Free Republic

Conservative groups are now campaigning for the defeat of the American Health Care Act, the bill introduced by House Republican leadership to allegedly repeal and replace Obamacare. Heritage Action labeled the bill “bad policy.” FreedomWorks called it “Obamacare-lite.” And the Club for Growth said it is a “warmed over substitute for government-run healthcare.” Senate Conservatives Action, the political arm of the Senate Conservatives Fund, is urging voters to contact their representatives to oppose “RyanCare” (or, “Obamacare 2.0”) and demand full repeal of Obamacare. “The truth is that RyanCare keeps Obamacare's most expensive coverage mandates,” SCF President Ken Cuccinelli writes. “[I]t...

WASHINGTON — House Republicans united Wednesday around a plan to use the threat of a government shutdown as leverage to repeal President Obama's healthcare law, confident the American people are on their side. House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) yielded to his right flank by agreeing to attach the healthcare law repeal to a must-pass bill to keep the government funded past Sept. 30. A vote is expected Friday on a bill that would allow the government to stay open for the next few months. The measure is all but certain to pass the Republican-led House, but faces rejection in...

Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa insisted Sunday on Meet the Press that his remarks about drug smugglers outnumbering immigrant valedictorians by a 100-to-one ratio was not inaccurate and that the plight of DREAMers “tugs at his heart strings.” “The people who are advocating for this, don’t understand the full scope,” King said of the immigration bill, which would grant a shorter path to citizenship to young adults who were brought into the country by their parents when they were underage, and exempt them from fines imposed on other undocumented immigrants. “My heart goes out to valedictorians who were brought...

President Barack Obama insisted Friday that the Senate Gang of Eight immigration bill would pass the GOP-led House, but that “internal Republican caucus politics” were preventing Congress from sending a comprehensive reform bill to his desk. The Gang of Eight’s wide-reaching legislation, which passed the Senate with 68 votes in late June, has essentially evaporated after House Republicans – adverse to many provisions in the 1,000-plus page bill – said they would not take it up. Obama said during his news conference that he was “absolutely confident” that if the Gang of Eight bill was put on the House floor,...

Paranoia #23: Bad Traffic: It’s often said that if the battle over immigration lasts into the fall, the controversial legislation will be held up in a traffic jam of Congressional activity. Here’s Ryan Grim and Elise Foley of HuffPo: “There will be scant opportunity for immigration reform in the fall, as a looming government shutdown, the approach of the debt ceiling and the festering sequester will combine to force themselves onto the agenda. In Congress, the fall quickly turns to Thanksgiving recess, which gives way even quicker to the Christmas break. And then it’s 2014.” Like the former CW that...

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The following statement was issued today by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX), and Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) following a special meeting of the House Republican Conference to discuss the issue of immigration reform: “Today House Republicans affirmed that rather than take up the flawed legislation rushed through the Senate, House committees will continue their work on a step-by-step, common-sense approach to fixing what has long been a broken system. The American people...

House Speaker John Boehner is sticking to his position: The House will not vote on the Senate-passed immigration bill. “I’ve made it clear and I’ll make it clear again, the House does not intend to take up the Senate bill,” Boehner said Monday. “The House is going to do its own job in developing an immigration bill.”

Following the passage of the Senate’s amnesty bill, Representative Steve Stockman (R-TX) sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner. In the letter Stockman requested that Boehner immediately kill the Senate’s bill, S. 774, though a constitutionally-required ‘blue slip’ resolution. A ‘blue slip’ is a resolution that automatically returns to the Senate any bill that violates the origination clause of the United States Constitution. Blue slip resolutions are immediately considered as a matter of constitutional privilege, are debatable for an hour and are not subject to amendment. “Not only is the Senate amnesty bill an abuse of taxpayers and immigrants,...

Time to flood their switchboards. Don't let the traitors get away with robbing us of our jobs, destroying our economy, giving up our sovereignty. Kill the amnesty bill before it kills us!! We did it before, we can do it again. KILL THE BILL!!

While most Americans rank the economy and government spending as the top challenges facing the nation, the Senate last month rushed through a comprehensive immigration bill to give amnesty to 11 million illegal aliens. The effort was more about the perceived needs of the Republican Party than the nation as a whole. The swift Senate action was intended to pressure the House to pass amnesty into law. The House seems to have other ideas. Last Friday, before Congress left for a week-long recess, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's office released to GOP House members a 3-page memo detailing issues that...

