Free Republic

Sen. Ted Cruz has already flexed his influence in the House with last year's government shutdown. Now, he'll be part of the Senate majority and presumed majority leader Mitch McConnell might have his hands full.His dry humor on display, Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell began his victory press conference on Wednesday with insider playfulness that had outsized import. The presumed soon-to-be leader of a GOP-controlled Senate started by briefly reviewing his takeaways from the election, including unhappiness with dysfunction in Washington. He then named some of the people who had called him that day: President Obama, Senate majority leader Harry Reid,...

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is planning to make ObamaCare a priority in his first weeks as leader of the Senate, vowing a sustained effort to dismantle the law piece-by-piece. Instead of a full repeal, McConnell said the GOP will tackle unpopular aspects of the law such as the individual mandate, the medical device tax and the 30-hour workweek requiring employers to provide insurance. “These are the kinds of things that I believe there is a bipartisan majority in the Senate to approve,” he said in the interview with Time magazine published Wednesday. The only other priority he listed was the...

Mitch McConnell, the expected new Majority Leader of the Senate, held a press conference on last night’s big wins today, and a remarkable number of questions he got were about one person in particular: Ted Cruz. Yes, Cruz not saying last night whether he would absolutely, 100 percent support McConnell for the Majority Leader position opened the floodgates today with reporters asking a lot about whether McConnell will be able to handle Cruz. The first question McConnell got wasn’t about Cruz in particular, but it referred to senators with presidential aspirations that McConnell may need to keep in check (this...

There were two messages from Republicans on the morning after their sweeping victory in the 2014 midterm elections. One was that voters had elected Republicans to stop President Barack Obama's agenda. The other was that voters had elected Republicans to depose Harry Reid and break the gridlock in Congress. Both messages are correct, and reconciling them will be the toughest task facing new Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. he first, and decisive, test will be Obama's proposed executive amnesty, through which--it is suggested--he may try to defer indefinitely the deportations of millions of people who broke the law to enter...

The jubilant leader of the Republicans in the US Senate, Mitch McConnell, on Wednesday challenged Barack Obama to find common ground with Congress after the Democrats’ crushing defeat in the US midterm elections threatened to test the limits of the president’s power during his final two years in office. In an ambitious speech hours after his party gained control of both houses of Congress, McConnell warned Obama not to “poison the well” by pushing forward with unilateral action on immigration reform, and promised to introduce legislation that would permit the long-delayed Keystone XL pipeline, bitterly opposed by environmentalists. Obama, meanwhile,...

Since 2007, I’ve been saying that Obama isn’t a mere narcissist but is, instead, a malignant narcissist. He worships at his own altar and is, in his own mind at least, infallible. The manifests itself most obviously in the fact that, once he’s set himself on an intellectual or behavioral path, he is incapable of change — or at least, incapable of change based upon external critique and criticism. To a narcissist, any such external input must either be ignored or twisted so that it conforms to the narcissists own immutable infallibility.Everything that I just wrote is highly abstract. If...

Wow! Obama went off on National Journal reporter Major Garrett today during his press conference after the thumping he received in the midtern elections. “OK, let’s see. See, they may… OK, medical device tax… I’ve already answered, uh-uh, the question. We are going to take a look at whatever ideas… Let me take a look comprehensively at the ideas that they present. Let’s give em time to tell me… I’d rather hear it from them than from you. Major, you know, uh… conceivably I could cancel my meeting on Friday because I’ve heard everything from you. I think I’d rather...

Consider this karma avoidance by the soon-to-be-ex-Senate Majority Leader, but Harry Reid’s new act won’t fool anyone, least of all Mitch McConnell. Reid has run the US Senate for the past eight years like a dictatorship, steadily eroding minority privileges to the point where Republicans couldn’t offer amendments or put up any significant resistance to Barack Obama’s radical appointments, unless Democrats forced Reid’s hand on either score. After watching his party lay a historic egg in the midterms — the size of which is still not yet fully known — Reid tried spinning the results as a mandate for the...

