Free Republic

Not much is truly known about where House Speaker John Boehner stands on immigration reform. He says he wants it done, but has barely waded into the policy. But in a closed meeting with his closest Capitol Hill allies — a group informally known as Team Boehner — he’s giving more clues. Rubio talked about the Senate Gang of Eight immigration bill, according to sources familiar with the meeting. Boehner didn’t heavily weigh in on the legislation, but the fact that he would welcome Rubio in to talk about the bill. shows that the speaker is actively gaming out the...

Former president George W. Bush’s popularity is ticking up. For the first time since 2005, Americans’ opinions of him are more positive than negative. A Gallup poll released Wednesday found 49 percent of Americans view him favorably and 46 percent unfavorably. Mr. Bush has chosen to remain largely out of the public eye since leaving the White House. He told CNN last year that “Eight years was awesome, and I was famous and I was powerful but I have no desire for fame and power any more.” When Bush left office in January 2009, he had a 40 percent favorable...

In 2007, John McCain’s “comprehensive” immigrant-legalization bill failed after opponents flooded the Senate with calls, shutting down the switchboard. Despite considerable press hype, the bill didn’t even muster a majority on the crucial cloture vote. It won’t be that easy this time. For one thing, they have a better switchboard, I’m told. For another, the Republican consultants–e.g. Gillespie, Rove–who helped Mitt Romney lose the 2012 election have taken their own failure as an excuse to push what they’ve wanted all along–a business-pleasing immigration policy guaranteeing a supply of inexpensive labor from abroad and a stream of campaign donations to pay...

Documents Reveal that ‘Dreamers’ Order Opened Door to Relatives of Illegal Immigrants, “Inundating” Border Towns with Petitions for AdmissionJudicial Watch announced today that documents obtained recently through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request show that the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) abandoned required background checks late last year, adopting, instead, costly “lean and lite” procedures in effort to keep up with the flood of amnesty applications spurred by President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) directive, which grants illegal aliens a two-year deferment from deportation. Acting on a tip from a whistleblower...

House Speaker John Boehner today called NSA leaker Edward Snowden a “traitor” who put Americans at risk by releasing classified information to the media. “He’s a traitor,” the highest ranking Republican in the House of Representatives said in an extensive interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos. “The disclosure of this information puts Americans ... continued here

House Speaker John A. Boehner on Thursday flatly ruled out chances of the House passing the Senate’s immigration bill, saying his chamber will debate its own bill instead. Mr. Boehner and his top GOP lieutenants issued a joint statement that seemed designed to tamp down some of the momentum behind the Senaate bill, which emerged from a Senate committee on a bipartisan 13-5 vote earlier this week, and to stake out a House GOP position

"We’ve had probably five or six lunches with a bunch of Republican senators standing and looking at Rand and Mike and me and yelling at us at the top of their lungs. I mean really upset. And they said, ‘Look, why did you do this? As a result of this I go home and constituents are yelling at me that I gotta stand on principal.” I’m really not making that up. I don’t even bother to argue with them… But, here was their argument. They said, ‘Before you did this the politics on this were all great. The Dems were...

Alex Conant @AlexConant: "We haven't had a cohort of people living permanently in US without full rights of citizenship since slavery". Mind you, he isn’t talking only about illegal immigrants. He’s talking about any non-citizen who lives in this country permanently, including millions of Green Card holders. And by implication: Conn Carroll @conncarroll: For those of you keeping score at home, Rubio spokesman @AlexConant just compared all Schumer-Rubio opponents to slave owners If this is Team Rubio’s strategy for winning over conservatives, good luck with that.

Washington, Apr. 19 (ANI): Failed presidential candidate Mitt Romney has said President Barack Obama gave a 'superb' speech at a memorial service honoring the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings.

House Republicans are moving quickly on a new bill to strengthen ObamaCare's temporary insurance plan for people with pre-existing conditions.... The Obama administration announced earlier this year that it would suspend enrollment in the PCIP, citing cost concerns. GOP lawmakers have since mounted a push to transfer money from the law's public and preventive health fund — disparaged as a "slush" fund by Republicans — to reopen the PCIP's enrollment.

