Free Republic

Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Texas) announced Friday that he is resigning from Congress immediately after facing a backlash over using $84,000 in taxpayer funds to settle a sexual harassment claim. "While I planned on serving out the remainder of my term in Congress, I know in my heart it's time for me to move along and look for new ways to serve," Farenthold said in a statement. The abrupt resignation is effective as of 5 p.m. on Friday, according to his office. Lauren Greene, the congressman's former communications director, sued her boss over allegations he fostered a hostile work environment where...

The nation’s top conservative donors and fundraisers are increasingly alarmed by the prospect of a midterm election wave that could cost Republicans control of the House. But the party’s deep-pocketed donors aren’t ready to abandon their efforts to keep the House in GOP hands — not yet at least. More than a half-dozen senior Republican donors and fundraisers interviewed by The Hill acknowledged that protecting the Senate majority might at some point become the only sensible investment for Republican donors. There is growing frustration among donors with the GOP-controlled House — most recently over the passage of a massive budget...

By KYLE CHENEY 03/23/2018 02:17 PM EDT Updated 03/23/2018 03:01 PM EDT Share on Facebook Share on Twitter A Virginia Beach man was charged Friday with threatening to murder his local congressman, Rep. Scott Taylor (R-Va.), the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia announced Friday. According to court documents, Wallace Grove Godwin, 69, visited Taylor's office on Thursday and threatened to shoot him and two staffers at a Saturday event. The dispute arose, according to the District Attorney's office, over a discussion about marijuana policy. “Scott is having an event this Saturday. I am going to get my...

Voters in Illinois head to the polls this Tuesday. They should vote for Jeanne Ives in the Republican gubernatorial primary over the thoroughly disappointing incumbent governor Bruce Rauner, who has forfeited any claim on his party's nod. Failing to pass the fiscal reforms he promised wouldn’t alone justify his ouster in the primary. But Rauner’s duplicity on the issue of abortion should be disqualifying to conservatives. During the election, Rauner — who is pro-choice, had once donated to Planned Parenthood, and whose wife is an abortion-rights activist — insisted that he was merely running to fix the state’s coffers. He...

Openly atheist Democrat Gayle Jordan lost a special election on Tuesday to fill a vacant seat in the Tennessee Senate. Republican Shane Reeves won in a landslide, according to unofficial results from the Tennessee secretary of state. He received 13,139 votes compared to 5,179 votes for Jordan. Reeves will fill a seat vacated by Republican Jim Tracy after he resigned to serve as state director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Development office. Jordan is executive director of Recovering from Religion, a group that supports people who wish to leave their faith behind. She is a former Southern Baptist...

ITTSBURGH — About four years after having to overcome negative ads from his own party to win a state Senate seat, Scott Wagner was first to speak at a major GOP committee dinner as the party's endorsed candidate for the state's highest office. Aboard a chartered plane from Harrisburg on his way to the Republican Committee for Allegheny County's annual Lincoln Day Dinner, Wagner said he started building relationships with Republicans statewide after his historic 2014 write-in campaign. The Spring Garden Township resident and owner of Penn Waste was forced to run as a write-in after the state party endorsed...

But Republicans said they worried their ranks would bear the brunt of the shift as young people moved away from party orthodoxy on issues like guns, gay marriage and climate change.

Freeper Inputs on Texas Primary results, turnout, key races, outcomes.

Eric Greitens, a Democrat turned Republican, who also happens to be the Governor of the Show-Me State was indicted and booked last week on a felony invasion of privacy charge. The grand jury indictment stems from a photo that Greitens, a married man, allegedly snapped of a partially clad lover during a sexual tryst in the basement of his home in the spring of 2015, one year before his winning gubernatorial campaign. This is a big story, one that has great ramifications for state and national politics. It is a commentary on the crashing of a promising career. It includes...

The Democratic rebuttal memo to the Republican House Intelligence Committee memo on alleged government surveillance abuses was released Saturday afternoon. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., acknowledged its release at his appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, at about 4 p.m. "It's just posted," he told American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp, quipping that the committee website was probably already crashing due to high traffic. Democrats say their memo was written as a rebuttal to provide greater context to a Republican memo that was released earlier this month, which outlines abuses by the FBI and the Justice Department...