If you thought House Speaker John Boehner has had a miserable time trying to govern, wait until you see what incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is about to deal with. The Kentucky Republican achieved his lifelong dream on Tuesday night in a massive victory for his party, and is positioned to move into Sen. Harry Reid's ornate suite in the Capitol when the next Congress convenes on Jan. 3. But it is likely to be a short honeymoon. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, the influential tea party firebrand, is poised to make life very difficult for the old-school Kentuckian by...

Senator McConnell holds presser in Louisville

President Barack Obama will hold a press conference at the White House on Wednesday afternoon, press secretary Josh Earnest announced on Twitter. The president will speak in the East Room of the White House at 2:50 p.m., according to a White House notice. The regular press briefing, originally scheduled for 1 p.m., has been canceled. The president will most likely address the midterm election results, which provided a major blow to Democrats as Republicans took control of the Senate and made gains in the House. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who won reelection on Tuesday and will become majority leader...

Open Letter to Mitch McConnell Congratulations on your win. It is commendable that you were able to keep another liberal Democrat from gaining a foothold in the US Senate. For that, you deserve thanks and credit.  Now, though, after the huge Republican win, it's time for you to recuse yourself from consideration for the Majority Leader position.  Unfortunately you have been too divisive and polarizing over the past year.  Your extreme comments against fellow Republicans make it such that you've spent too much goodwill among the whole Big Tent.  Your comments in fact amount to a conflict of interest in...

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) argued that Sen. Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) decisive victory over Alison Grimes was a referendum on Hillary Clinton as well on Tuesday.

After months on the campaign trail and millions of dollars spent on ads, the polls on this Election Day, Sen. Mitch McConnell has defeated challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes.

Veteran Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas lost his seat Tuesday to a freshman House Republican, putting the GOP a step closer to its goal of controlling the Senate for the first time in eight years. Rep. Tom Cotton's win brightened an already happy night for Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who won a sixth term of his own and was poised to become the Senate majority leader if his party could gain six new seats overall. Cotton, an Iraq combat veteran and Harvard Law School graduate, joined virtually every other Republican nationwide in relentlessly linking his opponent to President...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell won a hard-fought sixth term Tuesday, putting him a step closer to his lifelong dream of becoming majority leader and getting the GOP off to a good start in its goal of taking control of the Senate. Helping his chances was Republican Rep. Shelley Moore Capito's capture of the West Virginia seat of retiring Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller. Her victory, while not a surprise, gave Republicans the first of six new seats they will need to control the Senate for the first time in eight years...

The Hobson's choice ... Dirty Harry vs. Munch McClownCar

A Franklin Circuit Court judge denied a request from Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes to stop the Republican Party of Kentucky and the campaign for U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell from sending mailers that Grimes called a bullying tactic. On Monday morning Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd denied Grimes’ request to halt the mailing of the fliers which say “the information enclosed contains facts related to a possible fraud perpetrated on citizens across Kentucky.” Within the mailer it refers to statements in Grimes’ ads media fact checkers have criticized, such as a claim that U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell didn’t...

In a last-minute gift to Democrats on the eve of the midterm elections, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has announced his plan to push for Senate Republicans to declare a rightist war against Democrats if the GOP wins control of the Senate. Set aside the campaign pitches of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Colorado Senate candidate Rep. Cory Gardner (R), Iowa Senate candidate Joni Ernst (R), Georgia GOP Senate candidate David Perdue and Alaska GOP Senate candidate Dan Sullivan, who promise to end gridlock in Washington and govern for "all of the people." Cruz says they are all wrong. Cruz...

Some prominent Republicans seem to be feeling their oats, assuming what are sometimes infamously referred to as "RINOs" or Republicans in name only by the Conservative GOP base, eat oats, of course. Mitt Romney is merely channeling Jeb Bush here in an increasingly obvious last-minute GOP establishment gesture to reach out to Hispanics, perhaps especially in Colorado, as we move closer to election day. On "Fox News Sunday, former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) said a Republican-led Senate would pass new, stronger legislation on immigration reform. To be clear, there's absolutely nothing wrong with the GOP welcoming more and more Hispanics into a Right-leaning fold....