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The "Affordable Care Act" might die a death of a thousand legal cuts. Last June, upon learning that the Supreme Court had ruled Obamacare's individual mandate constitutional, many observers were forced to concur with the Dickens character who opined, "If the law supposes that… the law is an ass." Yet, the increasing number of anti-PPACA lawsuits that have been receiving serious attention from the courts suggests that the legal system may not be as irrational as it seemed when Chief Justice John Roberts began braying from the bench on June 28. If this seems Pollyannaish, consider the fate of McCain-Feingold....

Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist slammed for radicalizing Washington Washington is more dysfunctional than it has been in 40 years, and while Democrats have deserved their share of the blame over the years, today "the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party," write Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein in the Washington Post. What makes their column particularly interesting is that Ornstein is not liberal, but a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, and Mann is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Together, they call the GOP an "insurgent outlier in American politics" because of the...

Yesterday on Laura IngrahamÂ’s radio show, she asked Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell about a recent Roll Call article that framed me as one of the loud leaders of conservatives opposed to Mitch McConnell. The Senator from Kentucky responded that he had never heard of me and I did not have an audience. That sounds a bit like the child, when asked if he ate the cookie, replying that he had not and besides it did not taste good. If heÂ’d never heard of me, how can he comment on my audience? If he states plainly I have no audience,...

Senator John McCain appeared on This Week today from Afghanistan, but before getting onto matters of foreign policy, he weighed in on the Republican contest going on in the United States and continued to speak out forcefully on an issue that has been part of his political identity for over a decade: campaign finance reform. McCain has not been the biggest fan of Super PACs, and McCain today blasted the Supreme Court for its decision in the Citizens United case two years ago. When Jake Tapper asked McCain about how the GOP’s divisive contest may end up handing the election...

The president of local biotechnology firm GenPhar is accused of defrauding the federal government out of at least $3.6 million the company received to research vaccines against deadly diseases. The charges are contained in federal indictments unsealed today that also accuse GenPhar president Jian-Yun Dong and his estranged wife of making at least $31,000 in illegal campaign contributions to U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham and his political action committee. Dong, who also is chief executive officer of GenPhar, is accused of submitting false claims to federal agencies, converting grant funds to his own use and committing wire fraud to scam the...

As a U.S. senator, John Edwards, a staunch defender of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill, decried "a system in which huge amounts of money continue to flow unregulated into the campaign process and ordinary people feel their vote makes no difference anymore." Last week, a federal grand jury indicted the North Carolina Democrat for allegedly violating federal election law by funneling nearly $1 million in campaign contributions - in violation of the $2,300 federal campaign contribution limit per election - to conceal an extramarital affair while he ran for president in 2008. Edwards denies any guilt. "I did not...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 2 (UPI) -- If the Republican National Committee has its way, the already battered McCain-Feingold law will be stripped of one of its last remaining bastions, reducing the once powerful engine restraining the unbridled use of political contributions to a squeaky nub.

...my nutshell case for why McCain was functionally a Democrat: As a war hero who's hawkish on foreign policy, he more than matches Bush on the military front. As a reform-minded foe of corporate welfare, Big Tobacco, and the Republican right, he is peerless. McCain is Bush's most vociferous critic, voted against the president's tax cut, forced his hand on campaign finance reform, and federalized airport security in the face of White House opposition. He has co-sponsored numerous bills with Democrats--many of them in the presidential-aspirant class--requiring background checks at gun shows (Lieberman), a patients' bill of rights (Edwards), better...

John McCain said a reluctant goodbye to his longtime Senate colleague and “true friend” Russ Feingold on Tuesday. “I have to confess I think the Senate will be a much poorer place without Russ Feingold in it,” McCain said in a floor speech.

With most predicting he will go down in defeat, Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold earned compliments from his former GOP ally, Sen. John McCain, on Monday. The Arizona senator and 2008 GOP presidential nominee has campaigned hard for Republican Senate candidates this cycle while sharply criticizing their Democratic rivals, such as Sens. Barbara Boxer (Calif.) and Patty Murray (Wash.) But McCain saved kind words for Feingold (Wis.), with whom he worked on landmark campaign finance reform legislation eight years ago.

