Free Republic

Hoping to galvanize their base further, Republicans are casting the midterm elections as a golden opportunity to fire Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who has served as lead blocker for President Obama’s liberal agenda on Capitol Hill and chief opponent of GOP legislation.

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The 2014 Senate landscape continues to look challenging for Democrats. Republicans can take back the chamber after eight years of Democratic control with a net gain of six seats, and the seven seats most likely to flip are held by Democrats in states President Obama lost in 2012. The most important change since we looked at the Senate map three months ago is the glut of outside spending, particularly against Democratic incumbents in the majority-making seats of North Carolina, Louisiana, and Alaska. The nonprofit, conservative group Americans for Prosperity has dumped tens of millions into those states, beating up incumbents...

Republicans focused on winning back the Senate have a clear goal this year: convincing voters that vulnerable Democrats are liars. In races from Alaska to North Carolina, GOP strategists are attacking Democrats who echoed Obama’s promises that everyone could keep their health care plan. The Republican argument is that politicians lied to voters when they passed the law — and they are throwing Democrats’ past quotes back in their faces to prove it. In their eyes, every senator is the 60th vote that helped pass the 2010 legislation, and every Democrat is personally liable for health care failures. “We’re talking...

Oklahoma House Speaker T.W. Shannon is forming an exploratory committee to look more closely at a potential run in the special election for retiring Sen. Tom Coburn’s (R-Okla.) seat, multiple sources tell The Hill. Shannon’s office declined to comment, but sources say he's now expected to run. One source tells The Hill Shannon has received dozens of calls from supporters “very enthusiastically encouraging him to run” since Coburn’s announcement last week that he’ll retire at the end of the year. Shannon would run as a conservative alternative to Rep. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who entered the race Monday to considerable pushback...

Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas) is the outsider's outsider — what other Texan would spend a freezing New Year's hundreds of miles away in New York City? But there he was last night at the launch event for the NYC Bitcoin Center, located just up the street from the New York Stock Exchange. Stockman's attendance was a favor to Center founder Nick Spanos, a real estate developer and Bitcoin enthusiast. Spanos helped phone bank on Stockman's most recent Congressional campaign. The Center itself is still in something of a planning stage, existing more as a statement about Bitcoin itself, though it...

The White House is set to select outgoing Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) as its pick for ambassador to China, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and a Baucus ally confirmed Wednesday. Baucus, 72, previously announced that he won't seek reelection to the Senate in 2014. ... Assuming Baucus is confirmed sometime in 2014, it means there will be a vacancy in his seat. Gov. Steve Bullock (D) will get to make the appointment for the final year of Baucus's term. Bullock could pick his lieutenant governor, John Walsh, who is already running for the seat in 2014. But Walsh faces a primary...

A race-by-race analysis of the Senate, in fact, suggests that Republicans might now be close to even-money to win control of the chamber after next year’s elections. Our best guess, after assigning probabilities of the likelihood of a G.O.P. pickup in each state, is that Republicans will end up with somewhere between 50 and 51 Senate seats after 2014, putting them right on the threshold of a majority.

When South Dakota’s former two-term Gov. Mike Rounds made it official last week that he would seek the Republican nomination for U.S. Senator in 2014, it was national news. After an election year in which Republicans began with high hopes of winning a majority in the Senate only to end with a net loss of two seats from their ranks, news that Rounds was poised to challenge Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson was truly something to cheer for the dispirited GOP. “Instantly competitive,” is how the Hill characterized the likely contest between conservative Rounds and two-term liberal Democrat Johnson (lifetime American...

I want to say that, despite the Administration’s arguments that are laid out, that you all are all guns blaring and green lights for drilling, the facts that I checked, and if you disagree tell me, only 21 permits for offshore drilling have been issued by this date. In 2010 there were 32 permits. I just left the annual conference of LOGA, which is Louisiana Oil and Gas Association, Mr. Secretary, yesterday. They are beside themselves with not being able to get their permits processed and to answer you, Mr. Franken, let me just say Exxon and Shell may be...