Free Republic

President Trump has delivered on some important issues. If Roe v. Wade is overturned in the next decade, his appointment of conservative justices will be a cause of a great advance in human rights. He signed a law that included some of the tax relief for parents I’ve been advocating for 15 years, and eliminated the individual mandate that was the most objectionable feature of Obamacare. Whether we’re talking about religious liberty, school choice, or Title IX, Trump’s policies are much better than those of Joe Biden. On many issues, Trump has far exceeded the expectations I had when he...

Link/title only due to Bloomberg posting restrictions. However, it is amazing this came from Bloomberg. It mentions Biden on fracking, gun confiscation, and raising taxes.

President Trump pulled an inside straight to win in 2016, and now he needs another one. The good news for Trump is that his approval rating has stopped falling recently. The bad news is that it has stabilized in the low 40s. Election-watcher Harry Enten points out that no president since Harry Truman has won with anything like Trump’s negative net approval rating. Truman won at –6, while incumbents who lost (Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H. W. Bush) averaged out at about –13, roughly where Trump’s number is. The presidents who won reelection averaged an approval rating of...

Four Tests for Impeachment By RAMESH PONNURU  December 19, 2019 11:23 AM   And how the president meets them [cut] If you have read this far, you know my answer to these questions. The Constitution provides for impeachment and removal to protect us from officials, including presidents, who are unable or unwilling to distinguish between the common good that government is supposed to serve and their own narrow interests. Though he has done some good things in office, Trump is just such a president. Congress should act accordingly. RAMESH PONNURU is a senior editor for National Review, a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, a...

The Senate today confirmed Brian Buescher, President Trump’s nominee to the U.S. District Court in Nebraska. Readers may recall that Senate Democrats attacked Buescher for his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic service organization. I wrote about this here. Sen. Kamala Harris was one of the Senators who led the charge against Buescher during his Committee hearing. His other main adversary was Sen. Mazie Hirono, one of the Senate’s dimmest members. Harris isn’t dim, but she’s a hard core leftist and an incorrigible opportunist. Thus, her suggestion that Buescher’s membership in the Knights of Columbus makes him unfit...

The GOP division over whether to defund ObamaCare can be summarized in two quotes: This, from Texas senator Ted Cruz: "We can de-fund Obamacare if Republican leaders who tell their constituents they're conservative stand up and act like they're conservative." And in opposition, Ramesh Ponnuru: "[I]f Republicans stay firm in this demand [to defund Obamacare], the result will be either a government shutdown or a partial shutdown combined with a debt default. Either would be highly unpopular, and each party would blame the other. The public, however, would almost certainly blame Republicans. And which blame, according to Ponnuru and those...

At Right Matters, Ramesh Ponnuru has posted a potential agenda for Republican congressional candidates running in 2010. I agree with Ross’s characterization of the proposals as “substantial, sensible and politically sale-able.” Below I offer some additional thoughts: Here, admittedly off the top of my head and in no particular order, are a few of the ideas I hope Republicans run on: 1) A tax reform that includes tax relief for parents, increased incentives to work and save, and considerable simplification of the tax code. (In other venues I have sketched out how taxes could be reformed in this way without...

In the closing days of the 1992 presidential campaign, President George H.W. Bush took to waving a bumper sticker with the slogan ANNOY THE MEDIA/RE-ELECT BUSH. Four years later, Senator Bob Dole asked voters to "rise up" against media that were trying to "steal this election." Complaining about the liberal media is a signature of losing Republican campaigns. It doesn't work because whining doesn't look presidential and because annoying the media tends to be pretty low on voters' to-do lists.

The four leading Republican candidates for president have demonstrated that they have four distinct styles of flip-flopping. Mitt Romney is the most notorious flip-flopper in the field, and his most notorious flip-flop concerned abortion. He claims that a conversation with scientists about human cloning made him see how abortion had devalued human life. Nobody can prove that Romney isn’t telling the truth, but nobody quites believe him, either. Romney has also changed positions on guns, immigration, and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. But it is not the number of his flip-flops that has impressed people so much as how they have...

CONSERVATIVES are dreading the November elections. The Republican capture of the House of Representatives in 1994 was one of modern conservatism’s signal political accomplishments. Now the Democrats are poised to take back the House. If that happens, however, conservatives will find several silver linings in the outcome. It would be worse for conservatives if Republicans actually gained seats. The Congressional wing of the party lost its reformist zeal years ago and has been trying to win elections based on pork and incumbency. An election victory would reward that strategy, leaving the congressmen even less interested in restraining spending, reforming government...