Russ Feingold has spent 18 years on the fringes of the Senate Democratic Caucus and one very hard year here in his home state, running the opposite of this year’s standard-issue Democratic campaign. But Feingold appears on the brink of going down in a national tide that’s blind to distinction. Infuriatingly to the Wisconsin Democrat, he’s been painted not as a leftist but as, of all things, a Washington insider. He’s been forced to defend a claim to independence that he feels is self-evident – “A guy did his doctorate at Princeton on this,” he says indignantly – against an...

National Democrats have asked the Federal Election Commission to investigate whether Arizona Sen. John McCain violated campaign finance laws when his campaign paid to run ads for Republican House candidates in Arizona — charges the McCain campaign said are “baseless.” The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee filed a FEC complaint Tuesday against McCain and his campaign committee, Friends of John McCain, because of recent ads backing Ruth McClung, the GOP nominee in Arizona’s 7th District, and Jesse Kelly, who is running in the 8th District. The complaint also asks the FEC to investigate whether McClung, Kelly and their respective campaign committees...

Comparisons are always a great way to show how differently the Old Media treats conservative and leftist politicians in America today and Obama's nomination of the Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court gives us another opportunity to see the Old Media's penchant to excoriate a Republican's actions while soft peddling and excusing away similar actions by a left-winger. In this case, it is instructive to see how the Old Media treated the claim that Sarah Palin banned books from the Wasilla library when she was mayor and today how it is treating the recently highlighted Supreme Court arguments made...

WASHINGTON, D.C., June 17, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Delayed, but not undaunted, the leadership of the Democrat-controlled U.S. Congress may force a Thursday vote on a new campaign finance bill, the Orwellian-named “Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections (DISCLOSE) Act” that has pro-life, pro-family groups, and even the ACLU crying foul. Critics say the measure will have a chilling effect on political free speech, especially with mid-term elections just around the corner. Late Wednesday afternoon, National Right to Life Legislative Director Douglas Johnson told LifeSiteNews.com that the House Rules Committee was meeting at that moment to make...

Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) on Monday accused the Supreme Court of a constitutional power grab. In a nearly hour-long floor speech, Specter said the court had ignored congressional will and ceded federal power to the presidency. The outgoing senator, defeated in a Democratic primary last month, criticized Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito by name, saying both had paid “lip service” to Congress during their confirmation hearings. Specter also urged his committee colleagues to take an especially sharp look at Solicitor General Elena Kagan, whose confirmation hearings for the Court begin next Monday. Otherwise, he said Congress risks...

Senator John McCain's record as a staunch conservative came under fire during his Yuma town hall meeting Friday evening at Booth Machinery, prompting the senator to fire back in his own defense with a level of fiery passion reminiscent of his younger days. “It seems to me that every time you run for election you tack very much to the right…” Steve Replogle, a member of the Colorado River Tea Party, told McCain during the town hall. “I have personal questions in regards to your positions. You have at times advocated cap and trade… amnesty, and the McCain-Feingold Bill made...

Editor: It's time to retire Senator John McCain, 73, who's been in office 24 years. Contrary to how he depicts himself, McCain has been a big government globalist during his entire senatorial career. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which is dedicated to one-world government and the relinquishment of all national sovereignties. McCain is a RINO (Republican In Name Only), a closet Democrat. Suddenly running scared, and with a $5 million campaign war chest to spend, McCain is blitzing TV with ads in support of securing the border: a 360-degree turnaround. If you're wondering why...

“Senator Obama is a decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States.” – John McCain – Oct. 10, 2008, Town Hall in Lakeville, Minn. U.S. Senator John McCain must be confident Arizona voters have amnesia regarding his approval of Barack Obama’s presidential timber. Never mind that Barry Soetoro, aka, Barack Obama had a prolonged record of close associations involving socialists, communists, militants, racist clerics, labor unions, ACORN and the corrupt Chicago political machine reminiscent of Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall. Forget how Senator McCain continues to confer the President...

KINGMAN — A former Arizona Congressman campaigned in Kingman Saturday, railing against his Republican rival, U.S. Sen. John McCain, as well as Democrats. Republican candidate John David Hayworth, 51, held a town hall, which drew about 125 people to a Kingman church. Hayworth was a conservative six-term U.S. Congressman until 2007, after which he hosted a Phoenix radio talk show. Arizona House Rep. Nancy McLain, R-Bullhead City, said Hayworth has been “banging the drum” about border security for years now unlike someone who has an election year conversion, she added without mentioning McCain by name. She also formerly endorsed Heyworth...

