Free Republic

White House hopeful Julián Castro called on House Democrats to impeach President Trump after reports surfaced that he urged the Ukrainian president to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, his chief political rival in the 2020 race. “You cannot sit by as the highest officeholder in the land flagrantly violates the law and violates every norm of a healthy democracy that we have, because it’s setting a terrible standard for people in the future. We can never normalize this,” Castro said on the campaign trail. “He needs to be impeached. I love these House Democrats—my brother is one of them,...

The last time presidential candidates gathered to address LGBTQ issues specifically was 2007. Since then, there’s been a sea change in rights and acceptance. When 10 of the Democratic candidates for president gather in Iowa on Friday evening, it will be at a forum to address issues that are top of mind for one of their party’s most reliable constituencies: the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community. The candidates — Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Julián Castro, Tulsi Gabbard, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Joe Sestak, Elizabeth Warren and Marianne Williamson — will take the stage at Coe College...

President Donald Trump reacted to Robert “Beto” O’Rourke’s gun confiscation talk by suggesting “Dummy Beto” sank any chances for gun control legislation. Breitbart News reported that O’Rourke used the September 12, 2019, Democrat debate to say, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15.” The next day he elaborated on the statement, making clear that turning over AR-15s would be “mandatory” if his plan were in place. On September 18, 2019, Trump tweeted: “Dummy Beto made it much harder to make a deal.” He added that Beto’s comments “Convinced many that Dems just want to take your guns away.” A...

We wanted to find out what appeals to Donald Trump’s supporters and why they believe he deserves another term. The economy, the judges and a get-the-job-done attitude is just part of it. Here are their stories. BOSTON — His critics call him dangerous, unhinged and unstable, and 10 leading Democrat contenders and three Republican challengers would like to replace him. But less than five months from the Iowa caucuses, President Donald Trump enjoys the support of a solid majority of Republicans, and they have sound reasons to stick with their man despite the furor that continually surrounds him. According to...

Former presidential nominee Hillary Clinton blamed voter suppression for her 2016 loss, and threw her support behind claims made by former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams regarding the 2018 Georgia governor race. "You can run the best campaign, you can have the best plans, you can get the nomination, you can win the popular vote. And you can lose the Electoral College and therefore the election for these four reasons. Number one, voter suppression," Clinton said Tuesday an "In Defense of Democracy" event at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. "We saw what happened in Georgia where Stacey Abrams should...

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) says it’s simply a matter of time before President Donald Trump is impeached. Appearing Monday night on CNN, the Minnesota congresswoman said she was confident the president would be impeached despite recent polling that indicated 6 in 10 Americans were not on board. House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) said earlier Monday that, although he personally believed the president should be impeached, “we cannot impeach the president against the will of the American people.” Omar interpreted Nadler’s statement in a different way. She highlighted the change in public opinion during former President Richard Nixon’s impeachment proceedings,...

President Donald Trump will not consider the House-passed universal background checks bill as part of his proposed gun package, according to a source familiar with the conversation on guns. Trump’s position on the House-passed bill is not exactly a surprise. The White House issued a veto threat against the bill in February. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) have called on Trump repeatedly to bring up the House-passed universal background checks bill. Over the weekend, Pelosi and Schumer issued a statement following a phone call with Trump that anything other than the House-passed bill...

US President Donald Trump will be joining PM Narendra Modi at a mega event in Houston named "Howdy, Modi!". The September 22 event will be the first time a US president and Indian Prime Minister will be addressing a joint rally. Amid speculation if Trump would join PM Modi at the Houston event, White House issued a statement to confirm that he would attend the rally. This is the third successive meeting between Trump and PM Modi within the span of a few weeks after the G20 and G7 summits. More than 50,000 Indian-Americans from across the US have registered...

PLANO — Beto O'Rourke on Sunday said Democrats should be bolder in their approach to issues related to gun control, immigration, criminal justice and climate change. "I'm a lifelong Democrat," O'Rourke told about 300 people outside of Artcentre of Plano. "For too long Democrats have played defense ... but just like Lucy with the football, every single time that we put our best foot forward and move forward in the spirit of consensus and comprise and start in that middle position, we lose it." O'Rourke called for a different, less compromising approach, noting that attempts at consensus building have led...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s free child-care plan would be offered to families making less than twice the poverty-line income (less than $51,000 for a family of four), while wealthier families would have child-care costs capped. The program could cost $700 billion over a decade, while a tax on the ultra-wealthy to pay for it could raise near-$3 trillion over the next decade. Corporations have been increasing their child-care benefits and services in recent years as a way to meet today’s labor market needs, help the early education of the next generation of workers and be less reliant on government.

