Free Republic

Response to President Calderon House Chamber, Washington, D.C. May 20, 2010 M. Speaker: I rise to take strong exception to the speech of the President of Mexico while in this chamber today. The Mexican government has made it very clear for many years that it holds American sovereignty in contempt and President Calderon’s behavior as a guest of the Congress confirms and underscores this attitude. It is highly inappropriate for the President of Mexico to lecture Americans on American immigration policy, just as it would be for Americans to lecture Mexico on its laws. It is obvious that President Calderon...

WASHINGTON – Tom McClintock arrived in Washington last week, ready to say no. He'll say no to President-elect Barack Obama's plan to spend roughly $800 billion to rev up the economy. He'll say no to spending billions to bail out the auto industry. And he'll say no to his home state of California and others looking to Congress to get out of their budget messes. He said the federal government doesn't have the money and needs to spend less to avoid "the same folly" as California, which is projecting a $40 billion shortfall in the next 18 months. "My state...

WASHINGTON – Tom McClintock and Charlie Brown are staying at the same Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill, where they first bumped into each other Sunday night. They've toured the Capitol together. They've dined together at the Library of Congress. And tonight the two men and their wives will attend a reception for incoming freshman Congress members at the U.S. Botanic Garden. There's only one problem: Neither has been elected to Congress. With thousands of ballots yet to be counted in California's 4th Congressional District, McClintock, the Republican, clung to a 562-vote lead – out of nearly 340,000 counted so far...

Anyone doubting that every vote counts should have spent a few hours this week with election officials in Auburn. Or Placerville. Or Nevada City. There wasn't a hanging chad in sight. But both sides of the too-close-to-call race for the 4th Congressional District scrutinized virtually every uncounted ballot in the contest between Republican Tom McClintock and Democrat Charlie Brown. "It can be a mind-numbing process," said Brown volunteer Steve Barber of Granite Bay. Barber was among a handful of volunteers watching election workers in Auburn as they duplicated ballots that were damaged or cast in the wrong precinct. The duplication...

WASHINGTON – Republican Tom McClintock is atop the money chase in one of California's most expensive congressional races, but his Democratic challenger has more than five times as much cash in the bank, according to new campaign spending reports. While Democrat Charlie Brown had virtually no opposition for the Democratic nomination, McClintock won the right to advance by clubbing former Republican Rep. Doug Ose in the June primary. But McClintock's victory cost him: He raised nearly $1.6 million in his bid to replace Republican Rep. John Doolittle in the state's 4th Congressional District, and he finished the quarter with but...

The last time Charlie Brown ran against conventional wisdom, he narrowly lost in a decidedly Republican district where Rep. John Doolittle hadn't failed to win with less than 60 percent of the vote in 14 years. Now, two years after losing to Doolittle by 49 to 46 percent, the former Air Force helicopter pilot and combat veteran faces skepticism again. This time, his doubters say he can't win without Doolittle in the race. Brown in 2006 ran against a Washington culture of corruption, lambasting Doolittle's controversial ties to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Now he will face a popular conservative, state...

Candidate Doug Ose is a businessman with family partnerships worth at least $117 million, including burgeoning investments in real estate, stocks, farm land and mini-storage facilities.Candidate Tom McClintock is a 22-year state lawmaker with a legislative salary and per diem expense checks and a net worth he estimates at $175,000.Recently filed financial documents, plus tax returns and other records provided to The Bee by the leading Republican candidates in the 4th Congressional District primary race, offer clear economic contrasts between the two men. As the contenders assail each other over financial issues and demand disclosures, the documents serve up some...

WASHINGTON – Money pouring into the closely watched primary battle between former Rep. Doug Ose and state Sen. Tom McClintock is approaching $4 million and spending is not far behind, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission. The two Republicans are vying in the 4th Congressional District for their party's nomination to succeed Rep. John Doolittle, who is retiring at the end of the year in the face of a three-year federal investigation of his relationship with former lobbyist Jack Abramoff. New reports for April 1 through May 15 showed McClintock raising more money from individual contributors than...

