Free Republic

Last February, as rumors swirled about the failing health of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, a team of conservative grass-roots organizers, public relations specialists and legal strategists met to prepare a battle plan to ensure any vacancies were filled by like-minded jurists. The team recruited conservative lawyers to study the records of 18 potential nominees — including Judges John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr. — and trained more than three dozen lawyers across the country to respond to news reports on the president's eventual pick. "We boxed them in," one lawyer present during the strategy meetings said...

Contact: Tracey Schmitt 202-863-8614Documentary Celebrates Reagan’s Life And Presidency 25 Years After First InaugurationWashington, DC – The Republican National Committee celebrated the 25th anniversary of President Ronald Reagan’s Inauguration today by releasing a special tribute documentary. The documentary was presented to RNC members at the RNC Winter Meeting held in Washington D.C. and is available for viewing at www.gop.com“President Reagan inspired me and many others to become a part of the Republican Party,” said RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman. “His faith, and optimism for the future of the country, restored the confidence of Americans who responded by making our country and...

HOBOKEN, N.J. -- Among the many problems Democrats in the U.S. Senate have in talking tough about blocking the Supreme Court nomination of Jersey guy Sam Alito are these: (1) Unless he turns out to be a secret partner of Jack Abramoff or a member of a terrorist cell, Alito is clearly qualified for the high court; (2) They are starting just about 25 years too late. The shame of and for the leadership of the Democratic Party over the past quarter-century is that they have been unable or unwilling to engage Republicans (and conservatives in general) in battles over...

Another View: Republicans need to relearn lessons of the Reagan RevolutionBy NEWT GINGRICH and CRAIG SHIRLEY IT IS HARD to believe, but it has been 25 remarkable and often hopeful years since Ronald Reagan won one of the most important elections of the 20th century. Now, as Republicans go through their autumn of discontent and confusion, they would do well to look back a quarter century and study the leader who created the modern conservative movement and the modern Republican Party. In a world in which the Soviet Union has been defeated, Germany has been reunited, pride in being an...

Craig Shirley’s highly acclaimed new book, "Reagan’s Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign that Started It All" [Nelson Current, January 2005], details the story of Ronald Reagan’s first campaign for the presidency in 1976 against incumbent Gerald Ford. The historic campaign, although ultimately unsuccessful, united a dying party following Watergate and proved to be launch pad for the modern-day Conservative Movement. Today, the Democratic Party finds itself in a similar situation following Sen. John Kerry’s loss in 2004. Although the Democrats do not have a Watergate on their hands, they are suffering from a similar lack of leadership and...

A REMARKABLE ELECTION TOOK PLACE in Ukraine on December 26. After the ruling party stole the November 21 presidential vote, massive street protests forced a new runoff, in which the rightful winner, Viktor Yushchenko, finally prevailed.Although I have neither Ukrainian blood nor any special interest in foreign affairs, I have followed events in that country closely because a dear friend of mine, Katherine Chumachenko, is married to Yushchenko and about to become first lady of Ukraine.Leading up to the election, I was called by Russian "reporters" looking for information on Kathy, or Katya, as she prefers today. I should say...

Reagan's Revolution The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started It All by Craig Shirley Nelson Current, 417 pp., $25.99   LATE ON THE EVENING OF August 19, 1976, at the Kemper Arena in Kansas City, prospects looked bleak for the Republican party and even bleaker for the conservative movement. Gerald R. Ford had just barely survived a fierce challenge for the party's presidential nomination by Ronald Reagan. The Republican establishment at every level was furious, contending that Reagan's challenge had made it much less likely that President Ford could be elected. Not even Reagan's champions imagined that his failed...

To some analysts, Bush has now staked out the goal of completing the conservative revolution that Reagan launched in the 1980 election — and perhaps going further. Bush sometimes appears "less pragmatic" than Reagan was, the former Reagan administration official said. "Reagan worked in a Democratic-majority era, and had to compromise to get 80% of what he wanted," he said. Bush holds out for more, he said, and now with stronger Republican majorities in Congress he may succeed more often. "This goes beyond the Reagan agenda, considerably beyond it," said professor Walter Dean Burnham, a longtime Bush-watcher at the University...

We are not hated for who we are. We are hated for what we do. It is not our principles that have spawned pandemic hatred of America in the Islamic world. It is our policies. [1] Thus did Pat Buchanan sum up his sentiments about the War on Terrorism in his new book Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency. The bulk of his book is dedicated to advancing his belief that terrorism is the oppressed Islamic world’s reaction to the “neoconservative” foreign policy, and that isolationism, rather than taking the...

What the Class of '94 learned from the Gipper.RONALD REAGAN'S legacy as a party builder has gotten short shrift. The Republicans were able to win a majority in the House in 1994 for the first time in 40 years, and then keep that majority in 1996 for the first time since 1928, because we were close students of Reagan. When House Republicans stood on the Capitol steps in 1994 and announced our Contract With America, we were standing on President Reagan's shoulders. This is not merely a nice phrase. It was true in the issues highlighted, in voter appeal, and...

More than 100,000 people waited in line for hours in California to have the opportunity to walk near his casket. The scene was repeated in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, where mothers, fathers, college students, business men and veterans, blue- and white-collar workers, the old and the young waited in the heat and rain and dark of night just to be in the room with the body of our beloved former president. Hundreds of thousands more lined the streets in Washington for the processional to the Capitol and later to the funeral. Thousands more repeated the scene in California...

If you weren't around in 1980, or you were insufficiently sensitized to key world realities, you cannot know how bad things really were — hence the extent to which the nation required, the world required, a catalytic change artist like Ronald Reagan. Regarding Reagan, this is an hour of self-serving hagiography, of transmogrifying anthropomorphism — and comically by many in the press who spent seemingly their every waking hour ripping him and detesting everything he tried. Reagan was not a saint, not a god in human form. Nor was he the Lucifer of leftist desire. He was merely a man...

PBS’s Now on with Bill Moyers on Friday night delivered the usual liberal media perspective on Southern politics and the history of the two political parties. Setting up a series of segments with liberal guests complaining about appeals by conservatives and Republicans to racist sentiments held by whites, co-host David Brancaccio recalled how “when the Democratic Party embraced civil rights, the old political order began to fall apart -- 1964 was the watershed moment when legendary South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond turned Republican.” In fact, Democrats, such as House Speakers Tip O’Neill and Jim Wright, held power for another 25...