Free Republic

Democrats won’t win back voters they view with contempt. Everyone knows that Republicans have political problems, from their failure to repeal Obamacare to President Trump’s erratic tweets to his sputtering efforts to make populism a governing philosophy. But what about Democrats? While their problems don’t get as much media attention, Democrats are now both the minority party and a toxic brand to much of middle-class America. Take last Friday, when Governor Jim Justice of West Virginia announced he was becoming a Republican. “The Democrats walked away from me,” he told a Trump rally in Huntington. “Today I tell you as...

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., expressed his party's uncertainty about President Trump running for office again in 2020, according to a report Saturday. "They see weakness in this president," McCain told the New York Times. "Look, it's not a nice business we're in." The report takes into consideration interviews from over 75 Republicans from diverse levels of the party. It notes donors and strategists as being more hesitant to stand by a Trump 2020 run, and points out a break from tradition as possible candidates that in prior years may have respectfully laid low this earlier on in the presidency, have...

"Never Trump" may be getting a facelift for 2020. Bill Kristol, editor-at-large of the Weekly Standard, said he has initiated informal talks about creating a "Committee Not to Renominate the President." "We need to take one shot at liberating the Republican Party from Trump, and conservatism from Trumpism," Kristol told the New York Times. After the story was published Saturday afternoon, Kristol shared it on Twitter, with the message: "The task in 2020: 'Liberating the Republican Party from Trump, and conservatism from Trumpism.'" Kristol's disapproval of Trump dates back to the campaign, when the "Never Trumper" pushed for Evan McMullin's...

A Democratic political activist committee (PAC) recently released the results of a new poll showing that white working-class voters prefer Republican policies by a wide margin. The Super PAC connected to House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the House Majority PAC – which was created to restore a Democratic majority in the United States House of Representatives via the 2018 midterm elections – was delivered a warning by the results its own poll, as Democratic House leadership must now rethink its ultra-Left policies concerning the economy. Numbers don’t lie In the House Majority “White Working Class Voters Snapshot,” pollsters...

Who could blame the people who felt abandoned and ignored by the major parties for reaching in despair for a candidate who offered oversimplified answers to infinitely complex questions and managed to entertain them in the process? With hindsight, it is clear that we all but ensured the rise of Donald Trump. I will let the liberals answer for their own sins in this regard. (There are many.) But we conservatives mocked Barack Obama’s failure to deliver on his pledge to change the tone in Washington even as we worked to assist with that failure. It was we conservatives who,...

NEW YORK (AP) — Weary Republicans in Washington may be ready to move on from health care, but conservatives across the United States are warning the GOP-led Congress not to abandon its pledge to repeal the Obama-era health law — or risk a political nightmare in next year’s elections. The Senate’s failure this past week to pass repeal legislation has outraged the Republican base and triggered a new wave of fear. The stunning collapse has exposed a party so paralyzed by ideological division that it could not deliver on its top campaign pledge. After devoting months to the debate and...

"You think that if you don't fight back then maybe they'll like you, stop picking on you, calling you a freak. Well, here's what it is. They don't like you. They don't dislike you. They're afraid of you. You're different. Sooner or later different scares people. Victim or not; make a decision." The Accountant, 2016 The above words are from the film, The Accountant, spoken by the father of the main character, a brilliant man who as a child was diagnosed with Asperger's, a high-functioning form of autism. The father is a career military man, a Colonel who, rather than...

GOP Senate candidates across the country are battling to emerge as the pro-Trump candidate in contested primaries. President Trump’s approval rating might be stagnant nationally, but he still enjoys strong support with many of the GOP primary voters who will decide crucial Senate primaries ahead of the 2018 midterm election. So GOP candidates in states that Trump carried in November are beginning to hammer their opponents as unfaithful supporters of the president to gain an edge in their primaries. One clear example of this trend is in Indiana, where fellow Indiana Republican congressmen Luke Messer and Todd Rokita are poised...

On Twitter I just did a thread about how a new party that would replace the Republicans might come into being. 1. I don't think this can happen by 2018. Not enough prep time. 2. It should not copy the Reform Party and try to start, de novo, all at once. 3. It needs to begin within the GOP but (unlike the Tea Party) ALWAYS with the intention of going solo. 4. A candidate in 2018, for example, would run as an R but affix an "AmericaFirst/MAGA" affiliation. Start getting the brand out. This is key to name recognition on...

A reporter on Fox News last night compared the leadership style of President Trump to that of the late NY Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, as if that’s a bad thing. I beg to differ. Yeah, Steinbrenner was a bitch to work for – he fired Billy Martin alone on 3 different occasions – but here’s the record: While he was running the Yankees, they won more games, more division championships, more league championships and more World Series titles than any other team in Major League Baseball during those 38 seasons. Steinbrenner’s record is so impressive that ESPN, in an article...

