Free Republic

Breaking...

Under mounting pressure, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan emerged as the reluctant would-be savior of the fractious Republican House caucus yesterday, even being urged by 2012 GOP ticket-mate Mitt Romney to run for speaker. “I wouldn’t presume to tell Paul what to do, but I do know that he is a man of ideas who is driven to see them applied for the public good,” Romney said in a statement yesterday. “Every politician tries to convince people that they are that kind of leader; almost none are — Paul is.” Romney’s glowing endorsement of his former running mate came after the...

As Congress hurtled toward a government shutdown in the fall of 2013, Rep. Paul Ryan looked around at fellow Republicans who were agitating to shutter national parks, federal agencies and Head Start programs. "This can't be the full measure of our party and our movement," Ryan writes of that moment in his new book, released Tuesday. "If it is, we're dead and the country is lost." Such moments of raw frustration pepper Ryan's "The Way Forward: Renewing the American Idea," a book as much about his front-row seat as Republicans' favorite budget wonk as it is about his political future....

Rep. Matt Salmon (R-AZ) said on Wednesday at the Heritage Foundation-hosted Conversations with Conservatives press event that House Speaker John Boehner has promised him that the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” immigration bill is dead in the House. “I very recently had a conversation with the Speaker and if immigration reform moves, it’s going to move piecemeal,” Salmon said in response to a question from Breitbart News. “And it will go over one bill at a time and if there is any kind of conference, it will be on specific bills we send over. It will not be on the Gang...

Carney announces that now the CR and Debt Ceiling have gone Obama's way, the president is putting "immigration reform" back on the front burner. "It's the right thing for America."

If Republicans don’t join together with Democrats to pass comprehensive immigration reform, “they will never win another national election,” according to Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.). -snip- Gutierrez is an outspoken progressive, but he has still made somewhat unlikely alliances with Republicans in order to push immigration reform. In 2012, the Illinois Democrat praised the immigration reform strategy presented by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), someone he had previously called an “extremist.” Gutierrez also partnered with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) earlier this year, participating in a pair of immigration reform events in Chicago.

Immigration reform advocates plan an aggressive campaign to bring the issue back — and the White House has signaled it’s on board. Can Obama emerge from the fiscal crisis with enough momentum to win the immigration fight? As the fiscal fight roiling Washington nears its end, the White House is already signaling that it plans to use the political momentum it has gained during the shutdown fight to charge back into the immigration debate. And this time, Democratic pollsters and advocates say, they could actually win. The final chapter of the current crisis hasn’t been written yet, but Democrats in...

A small group of Senate and House Republicans are meeting Monday night to discuss how to pass an immigration overhaul through Congress. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who has been hungry to rewrite the nation’s immigration laws this Congress, is attending the session. -snip- Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) is involved in the planning, according to two sources.