Free Republic

House Republicans looked set to pass a bill on Thursday aimed at addressing the crisis on the southern border. After being revised repeatedly in order to appease conservative members who thought the bill did not go far enough, the leadership appeared to have settled on a final version which enjoyed broad support. The package even had the backing of moderate Democrats like Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX). “GOP leaders went to great lengths to secure passage by allowing a separate vote on a measure that would block Obama from any further executive action to stop the deportation of undocumented immigrants brought...

In the short term, the House GOP’s failure to pass an emergency immigration bill on Thursday over tea party opposition was another embarrassing moment for Speaker Boehner in a growing list. But the political damage may be limited: Americans tend to pay little attention to process stories in Congress, and the 2014 elections haven’t been particularly focused on immigration. Something Americans do pay attention to, however, are presidential elections. Here’s where this week’s border skirmish starts to look more significant. The key player in this drama is Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who has been working to corner the market...

First-term senator wielding such influence in House is sign of ongoing tumult in Republican Party.The beginning of the collapse of House Speaker John A. Boehner’s border bill came Wednesday evening, when Texas Sen. Ted Cruz gathered more than a dozen House Republicans at his office in the Dirksen building on Capitol Hill. It was there, as Boehner (R-Ohio) held his own meetings on the other side of Constitution Avenue, that Cruz heard that the speaker didn’t have enough votes — and realized that if his House allies held firm, he could rupture the fragile coalition supporting the measure. Around the...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Polling data compiled by Tea Party Patriots and provided exclusively to Breitbart News shows that a majority of Republican voters think Republicans standing strong on immigration is more important than repealing Obamacare, getting to the bottom of the Benghazi or IRS scandals—or anything else for that matter. When asked by TPP’s pollster which issue they think is the important for Republicans in Congress to deal with, 34.6 percent of GOP voters said stopping the flow of illegal immigrants across our southern border. Stopping Obama’s “illegal overreach” with executive power came in a distant second with 24 percent of GOP voters...

Instead of tossing out a lot of comments about how dumb Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee is, I’ll just link to this. Sheila Jackson-Lee might be the dumbest person in congress. She might even be the dumbest person outside congress. If there were ever a global championship for idiots, the country could send her there. And leave her there; because unlike Lassie, she wouldn’t be able find her way back on her own. In February, Congress was debating federal spending. And Sheila Jackson-Lee got up to make her contribution denouncing a Pepsi commercial as racist. Other things that Jackson-Lee has denounced...

At a Christian Science Monitor breakfast Wednesday, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) said President Barack Obama's lawless executive actions are not high crimes and misdemeanors worthy of impeachment. "I see this as sort of a ridiculous gambit by the president and his political team to try and change the narrative, raise money, and turn out their base for an upcoming election that they feel is not going to go their way," Ryan said, according to the Wall Street Journal. "[Obama's executive actions do] not rise to the high crime and misdemeanor level." However, as Andrew McCarthy, the former federal prosecutor and...

Cruz control, indeed. Taking 41% of the vote, Ted Cruz is your new primary leader, taking over from Scott Walker who finished in second at 15%. Rick Perry, Rand Paul and Mitt Romney round out the top 5.Cruz also won the second choice vote, although by a much smaller margin, edging Walker and Perry. Bobby Jindal and Ben Carson round things out.Cruz, Walker, Perry, Jindal and Carson are the most “acceptable” among the candidates posed.As to the most important issue, readers believe general election voters will be most interested in the economy, followed by immigration, health care and foreign policy....

The Texas senator convinces all of his enemies to praise his intellect. Here's why they're wrong -- and should stop. Even Ted Cruz’s critics seem to concur on one point: whatever else you might say about him, the man is very smart. Mother Jones magazine has called him the “thinking man’s tea partier.” Josh Marshall, in a mostly withering assessment, made the same obligatory concession to his being an “incredibly bright guy.” Jeffrey Toobin’s recent, ostensibly critical New Yorker profile of Cruz is full of quotes about his being “the smartest guy in the room,” his “sophisticated” constitutional views, and...

Sick of the “media filter”? Have $99.95 to spare? Sarah Palin has the answer with The Sarah Palin Channel, a new Web site full of news, videos, chats and exclusive insights into the life of the mamma grizzly. This new venture is the latest attempt to capitalize on Brand Palin, which has been through several iterations over the years. In fact, Palin has a remarkable ability to reinvent herself, both in politics and the media, when a venture comes to a halt. Here are nine times that Palin has managed to turn her hand at a new venture. 1. Mayor...

