Free Republic

With the dust still settling, many Washington Republicans are mystified—and alarmed—by the fact that not even Donald “Drain the Swamp” Trump had enough populist cred to swing a primary race to his candidate in deep-red Alabama. While the GOP’s class of professional strategists are generally ambivalent at best when it comes to the president, they had taken a certain comfort in believing that he was fully in command of his base. The assumption allowed them to draw conclusions about what his voters wanted, how to cater to them—and how to avoid drawing their wrath. But Alabama fully punctured the illusion...

“Promise made, promise broken. Once again, Senate Republican ‘leadership’ has demonstrated that its promises are meaningless. Today’s announcement that Republican Senators will quit before voting on a plan to repeal even SOME portions of ObamaCare is just the latest in a string of failures. When ObamaCare was enacted in 2010, Republicans on both sides of Capitol Hill vowed to repeal every word of President Obama’s government takeover of our healthcare system. It became their rallying cry in election cycle after election cycle. When the American people gave Republicans the House majority after winning the 2010 midterms on the promise of...

Many of the National Football League players who participated in the protests against the national anthem and American flag on Sunday have had past run-ins with the law themselves.

Becky Gerritson, the president of the Wetumpka Tea Party in Wetumpka, Alabama, just outside Montgomery here, has a message for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s PAC Senate Leadership Fund: Stop deceptively editing videos to attack conservative Judge Roy Moore. Last week, Senate Leadership Fund was caught splicing together videos from two separate events in an out of context manner—in other words deceptively editing videos—to make it appear as though Judge Moore does not support President Donald Trump’s planned border wall. Not just Breitbart News, but PolitiFact too, has called out the McConnell-affiliated organization for the attack ads. Of course, such...

Tom MacArthur’s town-hall meeting should have been uneventful. It was May and MacArthur, a Republican congressman, had come home to New Jersey to talk to constituents, having won re-election with a hefty majority less than a year earlier. Normally, at such an event, he might have expected to field a couple of dozen idiosyncratic questions, trot out some polite replies, wrap up after an hour or so, and go home for an easy night’s sleep. But it didn’t quite pan out like that. Six days earlier, the House of Representatives had voted to pass the American Health Care Act, which...

(snip) But the September 8 letter from the Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ Justice Department said it would not even reopen the investigation because officials require “proof beyond a reasonable doubt that a government employee intentionally discriminated against an applicant for a tax-exempt status based on viewpoint.” (snip)

The Justice Department says it will not prosecute former IRS executive Lois Lerner for targeting conservative groups during the 2010 and 2012 elections. In a letter to top Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee, Assistant Attorney General Kevin Brady said that after a careful review of the case, DOJ will not pursue charges against Lerner, who oversaw the IRS division that reviewed tax exempt organizations. “After this process, the Department determined that reopening the investigation would not be appropriate based on the available evidence,” Boyd wrote Texas Rep. Kevin Brady, the chairman of the House Ways and Means...

Soak this in: It's now possible that Trump's biggest legislative wins this year will be more spending and raising the debt cap — the exact opposite of what Tea Party Republicans came to D.C. to do. Trump "brazenly rolled his own party's leaders," as AP put it. Plus his own Treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin — in front of leaders of both parties. Why it matters: Tax reform is now less likely, with trust ruptured between Trump and Republican Hill leaders. Democrats are more likely to flip the House in 2018: Republicans have less than ever to show their voters. A...

TO the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little,Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever after- ward resumes its liberty. – Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass It is funny that the Left is only infatuated with ‘resistance’ when they are not in power. Then resistance is a beautiful thing, no matter how ugly it gets. When they are in power resistance is, of course, racist:While the Tea Party was a grass-roots group with no funding and no formal leadership, Antifa is...

Abuse Of Power: The IRS scandal seemingly has lain dormant now for months, all but forgotten amid the spate of recent anti-Trump media spasms, the ongoing violent antics of the antifa leftists and, now, Hurricane Harvey's devastation. But even if much of Washington has forgotten about it, a Washington judge hasn't. As reported by the Washington Examiner, Judge Reggie B. Walton of the Washington, D.C., District Court last week revived legal attention to the scandal, telling the IRS it has to reveal the names of IRS employees who targeted conservative, libertarian and Tea Party groups. But Walton didn't stop there....

