Free Republic

President Joe Biden, hosting both Republican and Democratic governors for a black-tie affair at the White House, raised his glass for a toast. Standing under a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, he told the people in the room to remember who they were. “We’re the United States of America. We can get big things done if we do it together.” “Cheers!” the crowd replied, as the clink-clink of glasses rippled about the State Dining Room. Biden hosted the dinner for members of the National Governors Association at the White House for the first time in his administration. […] The tables were...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) promoted Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) to Republican leadership as the North Carolina senator has continued to strike deals with Democrats. The Washington Post wrote a glowing piece on Tillis’s newfound status as a bipartisan dealmaker. Republicans and Democrats across the Senate praised his ability to strike compromises to pass legislation that would advance President Joe Biden’s priorities.

HARRISBURG — When Republican state legislator Jim Gregory nominated his Democratic friend and colleague Mark Rozzi to be speaker of the Pennsylvania House this month, the move stunned close political observers and seemed to offer new hope for bipartisanship. As with the nation, politics in this critical swing state, the country’s fifth-most populous, have become bitterly divided in recent years along ideological, geographical and racial lines. Donald Trump won the state in 2016, and Joe Biden took it back in 2020. False claims over the legitimacy of the 2020 contest became prominent Pennsylvania GOP rallying cries in 2022 and reinforced...

An experiment in bipartisan government in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives is less than a week old, and cracks are beginning to appear. If the compromise falls apart, the chamber will be plunged into chaos. Republican and Democratic leaders, at Speaker Mark Rozzi’s request, must find a way to move forward together, if they plan to serve the people of Pennsylvania this session. It’s time for Mr. Rozzi to honor the commitments he made in accepting the role of speaker, especially his pledge to change his registration from Democrat to Independent as a symbol of unity. After last week’s display...

Now that the Republicans have a slim majority in the House, they need to use all the powers available to them to slow down the Dems’ abuse of power and assault on the Constitution. This means both now and next term, no “bipartisanship,” no preemptive cringes to ward off media attacks, and no “negotiations,” over raising the debt ceiling, for example, that don’t get some substantive concessions for pruning back the Democrats’ fiscal excesses. Come January, the most obvious actions are House committee hearings and investigations. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, along with Jim Jordan (Ohio), James Comer (Ky), and other...

"The worst president since Jimmy Carter." You see a lot of that sort of thing if you regularly read conservative commentary, as I do. But as a conservative writer, I think it's unfair to the 39th president. I think it's time to say some good words for Carter. And if some of his accomplishments provide stark contrasts with his only-18-years-younger successor President Joe Biden, well, draw your own conclusions. I start off by noting that Carter came to the presidency with almost no relevant experience. For the voters of the mid-1970s, that was a feature, not a bug. Two of...

A group of moderate Democrats is clashing with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over when to vote on a roughly $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill – potentially imperiling a key part of President Biden's legislative agenda. The House returned from its August recess this week and is holding a crucial procedural vote Monday night on rules for debate on three measures: the budget resolution that will serve as the blueprint for Democrats' tax and spending plan, the infrastructure bill and a separate voting-rights measure. But a coalition of nine centrist Democrats has been at an impasse with Pelosi and progressive lawmakers...

President Biden on Wednesday spoke at the funeral of former Republican Sen. John Warner of Virginia, saying he showed that bipartisanship is possible “in the battle for the soul of America.” Biden said Warner’s decision to endorse him last year “gave me confidence, not about winning but about being able to do the job.” “In the battle for the soul of America today, John Warner is a reminder of what we can do when we come together as one nation,” Biden said. Warner, the sixth husband of actress Elizabeth Taylor, was a World War II and Korean War veteran and...

The Senate's months-long effort to clinch bipartisan deals - and prove the body can still function - is quickly running out of gas. The Senate passed legislation this week aimed at combating China's competitiveness, in a win claimed by both sides as an example of how the embattled chamber can cut and pass meaningful agreements........ The shaky grounds for bipartisanship come as Democrats are facing problems in their own caucus. A growing number of Democratic lawmakers are skeptical that Republicans even want to cut big bipartisan deals, and view negotiations as a waste of time. "Dems are burning precious time...

Two of West Virginia’s federal lawmakers have some of the highest scores among their colleagues regarding bipartisanship. The Lugar Center and Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy released its bipartisan index for the 116th Congress on Monday, in which U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., ranked sixth among 99 senators scored and Rep. David McKinley, R-W.Va., placed 10th among 437 members of the House of Representatives.(snip)..... Capito, speaking to MetroNews in January, championed her relationships on Capitol Hill, noting an eagerness to work with Democrats in the current Congress amid the split Senate. Capito is also the leading Republican...

