Free Republic

Have you ever wondered about the phrase "common sense"? Simply put, it's a rational way of thinking that comes naturally to all humans. It's an innately provided type of knowledge that is unspoken and unwritten. It's taken for granted. We acquire such reasoning imperceptibly from the day we are born. Such reasoning keeps us from even contemplating notions that violate our God-given ability to make prudent judgments. Contrarily, an irrational way of thinking might cause us to accept such statements as "my dog drove me to the supermarket" or "my mother is younger than I am." There was a time...

An alarming surge in threats and confrontations has elected lawmakers so rattled that Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said she was worried that a murderous encounter may be looming.Collins was the recipient of an unknown visitor's wrath when a storm window at her home in Bangor was smashed, The New York Times reported....Democrat Rep. Tim Ryan, running for an open Senate seat in Ohio, said on MSNBC that Americans must "kill and confront" the MAGA Republican movement, video posted showed.

Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) warned us about Kristen Clarke. Cruz called the radical lawyer “completely unfit to serve,” but serve she does as the Biden Administration’s chief of the civil rights division of the Department of Justice (DOJ). Her department is where equal justice now goes to die. Clarke considers her calling in Biden’s Justice Department one of score-settling for past decisions, holding contemporaries responsible for historical injustices, and chasing ghosts of the past. She greenlit the federal case against Mark Houck, a Pennsylvania Catholic pro-life author, whose seven children screamed for mercy...

While China has been relentlessly pursuing self-reliance when it comes to raw materials -- especially strategic ones such as titanium, tungsten and cobalt, which are used in the defense industry -- the US for the past several decades has been selling off huge chunks of the strategic minerals stockpile to the extent that the National Defense Stockpile is reportedly reaching insolvency. By comparison, China, as of 2020, was the world's third-largest exporter of titanium, while the US was the number one destination for the Chinese titanium exports. It is China's growing influence in Africa, especially through its Belt and Road...

In another move by the left to exert control over elections, several states are considering switching to ranked-choice voting. ... A multimillion-dollar effort to enact ranked-choice voting in Missouri has failed after Secretary of State John Ashcroft announced the initiative will not appear on the November ballot due to an insufficient number of valid signatures submitted. The measure would have appeared as a constitutional amendment to change Missouri’s election system. Millions in outside funding by Texas billionaire and former Enron executive John Arnold and his wife Laura went into getting ranked-choice voting on the ballot. Former Obama administration and Hillary...

In order to avoid a Republican primary, Murkowski operatives orchestrated a takeover of state election laws. Election officials called Alaska’s special election House race for Democrat Mary Peltola over 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin last week. Peltola’s victory, despite nearly 60 percent of votes cast for a Republican on all first-choice ballots, will mark the first time since 1973 that a Democrat will represent the state in the lower chamber. Whether the August contest was Palin’s race or Republican Nick Begich’s race to lose is an open question. Whether the Republicans’ loss was a consequence of Alaska’s new...

Chipotle is closing a Maine store that had been leading efforts to unionize the chain. Employees at the Augusta, Maine, Chipotle filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board in June asking to hold a union election at the store. It was the first of the Mexican food chain’s stores to file such a petition, according to NLRB filings. The NLRB had scheduled a hearing Tuesday on Chipotle’s objections to the union election. But early Tuesday, Chipotle announced it was permanently closing the store.

U.S. Senators Joe Manchin and Susan Collins slammed Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch for their votes in overturning Roe V. Wade on Friday. The senators had voted to confirm the Donald Trump appointed justices despite fears that they would overtrun the landmark abortion ruling, with the senators saying at the time that they trusted Kavanaugh and Gorsuch to uphold the law. Now Collins, a Republican, and Manchin, a Democrat, are accusing the justices of misleading them as they criticized the court's 5-4 ruling to end women's federal right to an abortion.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) on Friday said conservative Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch misled her about their views on the importance of Supreme Court precedent during their confirmation proceedings in 2017 and 2018. Collins, who voted to confirm then-President Trump’s first two conservative nominees to the court despite her support for abortion rights, has said she believed those justices would hold up important precedents such as Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion. A court majority that included Kavanaugh and Gorsuch struck down that right on Friday. “This decision is inconsistent with...

One takeaway from the Maine Republican Party’s stunning June 14 loss of a closely watched special election to fill a vacant state senate seat in a key swing district is that social issues matter.The reverberations of the landslide victory of two-term state Rep. Nicole Grohoski, a progressive Democrat from Ellsworth, continue to rock the Republican narrative of a coming “Red Wave” in this fall’s midterm elections.The Maine GOP put up as its candidate a well-known businessman, Brian Langley, also of Ellsworth, who had been elected twice to represent the 7th District until he was term-limited out in 2018.In Maine, a...

