Free Republic

Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (Miss.) says Senate Republicans should reverse the so-called nuclear option, which Democrats used to reduce the threshold for confirming executive and judicial branch nominees to a simple majority vote. Lott said incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) should reverse the change of precedent Senate Democrats made last year to defang GOP filibusters against President Obama’s nominees. Since then, Obama has stocked the federal courts, including the pivotal D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, with his picks. Republicans are split over whether they should keep the precedent in place now that they are poised to...

Let us count the times Sen. Chuck Schumer has blown himself up politically. That was a short count, wasn’t it? Whatever else might be said of him, Chuck Schumer is not in the habit of self-immolation. But progressives have been lining up to vilify New York’s senior senator as the Democratic Party’s village idiot for saying before Thanksgiving that ObamaCare was a political mistake. He even said that focusing on health care, the party’s magic mountain, was “the wrong problem.” David Axelrod accused Sen. Schumer of being, ugh, a professional politician, whose “abiding principle” is how to win elections. That’s...

Two senior Senate Republicans are preparing for a rare intraparty showdown over who will lead the Budget Committee, testing how big a platform the party will give one of the loudest conservative voices in the new GOP-controlled Congress. The race between Jeff Sessions of Alabama and Mike Enzi of Wyoming will have critical implications for the GOP’s vision on nationwide budget policy, determine whether Sessions — one of the fiercest immigration-reform critics — will have a prime committee perch and show just how much seniority matters in today’s Senate GOP, which is about to get a youthful infusion of at...

Aaron David Miller, who was Dennis Ross' top assistant, has told YNet that the United States 'always' tried to interfere in Israeli elections, but never succeeded (Hat Tip: Red Tulips) (link in Hebrew). According to Miller, the US gathered a lot of information about Prime Minister Netanyahu - including his activities while a student in the United States - but no one would listen. Miller admits that the George HW Bush administration influenced the outcome of the 1992 election to bring Yitzchak Rabin to power over Yitzchak Shamir, but he claims that's because the US set up the environment...

Conservative Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama could be chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, injecting a much needed shot of populism into the GOP policymaking apparatus. Sessions would join other conservative chairmen with populist leanings, including the two men whose committees oversee Wall Street. But Sen. Mike Enzi — a Wyoming conservative who is closer to the party Establishment and the business lobby — could take the gavel instead. Here’s the background on the race for Budget chairman: Technically, the entire Senate Republican Conference — all 53 or 54 GOP senators — choose the committee chairman. But as a...

Squeezing out conservatives on committee assignments is a tried and true strategy of the establishment. Boehner has threatened and successfully kicked conservative “troublemakers” off of committees for standing up for their principles. In the Senate McConnell even had to recruit Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) for the Senate Finance Committee to jam then Senator DeMint. Even recently, conservative Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) was pushed out of the chair at House Oversight because he wanted to aggressively go after the Obama administration. "Given the fact that Senator Sessions has done a superb job serving as the Ranking Member of the Senate Budget...

Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell discusses the possibility that Immigration reform will pass Congress, and how it may happen, with Jerry Seib at the WSJ CEO Council.

As the dispute between the Pueblo County Clerk and Recorder and the Pueblo canvassing board over whether to certify the 2014 election results enters its third week, the Pueblo County commissioners Monday assured the lone Republican who won his election that, if it comes to it, they will appoint him to his office. Meanwhile, a representative for the Colorado Secretary of State’s office is scheduled to meet with the canvassing board Wednesday morning. And District Attorney Jeff Chostner told the commissioners that his office has begun to monitor the situation to be sure that political gamesmanship isn’t interfering with the...

Last week, the Kansas Department of Labor and the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released October 2014 jobs and earnings reports that are sure to galvanize the nationwide push for sensible state tax policy. In the two years since Kansas’ tax-reform measures went into effect, the promises of Governor Sam Brownback’s administration are becoming a reality. I challenge tax-and-spend naysayers to dispute the following facts: 1.8,400 seasonally adjusted non-farm jobs have been added since September; 2.Workers saw their earnings grow by 3.3 percent in a year; and 3.The Sunflower State’s unemployment rate is now 4.4 percent, down from...

Democrats hope to take back control of the Senate in 2016, but their plans could be complicated by potential retirements. The two Democratic senators most likely to retire are Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who represent both sides of the party’s ideological spectrum. Boxer, whose fourth term expires at the end of 2016, has a paltry $149,000 in her campaign account, less than almost every other senator facing election next year. As the nation’s most populous state, California is expensive to cover with advertising. If Boxer decides to run for reelection, she would face a major fundraising...

