Free Republic

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his political activist wife, Ginni, are a high-profile Washington conservative power couple. Power couples are a common Washington phenomenon. Each spouse wields political power and influence in a certain arena. Together they concentrate power and influence. Per Public Citizen, of the 115th Congress, 59% of retiring congressmen remained in Washington, taking jobs as lobbyists or in consulting firms, trade groups or business groups, working to influence government. So, we have power couples that are in office, that were in office – congressmen and ex-congressmen, federal regulators and former regulators, lawyers, etc. But there is...

Going back to the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, the party of first-term presidents gained seats in House midterm congressional elections only twice. Karl Rove reminded readers a few months ago in his Wall Street Journal column that, since World War II, the average loss of House seats of the party of each first-term president in congressional midterms is 28. The largest loss was 63 in the first midterm elections in Barack Obama's first term. This was after Democrats rammed through the Affordable Care Act without a single Republican vote. Given that Republicans need to pick...

Since the new wave of race consciousness that has been sweeping our country, precipitated by the graphic video of the killing of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin, something very strange has happened. Somehow, what is perceived as a problem has become widely understood to be the solution. And it is endangering our country. If there remain citizens in America who, because of race or any other reason, are deprived of the benefits and protections of a free society, we should work to bring those benefits of freedom to them. The answer is not to abandon the principles that...

The Poor People's Campaign has announced a "season of nonviolent, moral direct action," targeting the U.S. Senate with disruptive activities every Monday, July 12 through Aug 2. According to the campaign's co-chair, the Rev. William Barber II, "The Senate must end the filibuster, protect and expand voting rights, and pass a minimum wage of $15 an hour." Barber is getting national attention. Even President Joe Biden recorded a video expressing his support. Concern about poverty is something we all share. What bothers me is that the factors driving poverty, according to the research of my organization and others, are ignored...

Listening to all the rhetoric in the popular media, you would think America is the most unfair, racist nation in the world. You would think that Black Americans are uniformly living in oppression and poverty, with no hope for the future, save the federal government arriving on the scene to their rescue. Sorry, liberals, to trouble you with facts. But indeed there are facts. And the facts tell a far different story than what we are hearing. Let's start with the most recent annual report of the Census Bureau: Income and Poverty in the United States: 2019. According to this...

By November 1947, as Jews continued their process of building and Arabs continued their process of hating, the United Nations gave the green light to establish a Jewish state and an adjacent Arab state. Jews accepted the U.N. partition of the region, declaring the new state of Israel in May 1948, but the Arabs rejected the plan and attacked the newly declared Jewish state. Israelis fought and miraculously prevailed in its War of Independence, and the project of rebuilding the ancient homeland moved forward. Now it is an officially recognized member of the community of nations. Compared with the desolation...

While sitting in the Delta lounge in the Atlanta airport waiting for my flight back to Washington, a white gentleman approached me and struck up a conversation. Politics was on his mind, and seeing me, a black woman, he was sure that he had found a kindred spirit to share his hopes that Democrats will prevail in both U.S. Senate runoff races in Georgia. I politely straightened him out, leaving him a bit in shock that he had incorrectly assumed that seeing the outside of me was sufficient information to know what is going on inside of me. Several months...

As more of our political elite join the mobs in the streets to conflate the death of George Floyd with a general indictment of America as a racist and evil nation, black Americans, more than anyone, will suffer. Former President George W. Bush has now weighed in to falsely accuse our nation of "systemic racism." President Bush was born to a life of privilege. Yet he fell victim to alcoholism and turned to faith and religion to take back responsibility and control of his life. Yet he has insufficient respect for black Americans, most of whom are born into circumstances...

In 1979, the year before Republicans nominated Ronald Reagan as their presidential candidate, the Rev. Jerry Falwell and conservative activist Paul Weyrich founded the Moral Majority. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, recently announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., founded by Falwell. Although Cruz made no reference to the Moral Majority in his remarks, his thinking is clearly in line with that of Falwell and Weyrich — that getting the largely politically inactive evangelical Christians politically engaged could change America. Cruz’s detractors call him “extreme,” but he may not be so close to the...

Nikki Haley, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, has served up a kind of Christmas present to the nation in the form of a new comprehensive policy book, issued by her organization Stand for America, serving up conservative solutions for our nation's many challenges -- domestic and foreign. Conservatives get a bad rap that they just say "no." That they're against everything but never clear what they are for. Haley is one conservative that cannot be accused of not having a broad vision and not being forthcoming in sharing it. It's all here in "American Strength: Conservative Solutions Worth...