By now, the events related to Republicans' plans for health care early Friday morning have reverberated across Washington. Three GOP senators voted down a so-called "skinny repeal" plan, a devastating blow to President Donald Trump and Republican leadership. House Republicans met Friday morning. The closed-door conference was planned to be a discussion where House Speaker Paul Ryan laid out the conference committee structure/next steps. In fact, GOP aides say they were planning to vote to go to conference, appoint conferees and motions to instruct Friday before they left town. That obviously isn't applicable anymore.

Dr. Danusha V. Goska was a lifelong liberal who “could not conceive of ever being anything but a leftist.” Her fantastic column, “Top Ten Reasons I Am No Longer a Leftist,” details how and why her philosophies changed. How far left was I? So far left my beloved uncle was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in a Communist country. When I returned to his Slovak village to buy him a mass card, the priest refused to sell me one. So far left that a self-identified terrorist proposed marriage to me. So far left I was a two-time Peace...

Newt Gingrich explained on Sean Hannity's show on Fox News that Republicans are passive when it comes to examining the corruption of the Democratic Party and the Clintons.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKHSVEWukRw  

The American political system has never quite seen anything like the current opposition to President Trump and his unusual reaction to it. We are no longer in the customary political landscapes. Usually, the out-of-power opposition -- in this case, the Democratic Party -- offers most of the criticism and all of the alternative policies in order to win in the next election. Instead, Trump has an entire circle of diverse critics shooting at him. But they just as often end up hitting each other -- and themselves. So far, Trump's most furious Democratic opponents have not been able to...

Medicaid now covers over 74 million people, 1 in 5 people in the U.S. The numbers were nowhere near this high of a percentage when it began in the 1960s. With the passage of Obamacare, an entitlement that Republicans were put in power to pull back, those on the Medicaid dole spiked dramatically. But is it too late? Once a government program begins, it is impossible to stop it.   Obama knew this and that is why he lied his way into ensuring that this monstrosity of the federal government’s intrusion into our healthcare system passed no matter what. People...

Former House Speaker John Boehner said at an event in Las Vegas last week that he used to “sneak into” the White House to see President Barack Obama to avoid scrutiny from the “right-wing press”.... ...Boehner also lamented the fact that Americans now have too many choices of where to go for news and information. “What’s making everything even worse today is because we have so much news, people get to choose where they get their news,” Boehner said, according to the Post. “It used to be we had three big TV networks, five big newspapers, and five big radio...

Former House speaker John A. Boehner, who has mostly avoided public commentary since leaving Congress two years ago, told a business gathering last week that Republicans are "not going to repeal and replace Obamacare" because "the American people have gotten accustomed to it." "Here we are, seven months into this year, and yet they've not passed this bill. Now, they’re never — they're not going to repeal and replace Obamacare," Boehner told a private crowd in Las Vegas, according to video footage obtained by The Washington Post. "It's been around too long. And the American people have gotten accustomed to...

Today the Senate will cast their votes on a bill that will allow open debate on the Repeal & Replacement of the failed, Obamacare health bill. Every one of the 100 Senators should cast a "Yes" vote to move this bill to open debate and amendments. That includes Republican, Senators, Rand Paul/Susan Collins and, every Democrat Senator in the Senate. Even seriously ailing Republican, Senator, John McCain is returning to Washington, DC to cast a "Yea" vote. Any Senator that does cast a "Yes" vote for moving this debate along, means they continue to support the failed Obamacare "monster". We,...

For leading Republicans today, the answer is almost certainly yes.  As evidence, allow me to take you back to the fall of 2013. The House GOP, the chamber majority since 2010, had a choice in deciding the fate of the Continuing Appropriations Resolution for the fiscal year of 2014.  They could have simply increased the spending limit and continued funding the government, including Obamacare.  However, this strategy presented a problem in terms of political optics.  Republicans saw their huge victory in the House in 2010 due to popular opposition to Obamacare -- there can be no legitimate argument about that,...

Jeb Bush, former Florida governor, former presidential hopeful and former loud critic of President Donald Trump, has stepped back into the political arena to call out his fellow Republicans as hypocrites — for not publicly condemning Trump. Sigh. Why, why, why do these entrenched Republicans insist on picking public fights with their fellow GOPers? It doesn’t endear them to anyone but their own dwindling bases. And we know their bases are dwindling because try as they might, their candidates — their Marco Rubios, their Mitt Romneys, their Jeb Bushes — just couldn’t win against Trump. Yet six-plus months into Trump’s...