Free Republic

Pennsylvania received about 10,000 mail-in ballots between Election Day and the extended deadline of November 6, the state’s top election official announced on Tuesday. The Pennsylvania supreme court ruled before the elections to extend the deadline for receiving mail-in ballots to November 6. President Trump and Republican allies have criticized the ruling, and Trump himself has claimed that votes received after November 3 should not be counted because they are “illegal.” Republicans challenged the ruling at the U.S. Supreme Court, however the justices decided not to rule on the case before Election Day due to time constraints. However, as of...

Each day, with the coverage of the Biden as president-elect, Trump’s insistence that he’s the true winner will seem more wan and detached from reality— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) November 8, 2020 Relax, Rich. Gore had 37 days. There’s canvassing, recounts, and lawsuits. Isn’t it time for an NR cruise? https://t.co/I7Hn8f8VUs— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) November 8, 2020

When it comes to polling, like Jon Snow, I know nothing. I don’t know from statistics. I’m so innumerate that I’d have to phone a friend if you asked me what comes between 10 and 12. When it comes to crunching, I’ll choose potato chips over numbers every time. Plus, when it comes to politics, I’m hopeless: I predicted both that Donald Trump wouldn’t run for president and that Democratic voters would find Joe Biden’s creepy behavior around women disqualifying. Live and learn! Biden is way ahead. And he is certainly going to win. Right? I’m all about stories, not...

Amy Coney Barrett has been the subject of all sorts of misleading attacks, and progressives have invented ridiculous process reasons to deny her a confirmation vote. When there is so much nonsense to knock down, we go into overdrive to do it. We are now in the same mode that we were in during the Kavanaugh fight — on high alert, rebutting all the shoddy journalism and tendentious arguments. Which is why I’d like to ask you to contribute to our flash fundraiser.

Should Amy Coney Barrett recuse herself from California v. Texas, the case challenging Obamacare? Chuck Schumer has called for it: video Schumer argues that Barrett has “clearly said she’d strike down the Affordable Care Act” and has “serious conflicts of interest” regarding the ACA. On the former point, as I have detailed at length, while Barrett in her academic writing has indicated her disagreement with the 2012 NFIB decision upholding the individual mandate as an exercise of the taxing power, she did not give a view on whether she agreed with Justice Antonin Scalia that the whole law should be...

So, what crime would you charge, Mr. President? The closing weeks of the campaign find President Trump berating William Barr, the attorney general who has served him and the country well. Trump’s increasingly strident complaints relate to the probe of his 2016 campaign, launched by the Obama administration. At Barr’s direction, the genesis and conduct of that probe have been under investigation since early 2019 by Connecticut U.S. attorney John Durham, a well-regarded career prosecutor.

Former CIA Director John Brennan briefed former President Obama on Hillary Clinton’s “plan” to tie the Trump campaign to Russia as a means of distracting the public from her private email server scandal before the 2016 election, according to newly declassified documents. Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe on Tuesday declassified Brennan’s handwritten notes along with a CIA memo showing that officials referred the alleged scheme to the FBI for potential investigation. “Today, at the direction of President Trump, I declassified additional documents relevant to ongoing Congressional oversight and investigative activities,” Ratcliffe said in a statement. Brennan’s notes, which were...

Norm #1: When Democrats are in charge of both the Senate and the White House, they are free to nominate and confirm any justice they please, as quickly as they please, as they did in the cases of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. Norm #2: When Democrats only run the White House, they are free to nominate any SCOTUS justice they please, and they also get to dictate whom Republicans are allowed to confirm, as they tried to do in the case of Merrick Garland — blessed be his memory. Norm #3: When Democrats run...

Link/title only due to Bloomberg posting restrictions. However, it is amazing this came from Bloomberg. It mentions Biden on fracking, gun confiscation, and raising taxes.

On the Senate floor this afternoon, Senator Ben Sasse (R., Neb.) set the record straight about his legislation, the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which the Senate will vote on later today. Before Sasse spoke, Democratic senator Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) came to the floor to propose a Medicaid expansion supported by Democrats, insisting that Republicans were pushing “anti-abortion” legislation while refusing to accept any measures that would help women in need. Sasse, the lead sponsor of the born-alive bill — which does not limit abortion access but rather requires doctors to provide standard medical care to newborn infants who...

A bipartisan coalition of members of Congress sent a letter to NBA Commissioner Adam Silver on Wednesday “to express our deep concern” over the NBA’s statements surrounding controversy over a tweet last week by Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey, who expressed support for pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. “It is outrageous that the Chinese Communist Party is using its economic power to suppress the speech of American inside the United States. It is also outrageous that the NBA has caved to Chinese government demands for contrition,” the letter reads. It was co-signed by eight members of Congress, including Republican...

