Free Republic

The 2020 election demonstrated how fragile our democracy is. As Donald Trump tried, by means both legal and illegal, to overturn the results of a free and fair election, only the courts and a thin line of courageous Republican election officials guaranteed that the peoples’ choice prevailed. But the safeguards are weaker. Although the Supreme Court upheld the last lower-court dismissal of multiple Trump-inspired lawsuits charging election fraud, in July the court upheld new voting restrictions enacted in Arizona. And many of the Republican election officials who refused to back up Trump’s bogus fraud charges have been threatened, fired, or...

By pandering to another interest group, the AFL-CIO, the Democratic presidential candidates on Tuesday made it more difficult for one of them to oust President Bush next November. With three momentary exceptions when Sens. Joe Lieberman (Conn.) and Bob Graham (Fla.) showed some courage and independence, the nine candidates fell all over themselves to tell the trade union convention in Chicago exactly what it wanted to hear on every issue. In the process, candidates-Sens. John Kerry (Mass.) and John Edwards (N.C.)-abandoned previous positions in favor of free trade, an idea that is popular with Americans almost everywhere but at the...

Morton Kondracke's column: Bush Could Face Big Fight in GOP Over Gay Issues The Republican Party has a "gay problem" that could complicate President Bush's re-election prospects. Bush wants to be moderate on gay issues, and that makes right-wing activists furious. Democrats and gay activists thought Bush was caving in to the right when his press secretary defended Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) as "an inclusive man" after he said that legalizing gay sex meant permitting incest and bigamy. But right-wing groups condemned the statement as "tepid," demanding a full-blown defense of Santorum's argument, and accused GOP leaders of "pandering to...