Free Republic

The House voted, as expected, to block a D.C. law banning discrimination by employers against employees who have had abortions. on Thursday night — but the measure is unlikely to have any effect before the law takes effect this weekend. All but 13 Republicans voted for the resolution of disapproval, which passed on a largely party-line, 228-192 vote, while just three Democrats voted in favor of it. The measure got a high-level Democratic opponent on Thursday with Hillary Clinton's campaign weighing in, calling it a move to "overrule the Democratic process" in a statement to CNN. The bill would roll...

Former Sen. Lincoln Chafee said he is not convinced Hillary Clinton will be the presidential nominee for the Democratic Party. Clinton faces a primary challenge from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) and potentially Chafee himself. When asked about Clinton being pushed further to the left, Chafee brought up the scandals surrounding the Clinton Foundation and lack of accomplishments. “I would argue that between what’s happening internationally in her tenure as Secretary of State, no real accomplishments, and now these new allegations coming out about the Clinton foundation and the book coming out next week. These are real,” Chafee said.

Hillary Clinton’s proposal to get money out of politics could allow the federal government to restrict or ban the publication of a book that has embroiled her presidential campaign in controversy, experts say. Clinton called for a constitutional amendment to “get unaccountable money out of” politics in an op-ed for the Des Moines Register published Monday. Her campaign did not respond to requests for additional details, but legal experts say similar efforts over the past two years would have profound effects on Americans’ free speech rights.

Everybody has a particular figure in the news who drives them a little bonkers. You may recall that for some reason, media hosannas for Chelsea Clinton stick in my craw. I’m perfectly happy to see Chelsea Clinton go off and live a happy life as a mom or doing whatever she likes away from the public spotlight. But I’m tired of the media telling us she’s remarkably accomplished in her own right, her keynote addresses to conferences like SXSW, treating her like she’s an A-list celebrity and fascinating figure, the “Woman of the Year” and “Mom of the Year” awards,...

RUSH: Let's get to this Politico story on the Clintons, 'cause it's big. I mean, The Politico and a lot of Drive-By Media outlets are really worried about this. They're worried about the Peter Schweizer book. They're worried about Hillary's e-mails and the servers. They're worried. This is sticking. There are some people in the media terribly worried about this, and what's also, I think, obvious now is that there is not -- as there was with Obama, there is not -- uniformity in the media supporting Hillary. She does not have blanket support in the media for her presidency,...

Hillary Clinton doesn't play by the rules. That's not a partisan attack. It's not a talking point. It's not a fantasy. It's a fact—an agonizing truth to people like me who admire Clinton and her husband, who remember how Bill Clinton rose from a backwater governorship to the presidency on a simple promise: He would fight for people who "work hard and play by the rules." The evidence is overwhelming and metastasizing: To co-opt a William Safire line, Hillary Clinton is a congenital rule-breaker. "More than 180 Clinton Foundation donors lobbied her State Department." "That's not illegal," writes Vox reporter...

State Department officials began allowing the Clinton Foundation to review emails the government planned to release to Congress and Freedom of Information Act requesters in January 2014, prompting a process that has delayed the publication of agency records for months, according to the group pursuing the records. [Snip] "On top of the obstruction that is in no small measure criminal in nature — with the hiding, removal and destruction of records by Mrs. Clinton — they are sending these records out to the foundation that are the very subject of these public controversies," said Tom Fitton. Fitton is president of...

The Clinton Foundation's finance controversies deepened on Thursday, when The Boston Globe reported that a huge affiliate of the charity failed to report its foreign-government contributions to the State Department. When Hillary Clinton, now the leading Democratic presidential candidate, became secretary of state in 2009, she agreed to have her family's foundation submit new donations from foreign countries for State Department review. This was designed to avoid potential conflicts of interest with her new government role.

Hillary Clinton wants to be president of the United States, but what actually guides her? The only currently declared candidate for the Democratic ticket was raised in the Methodist tradition and continues to practice that faith today. Here are six interesting facts about Clinton's faith as it relates to her candidacy and personal life. 1) Clinton was raised in the First United Methodist Church in Park Ridge, Illinois, and wrote in her book It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach Us that "religion figures in my earliest memories of my family. Our spiritual life as a family was...

Bernie Sanders just announced that he is running for President in 2016. The conventional wisdom shared not just by conservatives but many Democrats is that self-described socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is so unrepresentative of mainstream American political thought that he cannot pose a serious threat to Hillary Clinton. ItÂ’s true that the former secretary of state remains the prohibitive favorite to win her partyÂ’s nomination in 2016, and there isnÂ’t much evidence beyond the anecdotal that suggests Democrats are uncomfortable anointing her Barack ObamaÂ’s chosen successor. That dynamic might change, however, if Sanders runs against Clinton in a manner...

