaniel's primary challenge of Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS), sent an irate email. “Someone has created a video about Thad and Kay,” Sojourner wrote in the email, a partially redacted version of which was provided to Breitbart News. “It must come down ASAP. Does anyone know where this came from?”Sojourner was responding to a video posted online by Clayton Thomas Kelly, 28, a blogger who had been compiling documents and other information about Cochran's relationship with his executive assistant, Kay Webber.Kelly was arrested Friday night for...

Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) is trying to squeeze every last political drop out of a crazed blogger illicitly entering his wife's retirement home to take a photograph of her. His campaign is up with a new television ad attempting to tie his primary challenger, state Sen. Chris McDaniel, to the alleged actions of the blogger, Clayton Kelly.“It’s the worst: Chris McDaniel supporter charged with a felony for posting video of Sen. Thad Cochran’s wife in a nursing home,” a narrator reads while showing photographs of Kelly in an orange jumpsuit, while showing text of a headline from The Daily Caller...

WASHINGTON—Until House Republicans have confidence that President Obama will implement an immigration reform law as Congress passes it, there is not much to discuss House Speaker John Boehner said Tuesday. “We’ve talked about this literally every week for the last 18 months and I think its clear over the last several months that until the president gives us some reason, some confidence that we can trust him to implement an immigration reform bill we’re really not going to have much to talk about,” Boehner said at a GOP Leadership press conference. "The ball is in the president’s court.”

Courting powerful Jewish donors for the second time in two months, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie called Sunday for a more aggressive foreign policy that defends American values abroad — even in "in some very messy, difficult places." "The rest of the world watches in desperation and hope that America will realize and act upon once again its indispensable place in the world," Christie, a prospective Republican presidential contender, said in a keynote address Sunday at the Champions of Jewish Values International awards gala in New York. "We must lead." He charged that America must represent the strongest military and...

On a recent Saturday, foot soldiers in the Republican Party's civil war fanned out across a neighborhood of winding streets and manicured lawns to beat back the Tea Party. They did not meet much resistance. Over the course of two hours, dozens of residents said they planned to vote in the May 20 primary election for Idaho Representative Mike Simpson, a veteran lawmaker with a reputation for pragmatism. None said they would back his Tea Party challenger Bryan Smith. As he heads for a likely victory on Tuesday, Simpson has plenty of help. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, former Republican...

Jeb Bush gave an impassioned speech before New York's top political donors, casting immigration reform as a way to grow the economy, warning of a declining American Dream and pressing back on Common Core critics. "We cannot go back and dumb down our standards," Bush said at a Manhattan Institute dinner at Cipriani, across from Grand Central Station.

More Republicans are pushing for an immigration overhaul.House Republican leaders are mum on a timetable for advancing immigration overhaul legislation and have so far been noncommittal on moving on the issue before the end of the 113th Congress. But a group of mayors and business leaders from across the political spectrum is determined to prove that momentum is growing for a rewrite of the nation’s immigration laws — even among conservatives. The coalition, Partnership for a New American Economy, on Wednesday held the first in a series of monthly conference calls moderated by Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist...

Karl Rove denied Tuesday that he said Hillary Clinton had brain damage. "I didn't say she had brain damage, she had a serious health episode," he told FOX News, suggesting that her hospitalization in January 2013 for a blood clot could thwart her presidential ambitions.