Free Republic

...As Vice President Kamala Harris grapples with a portfolio of seemingly intractable issues and responsibilities that have drawn her away from the national spotlight — she Zoomed into the infrastructure Cabinet meeting from Paris on Friday — other Democrats have raised their own national profiles.... ...Though the expectation remains that Biden will mount a reelection bid, Democratic operatives are preparing for the possibility that it won’t materialize... Biden has also said he wants to be a bridge to the next generation, which has fed routine speculation that he could bow out to make way for a younger Democratic candidate. Typically,...

1. She can’t win the nomination without overturning the will of the elected delegates, which will alienate many Democrats. 2. She can’t win the nomination without a bloody convention battle — after which, even if she won, history and many Democrats would cast her as a villain. 3. Catching up in the popular vote is not out of the question — but without re-votes in Florida and Michigan it will be almost as impossible as catching up in elected delegates. 4. Nancy Pelosi and other leading members of Congress don’t think she can win and want her to give up....

WASHINGTON — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton needs three breaks to wrest the Democratic presidential nomination from Senator Barack Obama in the view of her advisers. She has to defeat Mr. Obama soundly in Pennsylvania next month to buttress her argument that she holds an advantage in big general election states. She needs to lead in the total popular vote after the primaries end in June. And Mrs. Clinton is looking for some development to shake confidence in Mr. Obama so that superdelegates, Democratic Party leaders and elected officials who are free to decide which candidate to support overturn his lead...

House speaker-elect's choice for Intelligence Committee head is latest test of her authority. WASHINGTON -- In a revealing test of her leadership, House Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday rejected a once-impeached congressman to head the House Intelligence Committee, a move that could blunt early criticism that she's paying only lip service to ethics reform.At the same time, Pelosi's decision not to promote Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., an African American, could ruffle her relations with black lawmakers.Hastings was acquitted of federal bribery charges as a federal judge in the 1980s but impeached by the Senate and removed from the bench. However,...

Republicans surely have the bigger problem. They're back in the minority after a dozen years running the show on Capitol Hill. And they've compounded the problem by making what appears to be an Hispanic affirmative action pick for the new boss of the Republican National Committee (Sen. Mel "Guest Worker" Martinez), and by bringing world-class pork-barreler Trent Lott back into the leadership ranks of the United States Senate, and by keeping the same top two leaders in the House (Rep. John Boehner and Rep. Roy Blunt) who oversaw the November 7th debacle which gave the nation "Speaker" Pelosi. If inside-the-beltway...

I'll admit my timing could be better, since the incoming House Democrats, on a unanimous voice vote, just made Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., speaker of the House. But I think her party should give serious thought to dumping her. The proximate reason, of course, is that she tried (and, thankfully, failed) to install as House majority leader Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa. It's bad enough that Pelosi promoted Murtha (over the perfectly acceptable Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., who won the caucus vote) in spite of Murtha's having once been named an unindicted co-conspirator in Abscam, a 1980 FBI sting operation in which...

FLUSH with victory, the Democratic Party is celebrating its return to power by loudly and publicly tearing itself to pieces. Anyone who wondered if House Democrats would be as reliable as the Republicans in supporting their leaders had only to watch the leadership fight between Reps. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and John Murtha (D-Pa.): Democrats still form their firing squads in a circle.SNIP... The larger Democratic war pits the New Left against the New Democrats. Brought to power in Clinton's administration, the centrist New Democrats are determined to keep the party in the middle on national issues. The New Left wants...

Nancy Pelosi has managed to severely scar her leadership even before taking up the gavel as the new speaker of the House. First, she played politics with the leadership of the House Intelligence Committee to settle an old score and a new debt. And then she put herself in a lose-lose position by trying to force a badly tarnished ally, Representative John Murtha, on the incoming Democratic Congress as majority leader. The party caucus put a decisive end to that gambit yesterday, giving the No. 2 job to Steny Hoyer, a longtime Pelosi rival. But Ms. Pelosi’s damage to herself...

The videotape is grainy, dark and devastating. The congressman and the FBI undercover agents -- the congressman thinks they represent an Arab sheik willing to pay $50,000 to get immigration papers -- are talking business in the living room of a secretly wired Washington townhouse. Two other congressmen in on the deal "do expect to be taken care of," the lawmaker says. But for the time being -- and he says repeatedly that he might change his mind and take money down the road -- he'd rather trade his help for investment in his district, maybe a hefty deposit in...

WASHINGTON — The race to be the No. 2 House Democratic leader turned nasty Tuesday, with challenger Rep. John Murtha accusing opponents of "swift-boat style attacks" that hark back to his days being investigated in the FBI's 1980 Abscam sting.