Free Republic

Republican leaders have intensified their planning to prevent a government funding shutdown, weighing legislative options that would redirect GOP anger at Barack Obama's expected action on immigration and stave off a political disaster, according to sources involved with the sessions. Obama plans to use his executive authority to change the enforcement of immigration laws by the end of the year, a move that top Republicans warn could derail efforts to pass a long-term spending bill by a Dec. 11 deadline. Increasingly, some top Republicans believe that it will be difficult to pass the year-long spending package that they originally envisioned,...

Senator Mitch McConnell said yesterday that he would not shut down the government, over immigration or anything else, after he takes over as Majority Leader in January. On the same day, Speaker John Boehner refused to rule out a shutdown. Both were being deceptive, but Mr. McConnell, as usual, was a little more clever about it. The House produced last year’s government shutdown when it insisted on attaching the repeal of various parts of the Affordable Care Act to spending bills necessary to keep the government open. That was a huge embarrassment for Mr. Boehner, making his caucus appear feral...

How many times can Cory Gardner explain that his answer to a government shutdown is “absolutely not”? We may not know the actual ceiling on that, but not for lack of effort from the Morning Joe crew. The newly-elected Senator from Colorado explains that “a mature governing body” should not have that on its radar at all, and instead emphasizes that Republicans took control of the Senate in order to expedite solutions, not obstruct the process. Gardner suggests that obstruction will come from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Democrats tried hard to paint the GOP as the Party of...

Republican Party's leaders perform no better than matriculants of a clown school, McConnell chief among them. Engender a despair born of surviving one Establishment Clown after another, since 1988 Mitch McConnell is the Shutdown Clown in the Establishment’s growing circus of Clowns—all performing under a “big tent.” Merely one day after being elected to the Senate, McConnell relentlessly declared, and was dutifully recorded to say, “We’re not going to be shutting down the government or defaulting on the national debt.” McConnell spoke these exact words in his very first news conference. The Leftists in the room recognized what was really...

House Republicans will have their largest majority since the 1930s next year, but that doesn't mean Speaker John Boehner's (R-Ohio) job will be easy.The House GOP leadership's struggles in keeping members in line over the past four years have been well documented. Some of the incoming freshmen will likely join the ranks of conservatives who frequently oppose leadership initiatives.Among the new freshmen, for instance, is one congressman-elect who has called Hillary Clinton the "anti-Christ," another who has suggested Muslims don't deserve First Amendment rights, and yet another who has declared himself open to the idea of the United States invading...

WASHINGTON – Sen. Mitch McConnell appears on the verge of achieving his lifelong goal to serve as majority leader in the upper chamber after easily dispatching Democratic Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky Tuesday night, winning an unprecedented sixth six-year term in the process. The race was expected to be close according to the late polls but, as was experienced throughout Election Day, the surveys seemed to undercount Republican strength to a substantial degree. With all of the commonwealth’s precincts reporting, McConnell ended up with 806,689 votes, good for 56 percent of the total while Grimes garnered 584,625,...

The service will shut down on December 31 -- just one of more than 60 products that the company has discontinued over the past two years. But the real significance, if only sentimentally, is the shutting down of Yahoo's Directory -- once the cornerstone of the company.

The tea party may have learned its lesson. As Congress finishes work on a must-pass spending bill set for votes next week, the most conservative lawmakers on Capitol Hill are eager to send a message on immigration, and stand firm against a government lending bank. But a year after they forced a 16-day partial government shutdown over President Barack Obama’s health care law, few seem to have the stomach to push their demands that far again. “No question we learned that with the aid of the news media the Democrats were able to pin the blame on us” for last...

Without passage of a spending bill by Sept. 30, the federal government will run out of money and grind to a halt, but leading Republicans, facing the November midterm elections, say they will block any attempt by the party’s conservative wing to force a self-defeating amnesty confrontation with the White House. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told CNN that despite Democrats’ hopeful predictions and right-wing threats that another shutdown is looming, it’s not going to happen. Asked whether he would favor a government shutdown, McConnell told CNN, “Of course not. I’m the guy that’s gotten us out of shutdowns...