(D-N.Y.), Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) plan to unveil legislation to close campaign-finance loopholes opened by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. The legislation was written in consultation with the White House. Here are details that have been circulated to Democratic congressional staffers, and were obtained by POLITICO:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Republican Party asked the Supreme Court on Friday to allow political parties to raise unlimited contributions, the latest outgrowth of the court's decision to unleash corporate and labor spending in federal elections. The filing sought to undo the ban on the raising of soft money — unlimited donations from corporations, unions and others — by national party committees. The GOP said the Supreme Court's rationale in January for removing restrictions on corporate and union spending in federal elections should lead to a similar removal of the restriction on such fundraising by national political parties. The soft...

(snip) Elias and other observers say that the day of reckoning for possible McCain support is Aug. 24, when Arizona voters take to the polls to decide the 2008 GOP presidential nominee’s fate against his primary opponent, GOP former Rep. J.D. Hayworth. Many observers speculate that after the primary, McCain may pivot toward the middle and could ultimately back a Schumer-Van Hollen bill.“Perhaps he’s planning on voting for it, but because of political considerations or other things he just doesn’t want to be out front,” Elias said. “At the end of the day, it may very well be that he...

From NBC's Mark Murray A new Research 2000/Daily Kos poll shows Arizona Sen. John McCain with a comfortable 15-point lead over GOP primary challenger J.D. Hayworth, 52%-37%. Interestingly, both men are viewed favorably among Arizona Republicans. McCain's fav/unfav with them is 76%-19%, and Hayworth's is 61%-16%.

So yeah, I'm getting sick and tired of how people are bashing Sarah Palin over her endorsement of McCain. We all know why she's doing it and she has my complete respect and support. So, anyway, conservatives are fighting amongst each other over this and it really is pathetic! On Sarah's Facebook page, people keep lamenting, whining and moaning over it, and I kept calmly trying to calm them down, but they wouldn't listen. Finally, I lost it and said: "FOR GOD'S SAKE, PEOPLE, PULL YOURSELVES TOGETHER!!!!! THIS IS NOT HOW A GROUP OF PATRIOTS ACTS!!!!!!!! SERIOUSLY, DOES SOMEONE HAVE...

A group of US senators Wednesday launched a bipartisan caucus aimed at promoting global Internet freedom, saying the Web should allow free speech and not be used by governments to crack down on dissent. (snip) Other top senators in the caucus included Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, Dick Durbin of Illinois, and former Republican presidential candidate John McCain of Arizona. "The fundamental freedom of all people to speak, associate, and develop their full potential is inextricably linked to the freedom of the Internet and all communications online," said McCain."But governments that deny the basic rights of their people are now building...

Campaign staff and volunteers of Sen. John McCain and his former vice presidential running mate Sarah Palin are preparing for the pair’s appearance at Mesa’s Dobson High School on Saturday. A spokesman for the camp offered a bit of advice for those wanting to get in: “Folks should get there early,” said Brian Rogers, McCain’s communications director.The event is free, on a first-come, first-served basis and does not require a ticket. (snip) Also speaking at a rally in Tucson on Friday, the appearances are McCain and Palin’s first ones together at a public event since their concession speech in the...

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Hillary Clinton will not easily be mistaken for Sir Winston Churchill, but our nation’s Secretary of State borrowed a metaphor from old “Winnie” recently when lecturing on the importance of freedom on the Internet. As the former British Prime Minister warned of the communist “iron curtain” descending on Eastern Europe at the beginning of the Cold War, Secretary Clinton has warned of an “information curtain” falling in those nations where governments have used modern technology to suppress and plunder, rather than facilitate, the flow of information among peoples and nations. The Secretary made her comments in Washington on January 21,...

FORT WORTH, Texas | Former President George W. Bush turned to his faith amid the tough times during his eight years in office, he said Saturday at a religious school's banquet.

