Free Republic

Reflections on a Federal Budget Impasse... During the February budget showdown in Washington, Senator Rand Paul rose to speak. He reminded America of our spending habit – a constant pattern of deficit spending, year-in and year-out, in both Republican and Democrat administrations. A spending habit that doesn’t just cause a year of trouble, but an eternity of trouble, since these deficits add up, year by year, into a mountainous national debt, one that doubled – Doubled! – in just the eight years of the Obama administration alone. And he is right. ... But this is not one of those areas...

the Dow is down! No, the Dow is up! No, wait – it’s down!The government’s shut! No, the government’s open! Whatever.Let’s just move immediately to FLOTUS Friday. She’s like a bright, sunny day after a week of gray skies. I grow weary of people demanding she be more than that. I for one am quite happy she doesn’t “use her platform” as the angry liberals think she should to advance their causes.Although I will confess, I would not be unhappy if she could use her position (and her phenomenal legs) to return hosiery to their proper place in a woman’s...

On February 8, government shutdown theater comes back into town. Will there be another shutdown? In January, the Democrats decided to shut it down for three-days for illegal aliens. The end result was the Democrats lost. They got nothing. They got a spending bill in which they had no objections to; it funded Children’s Health Insurance Program for six years. The exception was it was a week shorter concerning funding. Hence, why the news media and observers were wondering what was the point of this shutdown. Democrats thought they could blame the GOP, but you can’t spin facts. The facts...

2018’s government shutdown ended almost as quickly as it happened. While the shutdown in 2013 lasted over two weeks this one lasted just barely one workday.On the surface, it seems like Democrats were completely defeated. The original stop-gap measure proposed by House Republicans last week passed on Monday 81-18 in the Senate, 266-150 in the House, and was signed in the night by President Trump, officially ending the shutdown at least until February 8th.The prior few days saw Democrat and Republican surrogates battling it out on the public airwaves in a fierce tug of war between “#TrumpShutdown” and “#SchumerShutdown.” Democrats...

Is there a fair, reasonable way to deal with immigration without shutting down the government as the Democrats did just recently? Yes. A way to save the "Dreamers" and build President Donald Trump's wall to protect the borders, and lower the anxiety of millions of Dreamer parents, those immigrants who crossed over illegally for a better life in America. A way for Americans to accept immigration policy as fair, not just something jammed down their throats by politicians. We'd have to take the tribal politics out of it, and we probably should stop weaponizing the immigrants for future elections. But...

President Trump didn't respond to the so-called shutdown of the federal government in the way that the political class thought he should. He didn't get personally involved in detailed negotiations to end the impasse and didn't convey a sense of crisis to the American people. When all was said and done, this skirmish showed the dangers of underestimating President Trump and his ability to connect with voters on issues the political elites ignore. His approach worked because he instinctively understood the strategic situation far better than Senate Democrats, establishment Republicans and his other beltway critics. First, the president recognized that...

President Trump proved the pundits to be wrong, once again, with his breakthrough victory against the shutdown. Nearly all political experts pompously declared that Republicans cannot win in a shutdown, and yet Trump did exactly that. Margaret Thatcher, the late British Prime Minister who was Ronald Reagan’s ally throughout Reagan’s two terms as our president, explained how she achieved her improbable success as Britain’s longest-serving prime minister. Her pithy reply: “First you win the argument, then you win the vote.” Thatcher’s motto explains how President Trump was able to win the shutdown showdown with Democrats: first, he won the...

In Washington’s theatrical production of “Shutdown: 2018” – directed by Sen. Chuck Schumer, produced by the Mainstream Media, and featuring all of Congress’ top stars – we saw Republicans and Democrats hopelessly mired in an intractable partisan gridlock.  As the hours trickled by in the 24-hour news cycle, the audience waited with bated breath for our heroes to reach a last-minute, temporary compromise that saved the day, and our country. It was a story written for the headlines, and although enjoying only a limited run of one weekend, the drama captivated the attention of a nation, and distracted us from...

The government is open again. That's too bad. One day, one of these shutdowns should be permanent. We would still have far more government than the Founding Fathers envisioned. That's because even during so-called shutdowns, a third of federal employees -- nearly a million people -- remain on the job, declared "essential" government workers. Military pay continues, too, although political commentators, eager to make a shutdown sound scarier, repeatedly claimed that military families were being cut off. Here's a list of functions that kept going during the "shutdown": --Law enforcement. --Border Patrol. --The TSA. --Air traffic controllers. --The CDC. --Amtrak....

On Monday, Democrats caved on their manufactured government shutdown. In an attempt to generate a groundswell of support for a legislative re-enshrinement of former President Obama's executive amnesty, Democrats filibustered a continuing resolution to fund the government. That tough stance lasted precisely three days. Then, Democrats voted overwhelmingly with Republicans to fund the government in its entirety for another three weeks. This makes the second government shutdown in the last five years; back in 2013, the Republicans refused to fund then-President Obama's Affordable Care Act and then collapsed and fully funded it for nothing in return. That followed a government...