One party stands for life, freedom, and unalienable rights. The other stands for raw power. NRO’s Jim Geraghty in his daily column indulged one of the NeverTrump favorite rhetorical devices: That the president is just as bad for the Republic as the radical Democrats, and neither side “wants to solve real problems.” Apart from the common mistaken notion that the Founders created our political order “to solve problems” rather than protect the liberty of states, towns, civic society, families, and individuals, this tic often obscures an unwillingness to identify clearly those guilty of creating conflict and disorder by equally apportioning...

Fraud, chaos, the end of the Republic? Election chaos. That’s the latest thing to fear this week. Trump apparently wants us to fear an inaccurate and fraudulent election, because so many ballots will be mailed in. His opponents apparently want you to fear that the fear he’s ginning up will somehow empower him to reject the election results. And it seems that the media want you to fear an untraditional Election Night and that the counting of mail-in ballots will cause delays, with opportunistic charges and counter-charges of stolen and fraudulent results. Maybe a full-on Al Gore style in conceding...

Representative Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) slammed the Israel-U.A.E. agreement announced on Thursday, which commits the two countries to establishing full diplomatic relations and commits Israel in particular to suspending its annexation of territory in the West Bank. The agreement makes the U.A.E. the third Arab Middle Eastern nation to establish formal ties with Israel, joining Egypt and Jordan. In exchange for diplomatic relations, Israel agreed to suspend efforts to expand its territory in the West Bank. Tlaib, who is of Palestinian descent, is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which seeks to pressure Israel into giving concessions...

On the menu today: California drops a bombshell, confirming that the first American death from coronavirus occurred February 6, not February 28; a long look at the World Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019, weeks before the known start date of the virus outbreak; and a good proposal for accountability in U.S. policies regarding China.Maybe the Coronavirus Was Floating Around America Earlier Than We ThoughtThis discovery out in California is pretty significant. This doesn’t verify all of the “I had a bad flu in November or December — I’ll bet I had coronavirus” self-assessments, but it does remind us...

In her first speech since Joe Biden selected her as his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris told multiple lies. To wit: “The president’s mismanagement of the pandemic has plunged us into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression,” Harris said. False. The pandemic and its associated lockdowns, not the president, are responsible for the economic contraction. Donald Trump is not the president of the euro zone, which suffered through an even more dire economic contraction in the second quarter: minus 40.3 percent, on an annualized basis, as against minus 32.9 percent in the US. The U.K. suffered a contraction...

Joe Biden has named his 2020 running mate: authoritarianism. American prosecutors wield awesome and terrible powers that lend themselves easily to abuse, and Senator Kamala Harris, formerly the attorney general of California, is an enthusiastic abuser of them. Harris was a leader in the junta of Democratic state attorneys general that attempted to criminalize dissent in the matter of global warming, using her office’s investigatory powers to target and harass non-profit policy groups while she and her counterpart in New York attempted to shake down Exxon on phony fraud cases. Until she was stopped by a federal court, Harris was...

As regular readers of my column know, I’m no fan of Donald Trump. And that’s putting it mildly. I don’t like his chronic dishonesty. I don’t like narcissism. I don’t like his nastiness and his silly name-calling. I detest his need to constantly cause chaos, as he did with a recent tweet suggesting we should postpone the 2020 presidential election. There’s nothing about this man’s character that I like. And I hope he wins re-election in a landslide. Actually what I mean is that I hope the Republican candidate beats the Democratic candidate. And I wish the Republican candidate were...

President Trump pulled an inside straight to win in 2016, and now he needs another one. The good news for Trump is that his approval rating has stopped falling recently. The bad news is that it has stabilized in the low 40s. Election-watcher Harry Enten points out that no president since Harry Truman has won with anything like Trump’s negative net approval rating. Truman won at –6, while incumbents who lost (Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H. W. Bush) averaged out at about –13, roughly where Trump’s number is. The presidents who won reelection averaged an approval rating of...

Maybe Judge Luttig was right all along. I had the misgivings you’d expect back in late May, when I disagreed with J. Michael Luttig, the stellar scholar and former federal appeals court judge, regarding how the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals should handle the Flynn case. At the time, that court’s three-judge panel had not yet heard oral argument on Michael Flynn’s mandamus petition — i.e., Flynn’s request that the panel find that federal district judge Emmet Sullivan was acting lawlessly. Sullivan had not only failed to grant the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the criminal case against Flynn; he...