(snip) His loathing for McCain has a long history. “I don’t like him,” Tancredo said. “He is not a very pleasant person. He is nasty, mean; the skin of an onion would look deep compared to his. He has a short fuse, he is almost peculiarly unstable.” He still remembers his first encounter with the senator from Arizona. In 1999, Tancredo was elected to the House with 54 percent of the votes in his Colorado district. “When you win with less than 55 percent of the vote, you are seen as vulnerable. So then the party will go out to...

In critiquing Glenn Beck’s CPAC speech taking the Republican Party to task for failing to own up to its Big Government lapses, Bill Bennett cites various Republicans who have admitted the party’s culpability. But see if you can spot the glaring problem with his defense of the GOP: From Jim DeMint to Tom Coburn to Mike Pence to Paul Ryan, any number of Republicans have admitted the excesses of the party and done constructive and serious work to correct them and find and promote solutions. Even John McCain has said again and again that “the Republican party lost its way.”...

Please help. I plan to keep this thread alive until McCain loses the primary. Let's NAIL THAT RINO! Please help scout for headlines to bring here. I will ping people here once a week with choice headlines and links. [Since it's the OPPOSITE of high volume, several have already signed on.] If you would like to be on this once-a-week ping list, please let me know. Any helpful links will be appreciated. "The most recent online scores from the American Conservative Union are from 2008. In that year, John McCain scored 63 and had a lifetime average of 81.43. ......

When we conceived the RINO FREE AMERICA PROJECT ON FREE REPUBLIC, we envisioned Conservative activism that would send RINOs packing and replacing them with true Conservatives worthy of our support. NOW we need your help to defeat the biggest RINO of all. Many of us here on Free Republic have been cheering JD Hayworth on because John McCain is possibly the worst, (and most powerful,) RINO serving in the Senate today and he simply MUST be defeated lest he betray us again as he has so many times throughout his less than stellar tenure. While "the force" might be...

No matter what you think of J.D. Hayworth — former Congressman, talk-show host, anti-illegal immigration hardliner and Abramoff-scarred beneficiary — one thing you’ve got to like about him is that he is mounting a primary challenge to Sen. John McCain (R, Media) in Arizona. That would be the head RINO-in-chief and First Amendment enemy — RIP, McCain/Feingold! — who threw the election to Barack Obama in 2008 by taking everything that was interesting and/or objectionable about the former Barry Soetoro — his past, his associates, even his name — off the table and thus gave himself exactly zero chance to...

Nothing—not even George W. Bush—has sent liberaldom screaming into the streets more than the Supreme Court's recent 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The Court's ruling that corporations have a free-speech right to express opinions about politicians running for office really let the furies out. President Obama's in-their-face criticism of the Supreme Court over Citizens United at his State of the Union speech got pundits on every blogger barstool chattering about the propriety of this public smackdown. That's nothing compared to how the Supremes smack each other inside their public decisions. Justice John Paul Stevens dismissed the...

It's a good bet that the conversation in the Supreme Court break room the morning after the president's State of the Union speech was about Obama's drive-by distortion of its ruling in Citizens United v. FEC. Predictably, the spin at The Washington Post and Chicago Tribune was "Alito Disparages Obama's Supreme Court Criticism." Where else but in the Bizarro World of Obama's branch offices at the Post, Trib, and MS-NBC could we find such a polar opposite version of "reality"? Like their champion, these media corporations are extremely vexed that the Court leveled the playing field for all corporations and...

A major provision of the “Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002″, aka McCain-Feingold, was largely dismissed by the Supreme Court on January 21, 2010. President Obama’s reaction was swift and almost comically over the top. -... We are going to talk with bipartisan Congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision. The public interest requires nothing less.Uh-oh! Whenever they use the term “bipartisan” you know they’re trying to sucker us. It’s become as transparent as their disingenuous names for bills like the so called “Stimulus” which was supposed to fund “shovel ready jobs” and instead went to non-existent...

In 2000, Senator John McCain asked me to campaign on his behalf for president. I was honored to do so. I remember traveling to South Carolina to act as a one-man truth squad and doing countless television interviews for John. It was a tremendous experience and, as we all know, John came up short. But as always, he fought hard for what he thought was right. But the John McCain I supported for president in 2000 is not the same John McCain I’ve watched frustrate conservatives time and again as our senator. He still fights hard, all right, but too...

