Free Republic

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in a blistering floor speech Friday accused Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) of lying to him over a deal to vote on reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank.

Thank goodness we last November gave the Republicans the Senate majority.Who besides the GOP would resurrect government money for ridiculous “green” “energy” – which is neither green nor energy? To the tune of tens (if not hundreds) of billions of dollars more down the juice-less rat hole. Oh yeah – every Democrat on the planet. Senate May Revive Expired Green Energy Tax SubsidiesThe Senate finance committee will be holding a markup hearing on expired tax subsidies members want to be revived for their constituents and campaign supporters, and this includes now defunct subsidies for green energy.A document released by...

2016: If only Wall Street bankers had listened to St. Hillary during the subprime mortgage frenzy. She now claims she warned about the risky loans. Yep, a Clinton actually went there. Her campaign may regret it. While bashing Wall Street for risky acts and "criminal behavior," Clinton in her first economic stump speech portrayed herself as the voice of financial sanity in a casino of wild greed. "As we all know, in the years before the crash, financial firms piled risk upon risk," she intoned, "and regulators in Washington either wouldn't or couldn't keep up. "I was alarmed by this...

I have enormous respect for Victor Davis Hanson and read with great interest his account this week that people are fed up with liberal elites. Amid all this leftish high-fiving about court decisions and executive orders, we forget political and electoral reality. Barack Obama has done more to destroy liberal political power in the Congress and in the statehouses than any Democratic politician since the 1920s. His executive orders and neglect of enforcing existing law have green-lighted the executive power of the next Republican president in a way that Richard Nixon could hardly imagine. He has discredited the idea of...

Trump mentioned our "stupid negotiators" making trade deals which are ruining our nation. They are NOT stupid, they've been bribed. If the Lamestream Media would actually do their jobs along with the useless FBI, they would find that leadership has been bribed. The barbarians are at the gates of the Great Wall. All they have to do is bribe the gatekeepers to let them in and pillage. The moral breakdown in the country due to people turning their backs on God is bringing full-force destruction to the nation. Should people repent and turn back to God and start living circumspectly,...

With Governor ChristieÂ’s splash in the pool, the population pining to be POTUS is now large enough to hold a special Republican Primary: only the declared wannabes would participate, each egotist getting three votes. Naturally, weÂ’d eliminate all their first choices and zero in on the next two, thereby distilling a much tighter cluster of potential electables.Seriously, we now have a candidate for almost every splinter view imaginable, and good people though each of them are, they collectively exemplify a party in confusion and dysfunction. As one wag pointed out, the last time there were this many declared candidates, a...

Bernie Sanders has turned Hillary Clinton’s parade to the White House into a competitive race for the Democratic nomination, as unions prefer Clintons’ socialist opponent. LaborUnionReport.com organized an informal poll in mid-June 2015 and the results showed that union support for Hillary Clinton was lacking significantly. Seventy-six percent of union members favor Bernie Sanders for president in 2016. Only 11 percent of union members favored Hillary Clinton. The report said, “due to her time spent with the employer-friendly Rose law firm (which helps employers fight unions), as well as her stint on the board of directors for Wal-Mart, many union...

A recent draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade deal would give U.S. pharmaceutical firms unprecedented protections against competition from cheaper generic drugs, possibly transcending the patent protections in U.S. law. POLITICO has obtained a draft copy of TPP’s intellectual property chapter as it stood on May 11, at the start of the latest negotiating round in Guam. While U.S. trade officials would not confirm the authenticity of the document, they downplayed its importance, emphasizing that the terms of the deal are likely to change significantly as the talks enter their final stages. Those terms are still secret, but the public...

A recent draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade deal would give U.S. pharmaceutical firms unprecedented protections against competition from cheaper generic drugs, possibly transcending the patent protections in U.S. law. POLITICO has obtained a draft copy of TPP’s intellectual property chapter as it stood on May 11, at the start of the latest negotiating round in Guam. While U.S. trade officials would not confirm the authenticity of the document, they downplayed its importance, emphasizing that the terms of the deal are likely to change significantly as the talks enter their final stages. Those terms are still secret, but the public...

