Free Republic

Ardent supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) lashed out at the Democratic Party establishment and threatened to bail on the party after a federal judge in Florida dismissed a class-action suit Friday alleging that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) illegally favored Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton over Sanders. The DNC’s treatment of Sanders, who switched his party affiliation to run in the 2016 Democratic primaries, came under scrutiny after the 2016 hack into the DNC’s servers revealed that key party officials favored the more traditional Clinton over the progressive Sanders. But on Friday, Ronald Reagan appointee Judge William Zloch dismissed...

John Danforth can comfort himself over that if he likes by asserting that Trump doesn’t represent Republicans, but Republicans themselves have been pretty clear over the past 26 months what their view of that is.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) is warning President Trump's allies that they shouldn't expect a pardon in the ongoing Russia investigation should there be any convictions. The Democratic lawmaker on Saturday tweeted that targets of the investigation should still feel compelled to testify. "Any witness counting on a Russia investigation pardon should think again," Blumenthal tweeted, linking to an earlier report from The Hill quoting Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who said that Trump's pardon of former Sheriff Joe Arpaio was a signal to those targeted by the Justice Department.....

Senate Minority Whip Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) is stepping up his call for an investigation into President Trump's former special assistant Sebastian Gorka's alleged ties to a neo-Nazis. "Sebastian Gorka should never have been an advisor to POTUS. He should still be investigated for concealing neo-nazi ties," Durbin said in a tweet on Saturday, just one day after Gorka left his White House post....

Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain decried President Trump's Friday order for the Pentagon to ban transgender people from entering the military. "It would be a step in the wrong direction to force currently serving transgender individuals to leave the military solely on the basis of their gender identity rather than medical and readiness standards that should always be at the heart of Department of Defense personnel policy," McCain, R-Ariz., said in a statement late Friday. "The Pentagon's ongoing study on this issue should be completed before any decisions are made with regard to accession. The Senate Armed Services Committee...

The reaction in many quarters to Hillary Clinton’s reflective, candid assessment in her book, What Happened, of her devastating loss to Trump tells a lot about why she lost. She’s still being raked over the coals. She’s still called too guarded, not honest enough, too stiff, and even “robotic.” This fits in with the almost set-in-stone depiction of Clinton as cold, aloof, and totally unable to connect with real people. This supposedly stands in stark contrast to Trump, who appeared to be the consummate people person who spoke the common man and woman’s language. Then there’s the standard cherrypick at...

In further evidence that tensions are rising between President Trump and Republican Sen. Jeff Flake (Ariz.), Flake just criticized Trump's signature proposal to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. "This notion of a 2,000-mile wall has always been just — for anybody who spends time on the border — just a bit, you know, out there," Flake said in an interview Thursday with ABC15 in Arizona. He offered to show Trump the landscape of the Arizona-Mexico border to prove a wall isn't necessary. Flake's criticism came two days after Trump worked hard to avoid calling the Republican senator out...

A pair of parallel events occurred last night that perfectly capture the surreal and troubling times in which we are living. First, President Trump held a rally in Phoenix, in which he once again offered unto his base the reddest of red meat. “They’re trying to take away our culture,” he said, of the exploding debate over Confederate statues and monuments. “They’re trying to take away our history. And our weak leaders, they do it overnight. These things have been there for 150 years, for a hundred years. You go back to a university and it’s gone. Weak, weak people.”...

Speaker Paul Ryan Wednesday rejected a threat by President Donald Trump to shut down the government to force Congress to approve funding for a border wall with Mexico. "I don't think a government shutdown is necessary and I don't think most people want to see a government shutdown, ourselves included," the leader of the Republican-controlled House said at a news conference in Oregon where he was promoting tax reform. Ryan argued the House had already passed funding for border security but that the narrowly divided Senate -- where Democrats have considerably more sway over what gets into funding bills --...

Language is malleable, right? After all, a dictionary doesn't define a word's spelling, it simply gives the most common version of it. Well, how about a name? UCLA's The Den tweeted Monday morning that a recently unveiled statue at the new $700 million USC Village displays a typo.

In an unannounced trip to Iraq, a country that has seen horrific war and terrorism over the last decade, Secretary of Defense General James Mattis was making a statement. The general landed in Iraq Tuesday morning, just hours after President Trump made an announcement that America will be sending more troops to Afghanistan. Trump made it clear in his remarks that he is going to be empowering his generals to kill the enemy, whom he referred to as “losers.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) said in a statement released Friday that she welcomed the firing of White House strategist Steve Bannon and said that the Trump Administration must “abandon the bigoted ideology that clearly governs its decisions.” Here is the complete text of Pelosi’s statement: “Steve Bannon’s firing is welcome news, but it doesn’t disguise where President Trump himself stands on white supremacists and the bigoted beliefs they advance. “President Trump’s growing record of repulsive statements is matched by his repulsive policies. Personnel changes are worthless so long as President Trump continues to advance policies that disgrace our...