President Trump is a horrendous racist. And it’s time for Democrats to stop calling him one. Counterintuitive? Yes. But substantial evidence shows that labeling Trump “racist” backfires against Democrats. It energizes his supporters without providing any additional motivation to Democrats, and it drives soft partisans — voters who could be up for grabs in 2020 — into Trump’s arms. This doesn’t mean letting Trump off the hook for being the racist he obviously is; I’ve been using the term for four years because it objectively describes him. But this means talking about his racism in a different way: Say that...

And the winner is … Donald Trump. The Democrats’ third presidential debate was a long-winded, platitude-filled disaster where no single candidate could claim a clear victory. Instead, the seven men and three women took turns displaying why they are all probably unelectable. Start with Joe Biden’s incoherence. The nominal front-runner, the former vice president had a 40-year reputation for never shutting up. Now he can’t manage to finish a sentence without interrupting himself. Nearly all his efforts to make a point were swamped by a sudden change of direction mid-sentence, and then another change a few words later as a...

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg suggested during Thursday night's primry debate that those who back President Trump and his immigration policies are “supporting racism." During the debate, Jorge Ramos, the Univision anchor and a moderator of the ABC News-hosted debate in Houston, rattled off several immigration-related Trump administration controversies, including family separations at the border, a travel ban that blocked entrance to the U.S. from seven majority Muslim countries, and dust-ups over the president's own incendiary rhetoric. Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., was asked if people who support Trump and his immigration policies are racist. “Anybody who supports...

While some may be anticipating sparks to fly between Democratic candidates onstage, the Trump campaign plans to literally fly its counter messaging in the air above Houston ahead of Thursday's debate. President Donald Trump's campaign intends to counter-program the Democratic primary debate hosted by ABC News and Univision with an ad blitz that includes two front-page newspaper ads and flying a massive banner in the air that blasts socialism just before candidates take the stage. "Socialism will kill Houston's economy!" the ad reads, along with a number to text, according to a rendering provided to ABC News by a Trump...

As House Democrats appear to be pushing forward with potential impeachment proceedings for President Donald Trump, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is challenging Republicans who would vote against it to “go on the record.” The congresswoman told reporters on Capitol Hill on Tuesday that if the House of Representatives impeaches Trump and the matter goes to the Senate, she would want to “see every Republican go on the record and knowingly vote against impeachment of this president, knowing his corruption.” Ocasio-Cortez said any lawmakers who oppose impeachment should have the chance to put it to a formal vote “so that they...

Gee, who could have seen that coming? Millions of Americans don't like decriminalizing illegal entry into the country, or having their private health care insurance taken away. Joe Scarborough has figured out that those and other radical positions the Dem presidential candidates have adopted have turned off many Americans. And he's worried that could cost the Dems the White House in 2020. On today's Morning Joe, a concerned Scarborough cited a tweet by liberal New York Times columnist David Leonhardt that contained a poll showing that, in the wake of the Democrat debates, Republican voter ID has risen to equal...

How important do Democrats think it is to beat President Donald Trump in 2020? Obviously, most Democrats would say it’s vitally important. Four more years of the Trump presidency could allow him to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. It would worsen the climate crisis. It could cement his paranoid racism and scorn for democracy as the new American normal. Given these consequences, you would think that Democrats would be approaching the 2020 campaign with a ruthless sense of purpose. But they’re not, at least not yet. They are not focusing on issues that expose Trump’s many vulnerabilities....

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris (Calif.) acknowledged Salon's editor-at-large D. Watkins was "right" about police officers after he claimed they "they just harass and take up space in poor communities." Harris's campaign released a 31-minute campaign video on Monday that included Harris speaking with black leaders about the U.S. criminal justice system. Near the beginning of the video, Watkins criticized police officers and their role in poor communities. "We shouldn't have to acknowledge their trauma because they're paid to be there. We live in these places. Police officers have historically not been held accountable because they protect and serve...

While things have calmed somewhat regarding President Trump and immigration (I mean, his Sharpie pen on a hurricane map IS vastly important), Florida Democrats are trying to build the importance of that issue back up, and it's with an eye on the demographic map. Thinking they've found a wedge to finally strip away the dependable Cuban vote from the red team, Democratic pols and their pals in the press are loudly crowing about "the GOP deportations" to Cuba. At issue is that President Trump has shown a willingness to send back some illegal residents to the island nation. Dems believe...

Joe Biden’s bleeding eye at the Democrats’ marathon “climate crisis” town hall on CNN is as good an omen as any of the political curse of eco-catastrophism. From banning cheeseburgers and plastic straws to aborting babies in poor countries, the swivel-eyed climate zealotry of the 10 Democratic front-runners has just rendered them unelectable. It’s extraordinary the candidates were gullible enough to be lured into what clearly was an ambush by puppet youth climate activists from the shadowy Sunrise Movement and 350.org. Sunrise boasted afterward that it engineered the seven-hour talkfest, bypassing the DNC’s refusal to hold an official climate debate....