Democratic National Committee chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) seized on remarks by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) in an interview with Breitbart News, citing his desire to address immigration in a government spending bill to argue he's thirsting for a government shutdown. Wasserman Schultz's remarks, made on a conference call with reporters convened with the purpose of bashing Rubio, come as White House press secretary Josh Earnest used similar rhetoric in a briefing with reporters Wednesday. In the interview, Rubio said Congress may seek to address a unilateral amnesty by Obama in an upcoming spending bill. “There will have to be...

President Obama is expected to announce by mid-September whether he will circumvent a recalcitrant Congress and press ahead with immigration reform on his own terms. "Executive action," as it's come to be known, could be as robust and consequential as providing de-facto earned amnesty for millions of undocumented immigrants now living in the shadows. That decision would reverberate widely. Democrats have usually been afraid that if Obama decided to showcase the apogee of presidential power, the counter-reaction among conservatives and revanchists would cost Democrats an intolerably high political price. Now, though, after all the midterm primaries are done, as the...

...this White House is determined to unreasonably punish as many everyday people as possible. And this includes children sick with cancer. That might sound like hyperbole, but it is not.

The White House is going to war with another fox — and this time, it’s personal. The Wall Street Journal reports that a red fox has been causing chaos around the White House, tripping security alarms, digging up Michelle’s garden and distracting the president from his duties. The Secret Service won’t give any details about how often the fox trips the White House’s obviously sophisticated security alarms, but rest assured, officials say, they’re watching. President Obama was apparently “stunned” to see the fox roaming freely down the oft-photographed White House colonnade, home to the world’s shortest, but most dramatic, outdoor...

The Department of the Interior knew beforehand that two groups of aging veterans would be visiting the World War II Memorial as the partial government shutdown began on Oct. 1 but decided to barricade the site anyway, according to e-mails obtained by National Review Online. The newly released public records also show National Park Service employees busily monitoring the news for any bad publicity and making shutdown exceptions for their co-workers. On Sept. 30, staff from the offices of Senator Tom Harkin (D., Iowa) and Representative Steven Palazzo (R., Miss.) contacted the Department of the Interior’s Office of Congressional Affairs,...

The government has pulled the plug on an 11-year-old Illinois baker’s oven. A day after a local newspaper ran a story about the young and ambitious Chloe Stirling, who operated a cupcake business out of her parents’ kitchen, the local health department came calling. “They called and said they were shutting us down,” Heather Stirling, Chloe’s mother, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Officials told Stirling Chloe could continue selling cupcakes on the condition that the family “buy a bakery or build her a kitchen separate from the one we have.” “Obviously, we can’t do that,” Heather Stirling told reporters. “We’ve...

On Thursday, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) made his first-ever appearance on NBC’s “The Tonight Show” in which he discussed his background and some of the issues of the day. “I don’t have any problem with the Tea Party,” Boehner said. “Those people have brought great energy to the political process. Most of them have never been involved before. You know, when you agree with someone 90 percent of the time, they’re not your enemy. My problem was with some Washington organizations who purport to represent the Tea Party who I think mislead them. There’s nothing I could...

Federal Gov't Closes Due to Threat of Snow Why? Because the forecast calls for snow. (Currently there is no snow falling or on the ground.)

During the month of January 2014, IREHR will publish a multi-segment special report on the current status of the Tea Party movement. We will publish a track the membership of the principal organizations in the movement—a task undertaken by no organization or agency other than IREHR. We will look at geographic regions where this membership is concentrated. And we will look at some of the money that keeps this movement in the public eye. In the piece below, we follow the Tea Parties over the course of 2013. It was a year of countervailing winds and storms. A drive against...

While members of Congress ended 2013 congratulating themselves for passing a budget, the media missed the fact that the agreement doesn't actually avoid a government shutdown. The deal reached by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) provides simply a blueprint for government spending. Congress must still pass legislation detailing specific spending before January 15, when government's spending authority expires. Government still faces a potential shutdown in a little over a week. The budget agreement passed by Congress in the closing days of last year provides what is called the "top-Line" number, setting the overall level of discretionary...

Late last week it was learned that some 40 million charge cards were obtained using physical processing systems located in Target retail locations nationwide. Though no details of the how the hack attack was executed have been released by Target, the FBI or other agencies investigating the breach, it is likely that the processing machines themselves were compromised. Target claims that the hack was sophisticated, but on the technical side, once hackers found a way into the credit card processing machines, probably via remote entry from servers somewhere in Eastern Europe or Russia, the theft of credit card data itself...