Free Republic

Matt Hoskins is the executive director of the Senate Conservatives Fund, an outside group that has made waves with its willingness to endorse against sitting Republican senators. Prior to his work at SCF, Hoskins served as a top aide to then-South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint. Given how much animosity SCF is generating among establishment Republicans, we reached out to Hoskins to chat about the incoming his group is facing, what it means and how he envisions SCF’s role in future elections. Our conversation, conducted via e-mail, is below and has been edited only for grammar. FIX: Mitch McConnell told the...

There’s a new public enemy No. 1 in Senate GOP circles, and it’s not Ted Cruz. It’s the Senate Conservatives Fund, an organization that used to prop up underdog conservative candidates but now is training its fire mainly on Republican incumbents — rather than Democrats. The group has ginned up anger on the far-right towards Republican senators for refusing to use a government shutdown threat as leverage to defund Obamacare — a campaign that has been good for its bottom line. Since it started engaging in the defund Obamacare campaign, the group brought in the vast majority of the $3.5...

Senate Republicans are spoiling for a fight this primary season as they try to take back control of the party from conservative activists. -snip- “If super PACs are going to get involved in primaries, there has to be some other people involved in primaries who are interested in actually winning the election in November — and not just purifying the party in the primary,” said Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who ran the National Republican Senatorial Committee in the past two cycles and faces reelection next year. With the blessing of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the hardball plan is already...

OK, if you play along nicely, I'll tabulate the results later. So let's assume for the sake of argument that the next electable Republican president will come from the ranks of governors or from a handful of Senators or from an ex-office-holders like Jim DeMint or Mitch Daniels or Jeb Bush or Rick Santorum. PICK YOUR TOP FIVE (electability has to be your first consideration): Republican Governors here: http://www.rga.org/homepage/governors/

For the last year, the left has engaged in an organized campaign to drive Rush Limbaugh off the air. Knowing they cannot go after Rush Limbaugh directly, the left has launched repeated boycotts against any advertisers who dare advertise while Rush Limbaugh is on. Consequently, some advertisers decided to stop advertising at all on political talk radio, depriving the genre as a whole of resources. And it still hasn’t hurt Rush Limbaugh. Mitch McConnell has decided to embrace the same strategy in his war against the Senate Conservatives Fund. He can’t attack the Jim DeMint created Senate Conservatives Fund outright,...

We know that premiums are going up due to ObamaCare—Americans are getting notices in their mailboxes every day. On Wednesday, Drew Gonshorowski of the Center for Data Analysis at the Heritage Foundation published research that shows exchange premiums are going up in all but five states. In North Carolina, for example, many consumers will find their premiums almost double when shopping on the government exchanges. The hardest-hit states, such as Georgia, Arizona, Vermont and North Dakota, will see premium increases of up to 150%. Mr. Gonshorowski's research shows that the hardest hit by the increases will be young adults. "A...

It is hard not to be cynical about the right-wingers’ racket. They promote confrontation in which there is no hope of victory, assail other Republicans when it fails and, along the way, raise a great deal of money and get a whole lot of media attention. There are two things going on here. First, the short-term incentives for Lee to engage in this stunt are obvious. He’s not ever going to be president of the United States and will forever be in the shadow of people like Jim DeMint, president of the Heritage Foundation, and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). (Lee...

After calling Obamacare a “dog bill” and insisting that some good did come out of the shutdown showdown, Hatch was blunt when asked about the influence of outside conservative groups and the Heritage Foundation in particular. “Heritage used to be the conservative organization helping Republicans and helping conservatives and helping us to be able to have the best intellectual conservative ideas,” Hatch said. “There’s some real question in the minds of many Republicans now … is Heritage going to go so political that it really doesn’t amount to anything anymore…. Right now I think it’s in danger of losing its...

After last evening's vote to reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling, groups on the right were already criticizing Republicans who voted for the bipartisan compromise as traitors and threatening to work against their re-election. But longtime GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch said on MSNBC's "Daily Rundown" Thursday that those groups -- particularly a surging and newly controversial Heritage Action -- were risking their credibility by attacking Republicans and fueling primary challengers. -snip- Hatch, who himself survived a primary challenge from the right in 2012, had both empathy and praise for Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in leading the deal, possibly...