To his devotees, state Sen. Tom McClintock is a righteous defender of the Constitution and an unrepentant fighter for reining in government spending. To his detractors, the conservative populist and revered orator is a lone wolf who refuses to bend even when his closest colleagues are preaching compromise. "Lincoln said, 'I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true,' " said McClintock, a 22-year state lawmaker. "I have stayed true to my convictions." McClintock, the Thousand Oaks lawmaker now running for Congress in Northern California's 4th District, is a man as consistent in his principles as...

The conservative Club for Growth was an early supporter of state Sen. Tom McClintock in his bid for the Republican nomination to succeed Rep. John Doolittle in the 4th Congressional District. This week the club's political action committee began radio and television ads in an independent campaign against the Thousand Oaks Republican's opponent, former Rep. Doug Ose. Following is the television ad's text and an analysis by David Whitney of The Bee's Washington Bureau:•ANNOUNCER: Doug Ose has lots of ads, but they leave out several pieces of the puzzle.Ose had a really liberal record in Congress. He voted to waste...

With John Doolittle vacating the 4th Congressional District seat after 16 years, voters will elect someone new. This heavily Republican district stretches from Sacramento to Lake Tahoe and runs up the Sierra Nevada to the Oregon border. The winner of the June 3 Republican primary will face presumptive Democratic nominee Charlie Brown. The GOP race features two well-known candidates. Doug Ose is a land developer and former three-term congressman. Tom McClintock is a 22-year state legislator who has been on the statewide ballot seven times. (Suzanne Jones and Theodore Terbolizard also are on the Republican ballot.) Ose and McClintock have...

The Republican free-for-all to replace retiring GOP Rep. John Doolittle is ugly and getting uglier, with the campaigns spending plenty to tag one candidate as a greedy carpetbagger and the other as a big-spending liberal. Those are fighting words in the Fourth Congressional District, which rambles from the Sacramento suburbs of Rocklin and Roseville east to Lake Tahoe and north to the Oregon border. Former Rep. Doug Ose and state Sen. Tom McClintock are brawling for the GOP nomination in a district where Republicans outnumber Democrats 47 percent to 30 percent and the incumbent is leaving after being named in...

The leading Republican contenders to replace retiring Rep. John Doolittle pounded each other with charges of selling out their public service on Wednesday in a spirited debate reflecting the tense, closely watched primary race. Former Sacramento-area Rep. Doug Ose repeatedly assailed state Sen. Tom McClintock for trumpeting conservative credentials while serving as a career politician "taking inappropriate advantage" of some $300,000 in state per diem payments while living just miles from the Capitol in Elk Grove. McClintock lit into Ose for accepting $600,000 in farm subsidies for agricultural land he owned while serving on a House agricultural committee and making...

WASHINGTON – Doug Ose is drawing heavily from his personal fortune to pay for his aggressive Republican congressional primary campaign against Thousand Oaks Sen. Tom McClintock. McClintock could be a beneficiary. Ose notified the Federal Election Commission this week that he had pumped $849,000 into his campaign for the 4th Congressional District seat held by Rep. John Doolittle, R-Roseville. Doolittle, under federal investigation, announced in January that he would not run for a 10th term, opening the door to the attack-laden primary battle. Ose's notice, filed Monday as the campaign books on the first quarter were being closed, triggers a...

Doug Ose's 4th Congressional District campaign is running a new television ad central to one of Ose's themes – that rival Tom McClintock is a more profound political carpetbagger than he is.The ad shows a narrator walking an oversized California map from McClintock's Thousand Oaks-area state Senate district to the 4th District near Sacramento. Ose appears at the end of the ad.The following is the text of the ad and analysis by Peter Hecht of the Bee's Capitol Bureau. • NARRATOR: For 22 years, Tom McClintock has been representing Los Angeles in the Legislature. But now term limits are forcing...

I drove up to Auburn Tuesday to see Tom McClintock rhetorically throw his hat into the ring. "The ring" in this case refers to the 4th Congressional District, and the cliché is historically appropriate. Apparently derived from a frontier tradition of throwing one's headgear into a boxing ring to announce one's pugilistic intentions, it was popularized as a political term by Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. "My hat's in the ring. The fight is on, and I'm stripped to the buff," Roosevelt said as he announced he would challenge a heretofore fellow Republican, William Howard Taft, for the presidency. Which is...