Free Republic

The Democratic dream of “turning Texas blue” dissolved on Nov. 4. The left had elevated Wendy Davis, an obscure state senator, to superstar status after she delivered an emotional 11-hour panegyric to abortion. She was expected to ride her celebrity status and the “war on women” into the executive mansion in Austin. She had only to defeat a Republican white man. It didn’t quite work out that way, drawing just 38.9 percent of the vote. From the top of the ballot on down, the wreckage from the Democratic effort was strewn across the state from Texarkana westward to El Paso....

Prof. Gruber’s admission that passage of Obamacare depended on the “stupidity” of the American public should come as no surprise to anyone; the man should be applauded for his candor. Examining the answers to the following questions would suggest that he was and is absolutely right. It is the dependency on the existence of these people that have kept the Democrat party in power; it is their base, it is to whom they appeal and the rest of us, while living in this country, simply pay the price for their voting habits . So: (1) how did “hope and change”...

If Bernie Sanders has his way, “Democracy Day” will be the crowning holiday of America’s dystopian future. Imagine: Everyone in slab-gray uni-gender tunics and biodegradable Crocs, all lined up in perfect uniformity to cast a legally mandated vote for the single party that remains. Democracy! Pharrell’s “Happy” will play over loudspeakers in the background. On loop. To the country’s credit, a future in which Americans submit en masse to the shame of Crocs is unlikely. But Vermont senator Bernie Sanders is proposing, in the wake of November’s midterm-election turnout numbers, a new federal holiday: Election Day, or, as he would...

Rep. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, who is expecting a baby in December, is being denied a request to vote by proxy in the House Democratic Caucus leadership and committee member elections next week—even though her doctor advises she can't travel to Washington in the late stages of her pregnancy. The Iraq War veteran, who lost both legs when her helicopter was shot down in 2004, made the request in a letter to fellow Democrats. Her letter was read during a closed-door Democratic Caucus meeting on Thursday. But objections were raised, and the request was denied, with opponents including Democratic Steering...

Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Clinton? Gradually it is sinking in to Official Washington that the 2014 election could very well do to Democrats what the 1930 election did to Republicans: make them irrelevant for at least a generation. In 1930, the first election after the Stock Market Crash saw Republicans go from a 270-164 majority in the House to a minority, albeit by one seat. In the next three elections, Republicans would continue to lose until there were only 88 Republicans in the House after the 1936 election. The Depression wiped out two-thirds of the House...

I grew up in a Democratic family. I have been a registered Democrat since age 18, a Democratic candidate for statewide office in Colorado and a party precinct captain in that caucus state. I’ve volunteered for numerous Democratic candidates and contributed to party causes and campaigns. The 2014 election results were extremely disappointing for me, but hardly a surprise. I voted for Barack Obama in 2008, then lost my job in the Great Recession. I was lucky; my brother lost his job and his house. I survived on part-time jobs while paying out-of-pocket for my health insurance. I voted for...

WASHINGTON—The Justice Department is scooping up data from thousands of cellphones through fake communications towers deployed on airplanes, a high-tech hunt for criminal suspects that is snagging a large number of innocent Americans, according to people familiar with the operations. The U.S. Marshals Service program, which became fully functional around 2007, operates Cessna aircraft from at least five metropolitan-area airports, with a flying range covering most of the U.S. population, according to people familiar with the program. Planes are equipped with devices—some known as “dirtboxes” to law-enforcement officials because of the initials of the Boeing Co. unit that produces them—which...

In her first public remarks since Election Day last week, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi defended her decision to run to keep her post atop the House Democratic Caucus, and doesn’t sound likely to relinquish it anytime soon. “I don’t understand why this question should even come up,” the California Democrat said at a press conference Thursday. “I’m here as long as the members want me to be here. Pelosi suggested that she wasn’t, as many expect, looking to serve one more term as minority leader before retiring in 2016 — when, colleagues hope, Hillary Rodham Clinton will be elected...

Documents obtained by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) from the Department of Justice provide "hard evidence" that former Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-WV) should have been prosecuted after NLPC exposed his questionable financial dealings, and triggered a Justice Department investigation. CREW executive director Melanie Sloantold Politico yesterday, "It was clear the Justice Department should have indicted Mollohan." Mollohan was defeated for re-election in 2010 in a Democratic primary. His ethics woes were a key issue in the campaign. Although we have not yet had the opportunity to study the underlying documents, CREW has released a very concise...

In this year's midterms, Jews voted for Republican candidates more than they have in any election in the last decade. First, some raw facts. In the 2006 midterm elections, 87 percent of Jews voted for Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives. Last week, in the 2014 midterm elections, 66 percent cast ballots for Democrats. That's a 21-point drop in eight years—and, it might seem, a major cause for celebration among the likes of the Republican Jewish Coalition and philo-Semitic political strategists everywhere. But while Jewish support for Democrats has definitely declined over the last decade, the context is important....

