Kevin Vance is a journalist who contributed to The Weekly Standard during 2008–2009, covering politics, elections, and policy. His reporting for the magazine spanned a range of topics including domestic political campaigns, foreign policy debates, and trade policy. He was a frequent contributor of news and analysis pieces during that period.
Late Monday afternoon, the District of Columbia's Board of Elections and Ethics determined that a proposed referendum to repeal the city council's decision to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions violated the city's Human Rights Act. The District's Democratic establishment…
Third-term representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers doesn't fit the mold of the female member of Congress. Unlike at least three-quarters of them, she's a Republican. And unlike about seven-eighths of them, she's staunchly pro-life.
At the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing Wednesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fielded questions from three congressmen who asked her about abortion. New Jersey representative Chris Smith asked Clinton about her praise of Planned Parenthood founder and eugenicist Margaret Sanger at a…
Last month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accepted Planned Parenthood's Margaret Sanger Award, named after the founder of the American Birth Control League, which changed its name to Planned Parenthood in the 1940s. In her remarks, Clinton singled out the namesake of the award for praise: Now,…
As General Motors works to avoid bankruptcy, its CEO seems to be advertising his openness to a suffocating level of government regulation in the private sector. At a Christian Science Monitor sponsored breakfast with journalists in Washington this morning, GM CEO Rick Wagoner was asked about how…
The sun may be setting on the sunshine state. California narrowly averted a crisis with an 11th-hour budget compromise on February 19. Last Friday, on the same day Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency for a three-year drought, it was reported that the state unemployment rate…
Republicans looking for a fresh, young face to help guide the party out of the political wilderness don't need to look any further than new Representative Aaron Schock of Illinois. At age 27, Schock is the youngest face of all in the House of Representatives, where the Constitution requires members…
Over the weekend, Barack Obama embarked on a train trip from Philadelphia to Washington reminiscent of Abraham Lincoln's train journey from Springfield prior to his inauguration. As the New York Times says, Obama's pre-inaugural journey "is another nod to history, kicking off a week when the…
Ahead of her final White House press briefing, press secretary Dana Perino spoke with reporters at a breakfast in Washington hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. Perino said she's thinking about writing a book, though she promised it wouldn't be a "kiss and tell" because she "wasn't raised that…
Seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong (re)opened the door to a possible political run in an interview posted yesterday at The Daily Beast. Is there a future for Lance Armstrong in politics? If you feel like you can do the job better than people who are doing it now, and you can really…
Administrators of Team Sarah have uncovered evidence on a left-wing online thread that some Internet trolls sought to discredit the organization by posing as conservative racists on Team Sarah's forums. Team Sarah, an online community supportive of Gov. Sarah Palin, claims over 60,000 members and…
After devastating losses on November 4, Republicans finished the 2008 election cycle on a high note. Immigration lawyer and community leader Anh "Joseph" Cao (pronounced "gow") last Saturday narrowly defeated indicted Democratic congressman William "Dollar Bill" Jefferson in Louisiana's Second…
Politico confirms that California congressman Xavier Becerra turned down Barack Obama's offer to become the U.S. trade representative. The other leading candidate is rumored to be former Dallas mayor Ron Kirk. Kirk was elected Dallas's first black mayor in 1995 and earned a reputation for being…
Arizona voters last month approved an amendment to the state constitution defining marriage as "only a union of one man and one woman"--just two years after they rejected a similar though broader amendment, making Arizona the first state in the Union to reject a ballot initiative aimed at…
Ward Connerly is founder and president of the American Civil Rights Institute. This year, he led efforts to approve ballot propositions banning affirmative action in Colorado and Nebraska. Amendment 46 in Colorado failed with 49 percent of the vote, while Initiative 424 passed in Nebraska with 58…
A website intended to showcase great American role models in uniform was launched today by Matt Daniels and Sequoia Capital. GreatAmericans.com is an online video portal, similar to YouTube, that features videos of American soldiers, policemen, firefighters, and others. Matt Daniels, the creator of…
MD-1: Democrat Frank Kratovil leads Republican Andy Harris by 2,003 votes in this district that includes all of Maryland's Eastern Shore and parts of three counties west of the bay. Harris's campaign thinks there are about 10,000 outstanding provisional and absentee ballots. In order to win, the…
Four of the eight Republican-held House seats that were undecided late last night now have a clear winner: Republicans will hold on to retiring Rep. Deborah Pryce's seat in OH-15, with Republican Steve Stivers leading Democrat Mary Kilroy by five percent and only one precinct outstanding. Michigan…
Taking into account all House races, Democrats are poised to gain a net of at least 17 seats with a possibility of gaining a total of 25 seats. Worst case scenario for the GOP will be a 261/174 breakdown in the House. Democrats are leading comfortably or have been declared the winner in these…
CNN calls CT-4 for Democrat James Himes. Republican Christopher Shays represented the Connecticut suburbs of New York City as New England's lone Republican congressman.
