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With the federal government engaged in a de facto unconstitutional occupation of some two thirds of Utah’s territory, citizens of the state and their elected representatives have had just about enough. So, on December 31, the State of Utah is formally demanding that Washington, D.C., relinquish control over more than 30 million acres of valuable land currently controlled by various federal bureaucracies. While apparatchiks for an all-powerful U.S. government and far-left activists are fuming over the plan, Utah lawmakers, citizens, and experts say the time has come for the state to manage — and profit from — its own resources....

Editor's note: This piece was co-authored by Tim Graham.Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. Elizabeth Warren are polar opposites, a Tea Party conservative and an Occupy Wall Street socialist. Then there are the similarities: Both were elected in 2012, both have Harvard on their resume and both are mentioned as presidential material. But the media's read of the two demonstrates an unquestionable slant. Both senators have shaken up the Senate over heavy spending and regulation. When Warren does it, she's promoted as a profile in courage, standing up for fairness. When Cruz does it, he's a selfish brat causing meltdowns. On...

That didn't take long The 2016 Republican primary battle is up and running—at least on Google. Hours after former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush announced he would “actively explore” a run for the White House, the political action committee for Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who appears certain to announce a bid for the Oval Office in the coming months, took out a Google search ad on his name, with a not-so-subtle dig at the more moderate Republican. “Join a movement working to shrink government. Not grow it,” the ad states, with a link to RandPAC, Paul’s longstanding federal leadership committee, and...

He didn’t say whether he had a particular moderate in mind. Any theories? Cruz, a deeply conservative Texas Republican and likely 2016 candidate himself, called Bush a “good governor in Florida,” before warning against nominating a centrist Republican. He didn’t specifically place Bush in that category, but the implication was clear: Bush, the son of former President George H.W. Bush and the brother of former President George W. Bush, is far more moderate than the Republican base is on a host of issues including immigration and education.“If we nominate another candidate in the mold of a Bob Dole or a...

<p>Earlier Tuesday, a federal court in Pennsylvania declared aspects of President Obama’s executive actions on immigration policy unconstitutional.</p> <p>According to the opinion by Judge Arthur Schwab, the president’s policy goes “beyond prosecutorial discretion” in that it provides a relatively rigid framework for considering applications for deferred action, thus obviating any meaningful case-by-case determination as prosecutorial discretion requires, and provides substantive rights to applicable individuals. As a consequence, Schwab concluded, the action exceeds the scope of executive authority.</p>

Most Americans don’t watch C-SPAN and I cannot blame them. More often than not, it seems as though the Senate is in a quorum call or a lone senator is debating something totally irrelevant to the issues that are important to most Americans. That changed a little bit on Saturday when Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Utah Sen. Mike Lee forced the Senate to debate President Obama’s executive amnesty. I’ll save you the boring back-and-forth that occurred in our nation’s capital over the procedural stuff and cut right to the chase: Ted and Mike were attempting to carry out the...

Ted Cruz privately apologized to GOP senators Tuesday for interrupting their holiday schedules by his surprise tactics that effectively brought the Senate into session over the weekend. According to five senators who attended Tuesday’s caucus lunch, Cruz offered the apology in unsolicited remarks, saying that he regretted if any of his colleagues’ schedules were ruined by his maneuvering. He didn’t say whether he would do something similar again, senators said. And unlike a contentious lunch last year after GOP senators pointedly blamed Cruz for prompting the government shutdown, no sharp words were directed at the Texas freshman at Tuesday’s lunch,...

Sen. Mike Lee is defending the weekend's acrimony-inducing Senate session, explaining that it was important to get a vote on the constitutionality of President Obama’s executive amnesty.“It’s always worth it when you stand behind the American people, who want to make sure these that things are being voted on,” Lee said during an appearance Monday on Fox News. “When we have a president who engages in acts of lawlessness and behaves as if he were a government of one. It’s always worth it to stand up for the American people and get a vote on whether or not the president...

Sen. Ted Cruz, the firebrand conservative freshman from Texas, has blown up the Senate leadership’s plans to have a peaceful weekend by forcing round-the-clock votes on President Obama’s nominees and the $1.1 trillion omnibus.Cruz took to the floor late Friday to castigate congressional leaders for trying to pass the 1,600-page spending bill after only a few hours of debate and questioned the resolve of Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to fight Obama’s executive order protecting five million illegal immigrants from deportation.“Even though millions of voters rose up just one month ago to protest how...