If we don't like what is happening in Washington -- and few do -- the blame must be placed squarely where it belongs. It is "we the people" who send these people here. We send people of different and often opposing viewpoints to Washington and expect them to get along. Many quickly turn opportunities to represent us into opportunities to represent themselves. They become careerists, statists and hypocrites, first supporting one cause or policy when it suits them and then with whiplash intensity turning around and supporting its opposite when it is politically expedient. It is why my favorite lecture...

The more government “shutdowns” that take place in recent years, the more people realize they’re not really shutdowns. They’re merely called that to make the other political party look bad. Urgent services aren’t curtailed, and even non-urgent services and landmarks like public monuments are often kept open through creative ways. his latest government shutdown – which should really be called a partial government slowdown – threatens to withhold funding for the low-income children’s healthcare program CHIP. Republicans included its funding in a Continuing Resolution that would keep the government temporarily funded, as an incentive for Democrats to vote for the...

If Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney is right, the government shutdown may not wrap up as quickly as many are hoping.Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Mulvaney predicted the shutdown could last more than a week, but expressed hope it is resolved in time for federal employees to return to work on Monday morning, which did not happen as the vote was moved from 1 a.m. Monday to noon. “I think Democrats want to see the president give the State of the Union under a shutdown,” he told host Chris Wallace. The State of the Union is January 30.No matter...

ABC kicked off Sunday’s Good Morning America with five minutes dedicated to the government shutdown. And despite the fact that Democrats were bragging that they had the votes to do it, the liberal network trashed Republicans and touted how President Trump would take all the blame. “The government is not going to stay closed forever. The question is how long will it take. And you can see the argument on both sides. As our polls show, you guys showed it, people coming into this debate believe the President and Republicans will be to blame by a wide wide margin,” hyped...

On day one of the 2018 government shutdown, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) came out and claimed that he offered President Trump funding for his border wall in exchange for protection for so-called Dreamers via the Differed Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and he turned it down. Since then, the liberal media have been running around claiming that Trump was the reason an agreement couldn’t be reached. But during Sunday’s Meet the Press, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) chastised the media for buying the claim “hook, line, and sinker.” The dust-up with NBC host Chuck Todd began after Cotton was explaining that...

You already knew that both parties are trading hypocritical barbs over the current 'Schumer Shutdown,' but this clip from the archives is really quite special and simply too delicious not to share immediately.  Back when Republicans pushed a flawed shutdown strategy over Obamacare in 2013, a certain Senator from New York pronounced himself aghast.  The GOP's disgraceful 'hostage taking' was nothing short of "governmental chaos," he said during an ABC News appearance.  His own party would never go to such radical extremes, even over an issue in which they were deeply emotionally invested, he assured viewers.  Guess which issue he...

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) met with Jake Tapper on CNN's State of the Union Sunday morning to discuss the government shutdown and who deserves the blame for Capitol Hill's current quandary. Paul, a libertarian who tends to stray away from conventional GOP thinking, offered a "doable" solution that allows the legislative process to work itself out. Paul said the American people see though "partisanship and gamesmanship," when politicians claim the opposing party does not want to fund the military and pay our soldiers. "Republicans and Democrats and everybody trying to say 'Oh, you don’t want to fund the military', everybody wants to...

I must say I paid more attention this week to the continued unfolding of the Obama-Clinton "Russian collusion" poppycock, which seems to be coming to a certain closure with the investigative results made public and the consequent removal and prosecution of a number of high-ranking former and present officials. In the meantime, Chuck Schumer, whose surname (per ancestry.com) is "a nickname from Middle Low German 'good-for-nothing,' 'vagabond,'" revealed how aptly he is named. In fact, the Democrats' government shutdown gimmickry reminds me of nothing so much as the scene in the movie Animal House where Eric "Otter" Stratton offers up...

Several members of Congress, both Democrat and Republican, have announced that they will either withhold their pay during the government shutdown or will donate their salary during this time to charity. Republican Congressman Bob Latta shared a letter he sent, demanding that his paycheck be withheld until the government shutdown has ended. Expressing support for the troops and indignation that America’s elected leaders who caused the government impasse are being paid while the military is not, Latta tweeted, “Members of Congress should be paid while 2 million troops are not.” His letter read, “Dear Mr. Kiko, I have been informed that despite...

In 2013, House Republicans shut down the federal government in a doomed effort to defund then President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act. It lasted 17 days and accomplished nothing. Amazingly, Democrats have decided to follow the same lame playbook. Back in 2013, Obama called it the "Republican shutdown" -- and he was right, even if his party controlled the White House and Senate. Top aide Dan Pfeiffer likened the shutdown caucus to terrorists with a "bomb strapped to their chest." Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., had a similar view. The solidly conservative congressman called those pushing the shutdown "lemmings with suicide...