As we grow closer to the end of July, it means only one thing…it is almost time to go back to school. This year though, there is a new book that politics majors, particularly world politics majors, should read. The book is called Redefining Sovereignty. The book, edited by Orrin C. Judd, a blogger, includes writings from thirty individuals, each presenting their own views on the topic of sovereignty. Mr. Judd spoke about the book and the issues it covers recently at the Heritage Foundation. Mr. Judd was joined by three of the contributors, Paul Driessen of the Committee for...

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Listen While You Freep! All programs are replayed for 24 hours and again on weekends so tune in when it’s convenient for YOU! Call In Number – 866-884-TALK (8255) 1pm EST – Director of Media Analysis at the Media Research Center, Tim Graham, will be the featured guest this week. Paul Weyrich, CEO of the Free Congress Foundation, and Graham will analyze the media and the 2004 election. The media, it has been said, was not biased this time; instead, they had their own agenda. 2pm EST – TIPPING POINT - HAVE THE DEMOCRATS GOT THEIR STATES' RIGHTS MOJO BACK?...

Sorry to post a vanity...but I haven't found ANY other Freepers yet on the National Review cruise here in the Caribbean...any of you have friends or family present? If so drop me a line, I'd love to meet them. As for the cruise itself, it's been quite fun - there are around 400 mostly rabid Republicans here, plus several of the staff & contributors of National Review and a few other notables like Ed Gillespie, Dick Morris, Michelle Malkin, & Stephen Moore. Today they gave seminars on how Bush won, and thoughts on who the Repub. candidate might be for...

On Wednesday, the Kerry campaign issued a false press release. It claimed that a study by Austan Goolsbee had proven that under the president's Social Security plan, "the 45 million Americans who count on Social Security will see up to a 45 percent cut in their benefits, while Bush's biggest backers — the financial services industry — will reap billions as part of the largest windfall in Social Security history." Goolsbee's study said nothing about benefit levels, let alone for today's retirees, and after he told me so, the Kerry campaign revised its press release. Good for it. The campaign...

EDWARDS'S MEDICAL SCAMS [Ramesh Ponnuru] A friend passes along this link [ http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20040816-011234-1949r.htm ], along with the following comment: "Finally, someone has written an article about how John Edwards made his millions by suing obstetricians for cerebral palsy in newborns – a disease that is almost always genetic and has nothing to do with the obstetrician. Edwards punished these doctors with millions in damages for the crime of delivering babies. And as the article details, they and other doctors have learned their lesson: they stopped practicing in North Carolina, creating a crisis in access to healthcare for several specialties in...

Robert Reich’s Religion Problem Witless rhetorical oppositions. Liberals tend to take umbrage when it is suggested that they are hostile to religion, or to religious people, or to some subset thereof. They have nothing against evangelical Christians, they respond, so long as they do not seek to use the state to impose their faith on others. Some liberals go further, saying that they are religious progressives who advocate a bigger welfare state as an outgrowth of their religious values. (A number of my fellow contributors to the new Brookings Institution book One Electorate Under God? take this approach, including Paul...

She has an op-ed in the Washington Post on communion that displays a very common misunderstanding, one relevant to non-Catholics as well as Catholics. (That is to say: This specific mistake comes in her thinking about abortion, not her thinking about communion.) She writes, "Essentially, proponents of this harsh penalty make the flawed and intellectually dishonest argument that a vote not to criminalize abortion is the moral and church law equivalent of the act of abortion itself. Then, building on that mischaracterization, they erroneously conclude that pro-choice politicians are 'obstinately persevering' in the 'manifest grave sin' of abortion and must...

Kerry promised during the primaries to appoint to the Supreme Court only justices who favor Roe v. Wade because "people who go to the Supreme Court ought to interpret the Constitution as it is interpreted, and if they have another point of view, then they're not supporting the Constitution, which is what a judge does." Yesterday, he said that he would be willing to appoint anti-Roe justices so long as the Court had a pro-Roe majority. ("Supporting the Constitution" was apparently no longer a requirement for his nominees.) The abortion lobby expressed its displeasure, and reasonably so given its principles--if...

THAT VIRGINIA LAW [Ramesh Ponnuru] A while ago, I said I would look into a bill underlying a dispute between Jonah and Andrew Sullivan. The latter said that Virginia had passed a law that made it impossible for gay couples to make certain contractual arrangements. He said that conservatives should denounce the bill, especially since many conservatives had suggested the use of contracts as a substitute for the practical benefits of same-sex marriage. Here’s the Virginia law in question: “A civil union, partnership contract or other arrangement between persons of the same sex purporting to bestow the privileges or obligations...