Free Republic

A handful of Senate Republicans on Friday vowed to block major Democratic legislation and White House nominees for top positions in retaliation of a guilty verdict against former President Donald Trump on Thursday. Trump was found guilty of 34 felony charges related to falsifying his business records in order to hide a hush money payment to former porn star Stormy Daniels. Trump has maintained his innocence, and vowed to appeal the ruling in a speech Friday. The group of eight Senate Republicans, led by Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, accused the White House of making "a mockery of the rule...

Trump knocked it out of the park tonight at the #LibertarianConvention. Well done, sir!

@BasedMikeLee Don’t fall for the hyperbole. The sky is not about to fall. We must not allow for a “clean”reauthorization of FISA 702. We must continue to fight until we can attach a warrant requirement to FISA 702. Get a warrant!

Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah noted in a post on X that days after calling for the abolition of the Transportation Security Administration, he was subjected to a pat-down. "Update: days after calling to abolish TSA, I got 'randomly selected' for the needlessly slow, thorough TSA screening & patdown. Maybe it's a coincidence. Or not. Impossible to know. That's part of the problem with having a federal agency in charge of airport security," Lee wrote in a Thursday post on X. In a Monday post, Lee, who has served in the Senate since early 2011, called for nixing the...

@BasedMikeLee Rand Paul = total badass Honored to call him my friend @TrumpUSA24 He’s one of the few in Washington that I trust. @BasedMikeLee Me too!

Sen. Mike Lee's "technological exploitation" bill also redefines consent.Is Congress really trying to outlaw all sex work? That's what some people fear the Preventing Rampant Online Technological Exploitation and Criminal Trafficking (PROTECT) Act would mean. The bill defines "coerced consent" to include consent obtained by leveraging "economic circumstances"—which sure sounds like a good starting point for declaring all sex work "coercive" and all consent to it invalid. (Under that definition, in fact, most jobs could be considered nonconsensual.) Looking at the bill as a whole, I don't think this is its intent, nor is it likely be enforced that way....

@SenMikeLee Senator Lee has now been speaking on the Senate floor for 3 hours denouncing Ukraine funding without real border security.

@StephenM We all owe a deep, deep debt of gratitude to @BasedMikeLee

@BasedMikeLee 🚨 I have it on good authority that The Firm™️ intends to force through the Ukraine aid portion of the supplemental aid package (minus the border bill) tomorrow. Do you want to give $60B to Ukraine, knowing that the entire budget of the U.S. Marine Corps in FY2023 was $53.8B?🚨

The bipartisan border deal that is dividing congressional Republicans is already leading to angry calls to shake up the Senate leadership and furious claims by Donald Trump that it represents a 'death wish' for the party in 2024. The fury came in the hours since negotiators put out details on their new bipartisan deal to provide new authority for the administration to 'close' the border when crossings spike, while sending billions to support allies Ukraine and Israel. Among those to heap the most scorn on the agreement was Utah Sen. Mike Lee – who even appeared to demand a change...

@BasedMikeLee Like and share if you DO NOT want Congress to give Joe Biden $106 billion (mostly for Ukraine) in exchange for Biden’s commitment to approve stronger border-security laws.

@BasedMikeLee The Senate just voted to waive the point of order against the NDAA. 35 of us opposed the motion to waive. We needed only 41 to prevent this outcome, and to remove FISA 702 from the NDAA. This is not good. The House should #StopTheNDAA.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) drew attention at a fiery congressional hearing on Tuesday when he pressed FBI Director Christopher Wray on the agency's alleged warrantless surveillance of the American people. Lee blasted Wray over the FBI's conduct regarding its searches, even suggesting he had no regard for the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution. "FBI and other agencies searched Americans' communications over 200,000 times, only 16 of which were evidence of the crime that returned information," Lee said at the beginning of his question pertaining to searches on American citizens. "Were the three related batch queries consisting of over 23,000...

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) released all the 44,000 hours of Jan. 6 footage. Immediately, the release blew apart the Jan. 6 Committee's narrative about the event. . The video release showed why they were likely suppressed. They included police escorting peaceful protesters walking through the Capitol, even shaking their hands. There was even a video showing one "protester" who appeared to have been cuffed, then taken to an area by the Capitol Police, where he was released and fist-bumped one of the officers. ... That raised many questions about whether the man released was an undercover officer, which then...

As the joint chamber of Congress waited for Israeli President Herzog to enter, and as members were seated in their respective areas, Kristen Sinema, striking a rather voluptuous pose, was seen chatting with Republican Senator from Utah Mike Lee. From the time she entered until she sat down, she was not seen talking to any Democrat.

A Utah mayor has announced he will seek the Senate seat currently held by Sen. Mitt Romney in the state's 2024 Senate election, becoming the first candidate to pose a challenge to the Republican senator should he attempt to seek re-election. Riverton Mayor Trent Staggs – a Republican who gained notoriety in 2020 for his opposition to mask mandates amid the coronavirus pandemic – said he is looking to protect the country that his children will some day inherit. "I love my children, and I'm worried about the country they will inherit if I sit on the sidelines," Staggs told...

Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) backed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s support for ”substantive” budget cuts days before he is set to meet with President Joe Biden and other congressional leaders to negotiate on debt ceiling legislation. The Hill reported that McConnell signed onto a letter sent to Democrat Senate Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), led by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), that calls for “structural budget reform” in debt ceiling negotiations and opposes Democrats’ proposal for a “clean” bill that only raises the debt ceiling.

WASHINGTON (TND) — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will head to the nation's capital next week to meet with congressional Republicans ahead of his expected announcement to run for president in 2024. The National Desk (TND) has independently verified that the Republican governor of the Sunshine State will participate in a policy discussion in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, hosted by a nonprofit backing DeSantis as the GOP's next presidential candidate called "And to the Republic." The event is being put on in partnership with the conservative Heritage Foundation. Well-known Republican lawmakers such as, Reps. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., Darin LaHood, R-Ill., Thomas...

Former President Donald Trump took aim at potential Republican primary foe Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis during a recent campaign event, with much of the criticism garnering little enthusiasm from those in attendance.During his Saturday campaign event in Waco, Texas, on Saturday, Trump argued that DeSantis had little chance of becoming Florida's governor without the former president's endorsement, with Trump breaking into an impersonation of DeSantis allegedly begging him for his support in the state's 2018 Republican primary."So, he came, and he really wanted [my endorsement]. I said, ‘You can’t win, can you? How do you – can [you] win?'" Trump...