Free Republic

One of the Senate’s leading liberals is borrowing a page from the playbook of Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is pushing to strike out language from the “cromnibus” spending bill unveiled Tuesday that would roll back restrictions on “swaps” transactions included in the 2010 financial regulatory overhaul known as Dodd-Frank. Repealing the “push-out” provision would mean that certain derivatives could again be held in bank units with federal deposit insurance. Using a strategy sometimes employed by Cruz for entirely different policy reasons, Warren said that with the $1.013 trillion spending package first being considered by the...

Citing the Declaration of Independence, House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (Md.) argued on the House floor yesterday that same-sex couples are endowed by “their Creator—by God” with a right to marry. “Our Declaration of Independence, as all of us quote so often, says: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men’—of course, if Jefferson were writing today, it would be either all people or all humankind—‘are created equal, that they are endowed by’—not a Congress, not by a Constitution, not by a will of the majority—‘their Creator’—by God—‘with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and...

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) made her lack of enthusiasm for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech apparent throughout the remarks, applauding half-heartedly and then quickly exiting the chamber after the speech, before Netanyahu did.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) hammered Benjamin Netanyahu Tuesday, saying the Israeli prime minister's speech to Congress was an "insult" to the country. “The unbreakable bonds between the United States and Israel are rooted in our shared values, our common ideals and mutual interests," Pelosi said in a statement just after the speech. “That is why, as one who values the U.S. — Israel relationship, and loves Israel, I was near tears

The House of Representatives’ senior ranking Democrat, Nancy Pelosi, said on Wednesday she was concerned that if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to the U.S. Congress in March, it may result in negative ramifications for the ongoing nuclear talks with Iran. The fact that Israel is America’s only ideological ally in the Middle East and that Iran is sworn to the United States’ destruction did not make an appearance in the remarks of the House Minority Leader. “Such a presentation could send the wrong message in terms of giving diplomacy a chance,” Pelosi told reporters outside of a conference...

Whatever. Here’s how seriously you should take her alleged outrage over Netanyahu’s “Bibi knows best” attitude. Back in 2007, while George W. Bush was warning people that Bashar Assad might not be the cuddly would-be “reformer” that Democrats like Hillary Clinton were convinced he was, one prominent liberal flew all the way to Damascus to sit down with Assad and pose for photos. Bush wanted to isolate him; the Democrat in question, convinced that she and her party knew best, had other ideas. Guess who.I also like the idea here that when U.S. intelligence tells you something, you can...

(CNSNews.com)- House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer said on the House floor on Tuesday that if Congress did not pass a Department of Homeland Security funding bill by the end of the week, it would shut down the department—but that 200,000 of the department’s 230,000 employees would still go to work. The other 30,000 employees are not deemed “essential” workers. “The Department of Homeland Security will not be funded,” said Hoyer. “There are 230,000 people who work at that Department, and 30,000 of them, mostly administrative personnel, will be laid off. The others, known as critically important important—essential employees who are...

Former presidential hopeful Ralph Nader sent an Election Day statement to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and several of her fellow Democrats: Quit already. “Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and Steve Israel should now recognize the wisdom of baseball’s ‘three strikes and you’re out’ … step down from their posts and invite fresh leadership who can save the country from the ravages of today’s Republican party,” Mr. Nader’s statement read, The Hill reported.

A growing chorus of liberal Democrats is pushing President Obama to get Congress's explicit approval before launching missile strikes into Syria. The pressure from supporters on Capitol Hill is not only a headache for Obama, but also puts House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other top Democrats in the difficult position of bucking a broad segment of their own caucus in order to protect an ally in the White House. Scores of Democrats had signed letters a year ago advocating against military strikes targeting the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad without congressional backing. Thirteen months later the enemy...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)There are 65 prominent people who might run for president in 2016. The Democratic and Republican fields contrast sharply. Hillary Clinton is the clear front-runner, while there is no front-runner on the Republican side. Twenty-three Democrats have been mentioned as a candidate or are eyeing a bid, according to an analysis by The Hill. The GOP side has 42. Most of the people on this list won’t run, and some have adamantly claimed that they’re not interested. But many politicians have changed their minds on seeking the White House. Before mounting his 2008 bid, then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said he...