VETERAN FREEPER BUT BEEN OUT OF TOUCH LATELY ... WOULD LOVE TO GET FREEPER FEEDBACK IF MY THEORY ON THIS VIDEO MAKES SENSE ... Plenty of you have heard about or watched that bizarre breakfast brawl at the McDonald's in the City of Brotherly Love. Let's keep it real. Blacks Behaving Badly videos do really well on youtube and people make money off them. Black people watch them on World Star Hip-Hop and are like "dammmmmnnnn, girlfriend, you see this s--t?" ...

A river in Egypt.... When we last heard from the totally-not-crazy Nancy Pelosi, she was predicting that “Civilization as we know it today would be in jeopardy if Republicans win the Senate.” Then, Nancy’s worst fears came true. We’re sure you’re aware of this, because the world fell apart last Tuesday and you probably spent the last week scrounging for food in our GOP-created post-apocalyptic wasteland. It’s so terrifying out there that Ms. Pelosi has decided that - rather than face the reality of the wasteland - she’s simply going to pretend the Republican wave didn’t happen.

Losing in 2014 may not mean you're out of politics for good—or even for more than a cycle. For Democrats, there were plenty of strong 2014 recruits who found themselves wiped out by the Republican wave last Tuesday night. But they may not be out of politics for long: A handful of Democratic candidates, both incumbents who were defeated and challengers who fell short, are already being talked about as future prospects and could be back on the ballot as early as 2016. "This was a wave, and I think it was also the product of turnout more than these...

Healthcare, Fiscal, and Tax 10/22/2014 Jeanne Shaheen's Dishonest Claim That Obamacare Doesn't Cut Medicare Avik Roy In last night’s U.S. Senate debate in New Hampshire between incumbent Jeanne Shaheen (D.) and challenger Scott Brown (R.), Shaheen uttered a flat-out, bald-faced lie: that Obamacare doesn’t cut Medicare spending to pay for its expansion of coverage to the uninsured. It’s a talking point that a number of Democratic Senate candidates—and their enablers in the lefty blogosphere—have been clinging to. And it’s embarrassingly dishonest. “I want to go back to Scott Brown’s suggestion that we’ve taken three-quarters of a trillion dollars out of...

Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe plans to pardon his son for a felony drug charge from more than a decade ago. "It will probably be in the next few weeks," said Matt DeCample, a spokesman for the governor. "For any pardons the governor does the person has to have finished all terms of their sentence ... and then had a period of time where they've shown they have straightened their lives out." Kyle Beebe, who is now 34, was charged in 2003 with possession of a controlled substance -- marijuana -- with intent to deliver. He was fined and sentenced to...

The “elephant in the room,” now that Scott Walker has won a remarkable third election as governor of Wisconsin in only four years, is the presidential election in 2016. Well before the 2014 midterms, speculation was rife about Walker’s possible presidential ambitions, and his several trips to neighboring Iowa did nothing to quell it. It is widely assumed that Walker’s possible presidential ambitions are a major reason the national Democratic Party and its various third-party interest groups expended enormous resources in the unsuccessful attempts to defeat him. There are many reasons for the Democrats to be terrified of a possible...

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich is not running for president, but he thinks any Democrat who is – including his “old friend” Hillary Clinton – should worry about Republicans outflanking them on populism. Reich, now a professor at the University of California Berkeley, first met Hillary Clinton when she was a freshman at Wellesley and they marched in civil rights demonstrations together. He met Bill Clinton around the same time at Oxford, when they were both Rhodes Scholars. He went on to work on both of Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns, and joined the administration. In the Clinton cabinet, he was...

Republican Sen.-elect Joni Ernst easily won her race in Iowa last Tuesday, beating Democrat Bruce Braley by 8.5 percentage points. Her victory wasn’t shocking, but its size was (to everyone except pollster Ann Selzer, that is). The final FiveThirtyEight projection had Ernst winning by just 1.5 percentage points. What the heck happened? Here’s one explanation: White voters in Iowa without a college degree have shifted away from the Democratic Party. And if that shift persists, it could have a big effect on the presidential race in 2016, altering the White House math by eliminating the Democratic edge in the electoral...

Nancy Pelosi does not believe the midterm results were a Republican wave; she says they were more of a Democratic ebb. And in a new interview, the House Minority Leader says that it didn’t help that voters were distracted during the final leg of the campaign by various international crises. In an interview with Politico out today, Pelosi continued to insist there was “no wave of approval for the Republicans” and even admitted that Democrats need to do a better job mobilizing voter turnout on their side the next time around. But when pressed on whether the Democrats lost because...

The new conventional wisdom on Hillary: The Democrats should thank their lucky stars because she’s all that stands between them and political oblivion. What a difference a midterm debacle makes. If you think about the Democrats’ outlook without Hillary Clinton, it’s rather sobering. The New Yorker just chatted up three other presidential aspirants: Martin O’Malley, Bernie Sanders and Jim Webb. Ahem. Case closed. We’ll come back to the also-rans, but there is a danger for the Dems here that extends beyond 2016. To put it bluntly: this team has a very thin bench. The party has simply atrophied under Barack...