Free Republic

Drugmakers' shares fell globally after President Trump said he would sign an executive order to lower the cost of prescription drugs. Shares of Japan's Daiichi Sankyo, which gets about a third of revenue from the U.S., dropped around 8%. Other Japanese drug stocks also fell.

House Republicans are planning to include several of President Trump’s campaign promises in the first draft of the bill, which they hope to release soon.It was easy to miss, but last weekend President Trump floated a fundamental rewrite of the American tax code. In a social media post, and again in remarks to reporters, Mr. Trump suggested the United States could stop taxing income under $200,000 and instead rely on revenue from his extensive tariffs. “It’ll take a little while before we do that, but we’re going to be cutting taxes, and it’s possible we’ll do a complete tax cut,”...

"GOP Sen. Rand Paul says he expects to have enough votes in Senate to pass resolution to effectively block Trump’s tariffs. But Paul, who expects the vote Wednesday, attacked Speaker Johnson’s move to block such resolutions as “dishonesty.”" *** The background to this, via Politico: The White House warned that Trump will veto a bipartisan Senate resolution that would terminate his sweeping global “Liberation Day” tariffs. The statement of administration policy from the Office of Management and Budget, sent to congressional offices Monday, comes ahead of an expected vote this week forced by several Democrats led by Sen. Ron Wyden...

So far, American consumers have been shielded from much of the impact. But as the world of international shipping adjusts to his policies, the president is facing a potential reckoning. With the US-China trade war starting to gum up container traffic between the world’s two biggest economies, freight companies are warning of plunging bookings and a surge in “blank sailings” – where ports are skipped or voyages are called off altogether. Earlier this week, America’s most powerful retail executives trooped into the White House to deliver a blunt prognosis: tariffs on Chinese goods risked causing “empty shelves” in two weeks...

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is continuing his push against President Donald Trump's tariffs, with legislation he is co-sponsoring against them to come before the Senate next week. Paul says lawmakers should be in control of tariffs, rather than Trump, through the use of a national-emergency law. The discussion will come less than a month after Paul was one of the only two chamber Republicans to vote against his party's budget, which is seen as a key part of the president's tax cuts, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. "I don't have any bad feelings towards the president, but this is...

President Trump continues to walk back his original tariff assault, and markets are pleased. They rose again Wednesday after Mr. Trump said he won’t fire the Federal Reserve Chairman and is likely to retreat from his highest China tariffs. Is this Mr. Trump’s François Mitterrand moment? Readers of a certain age will recall how the French Socialist President swept into power in 1981 promising a far left agenda of government control over the private economy. The market reaction was brutal. Within a year he had put socialism on pause and by 1983 he had abandoned most of it. He went...

Republican lawmakers say there’s a good chance that President Trump’s trade war will boomerang on Republicans politically in 2026, as rising prices and shrinking growth could offset other accomplishments by the GOP. Republican senators are pointing to the 1932 and 1982 elections as historical examples of when trade wars and resulting price inflation hurt their party at the ballot box, and they are worried that history could repeat itself. Many Republican lawmakers view tariffs as a tax hike on American consumers, and some note that the last two times Congress enacted tax hikes on the scale of Trump’s recent tariffs,...

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said on Sunday said he’s questioning President Trump’s “endgame” in his approach to tariffs, saying the ongoing “volatility” isn’t good for businesses. “One thing I learned in the private sector is unpredictability can work pretty well in the negotiation, but the private sector — businesses want certainty. They want stability. They don’t like to see volatility,” Johnson said in an interview on NewsNation’s “The Hill Sunday.” “And, so, I’ve just been questioning exactly what’s the endgame here? What’s the strategy?” he continued. Johnson called himself an “unabashed free trader” and touted what he sees as the...

The formula used by the Trump administration to levy reciprocal tariffs contains a serious math error that over-inflates the impact by about a factor of four, economists at the American Enterprise Institute said. Why it matters: The conservative think tank says the error led to tariff rates massively higher than they should have been to achieve the goals the administration sought.

President Trump proclaims his tariffs will bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. Good luck finding workers to fill them. A common lament among employers, especially manufacturers, is they can’t find reliable, conscientious workers who can pass a drug test. Single women might commiserate: A good worker, like a good man, can be hard to find these days. Blame government, which showers benefits on able-bodied people who don’t work while at the same time subsidizing college degrees that don’t lead to productive employment. The result is millions of idle men and millions of unfilled jobs—what an economist would call a...