The African Leaders Summit in Washington, D.C., this week brought leaders from over 50 African nations to our nation’s capital to discuss such wide-ranging topics as women’s health to the threat of terrorism, according to WJLA. The summit featured a host of key speakers, including former President George W. Bush, Laura Bush, and congressional leaders. One such speaker was Democratic House Whip, Rep. Steny Hoyer (MA). And Hoyer took the opportunity to make what he would describe as a joke, which was met with light laughter, and one person clapping.

House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said that President Obama “can’t legalize” the illegal aliens in the United States, but then added that the president “can implement the laws as he believes they should be implemented." "Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution states that Congress has the power to make laws governing naturalization. Given this, does President Obama have the unilateral power to legalize illegal aliens?" CNSNews.com asked Hoyer. “I don’t think he does,” Hoyer responded, “and I don’t think that’s what he’s going to do. You’re right. He can’t legalize them.” “What the president can in fact do, however,...

The House's No. 2 Democrat accused Republicans of exploiting the scandal that has enveloped the Veterans Affairs Department for political gain and said he is worried that civil servants could be swept up unfairly in a witch hunt. "I don't think there's any doubt about it … that is essentially the tactic that Republicans are trying to employ," Minority Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland told reporters Wednesday. "In some cases there are huge fishing expeditions which are going on for millions of documents that goes beyond the realm of oversight and politicizes the issue very greatly." The Republican National Committee...

The Republican Party is currently trying to sort out an internal battle between its dwindling stock of moderates who are occasionally willing to work with Democrats, and its hard-right base, which views compromise with Democrats in general, and President Obama in particular, as heresy. But in a speech Monday, Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), the second-ranking Democrat in the House showed that there are significant fissures in the Democratic Party as well. Hoyer, though nominally Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s second-in-command, is starkly different from Pelosi and many others on the party’s left wing when it comes to economic and fiscal issues....

The second ranking House Democrat predicted his party was in good position to retake control of the House of Representatives in the 2014 midterm election. House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer pointed to a fundraising advantage for Democrats, lower poll numbers for congressional Republicans, divisions inside the GOP ranks, and a good recruiting class of Democratic challengers, and said "all of those combined in my view give me great optimism that we're going to win back the House." Democrats need to pick up 17 seats to regain the majority in the House, and most political handicappers say that with the narrow...

President Obama’s State of the Union speech closed with a truly uniting moment when he honored the sacrifice of Army Ranger Cory Remsburg. Sergeant Remsburg bravely fought for our country through 10 tours of duty. Too bad House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) ensured that division was the name of the game only hours later. Rep. Hoyer attacked Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), who delivered the GOP response to the State of the Union. Ignoring her stature in the GOP and her intellectual acumen, he instead reduced her solely to her gender, calling her a “transparent” choice to give the...

Posted a blank of this photo over the weekend, here are 12 of the best/favorite captions people came up with.

Pictures truly are worth 1000 words. Lets find a few for this one...I found this photo years ago and I've never been able figure out what the heck Obama is doing there...and why there's an applause going on in the background.Help me out...What's going on here? Who's saying what?I'll post the best ones in the next day or so.

Minutes after President Obama ripped America's gender “wage gap” during the State of the Union of Address, House Minority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) told Breitbart News "of course" he thinks the White House should pay its female staffers equally to any equal work done by male White House personnel. "Well, of course," Hoyer responded when asked by Breitbart News.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D., Fla.) has become a major obstacle to a new bipartisan Iran sanctions measure, according to multiple sources on Capitol Hill and in Florida. Wasserman Schultz has broken with leading pro-Israel Democrats like New York Senator Chuck Schumer and New Jersey Senators Robert Menendez and Cory Booker, privately urging her fellow Democrats to follow the White House’s lead by opposing a bipartisan House resolution backing new sanctions on Iran, according to multiple congressional sources close to the debate. The Iran resolution fell apart in the final days of 2013 after House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (Md.)...