On Friday evening, the Senate's leaders, Mitch McConnell and and Harry Reid thought they had an agreement from their members to let the clock run over the weekend without actually being in session, and vote Monday on the $1.1 trillion spending bill needed to keep the government up and running. But Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah objected to the spending bill. This meant their colleagues in the Senate would have to hold a rare Saturday session to keep the spending bill moving. It also had the unintended benefit of helping the Democrats move forward with...

Other than the Koch brothers, there is arguably no one outgoing-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid disdains more than the Tea Party. And no one represents the Tea Party in the Senate more than Texas Senator Ted Cruz. Yet, after hours of tedious wrangling, Reid on Friday agreed to allow a vote on a measure from Cruz questioning the constitutionality of President Obama’s executive order on Deferred Action, which does, in effect, grant de facto amnesty to upwards of 5 million illegal aliens. Cruz told Breitbart News that a Senate vote on Obama’s executive action was important for two reasons: “First,...

It’s a question that will prove crucial next year when Mitch McConnell takes the reins of a new Senate: Just how big is the Ted Cruz caucus? Three votes on the “cromnibus” late Saturday night suggest it could be as large as 22 senators — a dangerously high number for McConnell — or as few as a handful. Let’s break down the three votes — on filibustering the $1.1 trillion package, on Cruz’s point of order aimed at targeting the president’s immigration action, and final passage. The high-water mark for the Texas Republican came on his point of order vote,...

Jeb Bush does. The Democrats’ Castro brothers do not. Ted Cruz knows ‘Spanglish.’ But fluency and being able to talk to Hispanics are two entirely different matters.The ability to speak Spanish is a prized commodity on the campaign trail, a way to prove your bona fides with Hispanics—the fastest-growing bloc of voters—and to show your inclusiveness in a rapidly changing country. Lots of Anglos are proficient in Spanish. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a potential presidential candidate, speaks nothing but Spanish at home, and has for years. His wife, Columba, is from Mexico. A more recent phenomenon in the political...

Sen. Kelly Ayotte returned home to New Hampshire Friday, planning to see “The Nutcracker” with her daughter this weekend. But there was an unexpected conflict: Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Cruz, along with Utah Sen. Mike Lee, took to the floor Friday night to demand Republicans stop President Barack Obama’s executive action on immigration and scuttled a bipartisan agreement to push back votes until Monday, effectively forcing the Senate to return for a rare weekend session and cast a marathon series of procedural votes. Senior Republicans say there’s a problem with Cruz’s strategy: The GOP lacks the votes to stop Obama...

Other members of the Senate fumed Saturday over objections by Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) that held up a $1.1 trillion omnibus bill meant to keep the government open. The objection was fueled by the two conservatives' desire to fight President Barack Obama's executive action on immigration. The objections by Cruz and Lee mean that the Senate must slog through procedural votes Saturday on nominees and also vote to end a filibuster on the omnibus bill at 1 a.m. on Sunday. It was too much for Democrats and even Republicans to bite their tongues over....

After hours of debate on the massive government spending package, the Senate adjourned until Saturday, pushing a fight that dominated Congress for days into the weekend. The Senate is expected to vote Monday on the $1.1 trillion package, which has already passed the House, Sens. Mitch McConnell and Barbara Mikulski said late Friday. Members from both parties in the Senate are trying to make last-minute changes to the bill. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid made a procedural move Friday that would set up a vote on final passage in the Senate no later than Monday. In a surprise development, the...

enate Majority Leader Harry Reid is keeping senators in Washington for a rare Saturday session—and risking a government shutdown—after he went to extraordinary lengths to block Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) from forcing a vote to block President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty.

http://uneditedpolitics.com/utah-senator-mike-lee-floor-speech-on-the-cromnibus-121214/

WASHINGTON – Republican Sens. Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Jeff Sessions are pushing for a vote to defund President Obama’s executive amnesty in the “Cromnibus” spending bill Friday night, The Daily Caller has learned. The trio of conservative senators is hoping to get the defund vote onto the Senate floor as a “point of order,” which would force a procedural vote on the issue without Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid having to introduce it. The senators are pushing hard on Capitol Hill for the measure as of early Friday afternoon. If successful, the vote would take place late Friday...

Senate Republicans had no appetite for discussing how to thwart President Obama’s executive orders on immigration during the conference’s weekly lunch, according to a source familiar with the meeting. Senator Mike Lee (R., Utah) and Senator David Vitter (R., La.) tried to broach the topic, but were ignored. “At different times, Lee and Vitter stood up and tried to begin a discussion about what the plan was and asked leadership about what their strategy was to deal with the spending bill and respond to Obama executive amnesty, and the reply was always an effort to try to change the subject...