Hillary Rodham Clinton isn’t just running against Republicans. She’s also running against parts of her husband’s legacy. On issues large and small, the Democratic presidential contender is increasingly distancing herself from — or even opposing — key policies pushed by Bill Clinton while he was in the White House, from her recent skepticism on free-trade pacts to her full embrace of gay rights. The starkest example yet came Wednesday, when Hillary Clinton delivered an impassioned address condemning the “era of incarceration” ushered in during the 1990s in the wake of her husband’s 1994 crime bill — though she never mentioned...

Hillary Rodham Clinton had not planned to make the first major policy speech of her presidential campaign an impassioned plea to mend the nation’s racial fissures and overhaul an “out-of-balance” criminal justice system. But by Tuesday, as the nation confronted shocking scenes of Baltimore’s smoke-filled streets, Mrs. Clinton knew that the death of Freddie Gray from injuries he suffered while in police custody would lead her to make race, poverty and incarceration of men from poor, black communities central to her early campaign. “There is something profoundly wrong when African-American men are still far more likely to be stopped and...

Jonathan Allen of General Electric Vox wrote a loving paean about Hillary Clinton's speech today at Columbia University which touched on the Baltimore riots. However, what was really notable about his article is what it left out. An inadvertently jarring laugh line which Allen very conveniently skips.  It might have been overlooked by Allen but Hillary's unintended humor has caused a lot of laughter on the Web. We shall get to that but first let us watch Jonathan Allen grow misty eyed over Hillary's speech:

On the heels of the social unrest caused by a string of law enforcement involved deaths of African-American males across the country, today Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called for an end to mass incarceration. However, a little more than 20 years ago in 1994, Clinton spoke in support her husband, then-President Bill Clinton, and his sweeping crime bill that would build more federal prisons and “lock up violent offenders so they can never could get out again.” In a 1994 CSPAN interview, then-first lady Hillary Clinton pushed for the stalled crime bill saying, “This bill will put more police...

A politician from India donated some $5 million to the Clinton Foundation — which would have amounted to nearly his entire net worth, a new book about the Clintons claims. The Clinton Foundation in 2008 reported that it had received a contribution of between $1 million and $5 million from Amar Singh, a member of India’s Parliament and a pal of Bill Clinton. The size of the donation relative to Singh’s net worth raised questions about whether Singh was the true source of the cash, according to “Clinton Cash” author Peter Schweizer The 2008 contribution was made as Congress debated...

Clinton recently shifted her position on the issue of same-sex marriage slightly. Last summer, in a testy interview with NPR's Terry Gross, Clinton said while she supports same-sex marriage, the issue "had always been a matter left to the states." In a statement released via a spokeswoman earlier this month, Clinton now said she hopes it would become a "constitutional right." “Hillary Clinton supports marriage equality and hopes the Supreme Court will come down on the side of same-sex couples being guaranteed that constitutional right,” Hillary for America spokeswoman Adrienne Elrod said in a statement to ABC News.

Hillary Clinton's first official foray into the 2016 presidential campaign is raising questions about whether the former first lady, senator and secretary of state can find the same common ground with voters -- and the same success -- her husband did in winning two terms in the White House. Unlike Bill Clinton, whose ability to convey to individual voters an air of personal concern for the issues that affected them and their families -- a campaign technique referred to as "retailing" -- Hillary Clinton's initial attempt to connect with voters at an Iowa coffee house and her stealth visit to...

“It’s time to change our approach,” Clinton said in her first major policy address since launching her presidential campaign earlier this month. “It’s time to end the era of mass incarceration.” Clinton spoke in the days after violence and protests have swept through the streets of Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who suffered a spinal-cord injury while in police custody. In a speech at Columbia University, Clinton spoke of protests over policing in Ferguson, Missouri; Charleston, South Carolina; and in New York, and repudiated policies dating to her husband Bill Clinton’s presidency that lengthened...

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential candidate, on Wednesday dove into the debate over the death of Freddie Gray, the young black man whose death has triggered days of protests in Baltimore. In her speech at Columbia University, Clinton outlined a broader vision of criminal justice reform. “What we have seen in Baltimore should indeed--and I think does--tear at our souls,” Clinton said. Her speech strove to put Gray’s death in police custody in the broader context of poverty in Baltimore. Clinton reminded the audience that one out of every three young black men in the city are unable to find...