Abuse Of Power: The IRS scandal seemingly has lain dormant now for months, all but forgotten amid the spate of recent anti-Trump media spasms, the ongoing violent antics of the antifa leftists and, now, Hurricane Harvey's devastation. But even if much of Washington has forgotten about it, a Washington judge hasn't. As reported by the Washington Examiner, Judge Reggie B. Walton of the Washington, D.C., District Court last week revived legal attention to the scandal, telling the IRS it has to reveal the names of IRS employees who targeted conservative, libertarian and Tea Party groups. But Walton didn't stop there....

One of the groups that sued the Internal Revenue Service over its targeting of conservative and Tea Party groups believes there has been a breakthrough that will help them draw a more complete picture of what went on behind the scenes at the agency, four years after it took its case to court. In a lawsuit involving True the Vote, Judge Reggie B. Walton of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the IRS last week to release the names of employees involved in targeting conservative and Tea Party groups. Walton also told the IRS to explain...

Various media sources have reported that federal District Court Judge Reggie Walton has ordered the IRS to finally respond to various legal requests for information and documents made by the conservative tea party organizations that sued the agency. But the question that no one is asking is why that order was even necessary, and why the Justice Department, which is now supposedly under the control and authority of the new administration, hasn’t reversed its obstinate, inflexible, and stubborn defense of the IRS. It was over four years ago that the inspector general for tax administration at the Treasury Department released...

If the U.S. electorate were ever to grasp the full scope of what took place in the IRS, FBI and DOJ weaponization of government to specifically target people, no-one in Washington DC would ever be safe from the backlash. There’s enough material inside the IRS story for multiple Pulitzer prizes, in addition to severe and jaw-dropping revelations as to republican politicians who aided the overall scheme.  Start by finding out who in the IRS specifically sent 21 CD-ROM’s to the FBI, and find out who specifically received them inside the FBI, and what they did with them.

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the IRS to name the specific employees the agency blames for targeting tea party groups for intrusive scrutiny and said the government must prove it has ceased the targeting. Judge Reggie B. Walton also said the IRS must explain the reasons for the delays for 38 groups that are part of a lawsuit in the District of Columbia, where they are still looking for a full accounting of their treatment. Judge - Walton - Round - Discovery - Case Judge Walton approved another round of limited discovery in the case and laid out six...

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the IRS to name the specific employees the agency blames for targeting tea party groups for intrusive scrutiny and said the government must prove it has ceased the targeting. Judge Reggie B. Walton also said the IRS must explain the reasons for the delays for 38 groups that are part of a lawsuit in the District of Columbia, where they are still looking for a full accounting of their treatment. Judge Walton approved another round of limited discovery in the case and laid out six questions that the IRS must answer, including the employees’...

KrisAnne Hall, strict-constructionist constitutional lawyer, educator, Tea Party activist, and author, was this month's guest on C-Span2's "In-Depth" this afternoon. The program, three hours long, will be repeated tonight at midnight EDT. She responds to questions and comments from the program moderator and from viewers on her life and works. The titles of several of her books - Bedtime Stories for Budding Patriots and Not a Living Breathing Document: Reclaiming the Constitution tells much about her philosophy and teaching. Equally interesting is the story of her life, going from her childhood in a Democrat household where "the only thing more...

Snip There’s no such narrative around Eric Cantor, the former Republican House majority leader from Richmond who was spectacularly ousted in his 2014 primary by a no-name economics professor. Let’s back up a moment. Remember the summer of 2013, when the “Defund Obamacare Tour” drove the news cycle all through Congress’s August recess? The town halls organized by the political arm of the Heritage Foundation enlivened the base and furthered what had been the GOP’s core message since 2010—that Obamacare was bad and, if Americans helped Republicans hold both chambers, it could be repealed. Cantor helped create that perception. Earlier...

The Albuquerque Tea Party has been granted tax-exempt status by the Internal Revenue Service after applying eight years ago. The Albuquerque Journal reports Graham Bartlett, president of the local Tea Party, says he was informed about a month ago that the group's request was going through. Bartlett says the Albuquerque Tea Party requested tax-exempt status because it relies on donations and people tend to donate more when they know they can write it off on their taxes.

President Donald Trump may not be in the White House had former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin not blazed the trail for him. This week, Bernie Quigley observed that Palin “was prelude and harbinger” to Trump’s arrival. He wrote in The Hill that he was reading William Strauss and Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning when Palin appeared on the national stage. And he said then that “it was possible to see the rise of new political archetypes and forms and they are now upon us.” “It was not President Donald Trump that brought the age, although he turned the key....