Former governor Mitt Romney is not yet the Republican nominee but the inevitability factor is at a high level now that his main opponent for the right to take on pro-abortion President Barack Obama, Rick Santorum, has suspended his campaign.

Romney quickly picked up the endorsement of top Republicans yesterday and today after Santorum exited the campaign.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a pro-life advocate who had been a strong supporter of Rick Perry, got on board with Romney.

“Congratulations to Governor Romney on winning a hard fought race, I look forward to supporting him in retiring President Obama,” Jindal said in a statement...

WASHINGTON – Failure by Congress' debt-cutting Super Committee to recommend $1.2 trillion in savings by Wednesday is supposed to automatically trigger spending cuts in the same amount to accomplish that job.

But the same legislators who concocted that budgetary booby trap just four months ago could end up spending the 2012 election year and beyond battling over defusing it.

Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., say they are writing legislation to prevent what they say would be devastating cuts to the military. House Republicans are exploring a similar move. Democrats maintain they won't let domestic programs be the sole source of savings.

In the face of those efforts, President Barack Obama has told the debt panel's co-chairmen that he "will not accept any measure that attempts to turn off the automatic cut trigger," White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters last week.

Countering conventional wisdom that President Obama's foreign policy successes bolster the president's credentials ahead of the 2012 election, Sen. Lindsey Graham said Sunday that the Republican presidential candidates must be more forceful in challenging his decisions.

"To the Republican Party: national security matters, step up on it. ... We've got a jobs problem. We've got a national security problem that is growing by the day," Graham, R-S.C., told Fox News Sunday."

Graham credited the president with killing Al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden and supporting the overthrow (and death) of Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, but, by Graham's account, the president has failed by allowing Tehran to get a leg up in Iraq and get that much closer to nuclear weapons.

Obama has thrown Israel "under the bus," Graham said; he has blown his policy on the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and has made a politically expedient decision to remove U.S.

Republican candidates for president should make Boeing’s fight with the National Labor Relations Board over a massive new plant near Charleston, S.C., a centerpiece of their campaigns next year, Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, said Wednesday.

The battle between the aerospace giant and its labor unions and over the $1 billion manufacturing plant - the largest private investment in the state’s history - has developed into a major political brawl. The NLRB, now dominated by appointees of President Obama, has filed an action to block the nonunion plant from opening, infuriating South Carolina officials and sparking sharp criticism from congressional Republicans.

“From a Republican point of view, if you don’t see this as government overreach at its worst, if you don’t see this as payback politics at its worst, then you shouldn’t be leading our party,” Mr. Graham told editors and reporters at The Washington Times.

(CNSNews.com) – Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has called on President Barack Obama to dismiss Lafe Solomon, the acting general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) over the board’s decision to file a complaint against The Boeing Company for moving one of their assembly lines to South Carolina, a right-to-work state.

"Mr. Solomon, the guy who filed the complaint, is so out of line. I understand presidents picking someone sympathetic to their agenda, but they have some obligation under the law to follow the law, so I think he’s an interim appointee who will never see confirmation in the Senate," Graham told CNSNews.com following a press conference at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday where Republican members of Congress criticized the NLRB’s complaint...

Washington (CNSNews.com) – Republican Senators Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and John Barrasso (Wyo.) introduced a bill on Tuesday that would allow states to opt out of any part of the controversial new health care law, known as Obamacare, including the individual and employer insurance mandates.

Those mandates require individuals to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty, or an employer to provide insurance or pay a penalty.

Senator Graham was unequivocal in describing the new bill as a “third front” against the unpopular reform, saying he hoped enough states would opt out to effectively kill the law...

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- Sen. Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican who is the chairman of the Senate GOP conference, announced his opposition today to the nomination of pro-abortion Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court. His announcement makes it so every top Republican lawmaker now opposes Kagan.

“I voted against the president’s nomination of Elena Kagan to be Solicitor General and I will vote against her confirmation to the Supreme Court for the same reason," Alexander said today in a statement.

“President Obama won the election, and I am not surprised that he would nominate someone to the Supreme Court whose political and judicial philosophy is different from mine,” he continued...

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- In a nearly party-line vote with very little suspense, the Senate Judiciary Committee today approved President Barack Obama's nomination of pro-abortion Solicitor General Elena Kagan to replace retiring pro-abortion Justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court.

Now, Kagan's nomination will head to the Senate floor, where Republicans may mount a filibuster or may back down knowing they don't have the votes to uphold it -- especially with one of their own backing Kagan today.

That the Democrat-dominated panel would approve the former Clinton administration official who was tagged for promoting partial-birth abortions was fully expected...

The sole Senate Republican working with Democrats on a bipartisan immigration bill said Tuesday that the issue will have to wait until 2012, undercutting the drive to pass a law this year and setting up a partisan floor showdown that all sides acknowledge won't produce a bill that can reach the president's desk.

Pointing to Arizona's new law cracking down on illegal immigrants, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who had been trying to write a bill with Democrats, said it's clear that Americans do not think the border with Mexico is secure and will not accept an immigration bill until that's fixed.

He said trying to pass a bill in the face of that opposition will doom immigration reform for years to come and that the best lawmakers can hope for right now is to pass a bill in two years, once the border is secured...

(CNSNews.com) – While the Obama administration is pushing to repeal the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy regarding homosexuals in the military, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told CNSNews.com that he wants to hear from military commanders and not from politicians regarding the issue, and added that he will not make a “political decision” to “reward a political movement.”

On Capitol Hill, CNSNews.com asked Sen. Graham, ‘Will officially allowing gays in the military hurt recruitment, in your opinion, or will it help recruitment?”

Graham said, “Well, you know, that’s a question I’d like to hear from our military commanders. A couple of questions about changing the policy, ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ – Is it coming from within the ranks or are the people in the military suggesting it be changed, or is it a political decision?”....