Free Republic

President Donald Trump and Elon Musk look like they’re having a blast in Washington, clear-cutting elements of the federal government and seizing power from states and Congress. Their glee is at odds with the growing evidence of repercussions and anger out in the country at their approach of cutting first and asking questions later. The success of Trump’s second term may hinge on how and whether these cuts, imposed indiscriminately and without transparency, are felt out in the country. How small should a bureaucracy be for a country of more than 330 million people that brings in and spends trillions...

With election season underway, you’re bound to hear from former President Donald Trump that an army of undocumented immigrants is trying to vote in the presidential election. You may hear from Democrats that GOP efforts to pass new voting laws is a form of voter suppression. Despite that rhetoric, you might be surprised to hear the argument that voting in the US — the act of casting a ballot and the guarantee it will be counted — is better now than at any time in the country’s history. That’s what you’ll get from David Becker, founder of the Center for...

Donald Trump’s rhetoric dropped to a spine-tingling new low this weekend with less than a month before the Iowa caucuses.The GOP primary front-runner said migrants are “poisoning the blood” of the US and quoted Russian President Vladimir Putin about the “rottenness” of American democracy.Whipping up thousands of supporters at a New Hampshire hockey rink on Saturday, the former president again drew comparisons to the language of Nazi Germany with the comments about migrants from mostly Africa, Asia and South America “poisoning the blood of our country.”The language “parrots Adolf Hitler,” President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign alleged. Experts pointed to passages...

Forget the national polls that show the country has soured on President Joe Biden, and consider the Electoral College with less than 11 months until Election Day 2024. Former President Donald Trump would need to flip three states Biden won in 2020 to complete his political resurrection and retake the White House – and a new set of CNN battleground state polls out Monday suggests that if the election were held today, Trump is most of the way there. Biden, like Hillary Clinton, got millions more votes nationwide than Trump, but Biden secured the White House in 2020 thanks to...

American democracy is changing right now in important and optimistic ways in red and blue states. Anger at the lack of choices in the two-party system fueled the ranked-choice voting experiment in reliably Republican Alaska, which pairs with a similar experiment in the liberal haven of New York City. In ranked-choice voting, voters rank candidates in order of preference. Learn about the entire process. There is ranked-choice voting in Maine. There are nonpartisan primaries in California and technically no primary at all in Louisiana. While political parties are consolidating their power with redistricting in states where they can – Texas...