Free Republic

As the final weeks of the GOP-controlled Congress draw to a close, pro-life voters look on with great disappointment at the Republican politicians who failed to follow through on their most crucial promise: to defund Planned Parenthood. In about a month, Democrats will take over the House of Representatives and any hope of stripping the abortion giant of federal funding will pass away. With precious little time left in the lame-duck session, GOP congressional leaders have chosen to ignore the persistent urgings of pro-life leaders. Just last week, leaders from Live Action, Students for Life America, the Susan B. Anthony...

Retiring Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said in a new interview that the Republican Party has been inured to danger of President Trump's continued criticism of special counsel Robert Mueller. "It’s like the party is a frog slowly boiling in water, being conditioned to not be worried, to not think too hard about what’s happening around them,” Flake told The Washington Post. “They feel at a loss about what to do because it’s the president’s party, without any doubt," he said. "So, there’s a lot of whistling by the graveyard these days.”

A member of the Texas Republican Party’s 2018 platform committee and former delegate for Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential run proudly declared himself a “white nationalist.” Ray Myers took to social media last week and wrote “Damn right, I’m a white nationalist and very proud of it,” The Texas Observer reported Tuesday. “I am Anglo and I’m very proud of it, just like black people and brown people are proud of their race. I am a patriot. I am very proud of my country,” Myers explained in an interview with the outlet. “And white nationalist, all that means is America first....

“They had two years to defund Planned Parenthood, and they failed,” said Kristan Hawkins, president of the anti-abortion group Students for Life of America. “It’s a huge frustration. We worked so hard to elect supposedly these pro-life Republican officials, and we expected results.” As disappointing as this might be, it comes down to basic math, and Democrats had it on their side. The House has passed defunding language on a number of occasions, but the filibuster rules in the Senate require 60 votes for any appropriation bill. Not only couldn’t Republicans find nine Democrats to vote to strip Planned Parenthood...

The death of President George H. W. Bush provided liberals and their Fredocon houseboys yet another opportunity to lament the fact that all Republicans aren’t dead. Their feigned amnesia about what libs were saying while Bush 41 was still in the arena, and their latest hack attempt to tsk tsk tsk tsk about how the Bad Orange Man isn’t like [Insert Name of Dead Republican Here] serves to justify the prophylactic cynicism that we Normals should strive to cultivate. President Bush was an imperfect man and a frustration to hardcore conservatives like me, but he was also a WW II...

Trump fought like "Hell" to keep the Senate and gain Senate seats, which he did. Knowing that Trump is a raging street fighter on all issues the "he" loves & pursues with super vigor, he put little pressure on Paul Ryan, who just stood by and let the House slip from GOP hands. Now...I am thinking, "Did Trump want to give the House to the "Nutcase" Democrats and let them weave their own patterns of self-destruction leading into the 2020 POTUS, campaign. I think so. We shall see as time rolls by. The Democrats have no leaders, they have no...

Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives this year due to a big jump in liberal Millennials moving to the suburbs to buy houses, start families, and begin the transition into conservatives. The latest Ernst & Young LLP, Research regarding the changing preferences for the Millennial age group of 18 to 34 for the period from June 2016 to June 2018, found the percentage of older Millennials between the ages of 28 to 31 that owned a home spiked from 27 to 47 percent, and the percentage of younger Millennials between the ages of 20 and 23 that...

A special panel dreamed up by Speaker Paul Ryan to end the constant cycle of government shutdowns crashed and burned on Thursday. The special panel tasked with recommending budget fixes overwhelmingly rejected its own set of proposals, even after lawmakers admitted the package included only modest changes to the way Congress approves budgets and funds the government. The failed vote follows months of amicable work toward a bipartisan deal. In recent weeks, however, partisan feuding divided the group as members from each side of the aisle began accusing the other party's leaders of dooming approval in the Senate. “We got...

MYRTLE BEACH, SC (WBTW) -  A quarter of a century later, local, state, and federal leaders still work to build Interstate 73. It would be the Grand Strand area's first interstate.I-73 would run from Michigan to Myrtle Beach. Now after Hurricane Florence, there's even more urgency, among some, to complete the project. As Hurricane Florence approached the South Carolina coast in September, so did the call for evacuations. "If any of your listeners or viewers were stuck on Highway 501 or Highway  9 or Highway 17 trying to dodge this storm and get their family to safety they understand how important it is...