Fourteen Senate Republicans bucked the National Rifle Association and other Second Amendment advocates on Tuesday to advance bipartisan gun control and school safety legislation. In a 64-34 vote, the Senate voted to begin debate on an ambitious rewrite of the nation’s firearm laws. Although only a simple majority was needed to take the measure up, 14 Republicans led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell voted in favor.

This case was a challenge to the constitutionality of a Maine program that prohibits tuition for some students to attend private religious schools when their own school district does not operate a public secondary school. The court 6-3, led by Roberts, holds that the Maine program violates the free exercise clause. Because the benefits hinge on whether a school is religious, the Chief writes, the Maine program "effectively penalizes the free exercise" of religion.

Illegal aliens are known to cost U.S. citizens billions to support, but rarely is that experienced as directly as it is now in Portland, Maine, where city officials voted to raise property taxes in order to house 1,200 "asylum-seekers," along with 500 homeless. According to WGME : PORTLAND (WGME) — Portland property taxes will soon be going up by 4.8 percent. Last year, families with a $400,000 home paid about $5,200 in property taxes. With this new increase, it'll be around $5,550 for that same home. That's an increase of about $350. Portland's finance director says without federal help, it...

The University of Maine used the rising tide of outrage and frustration from the #MeToo movement in 2019 to dismiss a professor it simply didn’t like but had no cause to fire, an independent fact-finder determined. The university placed Tony Brinkley, a tenured English professor, on administrative leave twice as it examined students’ claims that the longtime professor sexually harassed them and other allegations of wrongdoing before firing him in May 2019. But UMaine made an “extremely flawed” case for Brinkley’s dismissal and “essentially gamed the system” to get rid of someone fellow English professors and administrators “disliked for a...

Various areas of Maine, including the Bangor International Airport, are reimplementing mask mandates due to changes in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) transmission map. The CDC’s map currently has several Maine counties, including Aroostook, Cumberland, Hancock, Knox, Lincoln, Penobscot, Piscataquis, and Sagadahoc, in a “high risk” level, recommending them to “wear a mask indoors.”

Do Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski want to force health care workers who are devout Catholics [in the non-Joe Biden sense of the term] and others with religious objections to abortion to participate in abortions under pain of losing their jobs? Apparently so, judging by the pair's comments on today's Morning Joe. Joe and Mika, saying "there's always something," dismissed Senator Susan Collins for her objection to the pro-abortion "Women's Health Protection Act," a Democrat bill codifying Roe v. Wade, for its failure to include such a religious exemption. But first, they mocked the "snowflake" Senator for calling the police...

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) has not changed her position on keeping the legislative filibuster intact, as her Democrat colleagues demand its abolition in the wake of a leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. On Monday night, Politico published a leaked draft Supreme Court opinion, concluding that Roe “must be overruled.”

Responding to the Monday night leak of a draft majority opinion that, if adopted, would overturn Roe v. Wade, Republican Senator Susan Collins accused Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch of reneging on commitments they allegedly made ahead of their respective confirmations. “If this leaked draft opinion is the final decision and this reporting is accurate, it would be completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings,” Collins wrote. “Obviously, we won’t know each Justice’s decision and reasoning until the Supreme Court officially announces its opinion in this case.”

President Donald Trump called 2020 Democratic Senate candidate Sara Gideon "very attractive" in meeting, adding, "not that I've looked at a woman that way in five years," according to a forthcoming book by two New York Times reporters. Authors Jonathan Martins and Alexander Burns detail Trump's involvement in downballot races and 2020 meetings with party leaders in their forthcoming book "This Will Not Pass," which Insider obtained ahead of its May 3 release. Then-Senate Majority Mitch McConnell, they wrote, tried to avoid bringing up races where Trump disliked the Republican incumbent, like GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who openly...

California and 15 states that want the U.S. Postal Service to electrify its mail delivery vehicles are suing to halt purchases of thousands of gas-powered trucks as the agency modernizes its delivery fleet. Three separate lawsuits, filed Thursday by the states and environmental groups in New York and California, ask judges to order a more thorough environmental review before the Postal Service moves forward with the next-generation delivery vehicle program. Plaintiffs contend that purchases of fossil fuel-powered delivery vehicles will cause environmental harm for decades to come. The lawsuits could further delay the Postal Service's efforts to replace the ubiquitous...