As Washington has been frozen in debate about whether to pass massive new economic stimulus legislation, something interesting has happened in the real world. In the real world, Americans sent a message to politicians saying they can take of themselves just fine, thank you. The Bureau of Labor Statistics report for the month of August just came in saying the U.S. economy is surging forward in strong recovery mode. The economy created 1.4 million new jobs, and the unemployment rate dropped to 8.4% -- not pretty compared with the 3.5% rate in February, before COVID-19 hit. But compared with where...

It has been said that the very moment a man finds himself, he finds God. This captures the story of Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, a man of deep faith whose youthful struggles with racism caused that faith to be shaken but who later returned to it, more deeply and more resolutely because of his great character and refusal to settle for anything but truth. The new film "Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words" will be released in theaters nationwide Jan. 31, exquisitely timed with Black History Month. But this is also a time of great tensions...

Bill Walton recently welcomed Star Parker and Winsome Sears to his video podcast for a discussion of why so many black Americans continue to vote for the failed liberal agenda. Here is a transcript of their conversation, edited mostly only for style and clarity. Bill Walton: Welcome to “The Bill Walton Show.” Race just seems to dominate so much of our political debate in the United States. Today, I want to explore and learn about the past, present, and future state of black America. Who has the better policy answers, conservatives or liberals or libertarians? What’s been the impact of...

Daniel Patrick Moynihan was an American public servant with characteristics all too rare today -- integrity, intelligence, wisdom. Moynihan was a Democrat who would find a hard time being at home in today's Democratic Party. He was a policy adviser in Democratic -- Kennedy -- and Republican -- Nixon -- administrations and went on to serve four terms as a Democratic senator of New York. Here are two of Moynihan's many famous observations that are particularly relevant in today's chaotic times: "The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The...

Unfortunately, the U.S. House of Representatives is starting to look more and more like America's universities. Freshmen show up not to learn but to teach. They think they already know it all and see it as their personal mission to set straight the faculty, university administrators and the world. So we see it with "The Squad," the now-famous far-left freshmen four in the House -- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley -- who believe they have been elected to a first term in Congress to reinvent what they think is a failed America and set straight the...

An evangelical university in Minnesota has blocked a conservative student group from hosting a lecture by African-American pro-life activist Star Parker because of her “radically” held beliefs. The University of Northwestern – St. Paul informed its chapter of Young America’s Foundation, a conservative student group, last month that it could not hold an open event featuring the 62-year-old conservative activist. Parker is the founder of the 800-pastor network Center for Urban Renewal and Education and has long argued that the conservative agenda of traditional values, limited government and free markets are the greatest benefit to low-income Americans, especially African-Americans, in...

The political agenda of the left is the problem, not the solution. My fellow Americans: Given that the Democratic Party chose to select a recently defeated political candidate to give a response to the president’s State of the Union address because she is black and a woman, I feel I should also step up and give my response. Although I have not recently lost a governor’s contest, I am black and I am a woman. Democrats want Americans, particularly minority Americans, to believe that a left-wing agenda is what they need and what will define America’s future. I am here...

As we churn through primary season, laying the framework for November's elections, we're seeing the emergence of a new face of the Democratic Party -- more progressive, more left wing. The Democratic Party is delivering more candidates around the nation like Stacey Abrams, recently nominated for governor in Georgia. She's unabashedly boilerplate, in-your-face, hard left. Pro-big government, pro-abortion, pro-LGBT rights. Recent Wall Street Journal/NBC polling shows how the Democratic Party has changed. In 2004, 67 percent of Democrats identified as moderate or conservative and 31 percent identified as liberal. In 2018, we see a shift to the left of 20...

New proposed changes in regulations from the Department of Health and Human Services will close the door on using funds from its Title X family planning program for abortion. HHS's Office of Population Affairs, which administers this program, is a poster child for ill-conceived government policy. How is it, in our nation that cherishes the ideals of human freedom and dignity, that we're funding government bureaucrats to advise low-income citizens -- almost a quarter of these "clients" are black -- about how many children they should bring into this world and when? Despite explicit language in the legislation that created...

Amidst the ongoing political noise and distractions in Washington, D.C., President Trump continues to focus on and address the nation's most deep-seated problems. In the wake of signing a temporary funding bill to get the government back open, the president directed attention to one of our biggest problems: Education. Trump proclaimed the week of Jan. 22 as National School Choice Week. National School Choice Week began in 2011. Trump's proclamation notes a commitment to "a future of unprecedented educational achievement and freedom of choice." We have a president keenly aware of the need to fundamentally change the status quo in...