The TPP includes 12 countries around the Pacific Rim. Electronic Frontier Foundation As a trade deal between the United States, Canada, Australia and their allies edges closer towards completion, an Australian Parliamentary report has slammed the deal-making process saying it lacks adequate "oversight and scrutiny." The comments come from a joint Australian Parliamentary report on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is currently being negotiated behind closed doors between 12 countries across the Pacific Rim.

resident Obama signed hard-fought trade legislation Monday, thanking Republican leaders who helped get it done and saying the package will “reinforce America’s leadership role in the world.” “I think it’s fair to say that getting these bills through Congress has not been easy,” Mr. Obama said as he signed the trade bills into law in the East Room. “They’ve been declared dead more than once.” The two major pieces of legislation grant Mr. Obama “fast track” trade-promotion authority

On August 12, 1986, President Ronald Reagan said “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Reagan clearly had fabulous foresight as he must have known that Dodd-Frank would be passed and Elizabeth Warren would start the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). I recently found out how bad things are with a recent refinance of my house. My bank recently screwed up and bounced a mortgage check. While pleading for forgiveness they asked me why I had a loan with Wells Fargo and not them. I told them when...

PBS revealed yesterday that it would be postponing the third season of Finding Your Roots after it was discovered that producers succumbed to pressure from Ben Affleck last year to leave out details of his slave-owning ancestors. According to emails released in the Sony hack by WikiLeaks, Affleck urged producers and host Henry Louis Gates not to include these relatives in his episode of the show, which traces back the ancestry of celebrities. While Mr. Gates claimed, after WikiLeaks, that these ancestors were only left out to make room to include more interesting ones—a Revolutionary War soldier and a mystic—most...

Journalists have established the authenticity of the first tranche of the top secret Saudi documents published by WikiLeaks, as Saudi Arabia has warned not to distribute them, spokesperson for the WikiLeaks told RT adding that ‘it’s just the beginning.’ “We are seeing how the oil money is being used to increase influence of Saudi Arabia which is substantial of course - this is ally of the US and the UK. And since this spring it has been waging war in neighboring Yemen,” Icelandic investigative journalist and spokesperson for the WikiLeaks organization Kristinn Hrafnsson told RT. On Friday, the whistleblowing website...

While conservatives have been nearly unanimous in calling for the end of the Washington slush fund known as the Export-Import Bank, Congress will clearly remain under a lot of pressure from powerful business interests. The authorization for the bank is due to expire at the end of this month, so no real action is required to make it go away beyond simply doing nothing. Given how that’s what Congress is usually best at, this sounds pretty easy, but one major employer has begun leveling threats as to what will happen if they don’t get to keep the scheme in place....

A group of Saudi students caught in a cheating scandal at a Montana college were offered flights home by their kingdom's diplomats to avoid the possibility of deportation or arrest, according to a cache of Saudi Embassy memos recently published by WikiLeaks and a senior official at the school involved. The students were in a ring of roughly 30 alleged cheaters at Montana Tech accused of having systematically forged grades by giving presents to a college employee. The cheating was discovered — and the staffer was fired — following an investigation made public in early 2012, but the memos reveal...

I know this is probably moot for now, but I think it’s important that we have all the information. Cruz went to the trouble of putting this on his website today as a further explanation of his position on TPA/TPP to conservatives.Here is the portion mentioned in the title: Isn’t TPP a “living agreement”? That particular phrase—a foolish and misleading way to put it—is found in the “summary” portion of one particular section of the draft agreement. That section allows member nations to amend the agreement in the future, expressly subject to the approval of their governments. Thus, if some...

Legal Memorandum #4 on Trade and Economic Freedom Why Trade Promotion Authority is Constitutional By Edwin Meese III and Todd F. Gaziano - November 2001 Congress is expected to vote soon on whether to grant trade promotion authority (TPA) to President George W. Bush. Some critics of TPA have suggested that it might compromise national sovereignty and may actually be unconstitutional. But an important aspect of national sovereignty is the right to enter into international agreements and to participate in their enforcement. Being bound by agreements, such as mutual defense treaties, does not weaken sovereign power even though it obligates...

Mark Levin 12 hrs · THE TPA BOONDOGGLE IS BACK AND ... I am told that John Boehner is telling the GOP members that if they vote to pass the TPA, a bill later with restrictions on immigration, among other things, will be passed to reign in Obama's actions. Boehner pulled the same trick against Congressman Marlin Stutzman not long ago, when Kevin McCarthy promised if he voted to let the massive budget bill go to the House floor, the GOP leadership would replace the bill on the floor with a smaller spending bill. But McCarthy lied to Stutzman. The...

After talks with President Barack Obama, top Republican leaders in Congress put together a quick rescue plan Tuesday for highly controversial, White House-backed trade legislation that derailed in the House last week. Officials said House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., were likely to split the stalled bill into two parts in hopes of sending them to the president separately, with Republicans providing most of the needed votes for one part, and Democrats for the other. The first would consist of stand-alone legislation strengthening Obama's hand in global trade talks by giving Congress the right...