-snip- “Heritage used to be the conservative organization helping Republicans,” Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, himself a longtime conservative leader in Washington, said Thursday in an interview on MSNBC. “There’s a real question on the minds of many Republicans now — and I’m not just thinking for myself, for a lot of people — is Heritage going to go so political that it really doesn’t amount to anything anymore? I hope not.” -snip- Dan Holler, a spokesman for Heritage Action, said Thursday that Mr. Hatch’s criticism is unfounded and in fact, he answered his own question about the...

The Republican Party is at war with itself. It's divided over how best to shrink the federal budget and how to undo President Obama's healthcare law. Behind the GOP crackup over the government shutdown lies a much bigger battle for control of the party. And the most important actors aren't Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and the tea party members of the House who brought us the government shutdown. The party rift's chief driver is a constellation of hard-line conservative fundraising groups, led in part by a former senator most Americans couldn't pick out of a lineup, Jim DeMint of South...

Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint called for an end to “pretend votes” and “gimmicks” to kill the Affordable Care Act and said Republicans must use the budget resolution to defund the president’s health-care law once and for all. DeMint dismissed the obstacles that a Democrat-controlled Senate and a likely presidential veto could pose to a House budget resolution. “This is must-pass bill. Our point is Republicans should fund the government in its entirety except for Obamacare,” he said. “They should send that bill to the president, to the Senate, make it clear to Americans, they don’t want government shut down.”...

The House Republican “leadership,” and we use that term in the loosest sense, is preparing to confirm once and for all that it is a principle-free zone by scheduling a phony vote to defund Obamacare. The smoke and mirrors procedure cooked-up by House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions of Texas and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia calls for sending the Senate a stopgap spending bill together with a resolution that would alter the text of the bill once it’s enrolled for presentation to President Barack Obama – the so-called “enrollment correction” would bar funding to carry out Public...

Well, here are five of its worst side effects. First, many Americans will lose their current health coverage. Second, many Americans will lose access to physicians they trust. Third, ObamaCare places bureaucrats between doctors and patients. The law imposes new penalties on doctors who do “not satisfactorily submit data” that meet Washington bureaucrats’ standards. It also creates a panel of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats empowered to make rulings that reduce Medicare spending.

The Senate Conservatives Fund (SCF) is targeting Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.) with radio ads blasting their opposition to a threatened government shutdown over defunding ObamaCare. The Tea Party-affiliated group's move is a warning to the two senators not to position themselves against the conservative base, and is especially notable since Burr won't face election again until 2016. Graham has a trio of 2014 primary challengers, though he appears to be in a strong position for reelection. "Republicans in Congress can stop ObamaCare by refusing to fund it, but Senator Richard Burr says that's 'the dumbest idea...

Former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) on Monday night urged voters to replace any Republican lawmaker unwilling to vote to defund ObamaCare during next month's budget showdown. DeMint, the president of the Heritage Foundation, dismissed fears that Republicans would be blamed for a government shutdown, as they were in the 1990s. “The risk of that is so much less than the risk to our country if we implement ObamaCare, and so I’m not as interested in the political futures of folks who think they might lose a showdown with the president,” DeMint said at a town-hall meeting hosted by Heritage Action,...

Video at link

Heritage Foundation President and former U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint tells Newsmax that the House should defund Obamacare no matter what the risk to the Republican Party, even if it leads to a government shutdown. The South Carolina Republican also says the Affordable Care Act will do more damage to the nation “than anything I’ve seen pass in my lifetime.” And he insists, in an exclusive interview Thursday with Newsmax TV, that a path to citizenship for illegals constitutes amnesty and opposing immigration reform won’t necessarily hurt the GOP. …

Jim DeMint’s at war with Republicans — again. The tea party firebrand who made his mark in GOP primary races across the country is now at the helm of the Heritage Foundation where its political arm is doing the same thing: holding conservatives' feet to the fire. DeMint only joined the group earlier this year, but already Heritage’s political arm has had some early fights out of the gate that have Republican leaders both angry and frustrated – feeling like DeMint is diminishing one of the party’s most powerful intellectual engines by turning it into a group taking cheap shots...

Honduras signs a deal that means international recognition of the November 29 elections. If there is one person in Honduras who is more despised these days than deposed president Manuel Zelaya it is a foreigner who goes by the name of Hugo. We refer here not to the Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez but to U.S. Ambassador Hugo Llorens.