Free Republic

The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, would not rule out the possibility of rescinding his endorsement of Donald J. Trump’s presidential bid down the road, and he described the candidate as lacking knowledge in a number of areas in an interview released on Friday. The comments from Mr. McConnell, in an interview with the “Masters in Politics” podcast on Bloomberg Politics, came as Republicans down the ballot continue to face questions about Mr. Trump’s criticism of the Indiana-born federal judge overseeing a case against Trump University as “Mexican.” Mr. McConnell has been pointed in his criticism of those remarks. It...

McConnell's Liberal Judge Forced Kentucky to Recognize Gay Marriages The Senate Conservatives Fund (SCF) released a new, 60-second radio ad today calling on U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to admit his mistake in recommending U.S. District Court Judge John G. Heyburn II, the liberal judge who issued an order last week requiring Kentucky to immediately recognize gay marriages performed outside the state. "Senator McConnell should admit that recommending Judge Heyburn was a mistake that hurt Kentucky," said SCF Executive Director Matt Hoskins."McConnell knew Judge Heyburn was not a conservative, but he promoted him anyway. Now Judge Heyburn is forcing his...

Matt Bevin, who is challenging Sen. Mitch McConnell in a Republican primary, calls the 2008 federal bailout of banks and Wall Street giants “irresponsible” and says he would have opposed it as a senator. Yet back in 2008, as an investment fund president, Bevin backed the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, as well as the government takeover of troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. McConnell supported TARP, and the Bevin campaign repeatedly reminds voters that the Senate minority leader calls that vote “one of the finest moments in the history of the Senate.”

Each of the five polls taken since December have had the race tight, but this is the first one showing Alison Lundergan Grimes in the lead. Noise or omen?I know what you’re thinking, but don’t celebrate just yet. “This is not going to be a coast for Mitch McConnell,” said pollster Jay Leve of Survey USA. “It’s going to be a dogfight. Every vote is going to matter. This election is going to have national consequences. We’re going to see a lot of money from outside interests flow into Kentucky.”…Sixty percent of likely voters in the Bluegrass Poll disapprove of...

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WHAS11) -- Nine months before Kentucky's 2014 U.S. Senate election, Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes leads five-term incumbent Sen. Mitch McConnell (R) 46% to 42% in a WHAS11/Courier-Journal Bluegrass Poll released Thursday. McConnell enjoys a comfortable 26 point margin in the Republican primary contest against Matt Bevin in the poll conducted by Survey USA and commissioned by a partnership of WHAS11, The Courier-Journal, WKYT-TV in Lexington and the Lexington Herald-Leader.

The conservative group ForAmerica is pushing to oust GOP leaders in both the House and Senate with a new campaign called "Dump the Leadership." The organization, long a critic of both House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), calls on both leaders to step down in its new online advertising campaign. ForAmerica Chairman Brent Bozell tells The Hill that the group is likely to spend at least $675,000 on the web campaign between now and the November election, and could increase the sum to more than a million dollars in the future. "We need new...

FRANKFORT — Matt Bevin is getting some outside help in his uphill battle to unseat U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell in the May Republican primary — and a lot of it targets Republican strongholds in southeastern Kentucky. The Madison Project, a Washington-based conservative group that supported Republican Ted Cruz in his Texas Senate campaign, announced a week ago it will open five Kentucky get-out-the-vote offices for Bevin. Then on Thursday, the group announced it is erecting billboards in Clay, Laurel, Madison, Pulaski and Whitley counties attacking McConnell. All but Madison are heavily Republican in registration. A spokeswoman for McConnell’s campaign blasted...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's (R) primary opponent, businessman Matt Bevin, raised $900,000 in the fourth quarter, according to his campaign. About half of Bevin's total appears to have been raised by the Senate Conservatives Fund, which has endorsed his campaign and said this month that it had raised $450,000 for him. Bevin's campaign said about $430,000 of the total was raised with SCF's help. The total doesn't include any self-funding from Bevin, who had previously loaned his campaign $600,000. His campaign did not release a cash-on-hand figure, but it had just $164,000 on hand at the beginning of October....

Marxist collaborator Mitch McConnell kicked off his reelection campaign last week with a new ad in which he claimed to be a conservative who loves America. This is the same Mitch McConnell that: •Told GOP donors that Tea Party activists needed to be punched in the face •Opposed the Ted Cruz-led partial shutdown of the tyrannical federal government •Bribed Kentucky voters with $3 billion in taxpayer money •Defends Obama’s illegal NSA spying •Works behind-the-scenes to pass amnesty To add insult to injury, the ad featured Rand Paul– whom Mitch McConnell opposed in 2010, and who only reluctantly agreed to endorse...

Saying the Republican Party needs to adopt a new vision, U.S. Senate candidate Matt Bevin is hoping to shift Kentucky's race to issues, rather than surface-level politics and attacks. The Tea Party-backed Bevin has often given speeches focusing on policy, and he decried Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell and Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes for failing to discuss them in-depth. "The sad truth is that while this campaign has been going on we have been speaking in-dept about the issues that truly matter as we travel around the state. But both Mitch McConnell and Alison Lundergan Grimes have been avoiding the...