U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance argues that importing cheap foreign labor through mass immigration has led to declining productivity and economic stagnation in the West. Speaking at a summit of venture capitalists hosted by Andreesen Horowitz on Tuesday, the Vice President stated the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom are “addicted to cheap labor,” which has fueled over 40 years of economic policy failures.“I’d say that if you look in nearly every country, from Canada to the UK, that imported large amounts of cheap labor, you’ve seen productivity stagnate,” Vance told technology industry investors attending the summit. He continued:...

Self-styled moderate Democrats are pushing a future campaign message on the issue that defeated Kamala Harris: Don’t talk about migration. Instead, Democrats should wrap themselves in the flag and patriotic imagery, says a five-page strategy memo drafted by Third Way, a pseudo-moderate Democrat group that held a post-election “Comeback Retreat” in February 2025: Embrace patriotism, community, and traditional American imagery (e.g., farms, main streets).The memo mentions immigration once — but only to slam the GOP’s messaging on the issue: “Democrats often let Republicans set the terms of cultural debates (e.g., crime, immigration) instead of clearly defining their own positions in...

DESTIN, Fla. - The war is on in Tallahassee as Gov. Ron DeSantis went on the offensive on Friday, again going after the Florida Legislature on the contentious issue of illegal immigration. At a news conference in Destin on Friday, the governor railed against the ‘TRUMP Act,’ which state lawmakers passed this week after rebuking the governor's special session and convening their own instead. Battle over immigration legislation Special session rebuked The backstory: Earlier this month, DeSantis called a special session, asking state lawmakers to consider several immigration-related proposals, along with hurricane relief, condo fee reform and the citizen ballot...

Within days of taking office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that has been misconstrued by most of the talking heads out there as "ending birthright citizenship." This characterization uses an overly broad brush to paint over what is actually an extremely nuanced issue with regard to the interpretation of citizenship in the 14th Amendment.Section 1 of the amendment starts off with one of the most consequential lines of any of the Reconstruction Amendments passed in the wake of the Civil War: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens...

In the giddy hangover of our tumultuous celebration of American liberation, let’s chat about some of the legal aspects of what’s happening and what’s going to happen because there are a lot of bad legal takes out there (follow the essential Twitter account of the same name), and you don’t want to be repeating the same kind of nonsense that other people do. Let’s be clear about something. I’m not telling you what I think the law should be. I’m telling you how the law actually is. And then I’ll give my opinion, which might be wrong. Of course, my...

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) warned Senate Republicans not to overrule parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough if some desired border security provisions are thrown out. Such a move would be akin to nuking the legislative filibuster, the new Republican leader said... Senate Republicans could seek out sweeping border policy changes that would be prohibited under reconciliation rules. Thune’s ruling should stop such a move that would step over the respected MacDonough. She’s served the Senate since 2012 and holds bipartisan praise. Thune lauded her in 2015 when Republicans sought to repeal portions of Obamacare....

Senator Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) questioned if deporting everyone in the United States illegally was “realistic” Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Host Kristen Welker said, “Let’s talk about the Republicans’ agenda. When I spoke to President-elect Donald Trump he said his mass deportation plan was his top priority. He wants to deport everyone who is here illegally. Do you support that plan to deport everyone who is here illegally?” Thune said, “Well I think certainly there are categories, people who have committed crimes. There are over a million people that the current administration had targeted for deportation. So...

Making the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent would be a good start for Congress in 2025. But it’s time to take an even bigger step: creating a simplified flat tax for all. The TCJA got us close to this goal, and a few additional reforms would get it done. Collapsing the personal-income and corporate tax rates to 15% would have huge economic benefits. America would suddenly have one of the lowest tax rates in the world, resulting in trillions of dollars of new capital flow and a spike in take-home pay. The simplicity of a flat tax would reduce...

onald Trump II is a brave new world, and look no further than his strange choice of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Health and Human Services Department. Only months ago Mr. Trump was calling the Kennedy family scion a “liberal lunatic,” yet now he wants to hand RFK Jr. the power to “make America healthy again.” Good luck making sense of this nomination.

In the last month of the presidential campaign, former President Donald Trump is doubling down on his promise to carry out the largest mass deportation effort in American history. In Reading, Pennsylvania, last week, Trump drew fervent applause from a rally crowd after saying he would "get these people out" and "deport them so rapidly." In Aurora, Colorado, on Friday, Trump told rallygoers he would "rescue Aurora and every town that has been invaded and conquered." Immigration researchers, lawyers, and economists have pointed to immense constitutional, humanitarian and economic problems posed by Trump's oft-repeated pledge. But beyond the anticipated damage...