The bipartisan Senate “Gang of Eight” pushing immigration reform is moving ahead with its plan to roll out an approximately 1,500-page bill this week despite the bombings that rocked the Boston marathon on Monday. The bill reportedly grants amnesty to the at least 11 million illegal immigrants in America. “Millions of immigrants living illegally in the United States could earn a chance at citizenship under a sweeping Senate proposal to be released Tuesday that would represent the most ambitious overhaul of the nation's immigration system in three decades,” the Washington Post wrote in a breaking news alert late Monday night.

Apparently America has too many jobs so Obama will be spending taxpayer money to support Russia’s defense industry on behalf of Afghanistan. And he’s doing so over the bipartisan objections of Congress from both the right and left and a ban on buying them written into the NDAA. The US Department of Defense said Thursday it plans to sidestep a Congressional ban to purchase 30 helicopters from Russian state-owned defense firm Rosoboronexport, despite objections from US lawmakers who allege that the firm has equipped the Syrian government to commit brutal crimes against civilians.

Hillary Clinton is clearly running for president in 2016, Huffington Post editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington said, but she’s overworking herself and needs to rest. Appearing on ABC’s “This Week,” Huffington said the former secretary of state should have taken more time off before making two speeches this week. … Huffington fears that Clinton is sending women a bad message; that the only way they can succeed is by driving themselves into the ground. …

Commencing with the earliest settlements, America's eventual rise to superpower status was in no small measure due to the continual flow of gifted, venturesome immigrants coming to her shores with little more than their hopes, dreams, skills, and willingness to apply these to forge a new life for themselves and their families. They thirsted for liberty and economic opportunity while accepting the responsibilities of dealing with the risks and privations that lay ahead, collectively achieving their goals through hard work and perseverance. That was then; this is now. Current immigration policy is not only very costly to the taxpayers, who...

By Connor Adams Sheets | March 27 2013 4:55 PM Anger is growing against President Barack Obama the day after he signed into law a spending bill that included a provision opponents have dubbed the "Monsanto Protection Act." That bill, the HR 933 continuing resolution, was mainly aimed at averting a government shutdown and ensuring that the federal government would continue to be able to pay its bills for the next six months. But food and public safety advocates and independent farmers are furious that Obama signed it despite its inclusion of language that they consider to be a gift...

When conservatives complain about the harm that the endless debate schedule had on the 2012 Republican primary candidates, the conversation often turns to the hosts and the moderators. Why are Republican candidates letting someone like ABC’s George Stephanopoulos — a former aide to Democrat Bill Clinton — ask them “gotcha questions” during a GOP primary? Why are GOP presidential hopefuls agreeing to meet for a debate hosted by an outlet like MSNBC, a cable network that has increasingly grown hostile to Republicans as it self-identifies as a liberal news network? As the Republican Party released a 100-page report on Monday...

“The chatter is he's up to something,” says one Florida operative. If Jeb Bush decides to convert his media tour into a presidential bid in a couple years, he won't have to look far for a campaign staff: The well-funded education foundation he runs out his office in a Miami hotel is stacked with former political operatives, a large communications team, and a rapidly growing staff whose work stretches into 40 states. It is common practice for undeclared presidential candidates to build a campaign infrastructure under the guise of a political action committee, but Bush appears to be laying the...

(CNSNews.com) - The U.S. Department of Homeland Security no longer uses control of the actual border as a measure of how well the Border Patrol is doing its job, according to written testimony released today by the Government Accountability Office. The GAO said that by the end of fiscal 2010, the Border Patrol had been able secure “operational control” of only 44 percent of the U.S.-Mexico border. Then, with 56 percent of the border not under “operation control,” DHS simply stopped using “operational control” as a measure of the Border Patrol’s performance. Since then, DHS has counted the number of...

HAGEL APPROVED AS PENTAGON CHIEF BY U.S. SENATE PANEL, CLEARS HURDLE TOWARD CONFIRMATION AS DEFENSE SECRETARY #BREAKING

A top U.S. Republican lawmaker said on Sunday he would support granting citizenship to children who are in the country illegally in a sign that conservatives who oppose immigration amnesty will be playing defense as Congress takes on immigration reform in the coming months. Representative Eric Cantor, the No. 2 Republican in the House of Representatives, said Congress could make quick progress on immigration if lawmakers agreed to give citizenship to children - an idea he opposed when it came up for a vote in 2010 as the DREAM Act. "The best place to begin, I think, is with the...