MANCHESTER – U.S. Rep. Paul Hodes, D-N.H., said yesterday he intends to introduce a proposed constitutional amendment to overturn a controversial U.S. Supreme Court decision last week that removed corporate and other special interest campaign spending limits. "The upcoming election in New Hampshire should be decided by the people of the Granite State, not special interests with unlimited cash," said Hodes, who is a candidate for the U.S. Senate. "Washington is broken, and this will only make business as usual worse." Hodes said he has been "fighting to stop the power of money in politics and now, after consulting with...

Senate Democrats, taking a cue from President Obama, are ripping into Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito for his understandable (and understated) display of disagreement with the president's misrepresentation of a recent court decision. During last week's State of the Union Address, recall, Obama launched into an unpresidential attack on the court's upending of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance act. Obama incorrectly claimed the ruling -- in which Alito joined the 5-4 majority -- would permit foreign corporate campaign contributions in US elections.

In his State of the Union address, the president of the United States called out the Supreme Court by name for sharp condemnation and egged on his congressional supporters to jeer its recent decision: "Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in our elections. Well I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people, and that's why I'm urging Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps...

A broken clock...

Sen. Orrin Hatch said Wednesday that President Barack Obama was out of line to use his State of the Union speech to criticize the Supreme Court while six of its members sat nearby. "Taking on the Supreme Court like he did, I thought it was kind of rude," said Hatch, a Utah Republican and former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. "It's one thing to say that he differed with the court but another thing to demagogue the issue while the court is sitting there out of respect for his position." Obama called on Congress to "correct" the court's decision...

From the commentary in the mainstream media, I thought there had been a coup d'etat in Washington. The New York Times said what happened "strikes at the heart of democracy." The Washington Post quoted an authority who warned it "threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the nation." No, not the Scott Brown victory. The media were upset because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that forbidding corporations and labor unions to spend money on political speech before elections is unconstitutional. A horrendous section of the abomination known as McCain-Feingold campaign-finance "reform" had bitten the dust. It was long...

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A full year into his presidency we suddenly discover what it takes to get Barack Obama all worked up. Not terrorism. In the president's estimation, a near repeat of the Lockerbie bombing Christmas Day wasn't worth remarking on until three days later. Not the risk of a fiscal doomsday. Only after 12 months of joint one-party rule to secure his place as the biggest-spending president in history does he call for a bipartisan spending-restraint commission and a spending freeze. Both the commission and the freeze don't come along until the fall at the earliest, if they materialize at all. But...

John McCain clings to more liberal positions than almost any other Republican in Congress. Whether encouraging economic suicide by standing against drilling in Alaska, putting the nation's security at risk by equating waterboarding with torture, demanding the shuttering of Guantanamo, joining hands with Ted Kennedy to open the floodgates of amnesty to illegal immigrants, nothing seems to satisfy his vanity more than hearing compliments from the leftist press after crossing over to the other side of the aisle. Now that the Supreme Court has declared much of his crown legislative jewel -- the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (McCain-Feingold) -- to...

It was rather incredible for Barack Obama to express outrage over the Supreme Court's pruning of McCain-Feingold's regulation of public financing and corporate campaign donations, since in June 2008 Obama became the first presidential candidate to forgo public financing in the general election, expecting that by doing so he could raise several millions more, much of it from the Wall Street and big-money interests that he now serially demonizes. The problem with Obama's hypocrisy is not just that, like most politicians, he does not do what he says, but that he fudges so vehemently and loudly and, to be candid,...

THE U.S. SUPREME Court has corrected a mistake it made in 2003, when it upheld a major flaw in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act of 2002. The reform measure, which the Times supported, made several important and positive changes in campaign finance law. It placed a ban on so-called soft money contributions — funds given to political parties and political action committees. Also, the act provided for quick disclosure of the source of all campaign donations and capped direct contribution to candidates. Unfortunately, McCain-Feingold went a step too far in abridging First Amendment free-speech rights by banning corporations and...

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--U.S. President Barack Obama used his weekly radio address on Saturday to assail a Supreme Court ruling this week clearing the way for corporations to spend freely on political advertisements, calling it a big victory for special interests and "devastating to the public interest." He added that his administration is working with Congress to develop a bipartisan legislative solution to override the ruling. "The last thing we need to do is hand more influence to the lobbyists in Washington, or more power to the special interests to tip the outcome of elections," Obama said in his address.