Republicans
September 28, 2017 — Scott Johnson
On Tuesday Roy Moore defeated Luther Strange in the Alabama Republican primary to run in the special election this December. The seat had been resigned by Jeff Sessions when he was confirmed to the position of Attorney General. Strange was appointed by then Governor Robert Bentley to serve in the position until the special election. The only suspense involved in the outcome of the primary was whether Strange would come
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September 26, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
Judge Roy Moore has opened up a nice lead over Sen. Luther Strange in the Alabama Republican Senate run-off election. With about one-quarter of the precincts reporting, Moore is roughly 17,000 votes ahead (out of about 120,000 counted), for a 57-43 lead. That lead is consistent with, though perhaps at the higher end, of what recent polling has indicated. Moore was expected to win. However, Trump might have though his
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September 18, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
Over the weekend, President Trump announced that he will visit Alabama next weekend to campaign for Sen. Luther Strange in that state’s Senate primary Republican run-off . I found this decision difficult to explain inasmuch as (1) polls show that Strange trails his opponent Judge Roy Moore by a significant margin and (2) Moore seems as likely as Strange to vote for pro-Trump positions — at least the ones that
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September 16, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
The last time we looked in on the Alabama Senate primary race between Sen. Luther Strange and Judge Roy Moore, the (former) judge had a double-digit lead. In the first round of the primary, Moore bested Strange by six points and apparently had extended the margin as the run-off approached. That was about three weeks ago. The latest poll, by Emerson just a few days ago, suggests that the race
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August 24, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
In my post last night about the GOP Senate primary in Alabama, I noted that Judge Roy Moore has a large and somewhat surprising lead over Luther Strange, who was appointed to replace Jeff Sessions and has been endorsed by President Trump. In lieu of offering a full explanation, I pleaded ignorance of Alabama politics. Fortunately, a longtime Power Line reader and GOP insider from Alabama has offered his insights.
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August 23, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
I don’t believe we have written about the race to fill the Senate seat in Alabama vacated by Jeff Sessions. The Republican primary initially featured three main candidates: Luther Strange, who was appointed to fill the seat after Sessions became Attorney General; Rep. Mo Brooks, a Tea Party style conservative and member of the House Freedom Caucus; and Roy Moore, former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. Moore famously
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August 20, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Arthur Finkelstein died at his home in Ipswich on Friday at the age of 72. Finkelstein was a skillful Republican political consultant who achieved substantial success with a wide array of candidates. Sam Roberts’s New York Times obituary provides the necessary information if you can ignore the “homophobic” slur that Roberts pins on unnamed clients of Finkelstein, who was homosexual. I met Finkelstein in late 1995 or early 1996 when
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August 8, 2017 — John Hinderaker
At FiveThirtyEight, David Wasserman has a heartwarming analysis of why the Democratic Party is pretty much hosed in Congressional elections for the foreseeable future: Even if Democrats were to win every single 2018 House and Senate race for seats representing places that Hillary Clinton won or that Trump won by less than 3 percentage points — a pretty good midterm by historical standards — they could still fall short of
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July 28, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Today is a day to be embarrassed to be a Republican, for Obamacare has survived every effort to repeal and replace it with the defection of Senator McCain in the last-ditch effort to keep the effort alive in the final vote on “skinny repeal” after midnight this morning. Robert Pear and Thomas Kaplan report the story for the New York Times here. The defeat of Obamacare repeal efforts in the
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July 25, 2017 — John Hinderaker
Fifty Republican senators voted today to begin debate on an Obamacare repeal and replacement bill. Vice President Mike Pence cast the 51st vote to allow the legislation to move forward. The two Republicans who voted No were Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. It remains to be seen whether any Obamacare repeal bill will actually pass the Senate. All 48 Democrats will vote No, regardless of the bill’s specifics. Amendments will
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July 18, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Within a few hours of the death of the Obamacare repeal-and-replacement bill in the Senate, a version of the repeal-only option appears to have died. That option represented Senator McConnell’s fallback position. Why not? Only eighteen months ago, in December 2015, Republican Senators (minus Susan Collins) voted unanimously to repeal Obamacare. They must have had their fingers crossed behind their back. The December 2015 repeal vote in the Senate was
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July 18, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
Last night, Sens. Jerry Moran and Mike Lee announced that they would not vote for the latest Senate version of Obamacare repeal and replace. They argued, in effect, that the proposed legislation did not really amount to repeal. Sens. Rand Paul and Susan Collins were already “no” votes. Thus, the defection of Moran and Lee meant the demise of the bill. What now? President Trump has called for the straight
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July 17, 2017 — John Hinderaker
Liberals hate diversity and can’t stand change. So they are toiling 24/7 to assure us that the Trump administration–the aberrational election of a president who is not a professional politician–is a rapidly-unraveling disaster. I doubt that, but time will tell. In the meantime, more unorthodox candidates–better yet, more unorthodox non-liberal candidates–are coming forward, perhaps inspired by the election of a non-politician as president. Yesterday, Caitlyn Jenner said that she is
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June 20, 2017 — Scott Johnson
CBS News anchor Scott Pelley — make that former CBS News anchor Scott Pelley — is the face of sanctimonious liberalism. The attempted assassination of House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and his GOP colleagues on the baseball field in Alexandria last week somehow prompted Pelley’s comment on the day after: “It’s time to ask whether the attack on the United States Congress, yesterday, was foreseeable, predictable and, to some degree,
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May 19, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Ammo Grrrll decries A RACKET WRIT LARGE. She writes: A book that had a profound effect on me as a teenager was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. Francie, the young protagonist, was, like me, a READER who discovers the library and it changes her life. Unlike Francie, however, we were middle-middle class, living in small towns in South Dakota and Minnesota, and Francie was starvation-level poor, living
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May 6, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
CNN and other liberal media outlets are pointing out that the group of Republican Senators working together on the matter of Obamacare replacement contains no females. CNN’s Erin Burnett slammed Republicans for this fact. Here are the members of the group: Mitch McConnell John Cornyn John Thune John Barrasso Lamar Alexander Mike Enzi Orrin Hatch Ted Cruz Mike Lee Tom Cotton Cory Gardner Rob Portman Pat Toomey The first four
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May 3, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
Two key moderate Republicans say they will support a Republican plan to “replace” Obamacare. I put the word replace in quotation marks because I think the word improve better describes what the proposal does. The two Republicans are Reps. Fred Upton (Michigan) and Billy Long (Missouri). They were won over after a visit to the White House by the addition to the existing proposal of $8 billion in funds over
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