Free Republic

Republican pollster Frank Luntz has suggested that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would be the Democratic party’s best candidate to challenge President Donald Trump in 2020 if she were legally able to run. “The key is authenticity,” Luntz told Fox News host Laura Ingraham Tuesday evening. “You want to say what you mean, mean what you say,” he continued. “You want to be able to look straight at the camera and be yourself. And at least half of them [the 2020 Democratic candidates] are trying to be something that they’re not,” he argued. Ingraham then pointed out that Ocasio-Cortez, despite her disagreements...

After U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren called for the resignation of Attorney General William Barr on Wednesday, President Donald Trump accused Warren of “defrauding the public” with her claims of Native American ancestry and said she should resign. Trump, calling in to a local conservative talk radio show, also suggested that Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins and Middlesex County District Attorney Marian Ryan “don’t mind crime” if they think immigration agents should be barred from courthouses. Trump phoned into Boston Herald Radio’s “Talk It Up” show hosted by Adriana Cohen and Herald editorial page editor Tom Shattuck, and spent about...

Is a woman a shoo-in to win the Democratic nomination and take on President Trump in 2020? Some women in three states that could make or break White House hopes aren't so sure. “I want to be for a woman, but it’s just hard when you see a lot of other people not supporting women yet. I feel that America’s just not there yet,” Wendy McVey, a 20-year-old junior at Iowa State University, told The Associated Press. At the moment, the candidate McVey is most interested in is former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke. Women are among the Democratic Party’s most...

Former Massachusetts governor William F. Weld, who is challenging President Trump as a Republican candidate in 2020, blasted the president for his attacks on democratic institutions and for stoking nationalist rhetoric as Trump seeks money for a wall along the Mexican border. “It’s part of his strategy to try to get everybody upset, and divide the country and persuade us that we shouldn’t be patriots who love our own country and our own people,” Weld said. Instead, “we should be nationalists who hate everybody else,” Weld said. Weld made the remarks during an appearance on WCVB-TV’s “On The Record” with...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Friday became the first 2020 Democratic presidential candidate to make a full-throated call for the House of Representatives to begin impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump after the release of special counsel Robert Mueller's redacted report. Mueller, who investigated whether Trump's campaign coordinated with Russia during the 2016 election and whether the president tried to interfere with the inquiry, found no evidence of a conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign and made no verdict on obstruction of justice. Mueller did find, however, that Trump made numerous attempts to interfere with the investigation but was largely...

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said Sunday Dreamers, children of immigrants brought into the country illegally, should get legal status. "Well, it's been put in place by President Obama and I believe we have a responsibility to fulfill what is a presidential pledge and commitment. So that's in the past. I would provide legal status for those Dreamers in the country," Romney said on NBC's "Meet the Press," referring to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that shields these individuals from deportation. "That's something the president's put on the table. I think we should get that job done, and hope,...

Watch in slow motion as Democrats, goaded by the media, conspire to re-elect President Trump: Voters care about the economy and making education and health care affordable. And so Democrats are talking about … abolishing the Electoral College? Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren started the latest distraction at a CNN town hall on Monday. “Get rid of the Electoral College,” she said, neglecting to mention that this has zero chance of occurring in the foreseeable future. The media took it from there. On Tuesday, MSNBC’s Garrett Haake pressed former representative Beto O’Rourke: “Getting rid of the Electoral College: Is that an...

Donations from Trump and his family add another wrinkle to a Democratic primary where candidates are trumpeting their distance from the president. Kamala Harris received money from Donald Trump as recently as six years ago. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner hosted a Park Avenue fundraiser for Cory Booker. Kirsten Gillibrand took in Trump family donations three times across a seven-year period — and then gave a similar amount of money to a nonprofit years later after the president mocked her in a tweet. As the president gears up for his re-election fight, donor records show that six of the declared...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a 2020 candidate for president, on Sunday endorsed the idea of President Trump's team invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office if the circumstances call for it. “My point here is that if they believe that Donald Trump cannot fulfill the obligations of his office, then they have a constitutional responsibility to invoke the 25th Amendment,” Warren said during a press conference following a campaign rally in Las Vegas. “Their loyalty under law is not to him personally. It is to the Constitution of the United States and to the people of United States.”...

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren took her battle with President Trump on the road to the Hawkeye State, as the newly minted Democratic hopeful mused before a crowd of Iowans that the president “may not even be a free person” by the time the presidential election rolls around. The Bay State’s senior senator visited Iowa, an important early primary state, on Sunday, a day after making her 2020 bid official. “By the time we get to 2020, Donald Trump may not even be president. In fact, he may not even be a free person,” Warren told a crowd in Cedar Rapids....