Conservative favorite Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) told FOX and Friends on Tuesday that Congress has only five weeks to pass border wall funding. Jordan is right! Paul Ryan repeatedly pledged to fund the Trump border wall but was lying to Republican voters. Despite passing record spending bills Ryan refused to include funding for the wall.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Texas) late Monday released a 297-page tax and IRS package that would address a host of issues some lawmakers are interested in tackling in the lame-duck session. The legislation includes provisions to renew expired tax provisions, make technical fixes to last year's tax cut law, provide incentives for retirement savings, provide tax relief for disaster victims and make improvements to the IRS. It would provide for a resolution of a number of tax issues in the final weeks of the year while Republicans still control both chambers of Congress. The House Rules...

Conservatives are bemoaning the mediocre performance Republicans had in the midterm elections. It is typical for the party in power to lose the House during the midterm elections, but Republicans also lost some big statewide races, particularly in Arizona where a U.S. Senate seat, secretary of state and superintendent of schools all switched to blue. Overall, however, it was not quite a blue wave. Republicans won two key statewide races in Florida; a U.S. Senate seat and the governorship. So why should we be glad for this mediocre performance? Because the Democrats dominate education, the media and Hollywood (they also...

Former FBI Director James Comey revealed Thursday that he has received a subpoena from House Republicans to testify on Capitol Hill, but said he would refuse to do so unless it is a public hearing. “Happy Thanksgiving. Got a subpoena from House Republicans. I’m still happy to sit in the light and answer all questions. But I will resist a 'closed door' thing because I’ve seen enough of their selective leaking and distortion," Comey tweeted. "Let’s have a hearing and invite everyone to see,” he added. The Hill reported earlier this month that House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.)...

In recent years, “Blue State/Red State” maps have become a ubiquitous, shorthand way to describe our political landscape. Unfortunately, and much like how a carnival hypnotist employs a soothing and repetitive motion to transfix his victims into behaving absurdly, many Republican pundits appear to have become so mesmerized by seeing “Red States” as “Republican,” that they have failed to recognize -- much less understand -- the significant demographic and political changes that have taken hold within those state; changes that have rendered traditional notions of political analysis largely ineffective. You do not have to be a high-paid political consultant to...

The feud over who will be the next speaker of the House is heating up, as allies of the longtime Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi, take on a rowdy band of rebels pushing for regime change. Pro-Pelosi forces launched a snarky Twitter assault against a handful of the men leading the rebellion. As the progressive pundit Joan Walsh tweeted, “So #fivewhiteguys are following the tactics of the right wing white guy Freedom Caucus to block a woman speaker after an election in which women saved the Democrats. Got it.”

The House race for California's 39th district has been called for Democrat Gil Cisneros over Young Kim, who was vying to become the first Korean-American woman in Congress and Republicans' last hope to keep a seat in Orange County. It is the 39th House seat that Democrats flipped this year. The big picture: Democrats dominated congressional races in the state this year, flipping six seats in southern California — four of them in traditionally red Orange County. The seat had been held by Republican Ed Royce for 13 terms.

With Walters’ loss to newcomer Katie Porter, Democrats will hold a 44-9 edge in U.S. House seats, with another Orange County GOP seat in peril. The county was once home to President Richard Nixon and was considered a foundation of the modern conservative movement, gaining the moniker “Reagan country.” Democrats are on track to hold every statewide office — again. And there wasn’t even a Republican on the ballot for U.S. Senate. “The California Republican Party isn’t salvageable at this time,” concluded Kristin Olsen, a former Republican leader in the state Assembly. “The Grand Old Party is dead — partly...

The good thing about screwing up is that you can learn from your mistakes and do better next time. That, of course, assumes you are not a Republican Party official, because the GOP Establishment seems largely incapable of learning from its mistakes.We should try again anyway.We won some races, but we lost a lot more. Losing has one advantage over winning – pain is a better teacher than joy. After all, winning generally teaches you the wrong lessons. It makes you complacent. Look at Texas. The governor did worse than expected; Ted Cruz had a close call, and down ballot...

Now that the midterm elections are over, Republicans have decided to use the next two months to be productive during a lame-duck session. According to Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Republican senators will work through New Year's Eve to confirm all of President Donald Trump's pending judicial nominations, The Washington Times reported. The decision comes after Democrats made a pact to take the maximum amount of time to debate Trump's picks, which could severely hinder the GOP's legislative priority of packing the federal courts with conservative judges. “I know that Sen. McConnell has made a commitment that we’re not going to leave any...

If Democrats are trying to reassure anyone that they won't impeach President Trump, they're aren't doing a very good job of it. Just days after her party won control of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi made clear that Democrats might impeach the president even if Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller does not find evidence to warrant charges against him. "Recognize one point," Pelosi told the Atlantic. "What (Trump-Russia special counsel Robert) Mueller might not think is indictable could be impeachable." "We're waiting to see what the special counsel finds," Rep. Jerrold Nadler, who will run the House Judiciary Committee, told...