Free Republic

Anyone buying that? No? OK Neil Gorsuch has been confirmed to a lifetime SCOTUS appointment, there’s nothing they can do about it, and Democrats are furious. Lefties who demanded the “nuclear option” be employed when they were in power, are simply aghast that the GOP has called Harry Reid’s bluff and used it against them. Remember, as Reid famously said, “Let them do it, why would we care.”

Markey Claims That Dems will Restore Filibuster for Supreme Court NomineesSen. Ed Markey (D., Mass.) claimed Monday that Democrats will restore the 60-vote threshold for Supreme Court nominees once his party retakes the majority in the Senate. "When the Democrats return to the majority and capture the presidency, which we will," Markey said, "that day is going to arrive [and] we will restore the 60-vote margin." "We will ensure that for the Supreme Court, there is that special margin that any candidate has to reach because that is essential to ensuring that our country has a confidence in those people...

Senate Democrats on Thursday slammed Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for not delaying a vote on President Trump’s pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) and some colleagues have repeatedly asked McConnell to delay the vote to confirm Scott Pruitt, currently Oklahoma’s attorney general, while Democrats and a liberal group wait for a public records requested more than two years ago. McConnell declined, Carper said, and the Senate voted 54-46 on Thursday — with all Republicans and two Democrats supporting — to move forward on Pruitt and line up a vote for Friday. “In my...

My, my: such a violent metaphor. Aren’t the Dems the peace ‘n love party? On MSNBC today, regarding the nomination of Scott Pruitt as EPA Administrator, Dem Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts threatened “a confirmation hearing that has razor-blade sharp edges.” To which guest-host Peter Alexander stunningly responded: “as the Sierra Club told me last night, they said this is sort of like putting an arsonist in charge of fighting fires.” Note: Alexander wasn’t merely reporting the Sierra Club’s statement. With his preface—”as the Sierra Club told me”—Alexander seemed to be adopting the slanderous simile as his own. View the...

With Democrats unable to sell their awful ideas on gun control policy, they’re becoming more and more irrational in their future proposals. Right now, there’s a piece of legislation that’s destined for legislative death, which would ban people under the age of 16 from firing AR-15 rifles ("weapons of war"), or any firearm considered to be “military-style” because that’s totally enforceable, said by no one ever (via The Hill): The proposal—from Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.)—would ban people younger than 16 from having or firing a machine gun or assault weapon. “The small hands of...

Senate Democrats on Wednesday couldn't agree that federal debt is a national security problem, in a hearing aimed at assessing the long-term strategic implications of the government's $19 trillion debt. "A realistic discussion about it, and accepting expert opinion that this debt that we have is not actually right now a threat to our country, is I think a more realistic and honorable way of talking to the American people about it," Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Wednesday. That surprised committee chairman Bob Corker, who concluded the hearing by describing such views...

Every senator who accepted money from the Iranian American Political Action Committee (IPAC) should be impeached and removed from office — or at very least, soundly defeated the next time he or she comes up for reelection. But the enemedia, true to form, will cover for them and do everything it can to keep them on the government payroll. (“Gillibrand and other pro-Dealers got Iran cash,” by Jeff Dunetz, The Jewish Star, September 3, 2015 (thanks to Banafsheh One of the many unanswered questions about P5+1 agreement with Iran is why so many Congressional Democrats are rallying behind the President...

Democratic lawmakers have introduced legislation to authorize $60 million in taxpayer money to go to the Centers of Disease Control (CDC) for research on gun violence prevention. The measure, introduced last week, would give $10 million a year “for each of fiscal years 2016 through 2021 for the purpose of conducting or supporting research on firearms safety or gun violence prevention under the Public Health Service Act.” “The epidemic of gun violence in America is not preordained, it is preventable,” Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass.) says in a press release. “In the 21st century, we should use research and advances in...

Democrats have a very different understanding of national security than Americans.Americans think we should improve national security by keeping ISIS in. Democrats think importing the Syrian Civil War here is a national security imperative.They warn us that, “We cannot expect countries hosting Syrian refugees to continue shouldering such a disproportionate burden if the United States and other industrialized countries do not begin resettling many more Syrian refugees.”It’s as if Jordan and Lebanon are doing us some kind of favor by ‘hosting’ their own fellow Arab Muslims.Besides we didn’t take in Jews during WW2. Now we have to make up for...

Twenty-seven senators want President Obama to block federal agencies and contractors from asking job applicants about prior criminal convictions. The senators, including 26 Democrats and presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), want Obama to take executive action to "ban the box," referring to a question on job applications that asks if an applicant has any convictions. "We ask you to require federal contractors and agencies to refrain from asking job applicants about prior convictions until later in the hiring process," they said in a letter to Obama on Monday. "This policy would eliminate unnecessary barriers to employment for all job...

