Posts by David Weigel

According to Phyllis Schlafly, founder of the Eagle Forum, the conference drew its largest crowd in 38 years, signaling a surge of grass-roots enthusiasm for 2010.

ST. LOUIS — Speaking to a packed hotel ballroom at the conservative How to Take Back America Conference, Rep. Michele Bachmann said that exposés of “criminal tomfoolery” inside of ACORN could kick off a campaign to “defund the left.”

While usually attendees at the annual Values Voter Summit focus on hot button social issues, this year the hotel buzzed with the 10th amendment and the national debt.

In a telling, but non-scientific, survey of the Republican Party’s social conservative base, former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-Ark.) won the 2009 Values Voter straw poll with a 28 percent plurality of the vote. Five-hundred and ninety-seven people voted.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s speech to the Values Voter Summit was tipped as a pivotal moment in his appeal to the GOP’s conservative base. Pawlenty hardly missed a target, and got his biggest applause when he mocked the president for saying he’d “call out” people who misled about his health care plan.
“I accept the challenge,” said [...]

WASHINGTON — At a small health care briefing put on by several House Republicans, Rep. Michele Bachmann argued that the president had lost momentum on health care reform because Americans didn’t trust him when he talked about it.
“What he’s trying to do is boost up the Democrats,” said Bachmann. “The people aren’t listening to him [...]

On a Thursday night Republican Governors Association conference call with conservative activists, moderated by Erick Erickson of RedState, Gov. Tim Pawlenty broached the possibility of “asserting the 10th Amendment” to keep Minnesota from fully participating in a health care plan passed by Congress and signed by President Obama. The 10th Amendment reads:
The powers not delegated [...]

On a 63-35 vote, the Senate has broken the filibuster against Cass Sunstein, President Obama’s nominee for Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The Senate will hold an up-or-down vote on the nomination later this week. Republicans voting for cloture: Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah), Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Sen. Judd [...]

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, introduced the cloture vote on Cass Sunstein’s nomination to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) today by addressing some of the conservative movement-driven attacks on him and rebutting them with letters from conservative supporters. “This is [...]

On July 15, with little fanfare, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) introduced the Czar Accountability and Reform (CZAR) Act of 2009,* written to prohibit taxpayer funds from paying the salaries at “any task force, council, or similar office which is established by or at the direction of the President and headed by an individual who has [...]