Free Republic

Heritage Foundation president and former senator Jim DeMint defended Senator Ted Cruz’s brief filibuster this week that forced a 60-vote threshold to raise the debt ceiling, requiring Republican votes to do so.DeMint argued Cruz was merely holding to normal procedure: ”The normal rule is you take 60 votes to move to a final vote, [which] they call cloture. I think that several members, including Ted Cruz, were simply asking, ‘Let’s keep the normal rules here.’ And that didn’t suit some folks.”“The reason there’s a 60-vote rule in the Senate, and the reason Republican leadership fought so hard to keep it for nominations, is...

The Heritage Foundation of late has been subsumed to the bare-knuckle Heritage Action, the result being a diminution in the influence and intellectual integrity of the foundation. It is therefore cause for conservative celebration that Wall Street editorial board member Stephen Moore is being brought in as the foundation’s chief economist. Moore is pro-growth, pro-immigration — a cheery conservative warrior. If allowed free rein — and I can’t believe he would have taken the job unless he was assured of intellectual freedom — he has the ability to restore Heritage Foundation’s luster and to help introduce the far right to...

Fellow Conservatives: We have some very sad news to report. Dr. Tom Coburn (R-OK)U.S. Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has announced that he will resign from the Senate this year. Dr. Coburn is battling a serious recurrence of cancer. This is a big loss for Oklahoma and the country. Dr. Coburn has been a tireless fighter against wasteful Washington spending. No senator has done more to research and expose our government's gross abuse of American taxpayers. He is a true citizen legislator and we need more like him in Washington. Please take a moment to read Jim DeMint's statement about the...

The leader of the Senate Conservatives Fund has become a controversial figure among Republicans for his willingness to back primary candidates against sitting GOP senators in the name of building a more conservative coalition. Matt Hoskins took over the fundraising operations for the group from former South Carolina GOP Sen. Jim DeMint when he left the Senate in 2012 to head up the conservative Heritage Foundation. Hoskins does most of his business from San Diego County, where he moved a few years ago to be closer to family. . . . . In this year's midterm elections, the Senate Conservatives...

Using a special method of fundraising that permits moving large amounts of funds to a candidate, a federal PAC has collected and forwarded more than $500,000 in earmarked contributions for five conservative Senate and House candidates. The Senate Conservatives Fund, a federal PAC that already gives contributions and makes independent expenditures for federal candidates, has reported collecting and forwarding $541,565 in earmarked contributions since May. During November they reported forwarding $201,460 to candidates. The PAC was founded by former Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., and seeks to elect conservative candidates, but does not support liberal Republicans, and is not affiliated with...

As he was ascending to the pinnacle of power in the Senate Republican conference almost exactly seven years ago, Mitch McConnell planted the seeds of a feud that could conceivably end his career this May. Democrats, capitalizing on the public’s weariness with the Iraq War and outrage at the GOP’s Abramoff-era corruption, had taken control of both houses of Congress. And McConnell had been unanimously elected minority leader. As they are today, Republicans were searching for a way to reconnect with the public. McConnell, for example, canceled an annual lobbyist-funded retreat at the tony Greenbrier resort in West Virginia in...

The damage done to the Republican ad firm Jamestown Associates as punishment for working for the controversial outside group Senate Conservatives Fund could be even more substantial than first thought. It was originally reported that the National Republican Senatorial Committee would blacklist the company. But that might be just the beginning. Aside from the NRSC, Jamestown has, in the past, been awarded contracts to create independent expenditure ads for groups like the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the Chamber of Commerce. In the campaign world, these I.E. accounts are considered especially lucrative business. But according to...

Think Republicans have been making fools of themselves? Blame Michael Needham. Link only to a very interesting article. Consider the source.

When Mitch McConnell wants to destroy you, you'll know it. The Senate minority leader has declared war against the Senate Conservatives Fund, an outside group supporting his Republican primary opponent, Matt Bevin. But rather than moving on and focusing on his Democratic opponent, McConnell and his allies have trained their attacks on SCF and its allies—with no apparent endgame in sight. The latest salvo came Monday, when National Review published a story that detailed the Kentucky senator's deep displeasure with Nebraska GOP candidate Ben Sasse for being endorsed by the conservative group. McConnell let him know about it during a...

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...