Free Republic

The Senate passed a resolution Tuesday aimed at ending President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Brazil, with five Republicans joining Democrats in a rare bipartisan rebuke of the president over trade policy. Sens. Rand Paul, Thom Tillis, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and former Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell sided with Democrats in the 52 to 48 vote. McConnell has long been critical of Trump’s trade policy, and said in a statement ahead of the vote, “Tariffs make both building and buying in America more expensive. The economic harms of trade wars are not the exception to history, but the rule.” The...

Another potential scandal has cast a pall over Trump’s presidency, and as has become a learned behavior in the Republican Party, the vast majority of GOP officials are declining to speak out against him. But their non-responses also speak volumes. After a whistleblower complaint released Thursday alleged President Trump’s misdeeds with regard to Ukraine, reporters set about getting reaction from Republican elected officials. They ran into a stone wall. As CNN’s Ted Barrett summarizes, many Republican senators claimed they hadn’t even read the relatively brief document, despite it having consumed the political world. But even those who said they had...