Free Republic

The United Nations Arms Trade Treaty goes into effect on December 24th. Through that date, Coach is Right will provide background and current information concerning the dangers this treaty poses to the American people and their freedom. President Obama has been re-elected since this piece was written and Republicans secured a massive, midterm victory in 2014. The midterm results should guarantee an incoming Senate that would not ratify the Arms Trade Treaty. But conservative voters were certainly betrayed by the vote of the Republican House on the Omnibus Spending Bill a few days ago. First published on July 13, 2012...

Senate Republicans are throwing up obstacles to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) plans to confirm a batch of executive and judicial branch nominees this weekend. Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa), the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said if Reid wants to confirm 12 pending federal district judges, he will have to run them through the regular floor process, which could take days. Grassley noted that Republicans don’t have enough votes to block the judicial nominees but they can drag out the process, which may force Reid to bring the Senate in next week if he wants to get the...

If some (i.e. Harry Reid) in the Senate seek unanimous consent to go straight to a vote on Cronybus, but Cruz (and others who may wish to join him) delay this move by forcing Reid to hold a cloture vote - and thus stall the vote in the Senate on Cronybus by 30 hours - would you support this if it led to a short-term funding measure? While this move may upset Boehner, who has now bent his will to Obama's desire, would you support Cruz (or whomever may wish to do this - Warren?) doing this?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) warned senators that they might have to stay in session through the week of Dec. 15. In comments on the floor, Reid said he hoped the Senate could avoid staying at work the week before Christmas, but warned an additional week of work was possible. “We have a lot to do and not a lot of time to accomplish it,” Reid said. “We might have to be here the week before Christmas, however Mr. President, not into the Christmas holiday.” Both the House and Senate are scheduled to recess for the year by Dec....

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) is demanding Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) bring time sheets for work he performed at Louisiana State University to their Monday debate after allegations surfaced that he wrongly billed the school while a member of Congress. Landrieu appeared briefly on a conference call with reporters Friday to call on Cassidy to bring 63 months of records to their debate “to explain this situation and put it to rest.” A spokesman for Cassidy said LSU would have to provide those records. “Senator Landrieu is still failing to produce any evidence of her ludicrous claims,” the spokesman told The...

Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) has opened up an 11-point lead over incumbent Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) in their runoff race for Senate, according to a new survey from Republican polling outlet Vox Populi. The poll finds Cassidy with a 53-42 lead over Landrieu, with 5 percent undecided. That’s up from Cassidy’s 48 to 44 edge in the same poll in October. Cassidy is crushing Landrieu 58 to 31 among independents in the state. In addition, the poll found that Landrieu’s efforts to pass the Keystone pipeline during the lame duck session may have backfired — 39 percent said it made...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren long has been a hero on the progressive left, but her popularity among the Democratic Party establishment is growing rapidly. Ms. Warren, Massachusetts Democrat, now is set to assume a leadership role in her party’s Senate caucus, and the leaders of that caucus say she’s uniquely qualified for the job.“I think [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid, all of us, have confidence that Elizabeth Warren is a great spokesman for our caucus and for our party on a national basis,” said Sen. Dick Durbin, Illinois Democrat and the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate. Mr. Durbin appeared on...

Dozens of House Republicans have signed onto a new letter that insists the GOP include language in the upcoming spending bill to prevent President Obama from taking unilateral action on immigration, escalating a simmering fight between Congress and the White House. Rep. Matt Salmon, an Arizona Republican who organized the letter, said Congress needs to use its power of the purse to defend its own powers to write immigration policy — and he said he believes there could be enough support even in the Democratic-controlled Senate to win. “I’m not going down without a fight,” he said in an interview...

Sen. Harry Reid said Wednesday he’s seen obstruction from Republicans and has no intention of adopting those tactics when he lands in the minority next year. Mr. Reid, the Nevada Democrat who will go from being majority leader to minority leader, said he will work “in good faith” to make the Senate operate smoothly, and said that means rejecting the obstruction he said the GOP pioneered while they were in the minority. “I have no desire to engage in that,” Mr. Reid said in opening the Senate for the lame-duck session, which will see a number of retiring or defeated...

President Obama will have to get his nominee for attorney general past a Republican-controlled Senate, Democratic and Republican aides say. A packed schedule after the election is almost certain to push the vetting process for Loretta Lynch into January, when Republicans are set to take power in the upper chamber. “It seems likely [the Lynch vote] would be in the next Congress. It’s difficult to process an [attorney general] that quickly,” said a Democratic aide. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has not yet made a decision on whether to move Lynch’s nomination in the lame-duck session, according to spokesman...

