Free Republic

Hillary Clinton: the patriotic choice for president? That seems the implication of Chuck Todd’s challenge to Paul Ryan in an interview aired on today’s Meet The Press. When Ryan told Todd that as Speaker of the House, he was supporting Trump, Todd retorted: “you just made a case though for party over country.” How absurd! As Ryan rightly went on to explain to Todd, “No I didn’t! I know Hillary Clinton won’t agree with anything we want to do. She’ll put a bad judge on the Supreme Court. She won’t agree with any of the conservative reforms we’re trying to...

A coalition of civil rights groups planned to hold an event Monday attacking Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump for his rhetoric against Mexicans and Muslims, but cancelled it after 50 people were killed and at least 53 more wounded in a reported Islamic terrorist attack Sunday. The event was supposed to include leaders from several top rights groups including National Council of La Raza and Muslim Advocates, an advocacy group founded by American Muslim lawyers. The groups said in a press release promoting the event they planned to condemn Trump for “demonizing” certain groups and would demand an apology. The...

Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund founded by billionaire James Simons, donated over $13 million to Sen. Ted Cruz’s failed presidential campaign. For a guy who’s supposed to be pretty smart with his money, the ROI on that one has got to sting. Nevertheless, now that Mr. Cruz is out of the race, Mr. Simons has begun pouring millions of dollars into Hillary Clinton‘s campaign, with Renaissance Technologies donating over $2 million to Ms. Clinton so far this election cycle. Euclidean Capital—also owned by Mr. Simons—has given the Clinton campaign over $7 million in contributions, and such figures are likely to...

Realville, as Rush often says, is where he lives. That’s a place without blinkers or rose-colored glasses. That’s actually where we all live, though some of us prefer to deny it. That is, until reality bites. Then our wishful thinking or willful ignorance dashes upon the hard rock of unforgiving reality. The crackup always smarts. Thus is the case with the 2016 presidential election. There’s Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. In other words, there’s Column A and Column B. That’s the choice. Column C is fairyland. Come November, tens of millions of voters will flock to the polls to choose...

Contrary to those in the media and elsewhere who claimed he was “far more accepting” on LGBT issues than other GOP candidates, Donald Trump is proving that he very much will be a force against LGBT equality if elected president. And he’s doing it in a more insidious, under-the-radar way than any previous GOP presidential nominee. Though he rarely raises his positions against LGBT rights on the campaign trail, Trump is making pacts with anti-LGBT forces. Today, Trump spoke at the Road to the Majority summit in Washington, an event attended by Christian right activists and sponsored by the Faith...

Donald Trump called for the Republican Party to fall in line behind his presidential bid Saturday during campaign swings through Florida and Pennsylvania, attacking skeptical members of his own party along with Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. “We have a war to win against a very crooked politician. The Republican Party really should get their act together,” Trump said here Saturday. “They have to come together. We have to win. And if for no other reason, the Supreme Court, remember that.”

A flyer circulated before Donald Trump’s Friday rally in Richmond, Virginia, called for violence and declared “passive resistance … has no effect on heartless racists.” Under a headline of “Self-Defense,” the flyer reads: We fully support your right to self-defense, we do not expect you to take a beating by Trump goons in order to “look good.” Your safety is important, protect yourself. Fascism wants us to peacefully resist while it steamrolls us. We take our inspiration from the workers of Spain who rose up by the millions to fight fascism when it came to their country. Passive resistance works...

Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., accused presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee of applying a double standard by planning to construct fencing around this summer's Democratic convention. "It's interesting that the Democratic National Committee will have a wall around their convention to keep unapproved people out while at the same time, their presumptive nominee, Hillary Clinton, pushes for open borders policies that are even more radical than President Obama's," Alabama's junior senator said in astatement. "She would refuse to deport dangerous criminal aliens until after they have been convicted of committing heinous crimes against Americans, close detention...

A brief look at the most egregious examples from the last 40 yearsAnnoyed at federal judge Gonzalo P. Curiel's persistent rulings against him in the Trump University case (brought by a law firm that has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for speeches by Bill and Hillary), Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said that maybe it's because the judge is a second-generation Mexican immigrant. The entire media -- and most of the GOP -- have spent 10 months telling us that Mexicans in the United States are going to HATE Trump for saying he'll build a wall. Now they're outraged...