Among right-wingers, there has been some delight about polls showing that Joe Biden's popularity at the 100-day mark is the lowest of any president since World War II. Oh, if you exclude Donald Trump. Undaunted by this detail, they note with satisfaction that Biden's approval rating, according to multiple polls, is somewhere between 52 and 57%. At this point in his presidency, Trump's approval was 40%. Americans were far less partisan in the era of Eisenhower, Reagan, Bush and even Clinton than they are now. Large numbers of Democrats were willing to give high marks to Eisenhower when the economy...

I haven't seen much humor in life during the past year or so, but one thing that has been uproariously hilarious lately is the orchestrated media narrative that President Joe Biden is bipartisan and conciliatory. Please give me a moment to catch my breath. I think it was Karl Rove who recently observed that the media's effective definition of bipartisan legislation is not that significant numbers of both parties' lawmakers support a bill but that some poll somewhere shows that a large percentage of Americans of each party support some vaguely described initiative, even if zero Republican legislators support the...

Former House Speaker John Boehner on Wednesday said “traditional Democrat” President Joe Biden has “caved to the left” despite vowing on the campaign trail to work in a bipartisan manner. Boehner noted during Fox News Channel’s “America’s Newsroom” that the Democratic Party “is being taken over by the left-wing progressives.” He added that as a result, Biden “has sacrificed any chance of bipartisanship.”

Friday on CNN’s “New Day,” House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) reacted to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) calling for more bipartisanship in response to the January 6 Capitol riot. Host John Berman asked Clyburn if he sees Manchin as an “obstacle” since his Democratic colleague will not support every piece of legislation that Democrats try to push through.

For two consecutive elections, more Republicans than Democrats decided against running for reelection, and so far, 2022 is shaping up similarly. Five Republican senators and one congressman have already announced they won’t seek office again next year, compared with just one Democratic congresswoman, and their retirements could signal a change within the GOP. “You typically see higher retirements when there is some sort of party shift,” said Joshua Huder, a senior fellow at Georgetown’s Government Affairs Institute. Major party shifts in Congress can also be the result of a wave election that brings in new blood, or a large, older...

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on Friday stated that Democrats cannot “indefinitely” reach out to Republicans, mere days after Democrats took control of the White House and Senate. “We cannot reach out to Republicans indefinitely. If they choose not to come on board to help the American people now, we have the majority. We should use that majority,” Sanders said alongside a clip of his recent appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers, in which the Vermont senator reiterated the same sentiment. “Look I think we should do our best to reach out to Republicans, who represent communities that were suffering...

Joe Biden’s historically weak administration and the far-left wing pulling its strings should not get Reagan-Tip O’Neill good-faith bipartisanship it laughably seeks.President Donald Trump is rightly fighting for his political life and the future of our nation. His legal team is presenting specific evidence of voter fraud from election officials in pivotal states. The Supreme Court has already ruled in his favor in one lawsuit. A complete audit of results in states using software that incorrectly counted votes in Michigan is a must. This is not over, and any Republican who concedes prematurely does so at high risk. Good luck...

In our deeply-divided country, it’s rare for Congress to come together. One bill that put a momentary pause on the gridlock is the Great American Outdoor Act (GAOA), the bipartisan conservation bill heading to President Donald J. Trump’s desk.   Last month, the Senate passed their version by a 73-25 vote. The House of Representatives, after much delay, overwhelmingly passed it by a 310-107 vote on Wednesday. President Trump is expected to sign it by August 1, 2020.There are two key takeaways from the GAOA: it will permanently fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) with $900 million annually in...

(Audio Link at Source)President Trump signed Sen. Kyrsten Sinema's bill July 25. The proposal closes a loophole in federal law that allowed some veterans to get caught up in predatory home refinance deals. The problem was certain VA loans could be easily churned, or resold. The new law prevents that from happening before a cooling-off period. "So veterans won't get stuck with these refinancing fees over and over again," said Sinema.

<p>TUCSON, Ariz. - Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema is urging no pay raises for members of Congress for this year.</p> <p>In a letter addressed to the Committee on Appropriations, Sinema teamed up with Republican Senators Rick Scott (Fla.) and Mike Braun (Ind.) to call for a plan that will safeguard taypayer dollars against what they deem to be unnecessary raises for 2020.</p>