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is on a collision course with House conservatives over immigration reform. …The five-term senator has stopped short of criticizing Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) vow to move immigration reform only if a majority of House GOP lawmakers are on board. Yet, McCain made a pointed comment last weekend that suggested he would only bite his tongue for so long. “I really don’t feel it's appropriate for me to tell [Boehner] exactly how he should handle this. But I think Republicans realize the implications for the future of the Republican Party in America if we don't get this...

Dearest FReeper-Patriots-FRiends, Hey Y'all The GOP House must KILL the Senate’s Immigration BILL, and the time for us to act is now. Today, tomorrow, this coming week! Like Rush said on Wednesday, Free Republic was the Tea Party before there was a Tea Party”. The House is the last stop between Amnesty and saving our Republic. We have been told that the House Leadership will meet on or about July 10, 2013 to decide on how they’re going to deal with the “Senate’s Immigration Reform Bill.” They are caught between big money interests and the will of the people,...

1. Since the Senate-passed bill doesn’t require the flow of illegal immigrants to stop, how can you say this approach secures the border? No one can make that promise. The Senate bill, S.744, throws tens of billions of dollars at the problem and calls for meeting arbitrary security standards, but it doesn’t guarantee that illegal immigration will stop. **snip**2. The Senate-passed bill requires the U.S. government to manage many more visas, even though it doesn’t do a good job with today’s smaller work load. So how does this “fix” our legal immigration system? It doesn’t. The bill makes some changes...

On April 17, my colleagues and I introduced immigration legislation. It marked a first step toward achieving the strongest border security and enforcement measures in U.S. history, modernizing our legal immigration system to unleash strong economic growth and job creation, and dealing with our undocumented immigrant population in a tough, but fair way that is directly linked to achieving several security triggers. While I believe this legislation will accomplish these things, I am also confident that an open and transparent process – one that engages every senator and the American people – will make it even better. I believe this...

Alex Conant @AlexConant: "We haven't had a cohort of people living permanently in US without full rights of citizenship since slavery". Mind you, he isn’t talking only about illegal immigrants. He’s talking about any non-citizen who lives in this country permanently, including millions of Green Card holders. And by implication: Conn Carroll @conncarroll: For those of you keeping score at home, Rubio spokesman @AlexConant just compared all Schumer-Rubio opponents to slave owners If this is Team Rubio’s strategy for winning over conservatives, good luck with that.

Health Overhaul: In a vote set up by the budget deal, all 53 Democrats, including 23 up for re-election in 2012, voted to preserve funding for their version of socialized medicine. All 47 Republicans voted no. Game on. For all the criticism Speaker John Boehner has received for his budget deal with the Democrats, settling for a meager amount of cuts while pulling the riders for defunding Planned Parenthood and ObamaCare, the separate Senate votes he engineered may just be one of the tipping points for a Senate and even White House takeover in 2012. Last Thursday's Senate vote to...

Reform: As the head of Medicaid and Medicare services testifies in favor of ObamaCare, the CBO director says it will destroy 800,000 jobs. Talk about killing two birds with one stone. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi once famously said that we'd have to pass ObamaCare to see what was in it. She also boasted that the health care bill would create 4 million jobs — "400,000 of them almost immediately." Now that we've seen what's in it, we realize the possible consequences for our physical and economic health. And congressional testimony before GOP-led committees has given us fresh reasons for...

Medicine: As the House moves to repeal the nationalization of health care, Britain plans to take a scalpel to its National Health Service, opening it up to competition and letting doctors and patients call the shots. It was both a stunning admission and a damning indictment of socialized medicine when British Prime Minister David Cameron in effect admitted that the holy grail of nationalized health care, the British National Health Service (NHS), was broken and in need of fixing. In a speech outlining public-sector reforms to be introduced in a bill Wednesday, Cameron promised to get rid of "top-down, command-and-control...

Medicine: As the House moves to repeal the nationalization of health care, Britain plans to take a scalpel to its National Health Service, opening it up to competition and letting doctors and patients call the shots. It was both a stunning admission and a damning indictment of socialized medicine when British Prime Minister David Cameron in effect admitted that the holy grail of nationalized health care, the British National Health Service (NHS), was broken and in need of fixing. In a speech outlining public-sector reforms to be introduced in a bill Wednesday, Cameron promised to get rid of "top-down, command-and-control...

Forget about going quietly into the night. Senate Democrats on Tuesday unveiled a broad agenda for an end-of-session sprint that, in other years, could be a whole year's worth of activity — ranging from an arms-reduction treaty with Russia to a major immigration bill to overturning the ban on gay troops. And that's not to mention the nearly 2,000-page, $1.1 trillion massive spending bill Senate Democrats said they'll try to push through. The bill contains hundreds of pork-barrel spending projects and new rules governing everything from airport baggage to detainees at the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. "We're not through....