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) vowed again Friday that the Senate will not confirm President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Merrick Garland, this year. “Let me say this once more, and let me say it clearly: Barack Obama will not get a Supreme Court Justice in the 11th hour of his presidency on the way out the door,” McConnell said to loud applause at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Washington, D.C. …

On May 26, the Chicago Tribune published an editorial in which it claimed the NRA is exaggerating Hillary Clinton’s threat to gun rights. Focusing on the Supreme Court, the Tribune claimed there is no guarantee that Republicans would confirm Clinton’s appointees to the highest court, and even if they did, there is no guarantee those justices would revisit landmark decisions like District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) or McDonald v. Chicago (2010).

Newt Gingrich confirms that he's running for President in 2012 because you know he would never backtrack from a statement like this: Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Wednesday he shouldn't have called Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor a racist, but said he was still concerned that she would bring bias to her decisions.

Noah Feldman is a Harvard law professor and a prolific author. In an op-ed in The Post and Courier, Noah Feldman has penned an article that grudgingly admits that the Second Amendment is a fundamental right deserving as much respect as the First Amendment.  Feldman gets much wrong.  For example, he declares that the Supreme Court found that the Second Amendment is an individual right for the first time in 2008.  From bloomberg.com: The evolution of gun rights has an internal legal logic to it. The contemporary story starts in 2008 with the case of D.C. v. Heller, a 5-to-4...

Escalating its constitutional battle with a federal judge over the ethics of government lawyers in the major test case on presidential power over immigration, the Justice Department late Friday night asked a federal appeals court to swiftly nullify the judge’s order of sanctions. In a massive filing of nearly four hundred pages, the department also asked that the judge’s order be put on hold while it is being challenged in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. This new conflict between the Obama administration and U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen of Brownsville, Texas, is separate but related...

As I said from the start, my goal has been to unite the party so we can win in the fall. And if we’re going to unite, it has to be over ideas. Donald Trump and I have talked at great length about things such as the proper role of the executive and fundamental principles such as the protection of life. The list of potential Supreme Court nominees he released after our first meeting was very encouraging. But the House policy agenda has been the main focus of our dialogue. We’ve talked about the common ground this agenda can represent....

Truncated title. Full title:Letter by climate change scientists urging prosecution of skeptics deemed a 'mistake' and 'withdrawn' You would think the group of 20 or so climate change scientists who sent a letter to President Obama urging him to prosecute climate skeptics under the RICO statute would have consulted a PR firm before they made asses of themselves to the whole country. But now, the learned men of science have hired Climate Nexus, a PR firm specializing in spinning global warming news. The letter - a move the PR firm called a "big mistake" - has been "withdrawn" and a...

A landmark California bill gaining steam would make it illegal to engage in climate-change dissent, clearing the way for lawsuits against fossil-fuel companies, think-tanks and others that have “deceived or misled the public on the risks of climate change.” The first-of-its-kind legislation — Senate Bill 1161, or the California Climate Science Truth and Accountability Act of 2016 — is scheduled for floor action Thursday after clearing Senate committees in April and May. The measure would allow state and local prosecutors to pursue claims against climate-change skepticism as a violation of the state’s Unfair Competition Law [UCL], as well as extend...

The White House’s Clean Water Act requires property owners to surrender possession of land that falls under its jurisdiction. The law, which has frustrated landowners for 40 years, was expanded last year when the Obama administration issued new rules for which bodies of water can be claimed as government property. Hawkes Co., Inc. was one of the businesses affected by the White House’s environmental guidelines. The company, which provides peat for golf courses, was prevented from using property in Marshall County, Minnesota, because it had been deemed federally controlled wetlands by the United States Corps of Engineers. The Supreme Court took up...

Did you ever wonder why unsuccessful candidates merely “suspend” their campaigns after losing a key primary, instead of terminating them? Surely all those candidates knew that it’s impossible to restart a presidential campaign once it’s been suspended. In the famous words of Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice Longworth, “You can’t make a soufflé rise twice.”

Conservative and center-right columnists often have to do far more digging than their liberal counterparts, simply because overwhelmingly left-leaning beat journalists, aka "Democrats with bylines," provide such unbalanced reporting on current events on a daily basis. Fortunately, the Washington Post's Marc Thiessen did the entirely necessary work of rummaging through available information about federal court nominations in 1988 and 1992. Any beat reporter could have done the same thing, but either didn't, or decided not to report what was found. What Thiessen unearthed makes an argument-ending mockery of Vice President Joe Biden's claim, made in a Monday evening tweet, that when he...