Mitch McConnell Caricature Shoots Gadsden Flag The Senate’s Republican Minority Leader has now made it official – he’s declaring war on conservatives. McConnell’s latest attack on conservatives came in an interview with The Washington Examiner, which ran last Friday. In it McConnell claimed the he is a “conservative” and went on to offer this interesting take on the present situation in Washington: “What they do [the Senate Conservatives Fund] is mislead their donors into believing the reason that we can’t get as good an outcome as we’d like to get is not because of a Democratic Senate and a Democratic...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican up for re-election in 2014, told the Washington Examiner in an interview published Friday that he believes it is time for the GOP establishment to stop conservatives and Tea Partiers. McConnell argued it is “utter nonsense” for groups like the Senate Conservatives Fund (SCF), which has endorsed his primary challenger businessman Matt Bevin, to argue that Republicans like him in Congress are not fighting hard enough to defeat Democrats. In the interview, McConnell focused on deriding Tea Partiers for leading the effort to defund Obamacare—something that, coupled with the Democrats’ refusal to...

On Tuesday, November 12, Nebraska Senate candidate Ben Sasse walked into Mitch McConnell’s office to clear the air. Contrary to the rumors, Sasse wanted to say, he hadn’t secretly vowed to oppose McConnell’s leadership if elected. In fact, he hadn’t been asked to make such a pledge and would never have even considered it. That was the plan, anyway. As soon as Sasse sat down, McConnell lit into him, criticizing him for working with the Senate Conservatives Fund (SCF) as well as for posting a viral YouTube video in which he demanded “every Republican in Washington, starting with Minority Leader...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on a conference call organized by Karl Rove’s Crossroads organization for large donors and their advisers on Oct. 30 that the Tea Party movement, in his view, is a “nothing but a bunch of bullies” that he plans to “punch … in the nose.” On the call, according to a donor who was on it, McConnell personally named Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) as Tea Party conservatives he views as problematic for him. “The bulk of it was an attack on the Tea Party in general, Cruz in particular,” the source,...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on a conference call organized by Karl Rove’s Crossroads organization for large donors and their advisers on Oct. 30 that the Tea Party movement, in his view, is a “nothing but a bunch of bullies” that he plans to “punch … in the nose.” On the call, according to a donor who was on it, McConnell personally named Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) as Tea Party conservatives he views as problematic for him. “The bulk of it was an attack on the Tea Party in general, Cruz in particular,” the source,...

For the most part, Mitch McConnell speaks in typical elected politician jargon. But as the Dems took away his chief legislative weapon, he sounded more like a character from “The Godfather.” carl hulse @hillhulse Sen McConnell issues blunt threat: "You will regret this and you may regret it a lot sonner than you think," suggesting 2015 GOP Senate. 10:09 AM - 21 Nov 2013

U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is a vocal critic of President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act and its glitch-stricken website, HealthCare.gov, repeatedly calling for repeal of the law "root and branch." "At this point, senators from both parties can agree: HealthCare.gov is a rolling disaster. Every day seems to bring more, newer comic calamity," McConnell, R-Ky., said Oct. 29 in a Senate floor speech. "The only thing the website seems to be good for right now is creating punch lines for late-night comedians." However, since 2011, McConnell has accepted more than $75,000 in political donations from health care giant...

For the last year, the left has engaged in an organized campaign to drive Rush Limbaugh off the air. Knowing they cannot go after Rush Limbaugh directly, the left has launched repeated boycotts against any advertisers who dare advertise while Rush Limbaugh is on. Consequently, some advertisers decided to stop advertising at all on political talk radio, depriving the genre as a whole of resources. And it still hasn’t hurt Rush Limbaugh. Mitch McConnell has decided to embrace the same strategy in his war against the Senate Conservatives Fund. He can’t attack the Jim DeMint created Senate Conservatives Fund outright,...

The Senate Conservatives Fund's (SCF) super-PAC is accusing Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) of helping Democrats fund ObamaCare with a new TV ad. -snip- But McConnell's campaign dismissed the ad, accusing the group of "working day and night to ensure Barack Obama's majority in the Senate." "When Mitch McConnell was rallying conservatives to fight ObamaCare, the fundraising group responsible for these ads was working day and night to ensure Barack Obama's majority in the Senate," said McConnell spokeswoman Allison Moore. 'You get an idea of what team the Senate Conservatives Fund is on when you realize that there are scores of...

Alexandria, VA — Senate Conservatives Action (SCA) announced a new 30-second TV ad Tuesday, which exposes U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell's decision to help the Democrats fund Obamacare. The ad ("Kentucky") will run statewide on broadcast and cable television from October 30 to November 12. The cost of the ad buy is $330,000. "Mitch McConnell says he opposes Obamacare when he's in Kentucky, but then he helps the Democrats fund Obamacare when he's in Washington," said SCA Executive Director Matt Hoskins. "Mitch McConnell has lost his way. It's why more and more Kentucky Republicans are supporting Matt Bevin, a true conservative...