WASHINGTON — When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses a joint session of Congress in March, it is unclear whether everybody invited will actually show up. Democrats have criticized House Speaker John Boehner for circumventing the administration when he invited Netanyahu to speak, and the White House has already said Obama will not meet with him when he’s here. BuzzFeed News asked several Senate Democrats whether they planned on skipping the speech or not. Most said they either hadn’t thought about it or they hadn’t decided. But there were no hard answers in the negative. Only one senator definitively said...

A pro-family organization is warning that "hate crime"-related legislation introduced on Capitol Hill could potentially squash free speech and create a "thought-controlled society." In mid-April, Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Massachusetts) introduced a bill authorizing the government to monitor and analyze speech online, on television, and over the radio, with the aim of classifying it as hate speech under the government's own vague guidelines and then possibly charging the "offenders" with a hate crime. The Hate Crime Reporting Act of 2014 (S. 2219) would create a comprehensive report of Internet and other telecommunications speech regarding gender, race, religion, ethnicity, or sexual...

If two Democratic lawmakers have their way, Barack Obama’s Justice Department will submit a report for action against any Internet sites, broadcast, cable television or radio shows determined to be advocating or encouraging “violent acts.” This according to the text of a new bill from Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y. The Hate Crime Reporting Act of 2014 “would create an updated comprehensive report examining the role of the Internet and other telecommunications in encouraging hate crimes based on gender, race, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation and create recommendations to address such crimes,” stated a news release...

There is very dangerous legislation making its way through both the House of Representatives and Senate that will finish the United States. The sharia bill calls for Islamic blasphemy laws — the criminalization of speech that offends or insults — who, exactly? Well, that is up to the enforcer, is it not? On Wednesday, Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) introduced “The Hate Crime Reporting Act of 2014″ (S.2219), which seeks “to examine the prevalence of hate crime and hate speech on the Internet, television, and radio to better address such crimes.” Congressman Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) introduced a companion bill in the...

WASHINGTON — Hank Ronan knew he would get the job. He had sailed through three rounds of interviews and hit it off with the doctors at the diagnostic center in Annandale, Va., where he had applied to be a driver for $11 an hour. Shuttling patients to appointments was a world away from his 20 years as a software engineer, but it was the best that Ronan could find after being laid off in 2011. He was eager to get back to work and granted the doctor’s office permission to run a credit check. Ronan never heard back, he said...

The newest US senator on Capitol Hill took aim at the Russian government this week, condemning what he called the country’s “hateful” new law on homosexuality, and asking Russia’s Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak for assurances that American athletes and tourists at the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympic Games will be safe. The law bans the promotion of “non-traditional relationships” toward minors, a move that has outraged the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) community and its supporters in the United States and elsewhere. Proponents say it shields children from harmful influences.

Ask Democrat Ed Markey or Republican Gabriel Gomez about guns or ObamaCare or each other's qualifications to be the next US senator from Massachusestts, and out come the canned talking points and put-downs that anyone following the Senate race quickly wearies of. But what if you toss them some questions from off the beaten path? I put some nonstandard queries to the two nominees, hoping their answers might be illuminating – or at least unexpected. Herewith excerpts from their replies. (The candidates' full responses are posted online: Click here for Markey's and here for Gomez's). 1. Are TV shows getting...

A Republican polling firm has found that the Massachusetts special election for the U.S. Senate is in a dead heat. Democrat Ed Markey, the longtime congressman, leads Republican and first-time candidate Gabriel Gomez by just a point. According to McLaughlin and Associates, a firm that often works for Republican candidates, 45 percent of likely voters in Massachusetts support Markey, while 44 percent support Gomez and 11 percent remain undecided. The election is on June 25. Markey has long led Gomez in the polls, which is no surprise considering Massachusetts leans heavily Democratic. According to the Real Clear Politics average, which...

...what I think Markey demonstrates with his answer here is that many of the people advocating such a tax also thirst for more revenue from people making much less — such as Markey’s low six-figure salary as a member of Congress. He talks about raising the Alternative Minimum Tax — the original “Buffett Rule” tax, intended to hit a select few — which today hits the middle class in many parts of America that have a high cost of living...

Several major U.S. utilities are under "constant" cyberattack and haven't taken precautions to protect critical systems from Iran, North Korea and other adversaries, according to a congressional survey of more than 100 companies accounting for much of the nation's power system. The survey shows the nation's electrical grid remains "highly vulnerable" to attack after four years of failed efforts to pass major cyber-security legislation, according to an accompanying report. Industry trade groups, including the Edison Electric Institute, joined by Republicans in the Senate, opposed the bill, arguing minimum cyber-security standards would be out-of-date by the time they were implemented. "Our...