The Democratic National Committee came under fire from many online Tuesday after sending out a release on its press list that called out President Donald Trump's "empty promises on border wall." "Trump has failed to deliver on his signature promise to build a border wall and have Mexico pay for it," the DNC release read. "Trump even admitted in a private conversation with Mexico that his border wall promise was 'the least important thing.'" The email, which contained a number of links to stories that backed up the DNC's assessment, was met with near-instant ridicule from those on the left....

According to DNC Vice Chairman Rep. Keith Ellison (D., Minn.), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) secretly supports Medicare for all. The video of Ellison, first reported by the Daily Caller, shows him speaking before a local Democratic party meeting in Minnesota last Wednesday. "I’m signed onto H.R. 676 which is a single-payer health care act," Ellison said. "They call it Medicare for all. Yeah, universal health care. Real single-payer health care. I’m on that." Ellison stopped to explicitly ask if he was being recorded before explaining that Pelosi backed this bill as well. "You may have heard that...

The Congressional Black Caucus, a formidable bloc of lawmakers with a big say in the fate of President Donald Trump and his legislation, Monday sent him a terse, clear message: We don't think you understand us at all. The caucus' chairman Monday urged cancellation of next month's highly anticipated meeting between White House officials and leaders of the nation's historically black colleges. And he plans to have the 49-member caucus meet when Congress returns in two weeks to discuss whether to back Democratic-led efforts to impeach Trump. Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-La., the caucus chairman, said the president's remarks after the...

Fighting Nazis is a good thing, but fighting Nazis doesn’t necessarily make you or your cause good. By my lights this is simply an obvious fact. The greatest Nazi-killer of the 20th century was Josef Stalin. He also killed millions of his own people and terrorized, oppressed, enslaved or brutalized tens of millions more. The fact that he killed Nazis during World War II (out of self-preservation, not principle) doesn’t dilute his evil one bit. This should settle the issue as far as I’m concerned. Nazism was evil. Soviet communism was evil. It’s fine to believe that Nazism was more...

Ohio Gov. John Kasich denied Sunday that he is planning to challenge President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, saying he hopes the President can steer his White House from chaos to stability. "I'm rooting for him to get it together," Kasich said on CNN's "State of the Union." "We all are." The Republican governor said he was trying to be a "responsible voice" and offered hope that Trump -- whom Kasich unsuccessfully challenged in the 2016 Republican presidential primary and whom he has repeatedly criticized -- would grow from experience in office. "I hope we're going to have...

Idaho Falls Rep. Bryan Zollinger took to Facebook on Friday, re-posting a conspiracy theory suggesting that last weekend’s events in Charlottesville, Va., could have been an inside job orchestrated to smear President Donald Trump. The post, written on a site called The American Thinker, is replete with wild, unevidenced claims couched in what-ifs. “The conflagration in Charlottesville is beginning to feel like a set-up, perhaps weeks or months in the planning,” the author wrote. In a comment, Zollinger called the blog post “completely plausible.” The post suggests, at various points, that the white supremacist demonstration in Charlottesville, which resulted in...

A ribbon of darkness is about to cast its shadow: The path of totality. We’re not talking about talking about Monday’s solar eclipse. The path of totality we’re discussing about is the specter of congressional resolutions to censure or even impeach President Trump. Congress has a lot to deal with: North Korea, government funding, raising the debt limit, health care, tax reform, supposedly infrastructure. But the U.S. Capitol is soon to find itself directly in the path of totality when it comes to the president’s remarks about white supremacists and Charlottesville. The issue will likely monopolize Capitol Hill as the...

Democratic Missouri State Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal retweeted a Holocuast-themed tweet on Thursday in reference to Missouri's Jewish Republican Gov. Eric Greitens. Chappelle-Nadal, the state lawmaker who recently wrote she hoped President Donald Trump would be assassinated, shared a tweet that said, "Greitens should know where the Trump Train goes. At the end of the line is this place!" The tweet included a picture showing the gates of a Nazi concentration camp. (TWEET-AT-LINK) The tweet is no longer on Chappelle-Nadal's Twitter page. The picture of the gate of the camp includes the sign with the words, "Arbeit Macht Frei," translated to...