Congressional Republicans led by Senator Mike Enzi of Wyoming and Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, are about to raise Americans’ taxes and set in place the foundation for states to be able to tax downloads from the internet, including from places like iTunes. Senators Durbin and Enzi are inserting an internet tax as an amendment to the Senate budget bill.The tax sounds innocuous enough. The tax is hiding under legislation called the Marketplace Fairness Act. The Act purportedly just harmonizes state laws so internet sales are also taxed. After all, it is not fair that Amazon does not charge...

This brilliant ad is coming to your televisions this Thanksgiving from Conservative War Chest.

Rep. Jim Costa was thought to be headed for a safe race. The California Democrat represents a district that supported President Obama by a 19-point margin in 2012—and while Costa had had scares in previous midterms, 2014 appeared to be in the bag. And indeed, Costa did keep his seat, but only after squeaking through one of the tightest races of the entire cycle, a vote count so close that it took 15 days for him to be officially declared the victor over Republican candidate and dairy farmer Johnny Tacherra. So what happened? Costa nearly fell victim to a radically...

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) had some good news for Republicans on Tuesday. Speaking at the National Press Club, the Empire State senator issued a veiled criticism of Hillary Clinton when he insisted that Democrats can only win the White House again in 2016 if they make a convincing case for big government. CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO... “That same underlying expectation that government should help make life easier for the middle class is as strong as it’s ever been, setting the stage for a Democratic victory in 2016 if, and only if, we can convince people that government...

The apoplectic and apocalyptic will scoff at the suggestion that this past week’s executive amnesty could help fuel a partial revitalization of our republic. So why is there room for optimism that something can be done–and what? President Obama’s threatened and now announced executive amnesty has, not for the first time, drawn pundits, politicians, and the American people, Left and Right, back to the Constitution to reflect on what, exactly, the president and Congress are supposed to do. That, in and of itself, is a good thing–an indication that, at some level, we all still recognize the need to square...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKLy-IcdH7cTRANSCRIPT: I’m Andrew Klavan and this is the Revolting Truth. The political landscape has changed and now that some time has passed, let’s try to get at the deeper meaning of the midterm elections. In the final results, Republicans won eleventy hundred Senate seats out of a possible thirty-three, and approximately a gazillion governorships including four in the seven states that only exist in Barack Obama’s imagination. I know many of you untrained amateur political hobbyists out there may feel this means that voters have repudiated the Obama presidency... and then thrown it to the ground and stomped on it......

The conventional wisdom espoused by the GOP establishment and pundits like Karl Rove was the idea that Tea Party supported candidates, that won GOP primaries, would be the big losers on election night in this year's mid-term elections. But a reasonable analysis of the elections results tells us that moderate GOP nominees were the big losers. Even the ones backed by the Koch brothers. The most moderate GOP candidates were nominated in some of the more blue states and they lost badly in races that could have been won against vulnerable Democrat incumbents who voted for Obamacare. In Oregon the...

In his recent Dome Magazine article, Rich Robinson of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network writes that Republicans won the state House and Senate because of “the power of the gerrymander”: As old Joe Stalin observed, it’s less important who votes than who counts the votes. Or, in our contemporary situation, how the votes are grouped to be counted. ...Through the magic of drawing advantageous district lines, a pure toss-up state has been turned into a locked-down Red State government. I guess you have to take your hat off to the mechanics in the back room that pulled that off. But...

A battle is heating up between two top Republicans over the coveted chairmanship of the Senate Budget Committee, carrying implications for the ability of the new GOP Congress to govern as well as the emerging clash over immigration. The turf war pits Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), the committee's ranking member, against Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY), a longtime committee member who asserts seniority over his Alabama colleague and is now seeking to reclaim it. "Senator Enzi is seeking the Budget Chairmanship," Enzi spokesman Daniel Head told TPM. "Under the Republican Conference rules, he has seniority for the post and it is...

RALEIGH — Already socked with rising premium costs due to Obamacare, Southern Elevator has delayed planned growth and job creation as it contemplates up to $800,000 in added annual health insurance costs a year from now, when employer mandates for medium-size businesses kick in. “Our health care insurance agent is estimating that we will have a 10 percent increase this year that is currently being priced,” said Rodney Pitts, owner of Greensboro-based Southern Elevator. That is on top of increases totaling 44 percent since 2012. The company now pays up to $20,000 annually for each employee with spouse and dependent...