Hot Air Presidential Survey After you click Submit the page may appear blank, but there should be a confirmation message at the top of the page. If you scroll up and see it, your votes have been received... ---snip--- ***** Polls to FReep on candidates for 2016 and issues. Please hurry, they usually close these pretty quickly,

Representative Raul Grijalva (D., Ariz.) thinks that President Obama should pursue his immigration goals unilaterally, even if it hurts vulnerable Democrats in the 2014 midterms. “That’ll always be the case,” the Congressional Hispanic Caucus co-chair told National Review Online when asked if Democrats were still nervous that the border crisis had turned Obama’s expected orders into a political liability. “You’ll always have members whose political vulnerability they tie entirely to immigration,” Grijalva said. “We didn’t make progress when we were in the majority because we were being protective of those — on immigration reform — we were protecting those members....

(FAKE COLLAGE PHOTO AT LINK) Our divisions are phony: There's broad agreement on more issues. Here's how we convert the Tea Party. Elizabeth Warren’s rock star reception at Netroots Nation came as a surprise to absolutely no one, but not so her popularity as a draw for red state Democrats running for Senate, like West Virginia’s Natalie Tennant or Kentucky’s Alison Lundergan Grimes. Yet, there shouldn’t be anything surprising about Warren’s broad economic populist appeal. It was, after all, the foundation of Democratic Party power from 1932 through 1968, a period in which Democrats won seven of nine presidential elections...

While the country has become more liberal in some ways, the Republican Party has moved to the extreme right, and the Democratic Party has filled in the vacuum in the middle by also moving to the right on many issues. As a consequence, many people who previously considered themselves in the middle are finding that the current views of the left are closer to their views. Thomas Ricks, who wrote Fiasco, and excellent look at the Iraq War, described why he moved to the left at Politico: Disappointment in the American government over the last 10 years. Our wars in...

Remember when former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the consummate “moderate Republican,” shocked everyone by calling immigration an “act of love?” It looks like he’s changed his mind. On Thursday, he called for nearly all of the 50,000-plus immigrants in limbo on our Southwest border to be sent home. That is, “except for those deserving few who may demonstrate a true case for asylum.” Deserving few? Someone should ask Bush which of the children fleeing impoverished and violent countries (where they have a 1 in 15 chance of being murdered) like Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras “deserve” to be sent home....

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) believes the House of Representatives will immediately begin impeachment proceedings if President Barack Obama unilaterally grants work permits and amnesty to millions more illegal immigrants by the "end of summer." Appearing on Breitbart News Saturday with co-hosts Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon and Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow from the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas, King said that if Obama "completely destroys the rule of law with the stroke of a pen" and "Congress fails to act," there will be "enough Republicans who didn't have a desire to do this" that will be "immediately activated" to consider...

Last weekend, Governor Palin gave a measured and thoughtful speech at the Western Conservative Summit, speaking primarily in the tone of the “forgotten man”–”the hard working middle class man who can’t catch a break”. She also used a masterful analogy of the “calloused hand that built America”. What a stark contrast between an open hand calloused from hard work and the clenched fist of socialism. What a stark contrast, too, between Governor Palin’s speech that hit a tone that resonates with middle class America and the tonedeafness and lack of self-awareness of Washington. Take, for example, the Left’s newest pivot...

Contrary no doubt to what she expected, Hillary Clinton has hit some serious snags in the rollout of her unannounced campaign for president. She has made Romneyesque comments about the size of her fortune, such as that she was “dead broke” when she bought her two mansions. When queried about events on her watch as secretary of state that proved embarrassing, she took responsibility without being accountable, projecting the impression that anyone who pressed further was crude. Most damning of all, what has emerged in plain sight from the first month of the publicity tour for her memoir Hard Choices...

Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s dramatic and defiant flight to Israel to protest the U.S. ban on flights to Ben Gurion airport got me thinking. Can anyone imagine Hillary Clinton doing anything so daring, so anti-authoritarian, as that? Has she ever done anything truly shocking and trend-setting? And that brings me to the ideal candidate to take her on from the left: Bloomberg. He has been a Democrat, a Republican and an independent (a man for all voters!). He is pro-choice, pro-gay marriage (much earlier than Clinton was), anti-gun, anti-smoking and anti-trans fat. Although he is a billionaire, he...

Senate “Gang of Eight” Republicans are vowing not to try anything sneaky, as Congress considers legislation to address the border crisis. In a statement that underscores the remarkable distance the immigration debate has traveled since their bill passed the Senate with 68 votes last year, the four Republican authors say they do not support bringing up such a bill this year. “Last year, we helped lead the effort to pass immigration reform legislation that received 68 votes in the United States Senate,” Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), John McCain (R-AZ) and Jeff Flake (R-AZ) said in a joint...

Call it doomsday prepper economics. For more than five years, many Republicans and conservatives have warned that catastrophe is nigh. Washington's deficit spending and the Federal Reserve's excessive money printing will lead to a financial crisis worse than the Great Recession, they prophesied. Inflation will skyrocket, the dollar will collapse, and the Chinese will dump treasuries, they swore. As Ron Paul, the libertarian former GOP congressman and presidential candidate, said back in 2009: "More inflation is absolutely the wrong way to go. We're taking a recession and trying to turn it into a depression. We're going to see a real...