The Democratic Party of Idaho has been criticized this week for publishing the social security numbers of GOP Rep. Bill Sali and his wife. The numbers were printed in a Democratic campaign mailer highlighting the Sali's difficulty paying off debts in the 1980s. The Idaho GOP released a statement…
John McCain released a statement this morning calling for Alaska senator Ted Stevens to resign: Yesterday, Senator Ted Stevens was found guilty of corruption. It is a sign of the health of our democracy that the people continue to hold their representatives to account for improper or illegal…
While President Bush's legacy with regards to U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan is uncertain and his approval rating stands at about 28 percent, his administration's Africa policy was celebrated this week in Washington. At the White House Summit on International Development, the president was…
Charles Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, has a brilliant new piece in the CRB's fall issue outlining Barack Obama's political thought. Kesler explains Obama's estimation of his ability to change the world: Eager to find himself by finding a community to which he could belong, he was…
Even before seven-term Republican representative Tom Davis announced his retirement, Keith Fimian was planning to run for his seat in Virginia's eleventh congressional district. It's not that Fimian opposes Davis, it's that he had been expecting him to run for the Senate seat being vacated by John…
Only a month ago, Minnesota Republican Norm Coleman was starting to pull away in his reelection bid for the U.S. Senate. Democratic comedian-turned-politician Al Franken's edgy humor was being made known to unamused Minnesotans. Aside from the harm the financial crisis has caused nearly all…
Republican senator Saxby Chambliss will face a much tougher battle than previously expected in his reelection bid in Georgia, according to recent polls. Chambliss leads former state representative Jim Martin by only three points in a Strategic Vision poll of likely voters taken Oct. 5-7. Three…
John Dowd, the lawyer who successfully defended John McCain during the Senate Ethics Committee investigation of the Keating Five scandal, spoke to reporters on a conference call earlier today. After a nearly two-year investigation, the committee exonerated McCain and Democratic senator John Glenn,…
Earlier today, Politico reported that South Carolina Democratic party chairwoman Carol Fowler said Sarah Palin's "primary qualification seems to be that she hasn't had an abortion." In a conference call with reporters, South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham fired back. Graham says he is…
With Gov. Palin's five chlidren and McCain's seven, the presumptive GOP nominees have more offspring than any major-party ticket since 1920. In that year, Democratic Ohio Gov. James M. Cox (six children) and Franklin D. Roosevelt (also six children) lost to Harding and Coolidge. Interestingly, both…
During a McCain campaign conference call with the media, former GOP presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani attacked Obama foreign policy adviser Daniel Kurtzer, who met with Syria's foreign minister last month. Kurtzer told the New York Sun that "None of us thought we were being used or abused [by…
IN MARCH 2003, registered nurse Jill Stanek submitted a statement to the Illinois Senate Health and Human Services committee in which she reported that infants who survived abortions at her Oak Lawn hospital were sometimes "taken to the Soiled Utility Room and left alone to die." Stanek was…