Massachusetts could become the first state to call on the U.S. Congress to begin impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump, if a resolution in the State Senate moves forward. State Sen. Jo Comerford, D-Northampton, on Thursday introduced the action that cites 10 legal reasons for drawing up articles of impeachment against Trump, including “cruelly and unusually imprisoning children and their families,” obstructing justice by firing and threatening to fire senior Justice Department officials, such as former FBI Director James Comey, and acting to interfere with the investigation into possible ties between his campaign and Russia. Comerford said in a statement...

Former Secretary of State John Kerry says President Donald Trump’s actions on the international stage do not help the United States and show he is not a negotiator. “This is the pull-out, walk-away presidency, and it is not enhancing the interest of the United States of America,” Kerry told David Axelrod on “The Axe Files,” airing on CNN on Saturday at 7 p.m. ET. “This President is not negotiating; he doesn’t negotiate. This is a man who claims to be the world’s greatest negotiator. What is he negotiating?” Kerry said, citing Trump’s decisions to pull troops from Syria and Afghanistan,...

Handicapping presidential elections nearly two years in advance may be a fool’s errand but that’s exactly what those seeking the Democratic nomination in 2020 are being forced to do. That’s why Sen. Elizabeth Warren became the first big name to formally announce her intentions on New Year’s Eve, more than 13 months before the first votes are cast in Iowa. Warren has had a rough recent few months after an attempt to put the controversy over her claims to Native American ancestry via a DNA test turned into a fiasco in October. The test hurt her among tribal groups that...

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who announced on Monday that she is exploring a presidential run, is quickly assembling a robust and experienced team to lead a campaign in Iowa -- an early signal of the outsized importance of a strong showing in the state. Emily Parcell, who worked as then-Sen. Barack Obama's Iowa political director for the 2008 caucus and as a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton in the state eight years later, has signed on with Warren, along with Janice Rottenberg, according to two sources. Rottenberg was an Ohio organizer for Clinton in 2016 and ran the Iowa Democratic...

Elizabeth Warren would have made an excellent president. Warren, who announced her intention to run for the presidency this week, spent much of her career before entering politics in law, which she taught at universities around the country, including UT-Austin, Harvard, and Penn. Particularly expert in bankruptcy, middle-class personal finance, and consumer protection, since entering Congress in 2013, Warren has spent much of her time pushing for better regulation of financial institutions. She was, for example, essential to the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFBP), a federal agency designed to protect Americans from unfair, deceptive, or predatory financial...

President Trump loves nothing more than when his opponents try to litigate his insults, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is trying to do with "Pocahontas," a staple riff at his rallies. The big picture: Trump's never more comfortable than on this terrain, and "Pocahontas" is one of his all-time favorites, according to aides. • But he also is especially proud of "Da Nang Dick" Blumenthal, for the exaggerated military record of the Democratic senator from Connecticut. • Trump also regularly hits "Sleepy Joe" Biden these days. • In Trump’s mind, his 2016 nicknames weren’t a sideshow, but were one of...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren suggested President Donald Trump’s comment about him personally administering a DNA test to her to prove her Native American heritage is “creepy.” She tweeted Monday that the president makes “creepy physical threats” about women who scare him, including her. “He’s trying to do what he always does to women who scare him: call us names, attack us personally, shrink us down to feel better about himself,” the Massachusetts Democrat responded on Twitter after Trump made the comment during an appearance in Georgia. “It may soothe his ego – but it won’t work.”(continued)

Elizabeth Warren's DNA test identifying her distant Native American ancestry is at its root a first stab at a question all 2020 Democratic hopefuls must answer: How do they run against a foe as menacing as Donald Trump? It is a mark of how the President has dragged campaign politics into a surreal era that what was seen as a de-facto declaration of a coming White House bid by a major rival involved an investigation into her own genetic make-up. The President has long mocked Warren for claiming she has a Native American connection and said he would love to...

One of the most infuriating aspects of this whole Kavanaugh saga is the degree to which we are flying blind about some of the most fundamental points of disagreement at its core. Making this even worse, it doesn’t have to be this way. On the Senate floor late Thursday, Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) made a new and tantalizing claim about what’s in the FBI documents on Brett M. Kavanaugh that all senators have now reviewed. Senators are severely limited in what they can say about these documents, which are summaries of the interviews that the FBI conducted as part of their...

One of the country's most popular Republican governors on Thursday called for an independent investigation into the allegations made against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and said the Senate should hold off on a vote. Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker made the comments as Professor Christine Blasey Ford testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Kavanaugh sexually and physically assaulted here. "The accusations brought against Judge Kavanaugh are sickening and deserve an independent investigation," Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker tweeted. "There should be no vote in the Senate." Baker, who faces re-election this November, is one of only a few Republican governors,...