Free Republic

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — U.S. Rep. Don Bacon, a Republican from Nebraska, announced Monday he will not seek reelection next year amid an increasingly polarized political climate.Bacon, 61, said at a news conference at Omaha’s airport that he would not seek a sixth term representing Nebraska’s second district with its so-called blue dot that includes many progressive voters around Omaha.Bacon has had to navigate an ever-thinning line between staying in his party’s and President Donald Trump’s good graces without alienating his increasingly Democratic district. He said he is proud of his bipartisan approach in the face of bitter partisanship in...

Monday on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) said she had “many questions” about the success of President Donald Trump’s military strike on three Iranian nuclear facilities. Cooper asked, “You’re somebody in Washington who’s, you know, people on both sides of the aisle consider a straight shooter. You have your what you believe in and you stand by it, sometimes it’s out of favor, sometimes it’s in favor with your own party. Do you think it was the right move by President Trump to order air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities given what we have seen now as...

Breitbart News @BreitbartNews Lisa Murkowski says that if the balance in the Senate goes from 53-47 back to 50-50, she's open to joining with the Democrats to give them the majority From Galen Druke 3:14 PM · Jun 23, 2025

@RepMTG My thoughts on bombing Iran. I don’t know anyone in America who has been the victim of a crime or killed by Iran, but I know many people who have been victims of crime committed by criminal illegal aliens or MURDERED by Cartel and Chinese fentanyl/drugs. Almost everyone in our country can relate to this fact. However America has not dropped bunker busters on the Cartel’s sophisticated drug tunnels, launched tomahawks on massive cartel poisonous drug operations, or gone to war against the cartels international terrorists networks. Neocon warmongers beat their drums of war and act like Billy badasses...

The promise of allowing China to enter “most favored nation status” in 1980 and entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 was predicated on the notion that insurgent free markets would revolutionize and liberate the largest communist nation in the world. The economic reality of 2025 is that this project has largely failed. Dictator Xi of China embodies one of the most hardline manifestations of Communist Party power in a generation. Previous reforms are now repealed and a pattern of internal and global human rights abuses are better funded than ever and rationalized in a growing technological network of...

As President Donald Trump attempts to muscle his GOP agenda through a narrow House majority, Rep. Chip Roy is perhaps the most important holdout to win over. He may also be the toughest. Speaker Mike Johnson and his team have been confident they can pass Trump’s massive reconciliation bill, because they don’t believe any Republican will want to stand in the way and face Trump’s wrath. But Roy, the unapologetic fiscal hawk, is the rare GOP lawmaker willing to publicly challenge the president. He has already survived multiple calls by his own party to oust him — including from Trump...

Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” former Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) said President Donald Trump’s tariffs caused the world to see the United States as an “unreliable partner.” Host George Stephanopoulos said, “I think you identified the tariffs as the number one issue. Liberation Day is probably the most consequential day of the first 100 days. Is there an exit strategy for Donald Trump on this? He asked, “Can he make this sort of series of deals that limit the damage?”

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,”...

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...

Sen. Ron Johnson is actively investigating 9/11. A day after the Wisconsin Republican went on a far-right podcast promoting conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, a spokesperson for Johnson said the lawmaker is currently seeking information and documentation in order to hold hearings on the event nearly 25 years later. He would do so in his capacity as chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, one of Congress’s most storied and powerful panels with far-reaching jurisdiction that gives its chair wide latitude to probe a diverse array of matters. It has...

The Senate, once again, was working into the early morning hours Friday with its new majority leader, Republican John Thune, setting the pace. It wasn’t until just after 2 a.m. that the last of the senators had straggled into the chamber to cast their vote on the confirmation of retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The vote capped a grinding start to the year for the Senate that included several all-night floor sessions and — importantly for Thune — the quickest top-level Cabinet confirmation process in the past 20 years....

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...

Barack Hussein Obama has prevailed in the 2008 presidential election. Obama not only carried all the ‘blue’ states that John Kerry won in 2004, he also flipped several ‘red’ states, such as Colorado, Nevada, Florida and Virginia, delivering a crushing electoral defeat to John McCain. And the blame falls squarely on the GOP for allowing this Marxist to become president of the United States. It has been interesting and amusing to read the numerous ‘post mortems’ from conservative and liberal pundits alike. Yet not one of the post mortems has identified the real reason McCain got clobbered. It was not...

If Republicans like Tillis actually care about lowering Americans’ cost of living, they should slash the federal budget they’ve spent years ballooning.It’s been less than a week since President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff blitz against foreign nations, and Republicans on Capitol Hill are already in full-on freakout mode. Throughout the past several days, GOP members of Congress have run to their favorite legacy media talking heads to express their supposed concerns that the president’s tariff policies could result in higher costs of living for everyday Americans. The latest example of this came on Tuesday, when Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., while...

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.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) claimed Friday on CNN’s “Inside Politics” that Republicans seemed willing to “buck” President Donald Trump by passing the Trade Review Act of 2025. It would require a joint resolution of approval for the new tariffs and allow Congress to end tariffs with a resolution of disapproval. Host Dana Bash said, “The veteran Republican Senator Chuck Grassley and Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell, they have introduced a bill, a bipartisan bill to require congressional approval for any new tariffs. And I’m sure you saw that Grassley said it’s necessary to reassert Congress’s constitutional role and ensure...

A single Republican senator — Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) — voted against the nomination of Harmeet Dhillon to serve as assistant attorney general, veering away from the rest of her GOP colleagues who voted in favor. After her nomination in December, lawmakers finally held a formal vote Thursday and Dhillon was approved in a 52-45 vote. However, Murkowski opposed the nomination and sided with Democrats. President Donald Trump announced in December the nomination of Dhillon to work as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Justice. “Throughout her career, Harmeet has stood up consistently to protect our...

Senate Republicans want Elon Musk to stop talking about Social Security, and the Department of Government Efficiency to leave it alone. Musk’s statement that Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme,” and his plans to cut up to 12 percent of the Social Security Administration’s workforce, are giving GOP lawmakers heartburn. They warn that Social Security reform is known as the “third rail” of politics for a reason: Any party that touches it is likely to get zapped come Election Day. And Republicans fear that reductions in staff and field offices will boomerang on them, predicting constituents will grow frustrated if...

Republican strategist Karl Rove said President Trump’s claims that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has discovered “hundreds of billions” in government “fraud” will backfire when Democrats spotlight a lack of prosecutions of those involved. During an appearance on Fox News’s “Sunday Night in America with Trey Gowdy,” Rove echoed Democratic strategist James Carville’s sentiment that Democrats should “allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight.” In his joint address to Congress last week, Trump criticized the “appalling waste” in government spending, while praising DOGE head and tech billionaire Elon Musk for discovering “hundreds of billions of dollars of...