The Trump administration is considering an offer from Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson to pay for at least part of a new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, four U.S. officials told The Associated Press. Lawyers at the State Department are looking into the legality of accepting private donations to cover some or all of the embassy costs, the administration officials said. The discussions are occurring as the new embassy clears its final bureaucratic hurdles. On Thursday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson ended weeks of delay by signing off on a security plan for moving the embassy from Tel Aviv to the holy...

There is a need we all have in these days and times for some help which comes from outside ourselves as we face the multitude of problems... Once in a while it might be a good thing for us to turn back to history. Let us study a little bit of what happened at the founding of this Nation. It's not merely the events that led up to the Revolutionary War. All of the confused problems that we were then called upon to solve were as difficult as those we face now... So when we came down to the Declaration...

Tuesday on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity” following President Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) gave Trump high marks for the speech. Cruz applauded Trump for highlighting the various personal stories of his invited guests and called it a “strong night” for Trump. “The president did an incredible job highlighting the parents of those who have lost their children to MS-13 and violent illegal aliens,” Cruz said. “Highlighting heroes, whether police officers and coastguardsmen or first responders across the country. And the president did a tremendous job overall focusing on jobs, on wages going up,...

The Democrats have overreached on forcing this latest federal government shutdown. Prioritizing illegal children brought here under Obama’s illegal DACA program before 9 million American children who are U.S. citizens and will lose their insurance and 2 million military members who will be asked to work without pay… The SchumerShutdown is the latest disgusting act by the Democrats. But they are starting to crack. Democrat Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill) said on ABC’s This Week on Sunday morning that he thinks “the wall is a monumental waste of taxpayers’ money, and it’s to build a monument to stupidity and it’s just...

You can watch and listen to the discussion by clicking the URL-LINK in the post. Opportunities abound for negotiating a better NAFTA. As the Trump Administration pushes for modernization, one commonsense policy area that should be preserved and improved is energy.

Grassroots support for Jeanne Ives’ gubernatorial bid continues to grow. Today, she adds the backing of the Wheeling Township Republican Organization (WTRO). Ninety percent (90%) of WTRO’s precinct captains voted to endorse Ives over incumbent Governor Bruce Rauner. Wheeling Township is a Republican stronghold. In 2014, more Republican primary votes were cast in Wheeling Township than in 89 of Illinois’ 102 counties.

Republican David Yancey will keep his seat in the Virginia House of Delegates after a state official pulled his name out of a bowl Thursday, deciding a contest that ended in a tie in November. Yancey and Democrat Shelly Simonds each received 11,608 votes in their Newport News-based district. Initial results showed Yancey leading by just ten votes. A recount gave Simonds a one-vote edge. But Republicans challenged a single ballot, resulting in a tie. Democrats sued to overturn the challenge, but on Wednesday a three-judge panel rejected their complaint. That led to Thursday’s drawing, in Richmond, out of a...

The Republican Party is sick, so sick it can’t breathe, and its lack of oxygen has given it severe muscle fatigue. There’s a chance that what ails the GOP is terminal, but to give ourselves a chance at recovery, we’ve got to move—physically. The party’s national committees, think-tank brains, campaign strategists, and government functionaries all live in the fever swamps of Washington that firmly anchor the snotty southern end of the Acela Corridor. The GOP’s elected and unelected leaders all want to heal the party, but no amount of voodoo will cure this disease. It’s time to move our whole...

Former Texas Rep. Ron Paul says a yearlong economic boom under President Trump is “a bit of an illusion” and that debt, inflation, and inequality could cause turmoil that benefits a “hardcore nucleus” of libertarians. The libertarian Republican leader told the Washington Examiner that Trump could face a strong challenger in the 2020 GOP primary, especially if “things are really much worse." “The big opening for us is the fact that this system is coming apart. We’re on the verge of something like what happened in ‘89 when the Soviet system just collapsed,” he said. “I’m just hoping our system...

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said opponents of the Republican tax reform plan did all they could to stop it and essentially conceded defeat before a vote scheduled for Tuesday. Sanders said on CBS’ “Face The Nation” there were too many forces opposing Democrats that they could not overcome. “We did everything that we could. But at the end of the day what you had is people like [Treasury Secretary Steven] Mnuchin, who is worth $300 to 400 million; the president of the United States, who is worth several billion dollars, as you mentioned; from four or five thousand lobbyists doing...