Senators John McCain and Ted Cruz don’t exactly have the best relationship. Cruz has said Republicans like McCain are why their party doesn’t do better, and McCain has not been shy about publicly dumping on Cruz, especially during last year’s government shutdown. And in a new interview with Salon today, McCain wanted to make it clear that the incoming crop of Republicans that will give their party control of the Senate will not be Cruzes. McCain even claimed that a lot of the GOP Senate candidates who won are in the same mold as himself and Lindsey Graham.

The first order of business for the U.S. Senate under Republican Mitch McConnell will be getting the Senate back in business. For most of the last four years, Democrat Harry Reid manipulated what was once the world’s greatest deliberative body for political purposes, not for the hard task of governing. The House passed more than 300 bills but they mostly died from neglect in the Senate. What little legislation that made it to the floor crashed as Reid manipulated Senate rules to ban amendments and debate. When Republicans refused to bow to his tin-pot dictatorial rule, he accused them of...

On Dec. 24, 2009, the Democratic-controlled Senate passed President Obama’s healthcare law with a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority, triggering a massive backlash that propelled Republicans to control of the House the following year. On the Senate side, going into Tuesday’s elections, 24 senators who voted for Obamacare were already out or not going be part of the new Senate being sworn in on January. To be sure, it isn’t fair to attribute all of the turnover in the chamber to Obamacare. Many senators voted for Obamacare and lost re-election battles in which they were hit hard for their support for the...

By this point in an election year, when polls are coming in by the bucketload late in the evening, you can get a sense for which pollsters are taking fresh samples of public opinion and which are herding toward the conventional wisdom. J. Ann Selzer, whose firm Selzer & Company conducts the Des Moines Register’s Iowa Poll, is in the former group: She’s always been one to trust what her data is telling her. On Dec. 31, 2007, Selzer’s poll was among the first to show a large lead for Barack Obama in the Iowa Democratic caucuses — most other...

Politics in Louisiana is a uniquely business. Don’t believe me? Then take a look at what’s about to go down there on Tuesday. You might not think a noontime political rally with two or three-dozen listeners in Lafayette, Louisiana -- a town 135 miles west of New Orleans -- is a logical place to look for one of the potentially crucial elements of the mid-term elections. And in just about any other state, you’d be right. But this is Louisiana. And Louisiana is....different. It’s not just its accents, its terrain, its laws (shaped by the Napoleonic Code, not British common...

Michelle Obama is being urged by her husband’s true believers to move to California when she leaves the White House and to pursue the US Senate seat expected to be vacated by Dianne Feinstein in 2018. The oldest member of the Senate, Feinstein, 81, has strongly suggested this will be her last term, Richard Turley will report in Orbmagazine.com on Thursday. The first couple haven’t said where they’ll go when Barack Obama leaves office in 26 months, but Los Angeles is the leading contender.

When Mary Landrieu was elected to the U.S. Senate 18 years ago, Louisiana residents needed her to become a strong and effective advocate for the state. She did that, forging relationships across party lines, pushing three different presidents and her colleagues in Congress to treat us fairly and building the clout that comes not only with seniority but respect. The benefits to Louisiana have been enormous. At a time when the New Orleans area needed eloquent and powerful leadership after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the levee breaches, Sen. Landrieu provided it. She championed our community's right to be rebuilt,...

As you can imagine, I was alarmed, but not very surprised, when I received reports of rioting at the Pumpkin Festival in Keene, NH. The residents of Keene hold the Pumpkin Festival annually. Their mission is first and always to amass the most number of jack-o-lanterns in history. In 2013 they broke the previous record held by Boston when they brought together 30,581 jack-o-lanterns, according to accounts by the Keene Sentinel.But into their 30,581 points of light this year was inserted sinister, dark forces. Forces that were nonsensical, dystopian and anarchical.And those forces descended into the hallmark expression of Obama’s...

With the midterm elections just weeks away, DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz seemed confident during her appearanceon “Fox News Sunday” that Democrats will keep the Senate. “We are going to hold the Senate,” the Florida lawmaker said. “The president is not on the ballot.” “Republicans are desperate to put him on the ballot because they’re trying to turn away from their own terrible record,” she added. She made her prediction amid a majority of polls that give Republicans at least a 60 percent chance of retaking the upper chamber, including a Washington Post forecast that gives the GOP a...

Fraud Alert: Judicial Watch Files Taxpayer Lawsuit to Stop Congress from Participating in D.C.’s Small Business Exchange Both houses of Congress were not exactly honest on the applications they filed with the District of Columbia’s Health Benefit Exchange Authority. In fact, the signatories who put their names to the applications seemed to make little pretense of providing truthful information. Under D.C. law, only those small businesses that have 50 or fewer employees can participate in the Small Business Exchange. Guess how many people are employed by Congress? And, guess how many employees Congress claims to have? Congress employs upwards of...