Free Republic

Over the past eight decades, Congress has gradually relinquished its lawmaking role and left it to the administrative state, said a conservative senator at a Capitol Hill event on Wednesday. “Many Americans now feel that they are not in control of their own government,” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said during an event hosted at the Federalist Society’s fifth annual Executive Branch Review Conference. “The administrative state is designed to be insulated from the will of the people.” The Utah senator said that one way he is working to combat this phenomenon is through an initiative he has started called Article...

Friday at the Irving-Las Colinas Chamber of Commerce in Irving, TX, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said some President Donald Trump political problems were “self-inflicted.” Cruz said, “What I’m trying to do is just ignore the circus.”

Levin said the media’s campaign to take out Trump is designed to “create the impression that the man is unfit for the presidency.” The media was “giddy all throughout the Obama administration,” he said of the establishment media’s partisan coverage. “So now they use their phony news pages to attack.” Levin also argued that the media undermined Israel by leaking classified information on President Trump’s meeting with the Russians. “This is a concerted effort by the media and the Democrat party, and some despicable people within the government … to take out this man,” Levin added. He continued, discussing the...

The American Health Care Act (HR 1628) passed by the House today reduces taxes on the American people by over $1 trillion. The bill abolishes the following taxes imposed by Obama and the Democrat party in 2010 as part of Obamacare: -Abolishes the Obamacare Individual Mandate Tax which hits 8 million Americans each year. -Abolishes the Obamacare Employer Mandate Tax. Together with repeal of the Individual Mandate Tax repeal this is a $270 billion tax cut. -Abolishes Obamacare’s Medicine Cabinet Tax which hits 20 million Americans with Health Savings Accounts and 30 million Americans with Flexible Spending Accounts. This is...

Fresh on the heels of a budget deal that fully funds Planned Parenthood, Donald Trump has signed a religious-liberty executive order that — if reports are correct — is constitutionally dubious, dangerously misleading, and ultimately harmful to the very cause that it purports to protect. In fact, he should tear it up, not start over, and do the actual real statutory and regulatory work that truly protects religious liberty.

WASHINGTON - U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro has decided not to seek the Democratic nomination next year to challenge U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, according to Democratic sources, clearing the way for a likely Senate contest next year between Cruz and U.S Rep. Beto O’Rourke of El Paso. Castro, of San Antonio, is expected to announce soon that he will bypass the contest to focus on his work in the House, which includes a coveted seat on the House Intelligence Committee. ~snip~ Castro declared last summer that he planned to weigh a campaign against Cruz and he has done so during a...

U.S. President Donald Trump has backed off a plan to start the process of withdrawing from the North American free-trade agreement after emergency talks with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto. The White House had been considering an executive order that would have taken the first step toward pulling the U.S. out of NAFTA, senior officials told U.S. media outlets. The directive, drafted by National Trade Council director Peter Navarro and chief strategist Steve Bannon, was ready to be signed later this week or early next. But after word of the order came out in the...

WASHINGTON – Young immigrants brought to the U.S. as children and now here illegally can “rest easy,” President Donald Trump said Friday, telling the “dreamers” they will not be targets for deportation under1 his immigration policies. Trump, in a wide-ranging interview with the Associated Press, said his administration is “not after the dreamers, we are after the criminals.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection sent a self-identified illegal alien with criminal convictions back to a family member’s home in Mexico on Tuesday. USA Today reports that Juan Manuel Montes, 23, is the first illegal alien who applied for temporary protection from lawful deportation to be sent back home after President Donald Trump assumed office. Montes first arrived in the U.S. at nine years old, and applied for a deportation stay under Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), twice. “Court records show he has four convictions: one for shoplifting in January 2016, and three for driving without a...

Pulitzer prize-winning columnist Peggy Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal about the efforts to take out White House strategist Steve Bannon. While offering a candid assessment of Bannon’s shortcomings and strengths, Noonan summarizes Bannon’s populist and nationalist worldview as outlined in a speech he gave at the Vatican in 2014 — a speech that predicted the issues that propelled Trump to victory in 2016. From Noonan’s column: But there’s something low, unseemly and ugly in the efforts to take [Bannon] out so publicly and humiliatingly, to turn him into a human oil spot on the tarmac—this not only from...

Glenn Beck spoke with CNN’s Anderson Cooper tonight about President Trump changing his position on issues like NATO and China this week. Beck––who also weighed in on the behind-the-scenes drama regarding Steve Bannon––said that for a lot of people, Trump was their “last hope” because of how different he was from so many other politicians. And he wondered how all those people feel today. Cooper said that it looks like Trump is now embracing positions that he successfully ran and won against. “The president,” he added, “is on the verge of beginning to look like another Republican who said stuff,...

Over the course of just one day, President Trump declared different positions than he took during the campaign on four issues. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal and at a press conference on Wednesday, President Trump declared that China is not a currency manipulator, entertained the possibility of re-appointing Janet Yellen as chair of the Federal Reserve, asserted that NATO is a relevant alliance and expressed a favorable view of the Export-Import Bank. On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer portrayed the shifts as reactions to changing circumstances rather than an ideological modification.

Are we sure that Trump’s going to end up having to fire Steve Bannon? Between this and the Syria bombing, the nationalists in the White House may just up and quit.If you think these broken promises are big news, wait until Trump comes out in favor of TPP. Mr. Trump said the reason he has changed his mind on one of his signature campaign promises is that China hasn’t been manipulating its currency for months and because taking the step now could jeopardize his talks with Beijing on confronting the threat of North Korea.“They’re not currency manipulators,” Mr. Trump said…Mr....

An estimated 4,000 Somali migrants in the U.S. are expected to be deported by President Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.

Officials say Kushner taking unprecedented role to interfere in foreign policy matters White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner is leading an unprecedented effort to meddle in the White House's National Security Council, causing mayhem for senior staff who say the president's son-in-law is interfering in key foreign policy debates, according to Trump administration officials who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon. Kushner has taken aggressive action to micro-manage the NSC, overshadowing even recently installed National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, according to sources both inside and outside the White House who described Kushner's behavior as highly unusual and damaging to the...