Free Republic

Conservatives in Congress and in the hinterlands are bitterly complaining about the massive insult to fiscal sanity the budget deal passed on Thursday morning represents. Even worse, some Republicans are offended by the pushback. Their target is Senator Rand Paul who, almost alone, tried to stand in the way of the budget deal in the Senate. GOP political analyst Susan Del Percio said on MSNBC that it was the day "the tea party died." DEL PERCIO: And it’s amazing we’re not even coming close to talking about entitlement reform, so I kind of look at today as the day the...

Perspiration of blood comes from the mind of a True Heart for The Father's will at all cost to self for Truly as John The Baptist suffered all for Me even as I was with him, in this same manner I am eternally with you in all you do in My name . Advance my children for I have already given you the victory as Gideon and David for you Carry My Kingdom with you for Zion is your home even now onto forever and my angels surround you in the myriads . Your Trust in Me is your Shield...

Remember the case of the Census worker who was found hanging from a tree with the word ‘fed' scrawled across his chest? You remember - he died at the hands of right-wing commentators and anti-government tea partiers. He was killed because of an overwhelming case of right-wing paranoia. He was murdered by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Bachmann, and Fox News. Keep this quiet though... While the death of Bill Sparkman was a media sensation for pushing anti-conservative sentiments just a couple of months ago, it is receiving little to no coverage currently. Why? Because, as investigators have recently speculated,...

“They’ve been burned. They’ve been hammered. They’ve been bludgeoned,” George Washington University law professor Miriam Galston explains to the Washington Post. “They’re trying to survive.” In this heartbreaking discussion during this special time of year, the “they” are the poor, long-suffering folks . . . at the Internal Revenue Service. It is a terrible, too-long-ignored scandal, which should tear at the heartstrings of every American. “Years of conservative attacks on the Internal Revenue Service have greatly diminished the ability of agency regulators to oversee political activity by charities and other nonprofits . . .” posits the recently published Post analysis....

“They’ve been burned. They’ve been hammered. They’ve been bludgeoned,” George Washington University law professor Miriam Galston explains to the Washington Post. “They’re trying to survive.” In this heartbreaking discussion during this special time of year, the “they” are the poor, long-suffering folks . . . at the Internal Revenue Service. It is a terrible, too-long-ignored scandal, which should tear at the heartstrings of every American. “Years of conservative attacks on the Internal Revenue Service have greatly diminished the ability of agency regulators to oversee political activity by charities and other nonprofits . . .” posits the recently published Post analysis....

U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner (R-CO) has been taking it pretty hard from all Coloradans, judging from his low approval ratings, and his conservative base isn’t giving him a pass when it comes to criticism either. In one recent Facebook post, for example, the North Jeffco Tea Party shared an image of an “Enema of the State” award that was apparently bestowed on Gardner by a vote at the Christmas Party of the Jeffco Liberty Party Coalition. The award, also given to Sen. John McCain of Arizona, was for Gardner’s “Conduct Unbecoming of a Conservative.” Gardner has also been under serious...

The threats that former IRS senior executive Lois G. Lerner says are serious enough to keep her court depositions forever secret date back to 2014, and she hasn’t shown any new threats, according to new court documents filed late Thursday. Ms. Lerner and her key deputy, Holly Paz, have demanded a judge forever seal their depositions and parts of any documents that mention those depositions, saying they fear for their safety. But the harassment they point to as evidence is more than three years old and dates back to the most heated days of the debate over the IRS’s illegal...

Finally, after four and a half years, harassment of conservative groups by the Obama IRS is put to rest, with the media downplaying the story. A William McGurn column in the Wall Street Journal, November 21, stated that IRS-Tea Party litigation has been settled.  A New York Times story on October 27, 2017 reported that the government, in one lawsuit involving 428 groups, "agreed to a multimillion-dollar settlement" and that, in a second lawsuit comprising 41 groups, damages will not be paid, "but the I.R.S. acknowledged its conduct was wrong."  It is not clear why the matter dragged on four and a half years.  The original Times report on...

Former IRS official Lois Lerner wants her testimony on the Tea Party targeting scandal to be kept from the public's eyes. She fears for her life, both she and her deputy Holly Paz claimed in a motion filed last Thursday. “Whenever Mss. Lerner and Paz have been in the media spotlight, they have faced death threats and harassment,” the documents stated. “Returning Mss. Lerner and Paz to the media spotlight places them at risk, regardless of what they actually said in those depositions.” The documents also stated that: “Public exposure will put innocent bystanders, namely Mss. Lerner’s and Paz’s family...

Former IRS executive Lois G. Lerner told a federal court last week that members of her family, including “young children,” face death threats and a real risk of physical harm if her explanation of the tea party targeting scandal becomes public.... Ms. Lerner and Holly Paz, her deputy at the IRS, filed documents in court Thursday saying tapes and transcripts of depositions they gave in a court case this year must remain sealed in perpetuity, or else they could spur an enraged public to retaliate.

U.S. Senate primary runner-up Sam Clovis plans to accept a nomination for state treasurer at this Saturday’s Iowa’s GOP convention, TheIowaRepublican.com has learned. Clovis, a professor and the chairperson of the Department of Business Administration and Economics at Morningside College in Sioux City, confirmed the news Thursday evening. “This all developed in the last 24 hours or so,” he said. Clovis has received a lot of encouragement to run over the past couple of days, which at first he shrugged off, but after hearing how serious people were about him running, the former Air Force pilot started giving the idea...

The IRS on Thursday settled two lawsuits alleging the agency illegally targeted conservative groups under the Obama administration. One of the settlements stipulated the IRS issue a formal apology for illegally singling out conservative and tea party groups due to their political beliefs dating back to 2013. The other settlement, a class-action lawsuit brought by the NorCal Tea Party with 428 members, includes a “generous” multi-million dollar payout, according to a lawyer involved. “There is no excuse for this conduct,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement. “Hundreds of organizations were affected by these actions, and they deserve an...

Agreement specifically blames Lois Lerner by name for failures The IRS admitted in court Wednesday that it wrongly targeted tea party and other conservative groups for intrusive scrutiny, placing specific blame on former senior executive Lois G. Lerner, and entered into a settlement designed to make sure that kind of political targeting never takes place again. The filing, made in federal court in Washington, D.C., amounts to a stunning apology from the Trump administration for actions taken under President Barack Obama, when hundreds of tea party and conservative groups were singled out for intrusive screening, forced to wait years for...

Four hundred sixty nine different plaintiffs in two class-action lawsuits over Obama-era IRS harassment settled with the Department of Justice Thursday, bringing to a close a dark chapter in the IRS’s history. In 2010 and 2011, the IRS under Lois Lerner, particularly out of the Cincinnati field office, launched what many contended were politically motivated investigations and audits of “Tea Party” and other conservative groups. While no criminal prosecutions ever resulted, hundreds of victims assembled in class-action lawsuits against the federal government. Attorney General Sessions appears to have largely acknowledged the plaintiffs’ claims. In a DOJ press release on the...

We’ve all read the stories, heard anecdotes, and seen it spewed over the media—that Trump voters are all the same. They all have the same motivations, right? Not really. In fact, the Trump coalition’s views on economics and government are quite diverse. You notice GOP consternation about Trump bashing congressional Republicans from time to time—that’s not by accident. Most voters view Trump as an independent rather than the head of a major party. In fact, new polling shows that Trump is actually more popular than the GOP leadership in some key counties for the 2018 midterms. Not really a shocker...

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...